 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're here at ServiceNow Knowledge 14. Craig McDonough is here as the director of product marketing, brought along the now guys. Hey now guys, how you doing? And yeah, we've been going wall to wall. Jeff Frick and myself, this is day two. Fred Lutty gave the keynote this morning, talked a lot about innovation. And one of the things that ServiceNow does every year is they have the innovation of the year award winners. These are customers, right Craig, that submit innovations that they've created, applications that they've developed. And you guys, well, why don't you describe it? What is the innovation of the year award? It's an opportunity for customers to really shine and show us the things that they've done in their business. They're not distracting at all. It's hard to concentrate, isn't it? It's an opportunity for them to shine and to show other customers, to show their colleagues, their peers, the amazing things they've done with ServiceNow and the way they've changed their business with ServiceNow. And so what's the process like? You put out a call for innovations a few months ahead of time? Yeah, we put out a call for innovations. We ask people to submit entries. And when we first started doing this, people would send us emails. Then of course we realized we should really be building a ServiceNow system to do this. That's a real no-no, isn't it? Right, so we fixed that pretty quickly. But then after that, the entries went from being this big to being this big to the ones we're getting now come complete with video and all sorts of supporting evidence and presentations. People put so much effort into this because they are so proud of the changes that they've been able to make in their business. And you got 50 some odd? Yeah, 51 entries this year. And they ranged from all sorts of things. There were telephone provisioning applications. There was one application that a guy had built to actually manage his whole wedding. Like nothing to do with business at all. I saw that on Twitter actually. Yeah, yeah. I didn't connect until just now. Yeah, there were some amazing examples that came into us. 51 great stories. Now what happens, you guys filter it down. How was that process to filter it down? Painful. Yeah, yeah. It's painful because they're all really good. That's the problem, right? Yeah, right. I bet you had a couple of coin tosses. It's like cutting kids in Little League. Well, it's kind of like that. So what we ended up doing, we have a panel of sort of service now. People would have, I guess people would have been working with service now for a long time, including Fred and some of our early sort of founders and the people that were with the company right at the beginning. Some of our senior architects. And we all go through these applications and review each one of them. And then based on that, we sort of slowly cut the list down until we get to a list of six finalists. And that's what we presented this morning. After that, the winner is determined by a vote from the audience. So American Idol-like. Very much so, yeah. The internal judges and then it's up to the community. So talk a little bit about, you guys are really developer focused. You're very sharing focused. Of these innovations, how many are commercial products that are going to be the basis of somebody's company? How many of them are just pure internal projects? And how many of them are going to end up on share open to everyone else to leverage? Yeah, I mean, hopefully all of them are going to end up on share. That's, that would be my goal. You know, with the fact, like the fact that we've announced share now means that these type of innovations, these type of applications can be shared a lot more easily. Our customers have been asking us for this for a long time. They've been saying, you know, we want to take the things that we've created and extend them and give them to other people. And so now we've given them the vehicle that they can use to do that. And so I'm hoping everything ends up there. Ends up on share. That's my personal goal. But in reality, you know, these are all applications that were built to solve a specific problem that a company was having internally. Those problems are probably common though. And, you know, you could be using that same innovation across multiple companies. And what was the most just completely revolutionary technology that they introduced that in terms of the capability of the platform that you just maybe didn't know, just didn't see come in? It was more about sort of solving, it was solving business problems in innovative ways. I mean, the most amazing technology behind all of them was now, of course. But, you know, people built incredible integrations. They built terrific sort of ways of interacting. So there was one company, Verisign, one of the finalists actually built these iOS consoles. And they have iPads stationed all throughout their data centers where people can go and check assets in and check them out and rebuild them and everything all through these consoles, these iPad consoles that they've built on service now. That's great. Now, how many years have you done this innovation award? This is going to be the fourth year. So we started back in 2000, actually the fifth year. We started back in 2010. Okay. Yeah. And then, so now you announced App Creator last year. So I would presume that makes it a lot easier for people to create stuff to submit, right? Absolutely. So you would think you're going to start to see sort of an old guy curve in terms of the uptake, right? For sure. You know, we've been constantly adding development capabilities to the product over the years. And App Creator was a big leap forward. Things like Service Creator that we announced in Fred's keynote this morning, that's also going to be a big leap forward. And it's quite possible that, you know, some of the future innovators of the year, maybe some of the ones even next year, won't be application developers at all. There will be business people who are solving a business problem and doing it by creating like a point and click form. Well, that's what I was sort of, help us think through that because sort of the App Creator announcement opened the world to a whole new set of developers. But you still have to have some sort of, what, JavaScript knowledge or? You don't have to have JavaScript knowledge. It helps, right? It helps. And you can use it to, and you can certainly use it to extend applications. I mean, I don't know any JavaScript at all. Okay. But I can build you pretty much any sort of service now application you want. It's very simple to do. Okay. But what we're about doing is making it even easier for people and making it more consumable. Putting it into a form that a real business person can take and start using. That's what we're, that's what we're doing. Okay. So now, so you don't have any programming skills. You're not a computer scientist. No, I think I'll learn Pascal and Fortran. Okay. So that doesn't count. Yeah, no. Hopefully you're not requiring Pascal and Fortran. That's pretty easy. But so it requires logic. So you've got to be able to have a logic flow and an understanding of the business requirement. Most importantly, you need to understand the problem you're trying to solve and you need to understand the process. And if you look at all of the innovation finalists, they, the majority of them had a process in place and they said, this is, the process works. It just takes too long and there are too many sort of cracks where things can slip through during that process and it's not, it's not automated and it's not auditable. And so all they did was they took existing processes and automated them on service now. And you have companies that said, you know, a particular process used to take us, one of the, one of the submitters said that they had a process that took them 15 minutes to order, to place an order. Now they do exactly that same process in 15 seconds because of the application that they created on service now. So some more Colombo questions, if I may. So help us understand that the differences in the similarities between app creator and service creator. So the way to think of service creator is it's kind of the next step in the evolution. App creator took a lot of the application, creation capabilities within service now and made them much more accessible to the IT professional who was creating service now applications. What service creator does is it takes it one step further and it says, you know what, you don't even need to be an IT professional anymore. You just need to understand the process that you are trying to, that you're trying to automate and you can do it within service creator. And it literally is as simple as dragging and dropping some fields onto a form and pressing go. And as soon as you do, it's available on any web browser. It's available on any mobile device. So that we saw that demo from Fred this morning and essentially the way Fred and his colleagues but the way they did it is they went and they essentially ripped off a form which is that, oh, what's a good form? Oh, I like that form. I think I'll replicate it. And you saw how quickly they did it. Yeah, it was unbelievable. I mean, that's real time. That was, there was no smoke and mirrors or trick photography. So, yeah, I could do that. No doubt, now the difference between that and app creators, I have to know the service now sort of parlance interface. Is that right? So I've got to be trained on service now in order to use app creator whereas what I saw this morning, I mean, anybody can do essentially. Yeah. I mean, very intuitive. No training required. Literally no training required, yeah. Now, if you wanted to take it to the next level and put some more complex workflow behind it or integrate to other systems, that's where you'd want to reach out into the app. Yeah, because otherwise you'd screw it up. Right, that's at that point, at that point, you sort of, but honestly, that's not the kind of thing that most people do for service now. Right, I mean, it's the simple forms. I mean, I think about, you made the comment yesterday, Jeff, that some huge percentage of use cases are paper-based. Yeah, it's like 90% of people's work is paper-based workflow, which is amazing, you think of the day to day. And what struck me looking at the new UI is it really feels like the place that I've worked, not necessarily a workflow tool, especially with the activity stream and the multi-tracks and the multi-colons and being able to move stuff around, it really becomes just my baseline application that I'm sitting looking at all day, as opposed to specifically going into execute workflow processes. Right, right. Yeah, it's not, there is workflow behind it, but you're right, it doesn't, it's not, don't think of it as a workflow tool, it's just, it's the thing you use to do your job. To get stuff done, and I think of, I think of Jive, an early Jive when they were talking about the new generation, they don't use email, they like to hang out in a place and execute things in that place and there's got the activity stream that really starts to feel more like that type of an application as opposed to, oh, the dirty little secret is it is all little workflows underneath the covers, but we don't think of it that way and it's just a way to get work done and now you've moved and you've added the personal tasks, managers, right, to get people off the Evernote, which again, for older folks, they like to work off the lists and then the younger kids like to work off the activity streams and kind of this multi-dimensional, multi-tasking nirvana, which is similar to what they do on their phone all day long. For sure, and yeah, the thing is, they're used to interacting with technology this way. This is how they work on Facebook or on any of those other applications they use to manage their personal life. It's how they work on things like LinkedIn to manage their career profiles and those sort of things. It's the same thing, it's just taking that and replacing the sort of the battleship gray soviet era stuff that they're probably using now with something that's just as modern as the other things they use in their life. And feels light. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to ask a question, Craig, about ESM. It's sort of, I mean, it's not a new area but it's one that you guys are focused on now. For sure. The enterprise service management and my question is the impact on product marketing. You're in product marketing so you've got some work to do there to help people understand and absorb. Yeah. Is that a major initiative in the near to midterm and what else you're working on? Yeah, it is. I mean, we're constantly, we have two releases of our product every year. And so with every one of those releases we add an incredible depth of functionality. All of the things that you saw Fred talk about this morning are things that are included in the next release of our product, the Eureka release. And then that was something that basically was six months since the last release. So it's happening very, very frequently and every time we have a release it has new capabilities that support new business processes or easier ways of doing things. So from our point of view, we're constantly evolving who we're talking to. We're constantly evolving the message that we're giving to people because the product underneath all of that is constantly evolving as well. Excellent. The other thing I'd like too and I've seen it before in the Alasian space in terms of a dedicated focus to shaving off seconds from processes. And just this continually shaving time and time and time. And he talked about the 55,000 reports that one of the customers have but I just want to see the reports that are relative to me. So to accommodate both ends of that extreme and help me get to what I need a little bit faster which over time, over huge organization, a huge enterprise, all those 15 seconds begin to add up. It makes a big difference, it really does. So part of that is about improving the performance of the underlying application and that's a constant theme. But part of it is about making processes easier to execute and making just that work easier to do. Making it easier to find the report that you're looking for. And those sort of things are very, very common. Another one of the innovation finalists was Yahoo. And they created an asset management or an asset audit application that they used to take a process that was probably pretty painful. They have to order the stock in 80 day, 80 stock rooms around the world every month. And that was a 100% manual process. Using ServiceNow, they built an app to do the same thing. That's now 95% automated. Meaning that all of those people that used to walk around stock rooms with barcode scanners and probably not a very exciting daily set of activities are now able to do things that are much more exciting that are actually impacting the way that the company does business. Yeah, I saw that. That was one of the finalists. I actually thought Yahoo was going to win. Yeah. He did that when I worked at Macy's inventory. Yeah, he did that when I worked at Macy's inventory. Honestly, all of the finalists, all of the entrants were supposed to win. Verisign was really interesting too. I thought they were going to be over there. All right, Craig, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on. The planes are backing up as Mark Hopkins likes to say. Hey, we're going wall to wall here at ServiceNow Knowledge. Thanks very much for coming on the crew. It's great to see you again. Thank you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Moscone. Be right back.