 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. No 15, this is theCUBE, our flagship program to go out to the events, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante, and I'm going to ask you guys to chase him away on President of ServiceNow's business unit for Cloud Sherpas, a business partner top of the heap for these guys. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Welcome to theCUBE. Appreciate it. Before we get started, what you guys do, honestly, integrations used, what key areas and then we want to sell them? Sure, so Cloud Sherpas is a cloud services brokerage that's a Gartner term. We provide cloud advisory and technology services for three key platforms. We're a partner with Salesforce, platinum on three continents, with a top three in the world. We're also a have a line of business supporting Google for Work, or Google's partner of the year, 2012, 2013, 2014. Largest Google partner in the world. Of course, I'm responsible for our ServiceNow practice. We were one of the first partners in the ecosystem. We're one of the few partners that are global. Platinum, excuse me, master services partner in the ServiceNow space. And very large presence, not only in the training practices, we had over 28 trainers here helping to do the pre-conference training on behalf of ServiceNow and over 3,000 clients today on the ServiceNow platform. So you're the middle of the digital transformation? We certainly are. So you got Salesforce, Google, ServiceNow, three really top game-changing products, cloud. What's your take on the cloud? I mean, what are some of the challenges? I mean, I'll see cloud is what everyone's seeing. Where are we in the cloud evolution? Are people still hesitant? Are we in the third inning, first inning? Why would you peg, moving back, in terms of going into this modern era? My take. My take on the cloud is it's the only take right now. There are very few things that you can do in technology that give you the extensibility and the scalability of a cloud platform really reduce that time to value once you get those clouds in place. What we find is there's very few customers we talked to today that don't have some sort of cloud application. In fact, Dave, I think last year we talked a bit about the proliferation of cloud being a bit of a challenge. In some cases you can see some customers with 30 to 35 different cloud applications. And of course, clearly if you've gone that deep in cloud there's some overlap you're going to start sub-optimizing. We're focused on three core platforms. The biologically is most concerned with the ServiceNow platform. What we're finding is we're really just in the honeymoon of extending the platform past IT. I think our consumers that we see, they're well beyond understanding that ServiceNow is an extremely capable IT service management tool. And now we're in the space of exploring those adjacent spaces and looking at the power of the single source of record in the workflow and automation engine of ServiceNow. Talk about the convergence of consumerization trend with the reconstruction of the back ends of IT and businesses, which is computer systems, right? So you got the converges all coming in. User and user experiences, iPhone, App Store, meets plumbing, all that stuff. It's an integration potentially nightmare. It's a challenge, but the opportunity if you crack the code is pretty significant. Share your thoughts and observations on that dynamic. What are you seeing as success formulas for folks that want to integrate fast modernized to have that feel of a consumer company, but yet still scale and have all the requirements? Yeah, we see very few companies that aren't interested in some level of a case of integration in their operation. We're well past this notion of you go to product X for one activity, product Y for another activity. Our consumer behaviors, if you look at it, that bridge between hardware and the service experience or the user experience, Apple's still famous for many others, those bridges have been crossed from a consumer perspective. What we're seeing is tools like ServiceNow, being that chasm or being that bridge really in the corporate back office. We spend a good deal of our time working with IT departments because it's not uncommon, in fact, it's most common for ServiceNow to be implemented as an IT tool first. And so there's this education process you have to go through that starts to reveal what the opportunities are to expand the platform. The best way to always do that is through case examples, other users' experiences. We've got a lot of really interesting use cases that we're seeing today. Last year we spoke about Einstein, NOAA, 137% increase in foodborne illness in stores, not because they changed the way they did business because they automated that workflow on ServiceNow. We're working with a large brewer and looking to modernize some of their brewery systems and those forward-looking maintenance tasks. It goes on and on and on. Folks in IT don't tend to understand or don't tend to think of what they're doing as some kind of chasm crossing major issuance in strategy. They're just trying to solve a problem and now they've got a tool that really enables them to do that quickly. So Jason, we've talked before about you guys made some early bets with Salesforce, but really Google and ServiceNow, it wasn't clear several years ago that this was going to be the type of business that it's become. So I'll talk about the momentum in that business, what's driving that, and then I want to talk about the extension into the business side beyond IT. So the momentum is the market. The market was really ready for something else, particularly in that IT space, right? And once you get IT and necessities the mother of invention, you've got this wonderful cloud platform that you can extend and use for other things. And your IT folks tend to be pretty crafty, right? So they're going to find those opportunities, they're going to look for solutions. They're trying to delight their clients and the way they're going to do that is through the cloud platform. You know, the market was just ready for something different, ServiceNow is that thing that was different. You can certainly see the way they've gobbled up the market in the ITSM space, ITOM's next, service management, also getting very significant at this point. So if you really look at modernizing that IT, the department of IT, and the users that touch IT across the corporation, there's no better place to be than right where we are with ServiceNow. And then two years ago at Knowledge 13 it was sort of Fred Luddy sort of gave us a glimpse of creating apps on the platform. Big announcements now this week, you guys are part of that, contributing to that. Why don't you talk about the store, what you guys are doing there? Yeah, so just today in fact, ServiceNow released the ServiceNow store. We have been fortunate to be part of the initial pilot group of partners out there. We have two apps that we've released on the store today. We have a legal application, we can talk about what that is and what that does. We also have a security incident management application, and that's just really going to be our start there. We have plans through the rest of the year to add additional applications into that store. ServiceNow from a platform perspective is caught up to the point where you can now use your IP so you can protect your own capital from a coding perspective, and it's enabling that to really propel us into a space where we can make those applications that today we're building one off four clients, we can make them something that is built once and repeated many times. So let's unpack those. Let's start with the legal app. What does it do? What problems does it solve? Yeah, so we've implemented a legal application that was the foundation of this. It's six different legal organizations since we've been part of ServiceNow, and we're really addressing three different aspects of what's important in a legal operation. First and foremost, there's a workflow between lawyers and document processors, people that do research requests, and things of that nature, and they needed a way to track that. Very often it's done by email, and there are no KPIs or service level commitments or ability to really report around that or understand who's being responsive and who's not being responsive and what information's needed in a transparent way. So we've addressed that workflow, that lawyer to research request or document processor. The second piece of the application is legal firms have very vast digital libraries now, and they have to manage their subscriptions to those digital libraries. They also have to manage the information requests for those digital libraries, and so we've got those built in as well. And then last, for all legal firms, it's extremely important that they have good understanding of billable time, and so many organizations are using tools like Chronos or others, and we've been able to actually integrate ServiceNow with those tools to not only ensure that you've got a good understanding of the billable hours for the lawyers, but more importantly, that as you go into those shared services and legal organizations, you've got a good ability to abstract what their billable hours are and get those back to the appropriate project. So out of, for instance, Chronos. Okay, so where does Chronos leave off and where does ServiceNow pick up when you request into that system, or can you describe that in a little bit more detail? Yeah, so it's usually used in this application, it's used in a way to kind of give the legal department's transparency on where those billable hours are coming from. Anybody can log into a Chronos system and pull a record, but it's not often associated to a task, we're not often associated to the specific activity. You might have an hour of billable time, but that hour of billable time may be made up of four or five unique tasks, and some legal organizations, customers want to get a little bit more transparency. This is the way they can do that. You're actually associated down to a task level. I know we want transparency, John, when we get our bill from lawyers, don't we? Okay, and then the workflow between lawyers and document processors, what people might say, well, can I just use a ticketing system to do that? And what's different here? You could use a ticketing system to do it. In fact, incident management is a foundation of any good transaction of work between groups. That sounds a lot like a ticketing type of application. The benefit of ServiceNow is that, of course, it has that, but in addition to that, you have the ability to get reporting, you have the ability to automate the workflow, you can draw security and draw roles and groups a little differently, and so you have the ability to target those things that are really useful for those individuals and not distract them with everything else. And you've got integration potentially if you have a single system of record with other processes within your organization. You got it. All right, what about the security app? Let's unpack that a little bit. We've heard ServiceNow talking about security apps. What's your security app? So I really look at it as a precursor of really this notion of how are you going to really comprehensively manage security incidents? If you think about what securities teams do today, particularly with threats, new virus, new code, those types of things, there are a lot of different channels where they could pick up that information. In fact, many security organizations follow certain handles on Twitter because they might get the information first. There are emails coming from vendors, there are emails coming from other organizations. There are websites that get updated and there are other types of places where you've got to be able to integrate with these many different sources of records, parse that information down to what's relevant for you, and then you have to structure some workflow around that so you can manage it. So what our application does is it creates the ability for you to create unique strings and query those different repositories of information looking for those unique strings, right? ThreatVirus A, for example, and it will then create automatically those tickets. So you don't have to have a person parsing out emails, parsing out websites, parsing out Twitter information, things of that nature. The system's going to do it automatically for you. Going to create that in a ServiceNow record. Going to give you the taxonomy of where that threat information came from and give you the ability to tie that back into your IT operation. Okay, so now talk about the business model for these apps. How you charge for them? Is it a subscription? What's your go-to-market on them? Do you wrap services around them? Yeah, so it's different by application. This is obviously a very early market for us, but we're still kind of fine-tuning our approach. But ServiceNow has given us a lot of flexibility there. So we have the ability to offer app-by-app pricing, we have the ability to offer subscription pricing. We also have the ability to do kind of a freemium model, if you will, where you get a lighter version for one cost and you can elevate privileges for another. And of course, we always have the ability to turn that into a service's engagement and charge nothing for the application. So we're still working through that as we speak. The store was announced today, so we're going to have a lot to learn there. But we've also been piloting kind of how consumers share and use service management information through ServiceNow's share site. So for the last few years, ServiceNow has had share-up and running developers and people on the ServiceNow platform that can go download bits of codes and things like that and make that useful for them. We've got over 2,000 downloads on the share site, so we think we have a good understanding of what the consumers would buy in a marketplace. And of course, that's why we've positioned legal and security incidents as our first applications. You mentioned in the quote here, your customers are wanting to automate more across their enterprises with innovative business applications. That's kind of the soundbite. You mentioned some of the workflow stuff with your clients. What innovative applications are you seeing? Give some other examples of applications that are innovative that you guys have worked on that ServiceNow is a big part of. Well, and I could give you a long list, but I'll give you some that I just think are interesting. The brewery application I think is quite interesting. So we've got a number of retail franchise types of restaurant organizations that we work with. IPA? And it's important for them. I'm not gonna tell you. It's important for them to be able to request beverages and types of beverages and get them to the appropriate place at the appropriate time. So we actually have a request catalog that fulfills that. A lot in the facility space right now, this notion of what you need to change a light bulb or what you need to shovel snow in the parking lot or what you might need to do some different types of things get a bid, for example, for services to be provided very similar to the types of workflows in IT. These are workflows that if you go back a decade ago would cost what? To automate. I mean, in terms of cost load or magnitude. Yeah. Significantly larger, would you? It's an apples to oranges comparison. I mean, I can't even, this would be a unique application. And years ago, you would start that conversation by saying, okay, I'm going to need a server and we're going to need to put that at a data center and we're going to need to make sure it's secure. And then we're going to need to build it on some sort of database and build something on top of that. Developers are higher. And, you know, exactly. And then if you had any money left over, you could actually execute it. And then you could actually do that. And so we don't even start there, right? Because as customers of Implant and Service Now, we're down to, okay, what is it that you really need? What do you want the application to do? Security requirements are met. You know, roles and privileges are already established. You're architectural. You're in the functional, real need of the conversation. Exactly, exactly. And so you're not starting from a technology discussion. You're starting from, you know, a business reason somebody needs some technology, which is just foundationally different. And what's the big aha with the store announcement? How would you summarize that to folks out there? What's the big, the top line news on that? You know, what I'm excited about is I think, and it's what makes Knowledge Conference such a great event is you end up talking to clients and you end up hearing so many different ways that they're using Service Now. And so I think what we'll find in the store really becomes an amalgamation of that. You see many different types of technologies. And of course we'll have the ability to see, well, what's really important? What's really moving in the ecosystem? What matters to clients? And they'll have a way to do it that doesn't necessarily always sound like a service's engagement, which I think will be empowering for them. So I wanted to talk about the sort of, the role of a company like yours as an application developer and, you know, service provider relative to what Service Now is going to be doing. Obviously, you know, Fred Lutty wrote the first application to Service Now. They've introduced the store. So what's your take on that mix? Do you, I mean, Service Now talks that they're going to really open up the ecosystem and what gives you confidence that that's going to be the case, that there's going to be plenty of white space? What's your take as a partner? Well, there's no question there's white space. I mean, we've been in this ecosystem since 2007 and it's been nothing but white space, right? So, you know, there's not a single anyone that I think could fill the void of what the clients are looking to do in the platform out there. And I'd like to think of, you know, Fred Lutty built a really capable IT service management solution and people kind of forgot that he actually also built the canvas that that solution's drawn on. And, you know, the canvas is blank at this point now. We were able to just, you know, kind of put the technology aside and say what matters, what's important? How do you want to address that? And, you know, there are a lot of businesses and a lot of customers and a lot of workflows within those businesses and customers. So it's a great opportunity for us to give them those spaces. And you guys remain a high touch service provider. Absolutely. You're not becoming a software company overnight but you're increasing the software content as a means of driving efficiency, value add for your customers, is that right? It's a good question. So are we turning into an app shop? Right? And then the answer is no, but we are building some apps. Well, why are we doing that? You know, foundationally I believe that, you know, we could go out there and I could speculate on what the next best app is and go try to partner with somebody that's got domain experience in X, Y, or Z, how to build a bread, bread basket, whatever it is and then try to turn that into an application and hope somebody buys it. We've actually gone the other way. We're actually listening to customer needs and looking at those services engagements to say, okay, where's the content that really needs to be repeatable? And that repeatable content is a good base or a foundation for application. You're not doing it for a venture development opportunity. You're doing it for a service delivery aspect. Exactly. Which then turns it into potentially a portfolio service. Efficiency, customer satisfaction, stickiness, all the good things, competitive differentiation. So you're a believer SaaS turns everything upside down. It really does. Okay, great. So the cloud mobile social revolution is upon us. You guys are in the thick of the digital transformation. So what about those companies that were the apples and oranges examples from 10 years ago? The big sex accounting firms, which are now our big consultant firms. They're out there, they're stuck on their ways. What's their challenges and how do you guys extend your distance and expertise lead against them? So I look at a big part of how we've added value in the ecosystem because we're relative to a KPMG or an Accenture. We're a relatively small firm in 1,000 people globally. So why are we so good at this, right? Why are we competitive? Why would Forrester put us in the leaders quadrant in this space or leaders wave in this space? Why would they do that? It's because we're able to get to a customer and meet them where they are. We're going to be very agile. We're not trying to roll into some business transformation. We're actually transforming business one workflow at a time in the trenches where it really gets done. And that leads us to the next opportunity, the next opportunity. Gives you track record and some trust. You can execute. Well, I would appreciate you taking the time. Stop them by and we'll see you tomorrow as well on theCUBE. Get all the action here live. Non-stop fireworks of action here on theCUBE all day. Three days, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellas. We'll be right back after the short break with the segment from Cloud Sherpa is great. Great insight. Thanks so much just for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back after the short break.