 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back, good morning everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. We're here at Knowledge 14. Robert Fedorkas here, he's with Highette Hotels and a participant in the hackathon that's going on here. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, it's good to be back. Yeah, so tell us what's going on in the hackathon this year. Well, what's going on is about 800 times more of the applicants or was it 800% increase in applicants? I think we started off with 46 teams that showed up compared to the last years. Well, the FruDevCon had four and then the original hackathon had five or six and so at least 10 times as many. And it was just crazy as you walk in there's like a just gigantic crowd of people. Nobody knows anybody, there's all sorts of teams it felt like a trading floor. It was like, over here we want people, over here we got ideas. Where's it going on? Across the street? Yeah, it was over at West, it was on the second floor. And they just had this big old room and everybody came in and yelling and screaming and it was really exciting. And when did it end? Midnight. It went till midnight. There was a little less time this year, it was eight hours instead of 12 and so since it usually takes me about seven and a half hours to get the swing of things it was a little bit tighter this year. So what were you working on? We did an app to help quantify and automate social media campaigns. So the problems with large brand sensitive companies today is that they're counting on their marketing teams to push out good quality material to the widest possible network. They have absolutely no way of quantifying these things and just now we're starting to see apps enter the ecosystem where we can actually quantify these things and assess your reach and then automate the tweets and curate the content that you actually want to send through the social networks. But for the people who aren't on those cutting edge tools they're doing it in email, right? And then even if they do have these tools they're off kind of segregated in their own little silo that the rest of the enterprise can't really engage with them on. And so what we did is we put that all in our favorite platform for service management, service now. And so now it's just the marketing team is just another team on the platform that you can engage. So you might be in the facilities management group and you want an internal social campaign to tell people like, oh, we got this, you know, we got this brand new facility service ram it through the social media campaign. They'll collect all the content that they want to curate to send through the social networks. And then they have a squad of people who have volunteered their social credentials to automate the tweets and it just goes out. It's magic, it's automated. So wait, so this is a good example because a lot of times people, service now touches on a lot of different areas, right? HR, facility, it's not HR software facilities, but it's not facility software, et cetera. So this is an application that coordinates, it sounds like the social media activities within the company, right? It's not doing the tweeting, for example. Yes it is. It is doing the tweeting, okay. So one of the things we had was when we were talking to the people who were giving us the use case, they said, it's really hard, you know, I create an email with all the stuff I'd like people to tweet, and then I send them an email with the word please on it, like please do this. And then they copy, paste. Yeah, and I was like, why, that's, I mean, that's... I mean, even the best intention person would be like, yeah, I'd be happy to tweet that stuff with you, but I work in eight to 10 hour a day, and then I got kids when I go home, I'm not thinking about the, oh, I supposed to tweet that a week ago, I better do it now, now I look like a dummy because it's a week old. Right, right. And so we allow people to kind of opt in to the company social network, and so if I opt in, it says, okay, Robert, what's your Twitter handle and your password, it's all encrypted, and then I trust the company to tweet on my behalf, or I'm tweeting on the company's behalf rather, but I'm trusting the company to do it in an automated fashion. Okay, so you've integrated with the Twitter API, is that what you did? Yep, we did it with Twitter, and that was our kind of preliminary use case, and then the next step would be obviously LinkedIn, because then you could, once you have LinkedIn, and if somebody, you just imagine this for a second, if you had it, if the tool was pushing updates to LinkedIn, and a company said that's really cool, I like that, or a person, Jeff Frick, you like this, is Cube TV a ServiceNow customer? We could probably check that by running through our ServiceNow company database, and then instantly you're a lead, because you're at a company that liked content that we pushed through the network, and we could determine that just really easy by first sending it out to the network and then scraping the data afterwards. That's great. Okay, and then you say you, sorry, Jeff, but you say you curate the content afterwards, so talk about that a little bit. Okay, so the person who gave us the use case, it was just, you could just feel the frustration, because of all the stuff you want to tweet at a conference like this, I mean there's just really pieces of valuable information everywhere you look, and she's basically got to put this in an Excel sheet, or an email, or a text, or in her head, and then write that all out in an email, and then send it out to the world. And so the curator component basically says, okay, I got this really cool blog post that's gonna be really handy when we do our next discovery upgrade, or when Fred drops that handband bomb in his keynote speech, and then so once that's done, I just want to drag that out of an archive, not an email, like a maintainable, ratable, retireable archive, attach that to the campaign that I want to do, hit launch, and boom, tweets, LinkedIn, Facebook, G+. So talk a little bit about just everyone wants innovation, right? And what you're talking about is extremely innovative, and you just did it in the day, or eight hours or something like that. Just did it, yeah. Just did it. But I'm curious in terms of how it was spec'd, and you said there was a person there that kind of had the use case, how much of that had they really thought through, how much of it did you write down before you implemented, how much did you just kind of start putting bits and pieces in, and then start adding, adding, adding, so good, but then also I'm curious, how does this whole hackathon thing relate to actually innovating in your day-to-day job and being able to do things like, what sounds like a phenomenal application in a very short period of time with a ton of value? I mean that's really the essence of the hackathon is that you don't come to hackathon to marginally increase the efficiency of your notifications, right, because that's not going to win. So everybody that goes to hackathon is either there to try something new and interesting and fun, and then there's a bunch of people that are trying to actually solve a big business problem, if you will, and both are really interesting to watch. As a matter of fact, one of the entrants in the hackathon this year is a multi-user dungeon. It's like a game. It's all happening through the ServiceNow platform. But for others you almost have to have, you almost have to enjoy the smell of garbage, right? So you go looking for it, you're like, what's garbage around here, right? And the idea of keeping all this media, I don't want to push through a social network in an email, that's garbage smell all over it, right? So let's just solve that problem and let's make somebody's day a little bit better at the end of the day. And that's what innovation's all about, really, is either taking something that's, it's kind of BS to deal with and flipping it over on its head so it's, it's cool to deal with. It's fun to do garbage to that. Now that said, really. Now what's your background? Are you a programmer, a developer? Everything I've learned about programming in JavaScript I learned in ServiceNow. I've always kind of been an ITSM guy, my first job out of school, somebody just took me in, showed me the ropes on whatever, whatever the tool of the day was back then. And I've been doing that ever since and I was lucky enough to fall into the ServiceNow game really early. Okay, so you're sort of a nouveau developer, right? I guess so, I pretend to be a developer. Okay, but this is what's interesting to me because the ServiceNow platform expands the number of people who can be developers, right? But knowing what you know and understanding that you're not, you know, a hardcore Python programmer or, you know, Java developer. But you understand that world, right? Yes, I do. I can speak their language. Right, yeah. What's the experience difference between those two worlds? I wonder if you could sort of clarify that to the best of your knowledge. Well, you need both. I mean, there's just no getting around if you have a really, really hot solution in ServiceNow. You have to have somebody who takes, who makes the magic happen, right? It's just that the magic is not exposed to the end user. And what ServiceNow is exceptionally good at, what Fred Luddy is exceptionally good at, is pushing the envelope of what can we get the tool to do that's magic versus having to have a coder build custom UIs all the time? Like, did you guys see his keynote and his document management of magic? Yeah, so give me a specific example, if you could, of sort of where the ServiceNow magic occurs versus what you might have to do in a conventional programming environment. Well, take the example Fred used today with the papers online, right? And now he's got an interface that doesn't even require me. So today, at the companies I work at, somebody says, gosh, Rob, it would be really nice if I had a tuition reimbursement form. Okay, what do you want to track, right? Well, we want to track the person's name. I could figure that out for you, but I'll put that on there, right? I'm collecting all their fields. I'm having all these meetings with them to determine their needs. And it's two people's time and it's an expensive person's time to get it done. When in fact, we could have just taken one person's time, they know what fields they are, give them an interface it's easy for them to use. They put the fields on that they want, the pictures on that they want, tell them, let them decide where it appears in the catalog of services. Then you don't need a guy like me around. At least for that. That's to say, but then do you have to come in and kind of connect anything to really make it work? Yeah, it's almost like being a shepherd of features now. You know, it's not like I'm, it's not like I have to build everything. The stuff that I have to build is less and less. So I can concentrate on richer, broader features, whereas the stuff that isn't as rich, isn't as broad, isn't as deep, can be handled by people that only need shallow, simple features. Right. Without service now, business line has a requirement to go to IT, go to maybe the head of application development or remember their liaison is to say, I need this project, I got to get this developed. I need some coding. Yeah. This is what I need. They okay, they scope it out, they maybe do some stencil, they do some wire frames, they describe the functionality, write the requirements doc, blah, blah, blah, and then somebody goes off on the program. That's already, I don't know what you're, okay. We're already lost, right? Okay, right. That's a crazy big process. But that's the, that's how it works today and 90% of the company's out there. And then what happens is they get, they probably select an industry specific app, right? And then you got to get all the different expertise for all the different industry apps that you got to buy. They don't really connect well together unless you have to pay for more expensive resources due to all the separate integrations, right? And then what happens, and this is the really, the part that I don't think a lot of people clue into when you have that ecosystem, but it just really pisses me off is that the customers have to find out how to navigate the entire service model, right? So if you need to go to facilities, well, you go to this system and you log in with hopefully the same username and password, but probably not. And then you go in there and you pick whatever you need to do, hit the request, and then you go over to our onboarding system and you do da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, and then you go over to our whatever system and you're going from system to system to system. What do we care, right? We're IT or we're the business. But our four customers are like, gosh, who do I got to talk to today? They got to keep it in their heads, which of the 60, 70, 80 services that I want to consume, where do I go to get it? And what if they're all linked together? Like I would hate to consider the day of, I'd hate to imagine a world without service now and I had to do onboarding. Like what am I gonna do? I'm gonna email all 80 teams that are involved in getting somebody ramped up, especially in a world more complex where we're getting more and more and more apps and more and more and more security concerns and segregated data and all this stuff. You're talking about, okay, we're live. Yeah. You know, start using it. Yeah. Training session today. Here's it, okay, now describe a world that you're in where a service now exists. How would that sort of interaction that I described be different? Well, I think service now is just a way to kind of get all these services collaborating together because prior to service now we live in this world where it's like, it was an ITSM tool. It was made for IT and that's really all that all the people really thought about. And maybe if you're lucky you got some forward thinking coming to the, oh, let's do SharePoint or maybe we'll get an open source, an open source business management slash workflow management, request management tool and we'll get some extraordinarily expensive talent in. I mean, even more expensive than service now talent relatively because there's like five or 10 in the world, right? And then they would build those applications themselves. What service now does is it really allows people and not necessarily, I'm not a huge coder, I'm just a guy, I've been in the ITSM tool industry for 10 years. I'm a perfectly average IT guy but they give me a tool like that and it's like all these components are so easy to use and interact with and now I can start thinking about, there's really no difference between what an HR team needs out of this or what a facilities team needs out of this. What they really need is a way to say, get records coming in and allow me to process a workflow and then where I'm able to allow me to automate that workflow. So it's not even people doing stuff, it's just, I guess to a certain point in the workflow and then the machines do the. So Rob, we're tight on time getting the hook but I want to ask you because one of the things that Jeff and I have been talking about and frankly struggling with a little bit is and when I read the Gartner Magic Quadrant IT service management tools, I see, I'm trying to squint through, I see things like, oh this legacy company has cloudified so now you can do it as a service. They got mobile support, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it feels like service now is different and the way you're speaking in terms of the business focus seems different. You've been in the business for 10 years. Are we talking about the legacy companies, I'll say it, putting lipstick on a pig? Is it legitimate what they're doing? Is it just sort of a new product or service now really that different? I say service now is just really that different. I mean it's the only one that looks at it as, I mean all the other tools will say IT is a service unless concentrate on IT service management. And then all service now does is kick the IT off it. Right, and it makes the components simpler and easier to use. It recognizes that the types of work we do are the same. Somebody needs to consume something from you. That something has some kind of process or as Fred showed us today, maybe no process. But it's still a way to quantify our work, quantify the requests that are coming in. So it's nuanced, but to hear from an IT practitioner, that to me is the ultimate. You can hear the vendors, so now I'll tell you one thing. I gotta tell you something else too is that IT is now a weapon in business. As before it was just like, oh, God. It was a dead weight, right? Come on IT, come on, all right. You know, come on with the rest of us. We're trying to get over there, come on IT. And now it's a weapon. So the whole business needs to get somewhere, right? Facilities management is lagging behind now. IT's okay, let's get you off that paper, right? Those paper forms. Let's push you into a real workflow engine. Let's integrate you with the rest of the business services, like onboarding, like room meeting finders, like the people that won the innovation of the year. Let's integrate that all together and have one big business solution. And now, service now, and IT is the machete that cuts through all the stuff in the way of the business. Awesome. I like that. Rob, great, it's always good to hear the IT practitioner, you know, the voice of the customer here. Thanks very much for coming on the queue. I'm on the front line. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Moscone. Service now, Knowledge 14, right back.