 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back, welcome everybody, Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. I told you before that we celebrate each year the winners of the Hackathon. ServiceNow sets up a Hackathon every year. It's a great program and they have two categories. One is the customer category, one is the partner category. Dian Wang is here. He represents the partner category in the Hackathon. Dianna, congratulations first of all on winning the Hackathon and welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So I specifically set it off camera. I don't want to know anything about what you did and what the project was all about, but take us to when you started. So I guess it was what, Tuesday afternoon? Yep, yep. Kind of the clock started ticking and you have until midnight when the bell rings. It starts shipping in pizza and beer and just coke and pizza pockets actually. Pizza pockets. No coding beforehand. Nope. Right, that's not cool. Yep. And everybody sort of plays by that rule. You could think about it in the shower, I presume. Oh, we had a vision. We had a vision. Okay, so what was that vision? And how big was the team? So my colleague couldn't join me today. His name is Chase McCrae, but. Okay. So. Team of two. Team of two. So what was the vision? So I think one of the biggest problems that we've ever encountered with far typical client engagements has been, you know, how can we make the CMS portal look great? When you get the default employee self-service portal, it looks very plain Jane. There's not really a lot of pizzazz to it. So I guess when we came into this, we were thinking, you know, what would be the best way to add some visual flair to this? But at the same time, we want to make it user friendly. So we wanted absolutely no code involved. So we wanted to make sure that our end users, our clients can use this application to build beautiful, rich, responsive pages without any knowledge of any code at all. So that was the objective. That was the objective. Okay. Reloaded. Wow. We've built responsive websites. Yes, we have. And simple websites, which are not easy to build. We didn't build them in a day. No. Seven hours actually. Seven hours. Seven hours. Seven hours. Okay, so that was the sort of, the mountain you were trying to climb. Yeah. Okay. And then the clock started ticking like literally. What time? Oh, I think it was just shortly after four o'clock. So it's 4 p.m. go. And you had all these hackathon, you know, wannabe winners. Yeah. And everybody's coding, stressful situation. So what'd you do? How'd you approach it? What did you think would be your biggest challenge going in before you actually got in? What did you anticipate? You know, we've been actually browsing a lot on the community forums for service now. And I guess I've been doing a lot of research on what would be a potential solution for this. So, you know, looking at the forums, there wasn't a lot of progress, you know, doing this type of work, the CMS work, right? So I think the biggest challenge was, is it even feasible? Is it even possible? That's a good challenge. It's going to do it. It was a good challenge. Well, obviously it was possible. So how did you attack this problem? So funny enough, the first four hours, we had absolutely nothing working. Zero, zilch. We were pretty much shooting ourselves in the foot at that point. We were just like, uh-oh, what did we do? And then- It wasn't working because your premise was wrong. Your code was bad. You were going down to Dark Alley. When you say it doesn't work for four hours, that's a lot of coding. What was going on? What were you trying to do that didn't work? So we learned that, well, we had a lot of help actually from the service now guys that were coming in. And funny enough, the guys who were falling on the community forums, they were there at the event as one of the helpers, right? So we had Nathan Firth and Travis, both CMS guys for service now, come in and help us. So they sat down with us. They looked at our code. They were like, you know, this should work. Like what's going on here? And then there's some, a little bit of debugging and then we have to actually start over from scratch. That's been a theme in the show. Starting over on the code again. Four hours in, yeah. Four hours in, it was an hour contest. Luckily it was fresh in your mind. So we rebuilt it in 15 minutes and then all of a sudden it worked. You rebuilt it in 15 minutes after you worked on a log. Copy and paste, you know, just put it all back in. Right, right. Four hours down to 15 minutes, second time through. So what was the glitch the first time that you worked around? So something new in the Fuji release was something called application scopes. We found out that some of the, I guess the functions or API wasn't available in that particular application scope. So we had to actually go to a global scope which allowed us to use the global functions that are available in ServiceNow. And I guess that was the major roadblock there. So take us through how you went at this. So for the first four hours when you spent your time doing what? Just coding out the vision. But what does that mean in terms of was it the layout? Was it the ability to customize the page? Was it the ability to put in, you know, custom themes? How'd you make it responsive? Take us through that. So when we originally were determining like the scope of this whole project, we wanted to, well, at first be able to change themes on the fly. So say you're not satisfied with theme A, you can change it to theme B, theme C, any type, any number of themes that you can download online at any point. And then the other thing too was we wanted to make it so easy. We wanted to be able to just click and drag a control onto a page and there it is. That's all you need. So building that, we were, you know, it was a bit of a struggle, kind of like laying it all out, like what order to attack each control, right? So it was a bit tricky there. But you did. I assume you're not the winner for effort. I assume you accomplished a task. Okay, so the end game is a portal, so a page. And so I can envision, I'm thinking if I'm going to build out a site like that, I'm going to think through the content that I'm going to require. I might want social content. I might want, you know, knowledge. I mean, all kinds of things. I mean, maybe it's not infinite, but there are a lot of different permutations. So how do you accommodate all those different data types? So the technology we used actually is called Bootstrap. So that was the, actually funny enough, presented at the second day of the keynote by Fred Ludi. So we had some crossover there. But pretty much what we built was backwards compatible with all of ServiceNow's existing content management system. So things like knowledge-based integration, you know, into that portal page was possible. And you can add the visual flare from our Bootstrap integration as well. So you can mix and match and get, you know, the best of both worlds, almost. So you actually have a drag and drop capability. Yes. Out of the box now, that access is virtually any data type that's available in the ServiceNow platform, pretty much, bottom line. And all of the major Bootstrap components as well. And it's designed for the user then to be able to build their service applications without knowing anything about coding, basically in a drag and drop methodology. So I had, we do this stuff all the time, right? I had a East Coast based developer tell me that to build that capability that you just described was a million dollar project and it might not be able to be done. You did it in seven hours? Yeah, seven hours. Well, technically, this guy's more pizza. Technically three hours, you know. Well, I mean, you got to have service. Right after the four hours. You have to have ServiceNow platform installed to do it. And that is a precondition, but, you know, which not everybody has, but nonetheless. And so when the clock struck 12, you were still coding or were you pretty much done? We actually called it at night, seven hours in. So, no, the clock wasn't ticking at that point. We were just like, okay, everything's in. So 11 o'clock at night, you're done? Yeah, pretty much. Because how much time did you have in the whole contest? Eight hours. Eight hours. Yeah, eight hours. So you spent four hours at midnight. And then a team of two. Just a team of two. So now, so now what are you doing? With a little bit of help from ServiceNow. The other guy was supposed to be the mouth and I was going to be the brain. With a team of two with a little bit of help from your friends at ServiceNow, right? Yeah, yeah. That's great. So what are you going to do now with the app? Is it something that you're going to commercialize or? Yeah, we were hoping to bring this to our customers. Like, pretty much at the end of the day, this was built for our customers. Because all of our customers asked for the same thing. We want a beautiful, responsive, rich UI experience. That's pretty much the core essence of ServiceNow, right? Everything has a service. And if you think about it, something like user experience is a core part of a service. Right. And what do you think would be the impact for, I forget the expression that Shane just used in terms of the not coder coders. The low code developers. The no code developers to have a tool like this in terms of their ability and not so much ability, to inspire them to actually begin to build applications inside of ServiceNow. So I think this is something that people have never seen before in ServiceNow. The ability to build pages without any code at all. Any knowledge of that platform, Bootstrap. You don't need any background knowledge on it. And we made it so simple, like things like an image carousel. It's pretty much a PowerPoint slide. All you have to do is click, upload an image. If you want banner text, you can put it in. You can leave it out. It's up to you. Excellent. Now, tell me a little bit about online business systems. What's your company all about? So online business systems is a consulting company. It's actually based out of Winnipeg. But we have offices all over Canada. So I'm actually from Alberta, Canada, so. What types of clients do you serve? What type of industries, roles? So we, well, out west, from my home office, we mostly serve the oil and gas industry. Okay. Of course. Of course. But we also have a wide variety of clients as well, like tax preparers. We have one that's auto dealership, things like that. And also MSPs as well. So you're seeing this proliferation of applications outside of kind of the classic ServiceNow space in terms of the IT management into all types of things. Yeah. Like what is the car dealership user for? Car dealership uses for, I guess, pretty much to help us. But I think a better example would be the tax preparer, where we use it actually as like a monitoring tool. We kind of built our own service watch for ServiceNow. So we kind of customized it, tweaked it a little bit and made it something their own. Now how long you've been working with ServiceNow? So funny enough, I just graduated from university last year. So less than a year at this company, at least. You must be so psyched. A year out, you win the hackathon. Pretty wired, pretty wired, yeah. See, that's awesome. Are you doing on next year's idea? Oh, I'm thinking. I'm always visualizing. And your background? What's your background? I'm Chinese. Oh, excuse me. Well, that's great. That is beautiful, wasn't it? I'm Italian. I'm Canadian, I was born as a Canadian. Oh, so, but I mean in terms of computer science major. Oh, okay. History major, right? Computer science. You're a basketball fan, not a hockey fan, so science for the Warriors tonight. You're the one Canadian citizen and it's not a hockey fan, not a hockey fan. J-E-T-S-Jets, Jets, Jets, Jets. Yeah, good things done when the hockey fans come. Golden State Warriors is your team. Golden State, all right. They're gonna take it tonight. All right, good. Well done. First of all, congratulations. Awesome story. Thank you. And appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thank you, good luck going forward. Yeah, look forward to seeing that in the store. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back. Frick and I to wrap up Service Now, Knowledge 15. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.