 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here in Las Vegas, this is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and I start to see the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Ames. I'm my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibond.com. And our next guest is Dave Wright, Chief Strategy Officer at ServiceNow. Great to see you again. Congratulations to the keynote this morning. How do you feel? I'm pretty pumped. It was a good one. I mean, I've known Fred for 20 years and I've watched him do these type of things for 20 years. So, to be on stage with him, yeah, it was a big deal for me. A lot of people happy in the keynote. First of all, Pack House, great crowd. Congratulations. But really, a lot of ooh-ahs on the UI and the clean interface work. A lot of hoo-yahs. And then a lot of really big cheers on the private instances, which really sets the table for a developer run. So I think you guys are going to see my prediction is, you know, I'll be a rocket scientist to predict this, but your developer is going to get some significant interaction, certainly sold out here. Yeah, how many are your creator gone? So, yeah, we've got like the 1200 people at CrazyCon, which was a sellout, but I think you're right. The whole, the ability now to get an instance, that's obviously what's going to drive the developer community in the past. It was really easy to develop something if you were a customer. But coming in from the outside, not so easy. Now the fact people can get an instance by signing up to the program. So Amazon has been very successful. We follow those guys who do all their events at theCUBE. One of the things that I'm really impressed with Amazon is their ability to just unleash new stuff. Machine learning is a service. Last year was Kinesis, Redshift, fastest growing, piece of their business. They keep on adding onto their core building blocks, which is EC2, S3, and the variety of the stuff. They got Qing, Messaging, Elastic B, so all the great stuff developers have been building that integrated stack in for agility, more performance. So I got to ask you, what's your plan? Because you guys are really building out that platform. We talked to them in our office when you came by. There's some core building blocks. What is the new blocks that you're announcing here, and what's the division and strategy that you guys are taking out to develop for enablement is one? What are those core building blocks, what are the new building blocks, and are you going to take that same approach like Amazon and just a tsunami of releases and being agile? So what we'll do is we'll take the platform that we've got now, and obviously we see this community now starting to build out in the platform. From a features perspective, what we're looking to do is get anyone to build anything that's managing anything to do with work. That's the main drive for it. If you're giving someone a task that they need to do, this should be the place where people go to do it. Now the drive around this is to try and get people to just not waste as much time as they were wasting in the past. So we'll continue to innovate in the platform. You'll see there's some new products that you can see that have already been built as modules that we haven't announced at the keynotes, but they're actually down at the booth. So you can go down and you can see some of the analytics stuff, some of the security incident management stuff. But what we've, I think what we've realized as a company is we can never build everything. You know, there's just certain areas where people come in and go, I've got the expertise, just give me a platform and let me build on it. And that's why you see people going out there into areas that we didn't expect. That's why you've got people doing medical asset management, why you've got people doing pharmaceutical type apps. So really, for a verticalization perspective, I'm hoping that we see a lot of independent developers or partners coming up for this. Because when you get people coming up, this is what really excites me on the platform. You get people coming up saying, hey, we want to build on your platform. We don't want access to your sales force because we're going to sell to a completely different set of people. We just want to be able to build on your platform, have your availability levels, have your recovery levels. That's where the exciting side is for me. What you guys are doing is what I think is really the holy grail, pun intended, given we had Monty Python on last night and John Cleese. But you've got the disruption and you're also innovating, which is a really rare thing to see in the business by you guys winning. And Amazon has that same thing there. Disrupting the market, some say race to zero but the value's shifting somewhere else. But they're also innovating. So at the same time, you guys are a little bit different in the sense that you're in the enterprise. So you have enterprise grade mindset and building a born in the cloud-like platform. So I want you to comment on where you see the disruption and the innovation. If you could share with the audience that dynamic and how you guys view that, are you aware of it? Is it a flywheel for your growth and what's your comments on that? So where I think the disconnect is now is it's the fact that software that you use outside of the enterprise is better than the software that you use inside of the enterprise. Now that's crazy to kind of a generation gap where people just arrive and look at enterprise software and go, why are you doing it this way? Why haven't we got the same experience we have with other applications that link requesters with providers? So you'll say, what do you mean? Why haven't I got the Uber experience? Why haven't I got the Airbnb experience? That's the same process. I want something. You provide it. Give me something that connects. So why couldn't we reinvent the way that people interact with enterprise software and why couldn't we make it a more immersive experience? And that was what a lot of the stuff you saw today around the mobile side of it. A lot of that's trying to drive towards getting people into this type of mode of working and way of thinking. But yeah, we want to get to the point where you can join a company as a 22 year old and you log onto the system for the first time and you go, this is cool. As opposed to like phoning your dad and saying, dad, I'm on some system. Can you tell me how it works? It was the innovation of Amazon as an example. They say, okay, pay by the drink but you're up and running. You're standing up stuff quick. That's a cloud term. What's your equivalent corollary to that innovation? To actually be some dude. On the innovation side of service now, what is your core innovation? When you go to folks say, what's your innovation message to the customers? Is it standing up stuff quick, redefining processes, workflows? So I think it's actually creating processes. So it's creating, sorry, I'm screwing up on accents now. I almost went processes, processes. Bad news being long day. Long day. What it is is about being able to, the innovation is to be able to give something structure that didn't have structure. So the best example I always use is you, you go around different areas of business and you talk to people and you say, use the IT example. You say, hey, IT spends all its money being as good as it was last year and everyone laughs at it. But you ask them, well, how do you perform? What do your guys do every day? They haven't really got an answer. So it's being able to take some kind of unstructured work format and being able to say, well, I can give you a system where everyone engages in the same way, where everyone gets to manage work in the same way or when you get to understand exactly what your business is doing. So it's that, I think the real innovation is to be able to create a true system of engagement that sits on top of a system of record. That's what it's all about. So David, struck by your keynote today, you and Fred were sort of taking us back in time. 2004, 2006, eight, the downturn, 2012, the IPO. And you did a great job of saying, okay, remember what the world was like back then. There was, Facebook really didn't have any users, that weren't college students, right? Google had an IPO and it just sort of took us through the litany of innovations that have occurred. Everybody talks about the consumerization of IT. As the chief strategy officer, do you basically look at what's happening in consumer tech and say, okay, we can do that as well. You guys used to use the Amazon example. Or do you have a different methodology? How do you predict sort of where things are going? I think it's kind of like the race of change becomes very hard to predict. I talked about the race of change at the start, but there was figures that we didn't use when we started to extrapolate it around adoption. You just get things moving so quickly now. I think the challenge is to try and not necessarily emulate what everyone else is doing, but you need to be able to move ahead of this. And I think rather than directly copying something, it's looking at the themes that you see happening at that level. So you could have gone back to 2004 and said, well, we've already got these type of social media solutions. This is the way people are gonna work. But then it took, whatever it was, three and a half years for Google to get 50 million users. Now, most companies aren't gonna wait that long for an adoption curve, even though that's a really fast curve. So it's been able to predict what technology exists now in the consumer world that you think is gonna end up having a major lead in place going forward. So how are people gonna interact? You see a lot of startups coming up now where people are starting to do work in different ways. Which one of those do you think is gonna be successful? So one of the ones we took a gamble on was the visual dashboard concept who was seeing more and more people integrate in different ways. I think the way you see companies like Slack and Glip doing different work around how they get people to integrate together, a lot of people have got good ideas and it's seeing how people wanna interact with those. I think a big driver or a big influencer is looking at what developers use, how, what tools are developers using to develop because that kind of influences what they develop and that kind of influences where we'll end up being. And what about your developer story? Obviously the 1,200 people coming to CreatorCon. You have the private instances which is great for DevOps like mindset, cloud guys who loved sandboxing, pushing code and testing and doing all that like on the fly work which is the new normal. Developers are worried that they, for example, Twitter has a problem with their developer ecosystem by putting developers out of business. The balance is you guys have a roadmap and you don't wanna put developers in business but if they're in the lane of, you're in lane, how do you balance that? To be honest, if we build an application that does something and someone else builds an application that does the same thing, I don't really care. I mean, I just want customers to choose which the best one is for them. It really doesn't make that much difference to us. I mean, there might be a minor financial impact on which license it consumes but fundamentally at the end of the day it's still building that community. It's still getting people on the system because I think the great thing about service now is once you're in the system, it's the capability of whereabouts you can go from that point on. So if someone, I mean, I think there's already multiple HR products out there. There's already multiple products doing mobile asset management out there. I'm fine, some areas we don't play in, some areas we do. But yeah, for me, I don't see it as a competition. I think it's- There's plenty of beach head out there. So you guys are enabled. I mean, Fred was on the cube earlier and one of the things I thought was really insightful that he mentioned among this whole interview was that when he asked him about the future he actually brought up internet of things and he said the use cases are emerging because the capabilities weren't there in the past. And he's the thermostatic example and they correlate the nest, which is kind of like a mainstream. But that brings up the point. There are new use cases emerging that are potentially worth a lot of money. Maybe it's lifestyle, business for a developer or full-on venture-backed business. By innovating a workflow that's now new and relevant. And you guys are on that. You agree with that? I mean, that's what you guys see 100%. Okay, so I'm a developer, I'm an entrepreneur. What's your message to me? Like, how do I do that? What advice would you give me in doing that? So there's plenty of material out there that I have to actually develop on the platform. The first thing, and I'm not a developer, I haven't coded for years. The first thing I do once I had an instance is I try and start off the process of looking for a, looking for something that I do on a daily basis that frustrates me. So I can pull this up easy because I do this almost every other day. Checking into a hotel. So I check into a hotel, I do something online. I book the room and then I get there and you get questions like, well, do you want a high room, a low room? Do you want a smoking room, no smoking, twin beds? Why couldn't I just select it at the front? So when it gets there, why doesn't it know off previous histories what my preference would be? Why do I have to still give a credit card to be swiped? When you find something that you do on a daily basis or an interaction that you do where you're asking someone for a service, my focus would be, how could I find a better way of doing that? Because they're the things that people are gonna buy. So also, Fred also mentioned the whole email thing. And there's a lot of people trying to crack the email code. IBM's doing some stuff around new way to work and email. It's never just trying to crack this code for a year. Everyone hates email, but we still use it. Certainly our kids, my kids don't use email or voicemail, but that matter. But the new way to do this is to actually have messaging and mobile app. So I want you to comment on this as a lead into the question of productivity. You get to put out a survey. How is the service now value proposition impacting the productivity piece? Because what Fred's teasing out is, this is a productivity rattle. And you're going into the email as an example, but this other way, other productivity opportunities that you guys are eliminating or process improvement. Can you share your vision on that? I think what it's more about is it's about the delivery of information at the right time. So it's kind of the equivalent I always use to explain it is it's the difference between constantly going to your mailbox to see if you've got mail or a telephone ring. I mean, when telephone rings, yeah, you got to do something, but the amount of time you can spend just checking if there is something for you to do is pointless. I think it adds structure around being able to prioritize things. I mean, that's what people can't really do at the moment. You get a request, yeah, okay, how am I going to do the request? The innovation around driving things out of email is one thing, but I think the process of being able to bring other systems potentially onto a single system is something else that drives a lot of benefits. But I would say at the moment, people use email because email is ubiquitous, and that is the main focus. And I don't think to say to people, hey, don't live in email, live in service now, that's never going to happen. That's why we needed to get that whole mobile app out in place, because you need something where you're getting work delivered like a telephone ringing, like UPS saying, hey, it's going to be there in 20 minutes. That's what you wanted to put. What's the biggest use case pattern that you see from a productivity standpoint across your broad customer base out there? Is it onboarding? We heard the KPMG, that's pretty solid. What is the consistent pattern that three years it's had all over and over again? We say, yeah, we're killing it there at productivity. We're doing great work. So it tends to go, it still tends to start off in IT. And then IT, we tend to see the next move through is HR, the next move through after that tends to be facilities. And the other parts of the businesses, legal finance marketing, they have an interest in it as well but that tends to be the flow that we see people going through. And it can be multiple things. I mean, people first of all start to look at the onboarding situation, but then they start to look at, well, how do we do candidate management? So how are we going to actually handle the recruitment side? And then people come in with kind of tangential things. So I was having a conversation the other day about someone at a university, about someone at a university saying, well, what I need to do is I need to handle student recruitment. So when a company comes in on campus and wants to recruit people, how do we communicate to people that they're on campus? And then how do we actually track people coming in and applying at that level? So people come up with solutions like that. We get a lot of things around hospital management where there's productivity issues where people are saying, well, how can we actually start to manage things more effectively from a medical perspective, be it medical assets, be it hospital beds, any area like that. So the problem I have, and this is why the platform's so good and the partner market's so good, is you could sit and write down use cases all day. I mean, you saw the scrolling anything as a service. That's what it feels like sometimes. I want to ask you about the innovation curve. So it's interesting, at the micro level, we're talking about all the waste that goes on in organizations, but at the macro level, productivity numbers actually look pretty good. Productivity's going up. Employment's not following productivity, which is a concern, and you guys potentially are going to add to that problem in theory. So it seems to me that the opportunity is to replace that gap between things that we're doing that are wasting our time and apply that to new innovation. So be it a bend the innovation curve, if you will. So I'm wondering, do you have examples of that starting to occur in your customer base, or do you, as a visionary, do you have a vision as to how that might occur? So I think there's kind of two elements to this. You look at the survey that we published on Monday and we're saying that out of a thousand managers we surveyed in America and the US, they spend around 15 hours out of a 40 hour week doing this type of administration task. Now, I think there's two ways to look at that. One is the benefits of the business of being able to drive productivity. The other is the fact that those 15 hours that you're wasting on admin, you're probably doing it in your own time. You've probably got some kind of knock on and work life balance around this. But I look at examples that I've had from a perspective of how I've worked with things before. And this is another good use case example. So before strategy, when I was running all the engineering, the pre-sales engineering team here, if someone wanted a resource, they'd come to me, hey Dave, we need a resource in this company at this time, and they'd email me. And I would spend ages basically re-rooting emails to the managers to say, hey, have you got anyone in England? Have you got anyone in the Netherlands? So it took like two days, and we wrote a full system where someone could just come in and request a resource. It got resourced to the right manager in the right region. My emails probably went down around 800 a week where I wasn't getting a request coming in for things like that. Reduction of 800 emails a week because people just weren't asking me for resources. And as it's queued up in the right place, you can work your business. And I can reassign it, if I go away for a week, I can just say to my next manager down, hey, can you look after it this week? But I'm damned if I'm going to give him my inbox. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'll go through writing. Once you strap past the line in your inbox, it's gone, right? Dropped off the end. Okay, so example of one, how did you use that time that you freed up? I might be how I ended up where I am now. Okay, so this is a good example, because the big thinkers worry that Instagram and Facebook have way more photos than Eastman Kodak ever had. And they employed far fewer people, yet they're worth a lot more, you know? So it's people like you that have the freed up time and the vision to create these new, you know, ideas. You get more time to focus on things and look at how things are done. So are you seeing that within the customer base yet? Because a lot of what you're doing is sort of cleaning up messes, right? Or are you seeing there's enough time now, I would think you're starting to see glimpses of people sort of shifting. It's not so easy to say, okay, I'm going to take somebody who's a whatever, mid-level manager doing X, and now I'm going to put them on innovation. So yeah, you see the shift now with people starting to move outside of IT into general service. The interesting drive is a lot of people who are in IT who are driving IT service, the company will decide, okay, we want to move this further. We see the vision for where we could go in service management. A lot of times what they do is they move that person outside of IT and they'll say, okay, we're going to create global business services or global shared services and actually put you- Make it happen. Running that division and make it happen. And everyone says, everyone to a letter says it's easier to let the vision flow down than sometimes it is to try and push it up from IT. Because a lot of people will say, let's say IT, you go to legal, legal it's sitting there saying, you're IT, what are you bugging me for? But if someone comes to you from the top and goes, we want to redefine how service is consumed by your group. People will be okay, yeah? That sounds interesting, show me what you've got. So in our last minute here, I want to get the chess board out. Dave and I always like to do the chess board of the market. You're doing strategy, so you've got to run the chess board, you know? Okay. With the team. So what's on the chess board? What moves are you making? What's your key strategy right now? How would you describe it to, how do you describe to analysts, customers? And what are the key things that you're focused on in terms of the big moves you're making? Right, so kind of think of it in three directions. So think of it, the first direction we're focused on is the extension of service management. How to get service management out across the enterprise. The second area we're focused on, what can we do to complete the IT stack? So if you think of the IT stack as, ALM, ITOM, ITSM, IT financial management, what can we actually build out in that stack? Be it through building or be it through acquiring. This year we spent a lot of time on ITOM because ITOM hasn't changed in 25 years, so probably worth changing it. The third element is innovation. So what do we focus on around how people interact with the system, how they engage with the system, what their experience is with the system. And I think the interesting thing now is looking at how many of those elements in the IT stack actually expand out across the rest of the business unit. So initially, we came up with a concept of IT financial management. To be honest, you may as well scrap that. It may as well be dealing with service financial management because once you've got that data, you can then track it across any business unit that you're doing. So they're kind of the three vectors we... Okay, so let's talk about the API economy. Obviously, workday is a big system. You guys have customers have workday, but you guys have an HR app. Is it to build connectors? I mean, is connectors a way for customers to deal with the data portability? Because at the end of the day, the systems of engagement is interesting, right? So there are many systems of records out there. Yeah, I mean, there's different approaches people take. Some people say, well, my first move is going to be to modernize the front end and build a single front end where everyone goes through to all these other systems. And we're a workday customer. We interface to a workday. But a lot of the drive case is just to be able to just manage the work that comes into the system. So we focus on, let's say the HR example, we focus on knowledge case and request. That's kind of it, you know, you come in and you're processing one of those type of orders. And then it might be that in order to complete that case that comes in, the HR for filler is actually living the life and workday to do it. And they're doing the work and workday and then it gets updated and passed back. So ours is more defining how you actually engage to generate that work to stars. And the customers, it's not a lot of heavy lifting on the customers. And they don't have to rip and replace workday in this case. They can come in and get a point. A solution with all the goodness of service now behind it. And pay as they go. If they want to go. And certainly in service now, we front end our SAP system with it. So if you raise a procurement request, you do it in service now. Is you can front end a lot of systems. Yeah. Instead of having a lot of front ends. But you don't have to train people how to use all the front ends. Then from a productivity perspective, you get someone in each and one UI. That's it. They're done across the board. So the platform goodness there is it's flexible. You guys have an enablement model. That developers now onboarding. You've got customers getting the ability to rapidly deploy stuff fast in IT, which is a good problem space to work in. And then as you go to adjacent, you not really have to do a lot of medieval activities in the platform to grow, right? I mean, you wouldn't believe the speed we turned around the whole security incident system. That was amazing. Well, this is awesome. Congratulations. Certainly, we're certainly impressed with the software. We saw up there in your keynote. Great UI. Love the real time, synchronous stuff. Getting stuff pushed to you will be the future. That's certainly great. You've got a coding angular. You've got a bootstrap, all this stuff going on. Real cutting edge stuff that we've been playing with. So we're super impressed. And congratulations on your success. Dave Wright, Chief Strategy Officer, in charge of the chess board with the management team up at ServiceNow, making it all happen. This is theCUBE, sharing all the data with you. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you.