 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17, brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back, this is day three of ServiceNow Knowledge 17, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, where we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and my co-host this week has been Jeff Frick, not only this week, Jeff, but for the last five years, we've been doing ServiceNow Knowledge events, really getting a sense as to what this company is all about, the evolution of the company, the transformation from really early days of sort of IT, help desks, service management, to now just permeating throughout the enterprise. One of the key things, Jeff, that is notable and that we saw a couple years ago, I think it was three years ago when they had the first CreatorCon. In fact, actually in 2013, I think you did a little sidebar, you went out and did some hackathons. You went with Alan Lee-Wine and checked in on the hackathon. And the point I want to make is that we work with these events, we come to these events, we see a lot of large company events, and whether it's Oracle, or IBM, or HPE even in the past, even EMC with its code initiative, they are drooling over developers. They can't get enough developer action. And it's like ServiceNow builds this platform, they open it up with this low-code development kit, essentially, throw their glove in the field, and everybody comes to the game. It's just amazing. And so today, day three is about CreatorCon and it was hosted by Pat Casey, who's the Senior Vice President of DevOps. Really the closest, I think, to the Fred Lutty DNA. I mean, that's really Pat. Fred Lutty is the founder of the company and sort of the icon of ServiceNow, not here. You know, we're entering a new era and it's really underscored culturally by CreatorCon and Pat Casey. You were in there today, what did you think? Was it Fred that turned the citizen developer? I can't remember, I'll have to go back and check the tape because he definitely talked about low-code and I think he may have been the one that said citizen developer and it's funny, even with CJ Desai, right, when he was thinking about coming over, what is the first thing he did? He downloaded the app and wanted to create a little app. So everybody here is a developer and I think, just looking back at some of the interviews yesterday, Donna from Cox Automotive, she built a prototype app. It was her, one business analyst and an intern to start a whole new perspective. So I think they're really trying to make everybody a developer. It's a different way to think and not just a business analyst and you have to pass it off to development but using, again, a simple workflow tool. It's still a workflow tool to let everybody automate processes and we're just in the CreatorCon. The other piece that really strikes me and it strikes me every time I look at my phone now, you know, my phone knows I follow the Warriors and so it just automatically gives me an update. So it's kind of this soft, it's kind of this soft push of AI and machine learning into your day-to-day activity without kind of this heavy overlay and that's really how they do it effectively and then that's kind of the basis of what they're doing here with integrating the machine learning into the applications to collect the data, build the models, try to take some of the mundane, mind-numbing work off of your plate and get people doing real decisions based on the machine giving you better data. It's an incredible dynamic to me, Jeff, because it's not like this company has a blank sheet of paper and says, okay, let's go after developers. They have this impassioned community of people and they just keep rolling out new function and then, of course, ServiceNow has some really killer developers internally and so they make those people available to inspire and educate other developers and it's just, as they say, this platform just permeates throughout the organization. I mean, it's really hard to do platforms. We've seen it so many times, companies say, okay, we're developing a platform and platform gets a little traction and gets bought out but this company's ServiceNow really has a foothold here. So 4,500 people at CreatorCon this year is up from 2,000 last year. So another example of just super meteoric growth. Pat Casey, I loved, he showed a mainframe. It actually looked like a vax to me, but anyway, he put up a mainframe and then he showed the HP UX, what do you call it, HPUX? And oh yeah, we thought that was better and then client server was kind of worked for a while and then he put up August of 1995 and of course I was immediately saying Netscape, right? And he showed the Netscape logo and that really changed the development paradigm. Just as a way to, and I'm sure none of us thought of it, it was just kind of web bulletin boards with pictures now when you saw Netscape back in the day but really has an application delivery vehicle when you think of what browsers have become. It's pretty fascinating. I had a friend who was working on Chrome and they described it as kind of an OS and a browser and like, we would want an OS and a browser. Well, now we're basically here. It's like the old Sunray machine, right? Anytime you log onto your browser, you're basically into everything in your world, whether it's your phone, tablet, my computer, your desktop computer, it's pretty fascinating. The other thing that Pat talked about was these things that we grew up with kind of in our imagination. He talked about flying cars and then he adjusted it to maybe electronic cars, this vision. And now electronic cars are here and Tesla's the highest selling luxury nameplate out there but I thought of my old world, it was flat TVs. The Jetsons had flat TVs and the concept of a flat TV was completely bizarre and I remember seeing the first one in Chicago at the Consumer Electronics Show was like nine inches, you had to have secret passage to get back to see it. But now look what happened. I can't help but think of a Mars law, Dave and he's a gardener's trough of this illusion that I like a Mars law better which is we overestimate the impact in the short term but way underestimate the impact in the long term. Look at flat screens now, compared to what didn't even exist now and that's going to happen in AI and it's going to happen in machine learning and in a very short period of time, especially with the advances in compute store, networking, cloud, speed of networks, IoT, it's going to be a phenomenal amount of horsepower driving your interaction with all these various objects. Even the .com, how over-hyped that was but it really was under-hyped, in the long term. So the other thing I loved, we've been talking about data for quite some time and every time we came to a knowledge show we'd say, is there a big data angle here? And we're like, yeah, well kind of. Well it's really now coming into focus what the machine learning and AI and big data angle is and Pat threw up a really nice infographic. He went back to 1969. He gave some interesting stats that I wasn't aware of. I knew the 2K, the moon landing was done on a computer with 2K of memory. That I knew. What I did not know is that it had two programs. One for docking and one for landing and there wasn't enough memory on the computer to have both programs. So they had to reprogram the computer after the dock. Not even reload, right? They could just put the USB stick in to update it. They had the code, which is kind of cool. So that was 2K. He had an intern download the 1982 census and it was 182 megabytes. And then the human genome project was 53 gigabytes, which he's right. It wouldn't have fit on your previous iPhone, but it will fit on this one. And then I didn't know this stat. The spell checker and all of our phones and the red lines and so forth. The back end of that, that's sitting in the cloud is four terabytes. So you're seeing just this explosion of data. These are some simple examples. So this company is using, again, it's not just starting from scratch saying, hey, here's some kind of machine learning tool. Apply it. What they're doing is saying, we're going to build this into the platform. Take the existing corpus of data that you have. Now, what is that corpus of data? It's a bunch of incidents. It's a bunch of categories and people and it's going to auto-categorize, for example, all these incidents on an existing corpus of data. That's not how most people are using machine learning today. What many people are talking about is a use case of real-time continuous applications and doing machine learning in real time to try to affect an outcome. Which means try to get you to buy something or try to detect fraud or whatever it is. Try to, you know, some healthcare outcome even, although you think healthcare could be more post-process. But essentially, that's what ServiceNow is doing. They're using a post-process methodology on top of this corpus of data to add instant value that lives inside of the platform. It's very compelling, simple and practical, in my view. That's the part I love the best, Dave. It's simple and practical and delivers immediate results. Alan, Lee Nguyen, who we'll have on later and we've had on a number of times, you know, made a mention that the other thing that's very different is now the apps are listening in real-time and they're adjusting what they're doing and re-jiggering their algorithm based on stuff that's happening in real-time. So it's a different way to think about applications. And just a couple other things I wanted to touch on from yesterday was some of the guests we had. Great reason we love the show is the number of customers we get is so high. And I was just struck by Donna Wooder from Cox Automotive, how much she understood innately that it's a platform. Yes, she bought some applications, but she really understood the platform component and was able to drive from it. And the other one I just wanted to touch on was the rest from Beats Healthcare and the impact of mobile. Also, I could think about when he was talking about his delivery service, right? Like, where's my truck? I had my fridge fixed the other day. Where's the guy? Is he closed? Call me. And then to apply that to something as powerful as the work that they're doing around hospice and to enable that nurse to get to one more stop per day. Wow, what an impact just by getting on mobile. And the funny part he said to some of their older nurses when they saw the mobile device said, I'm done, I'm not doing anymore. I'd rather schlep around 25 pages of case information and then go back and forth to the hub in between every stop. So, again, it's this combination of all this power that's coming to bear along the three courses of compute that are now delivering phenomenal transformation to people that are willing to think of things in a slightly different lens. Yeah, and when you look at the problems that service now is solving, they are in the boring but important category. And that's why I think that this company for a long time sort of flew under the radar and is still misunderstood. I mean, even CJ, who's basically in charge of all the products, when he first was approached by service now, he's like, man, I really know. And then he dug into it and said, wow. So a lot of people really don't understand it. I talked to a lot of people in the software business, software sales people that they just don't understand the power of what this company does. And I would make a prediction is that, like Salesforce before it, and we've been talking about this for years, how these guys are on a collision course and they'll say, no, no, no, but very clearly, the power of a platform that Salesforce has, for example, service now is replicating in some ways much, much different. Because Salesforce has a lot of bolt-ons, sorry, we love it, we use it. But my point is that my prediction is that over time, this company is going to become a very well-known company because of the impacts that it's having on the business. It's going from boring, but important to fundamental transformation of organizations. And like, I tell ya, CRM, I even put it up there with ERP. I think that what service now is doing is as big as the ERP trend, potentially bigger when you put in all the IoT stuff and the machine learning capabilities and the like. With what is a relatively modern platform? Well, we're in an attention game, right? On the consumer side, it's about attention. The thing that people have, the least amount of anymore is time. So how do you get their attention? Do they spend their time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, watching TV, looking at YouTube videos, watch your kids, how do they spend those hours of their day? On the work side, what screen are you interacting with in your day? Are you in Salesforce all day? Are you in email all day? Are you in Salesforce all day? Are you in Marketo all day? That's where the competition is going to come. And there's only going to be two or three primary applications in which you engage and get work done. And they're making a hard play to say, we are the application that we want basically in your face that you're using to get stuff done all day long. You know, one of the things too, I wonder, you know, you always wonder, think about blind spots to a company like this. They're on this amazing ascendancy. You know, what could, you know, come in and disrupt service now? And you think about the millennials, there's no question that service now is on to the new way to work. I bet I call it the new way to work. I don't think they use that term. And the millennials are going to come in and they don't want to use email. They're going to be much more open to adopting a platform. Now is that platform going to be something like service now or is going to be too boring but important? Are they going to do something more like Facebook now? My feeling is this is enterprise. And as we talked about yesterday, is it possible that enterprise could actually begin adopting a lot of these consumer like interfaces and user experiences and leapfrog in some regards because of the use of AI and the enterprise nature and the security capabilities that a company like this can bring? I don't know, maybe that's a stretch but the gap between enterprise or consumer and enterprise has to close. It is closing and I think it will continue to close. I think it's the automation piece to automate themselves out of their customer base. I mean, as more and more things are automated there's going to be less and less and less people looking at the screen to do fewer tasks in terms of just an end. Blind spots always come where you're not looking, right? That's what's going to hit them but certainly as more and more this mundane stuff can be automated if they can actually execute their vision so these auto categorization and auto routing and things are getting solved before they get to a customer service agent happen then their seat based licenses but that's why they're trying to find other places to go, right? Facilities management, HR management, integration on the human connection across multiple applications into even these other systems like we've heard about on the HR side, et cetera. So I think that's, you know, as the nature of work changes what will people be doing with their work or are they just going to be getting a scientist to go execute that the machines can't do? It's going to be interesting to watch it evolve. Well, and then coming back to sort of the top of this segment, it's the developers and that's really where the innovation occurs. The developer ecosystem here continues to grow. The importance of developers is very well understood. We've seen it with, you know, previously with companies like Microsoft you see all the big enterprise companies trying to appeal to the developer community. Certainly Amazon, Google, you know, owning, having great, very strong developer ecosystems Apple as well, Facebook and so forth. Enterprise guys continue to struggle frankly in that regard. I mean, I think IBM's done a good job with Bluemix but it's been a real heavy lift for IBM, HP. I mean, we've talked to, from Kedifa to all their software execs and they just, you know, never were able to figure it out. Oracle kind of lost its developer edge despite the fact that it owns Java now and is trying to get that back. Whereas, as I say, ServiceNow just says, hey, let's have a game and they throw their glove in the field and everybody shows up. But also think of the focus of a SaaS software company or even like an Amazon, AWS, right? Everyone here in the company is working on platforms and derivative products from that platform. They don't have this hardware group, that hardware group, this software group, that software group. It's a single application at the end of the day. Salesforce is a single application at the end of the day. Workday, single application at the end of the day. AWS, infrastructure for customers at the end of the day. So I think that gives them a huge advantage in terms of focus. Everybody pulling in the same direction and ability to execute. Well, everybody talks about platform as a service and it's really, a lot of people say that whole market's collapsing. It's IAAS plus, I think Amazon and it's SaaS minus. Think Salesforce and ServiceNow. All right, we got to wrap. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest of theCUBE. We're live day three from Knowledge 17. We're right back.