 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back in Orlando, Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Pat Casey is here as the Senior Vice President of DevOps and more at ServiceNow. Pat, good to see you again. Yeah, absolutely. It's fun to be back. Been quite a week, hasn't it? It has been quite a show. Yeah, I think 15,000 people give or take. And first time in Orlando, I was also just really shocked walking the Expo floor. It was crowded down there. That was fantastic. And obviously, the next chapter of ServiceNow, and you've seen them all, it felt like CreatorCon today, that people were really excited to hear what you had to say. Sort of the cultural link to the roots of ServiceNow. I think the common theme that's always been there at ServiceNow is it's always been about making it easier to do things that used to be hard. Fred started that way. He wanted to make it easier to build business applications. And I think he really, really hit that ball really out of the park. And then we built all the applications people know and love, incident, problem, change. But it's not enough these days. So we're trying to bring that same sort of approach of simplifying to today's problems. You still have a time series database. It's big time IOT problem right now. You saw the machine learning. So it's really about making stuff accessible, but keeping that kind of ServiceNow vision of regular people. We hear tons of talk about platform, right? What makes a platform a platform? Oh, I actually have a slide I do on that. It's a picture of an oil rig. It says, is this a platform? And it sort of is. I guess so. The way we define it, and I'm gonna sound like I'm reading a definition, but it's a good place to start. It's the software and hardware that builds fundamental services that people use to build applications on top of. So it sounds less like I'm reading from a dictionary. It's the underlying stuff people use to build applications as distinct from the application itself. So it's UI, it's persistence, it's workflow, it's business logic, it's storage and retrieval. It's all those underlying guts. You have all that, the world's your oyster. People are gonna build cool stuff. The part that I love, it comes up again and again with you guys now at the machine learning is complex buzzword. People talk about it all the time. You find really simple ways and elegant ways to integrate that functionality into what are relatively straightforward processes that are mundane and painful. And it's the value delivered compared to kind of the sexiness of the application, if you will, is so high in categorization. And some of these things that you guys are attacking. I mean, it solves real problems for real people. And that's fundamentally where we're at as a company. We're not a hype chasing company. We're not a marketing driven company. We're a delivery driven company. We wanna deliver products that our customers can turn on and use. And if you look at a lot of the work people do in the service management space, there are parts that machines can do. The routing, the assignment, the categorization, the prioritization. And they won't be able to do all of it because the technology's not there. Hey, if I can do 50% of it, think of what that frees up humans to do. We're not gonna waste our time on mundane things anymore. We can work on higher value things. And that's really where we see the push in the service management space over the next, call it five years. It's around getting that better efficiency, getting the boring stuff out of there and letting people focus on the more important stuff. Well, we've been trying to bait you guys to talk about big data for five years. And it really didn't seem to be a relevant topic of conversation. Now the big data hype cycle's kind of over and now you're talking about sort of applying machine learning to a really hardcore big data app, which is, as Jeff was saying, I love the practical example there. And my question is related to the dogma of the platform. And I don't necessarily mean that in a pejorative way, but you guys are pretty OCD about making sure it's in the platform. And other platforms, you see a lot of bolt-ons and talk about your philosophy there and why it's so important for customers and developers. I've done it both ways. In my engineering career, I have run companies or been fairly senior in engineering where we grew by acquisition and we integrated with PowerPoint. And what I found out was that it worked great for about 18 months and then your customer started complaining. They said, do you sold me this suite that's not a suite? It's five distinct things that you then have to pay professional services or an Accenture or somebody to wire together for you. Why should I do business with you as a unitary entity? I could just buy piecemeal and get the same outcome. And as an engineer, that was really sort of depressing. It was a little bit of a kind of Bernstein Bears moment. Like I know now how not to do it. And Fred went through the same thing with me, frankly, because that was a company we both used to work at. At ServiceNow, we had a very, very strong vision that we wanted one platform and we have made the decision that when we buy technology, we will take the hit. We will say, hey, look, we bought DS Continuum and we're not going to sell it right away. We're going to take the time and the energy to re-platform it so that when we do take it to market, it's a really good integrated solution on platform. It's not a bolt-on to use your phrase. And yeah, it may delay our time to market in some cases, but we think the ultimate value is certainly offsets the delay. Well, I mean, are you wondering these days, talk about first mover advantage. There's so many examples of first movers who didn't get the advantage. I hate to even ask this question, but is time to market overrated or is it overrated in a situation where you have a platform that's installed with a bunch of loyal customers? I would say, honestly, somewhat contextual, but I think you get time to market. It also, especially because we're in the enterprise space, at some level it has to work. So if you're there first, but it doesn't work, it's not a great situation. And maybe the archetypal example of this is years and years ago eBay was just dominating, they're growing, it's before they're quite the colossus they are now, but they don't dominate in Japan. And oddly enough, they were delayed six months going into Japan because they had to spend all their engineering resources basically making the stuff they'd already bought and sold work. And that six month delay let somebody else, actually a local Japanese company, really take over the auction market in Japan. So for us, it's really key that anything we release, it has to work. So we'd rather be second with a working product than first with the PowerPoint deck. So the other thing Pat keeps coming up, especially some of the older customers, is customization versus configuration and how much of best practices are represented in what you guys deliver out of the box and making upgrades easy. And it's interesting because a lot of the early people built their mods and how they're telling us, all that stuff now is stock out of the box and we purposefully don't want to do mods anymore. We want to do configs to make upgrades easier and to presume that you guys, because of your breadth of experience, so many customers are baking in best practices in the standard out of the box processes. So it's a great opportunity for you guys to help them do better out of the box, but more importantly, as upgrades come out, execute those at a much faster rate. Yep, well, we definitely have heard the same thing from the customer base, and I think you've got two kind of related dynamics working out there. One is absolutely that we're expanding the breadth and the depth of our application. So there's more there. So our customers have a, oh, there really is an out of box solution. Whereas 10 years ago, we were just before we even IPO'd, you bought a pretty skeletal app and you had to customize it. I think the second piece of it though is the part of the market we're selling to has shifted. Early on, you sell to early adopters. Early adopters will fix your installer for you and mail you a patch. They really, they enjoy being part of a technology journey with you and they like configuring. That's a benefit to them. Right now, we're right in the middle of kind of a center of the marketplace. We're selling to companies who are not early adopters and they've generally said, hey, look, we want value in the platform, but we're buying an app. We want value not just in the configurability, but also in the as-shipped functionality. And for our old customers who have got all this customization, a lot of them are actually running projects to unwind that. And that's something we're very supportive of. We can help do that, but there's no magic bullet. You took your work to get it in. It's going to take your work to get it out. Probably less, but some. So I got to ask you kind of a personal question here. Sean Convery was on the other day saying, you know, his inspiration was when he was a kid. He saw some, you know, evil doer and he wanted to save the world. You know, that's how he sort of got into the security business. Jeffrey Hammabacher, you know, quips that the greatest minds of our generation are trying to get people to click on ads, right? You're a developer, coder, software engineer, programmer. You gave all those names today. And you're somebody who has the capability of changing the world and you're changing the world. The world you're changing is, you know, don't hate me for saying this, but it's kind of boring, but really important. But service now seems to be this platform that's permeating virtually every company and type of company in the world and you're creating new ways to work. And what are your thoughts on your ability to affect your customer's ability to change the world? When I was a kid, actually, I wanted to build physical things. And I went to college as a mechanical engineer. I thought I was going to build like, you know, caterpillar tractors. In my head, I wanted to build earth moving equipment and dams and buildings and bridges. And I kind of realized a couple of things. One was, at least in the US, we don't build a lot of that stuff anymore. You get to build like three bridges in your life if you're a bridge architect. The second piece of it, though, is that less and less of that is what I call tactical, tactile engineering. You don't touch it with your hands. It's more done with extreme math, with computers. And, you know, the world of kind of creative production, the world of actually engineering things to change people's lives, I do think a lot of it's shifting out of the physical into the kind of the software world of virtual. And for me, I found that I was feeling more fulfilled writing software than I was, you know, trying to build a new digger blade on a caterpillar tractor. This one reason is simply it's faster. I mean, it takes you 18 months to iterate on like big earth movers. You can iterate on software in 18 minutes and get that immediate feedback from the customers, like, wow, that's better. And like, okay, I'll keep going that way. So I always felt like I could get a better outcome with software than I could with physical. I will admit at some level, I go, I visit like the Hoover Dam and I look down and things massive. I like, man, I really wish I had built something this tactic, this visible that I could take my kids to. So I wanna ask you as well about something we talked about the other night at the analyst event, which was the impact on cognitive machines replacing humans. You're concerned about it, I'm concerned about it. And we were talking about education and it's kind of a bromide. We need education. But I always tell my kids, learn how to code. It helps. Can't go wrong, don't know how to code. But I wanted to give us your thoughts on that. I mean, as a society, we're seeing cognitive machines for the first time replace humans. You've expressed some concern about that privately. What can you share with our audience about that? And is there a prescription in your mind? Well, the short answer is I'm not sure. I mean, the longer answer is if you look at relatively modern, I'll call it cultural history, we've gone through a couple of major shifts that were super disruptive to society. You know, one is clearly the Industrial Revolution. It moved people off of farms and into cities. And it was very, very disruptive. And as a society, we eventually got through it. But you had wars, you had revolution, you had Marxist revolutionaries, you had fascist governments. It was a lot of work as a society to get through that. I do think we're going through a similar and equally disruptive change right now because we're starting to see technology displace a lot of people's jobs. And the utopian will point out accurately that, yeah, there's seven and a half million people in the United States looking for work. There's six and a half million open jobs. So it's just, yeah, the jobs haven't gone away, they've just moved. The pragmatists though, I don't think we can expect magically, especially at today's rates, for people who used to be truck drivers to suddenly say, hey, I'm going to suddenly develop a passion to write code and go back to school and four years later be a software engineer. It's not about intellectual ability, it's just they spent their life doing one thing, not going to go their way immediately. So to me, I'm not a utopian, I'm also not a doom and gloomer, but I do think we as a society need to expect to invest time, energy, thought and resources into managing this transition because I think we're right at the beginning of it. If we don't get ahead of the curve, it's going to be bad for collectively us. So I do think it's very important for us not to view technology as an abstraction, it has impacts on society and getting that right is just as important as getting the technology right. And just hearing you talk about that example of the truck driver, but I feel like the answer may be in software. That truck driver is not going to be a coder potentially, but he or she is a domain expert and that expertise could be applied to improve some kind of process or invent something even. So we're not going to solve it here on theCUBE, obviously. You talked about three other big trends. Timelines are compressing from years to months and sometimes even weeks. The second was the data explosion. You have a great infographic, we talked about it earlier, so we don't have to review it in detail. And then expectations, this notion of thinking machines. So how are you sort of service now at the core looking at those trends and how does it inform you and what can we expect going forward as a result? I think the super macro trend that I think we're seeing is that we're moving out of a structured data era. You know, human beings, this is a non-structured interchange. We're talking organically, it's language, it's imperfect. Computers like perfect data. They like you to give them structured data and they're extremely good at managing it. And we as a society, at least as an industry, have probably spent the last 50 years trying to force society as a whole to act like computers, fill in the form, put the data in the field. And once you do that, the computers go off and do wonderful things. I do think that the real benefits to the average human being for automation is going to come from removing the need to use that kind of structured format. If you can just tell a machine, hey, my laptop's broken. And they say, oh, we'll send a technician to fix it in 20 minutes. That's a radically different experience and better for you than having to fill in a form, a device that is broken, category, desktop hardware, in a time on set of event. Right now, why do you need to ask me this? So I do think that getting out of the structured data and into an unstructured interaction with machines, I think that's really the future. And I think you're going to find that there's going to be an intermediate layer of technology that abstracts between humans and between the computer systems we know today. So that you will interact with free form text, with voice, potentially even with gestures, but you'll interact as a human and we won't try to force you to interact as a machine. And if you have to be me, I sort of work well with forms. I may still choose to do that, but I don't think most people will. And I don't think I should make the world work the way I work. We're just seeing the very beginnings of that, right? With Alexa and Google and Google Assistant and those kinds of things, which are fun to play with because they still got a long way to go, but early days. It is the camel's nose under the tent, but it is coming. Well, you gave the example today at CreatorCon that you've never sort of denied that maybe a Spence report or some kind of approval ever. It's always been, I mean, you look at them because you have to. I'm a good corporate citizen. I read them. Guys, I do read your Spence reports. But machines can probably figure that stuff out. They can. And they already are in a lot of cases. The technologies are out there and we're seeing our customer bases start to roll them out. For me, it's really about making it easier to apply those technologies to more and more use cases because right now they're somewhat specialized. You get one that's really good at approving a Spence reports. It's not so good at approving travel requests. The next step up on that will be more general solutions. All right, Pat, we're out of time. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really great to see you today. Absolutely, it's a pleasure. All right, always a pleasure. Thank you guys. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. Day three, Knowledge 17. This is theCUBE.