Are we good to go okay? Thank you for coming to our presentation today So before I begin I can have a quick show of hands. Who's running like a Linux server right now in production at their company? Okay, and of those people that have their hand up How many of you have your legal team concerned that the Linux kernel is GPL license? I'm sorry for you But for everyone else right GPL the Linux kernel being GPL license is just a normal part of what we're doing right and So by the end of this talk, I hope you'll also learn to stop worrying and love the GPL for eBPF based programs, too So with that let's begin with the most important part. We're not lawyers. This is not legal advice This is a summary of intent if you really want to get a extremely precise and expensive answer go talk to your lawyer Your lawyer so talk to your lawyer. This is a free conference talk. Yeah Okay, so what's in this talk? So the first thing we're gonna walk through the motivation Why is eBPF worth this GPL hassle a quick overview of eBPF licensing considerations? reviewing the history of the relationship between CNCF and GPL licensing and then Providing you with a little bit of practical guidance about how you should think about GPL licensed eBPF programs in your application So the motivation it's no secret eBPF is eating the world Right. Why is that? So if you think about the Linux kernel, it's a 30 year old technology It doesn't innovate as fast as it used to it needs to provide stability because it's running on billions of devices Or worldwide and the Linux kernel is great because it provides a lot of performance and visibility into the system It controls everything that's happening between the application and the hardware But it kind of has lost that flexibility of adding new functionality on the fly as you need it you can do things like kernel modules, but they can be difficult to use unsafe and crash your kernel and may not always be stable and How can we kind of bring this program? Ability into the kernel and how does this benefit a cloud native environment? Right, so this is what eBPF is it's bringing that flexibility and program ability into the Linux kernel To allow us to provide new functionality to meet the demands of the cloud native world in terms of scalability performance complexity it's a safe performance an observable way to instrument the Linux kernel and the great thing is it's available by default in most modern Linux Distributions so provides a lot of benefits, but we're not here to kind of Talk about that So the kind of like history in the old days it could take you five years to get something from a User demand about what you kind of need in your Linux kernel to actually being available in production Right, this is a very long cycle So instead with eBPF we can now do that in a couple of days And this drastically reduces the innovation cycle and what we can add an instrument into We need to provide for our applications and In the word of Brendan Gregg's this kind of gives superpowers to the Linux kernel and I guess another way to think about this in the cloud native world, right? So you have your smartphone and originally it was just shipped with the applications that the that the Device provider gave you but with the iPhone in the App Store suddenly you could download new functionality on your phone on The fly and have something like an application to guide you around a new city or a way to buy Metro tickets or call a taxi, right? That's new functionality that you needed and we're able to download it eBPF allows you to do something similar You're able to add new functionality to a device you already have on the fly and that's pretty powerful So You now know why you have this great, but what do you have to actually provide when? You're going to put eBPF in your project I'm going to go over there's a lot in the slide, but I'm going to break it up into three pieces, right? So the first thing you have to do is provide eBPF by code then needs to be loaded into the kernel. This is what ends up Practically needing to interact with GPL code so you have to be careful there and it's going to Optionally interact with a user space application that you provide This is normally what you do in a project. You'll have a user space application and BUPF by code. So and this is the thing that usually does all your business logic and will interact via maps With the kernel and it's usually run privileged. Usually there's an asterisk there There are some short small use cases where you don't have to run as a privileged application But the linux kernel provides a whole bunch of stuff for you already, right? There's a syscall API that you interact with so you can actually load the eBPF programs and load the maps that they use to Exchange Jada with the user space There's also a just-in-time compiler and a verifier and a virtual machine all of this is inside the kernel space So and this is sort of real magic is all of those components that you don't have to provide You just have to load your bytecode into the kernel functions So here's a really simplified Lifecycle for what an eBPF program will look like very high level Right, so you start out in user space and you compile your usually see your rust Though I guess we have to go now right so into eBPF bytecode then you basically Use the syscall API's and you load that bytecode into kernel space for for the verifier to take over Your application then does whatever other business logic it needs And before I get to maps Now in a modern program or user space program We actually use lib eBPF you can actually wrap those two pieces together into an application And the application will then load the bytecode for you, right? You don't have to do it as separate steps modern applications will do that As part of normal startup So if you flip over to the kernel space, you know once you've loaded the bytecode via the API It'll verify that it's safe to run and it's possible to run It'll attach it to the correct kernel event hooks So you're you know, whether it's networking or or file system layer Whatever the eBPF program is supposed to be in line and executing on and then it becomes an event driven Executable right so it's not async It's not running parallel on some sort of thread as as event data or a kernel data flows through the kernel It'll use these hook points and basically Activate these eBPF programs at that point, which is why it makes it super efficient But the big thing that I want to come back to at the very end of this is that the kernel space and the user space side Are interacting via these eBPF maps via the syscall API? And this is how you communicate back and forth So you're able to get observability data out of the kernel or you're able to reconfigure eBPF programs to take different actions So now that we know why we want to use eBPF and a little bit about what it was Let's dive into the licensing overview. Why are we even talking about gpl? If it's so scary for so many people so eBPF has its origins in the Linux kernel and a lot of what we're gonna be talking about is licensing concerns working specifically with the Linux kernel implementation of this and Because the Linux kernel is gpl to license We're gonna have to talk about how that affects the way that eBPF programs are licensed So the big question is do eBPF programs need to be gpl licensed? Well like any good lawyer would say it depends. We have a few more billable hours that we need this month So when eBPF bytecode is loaded by the Linux kernel it's going to check if it's using any of the helper functions that are marked as gpl only and see if the eBP the licensing of the eBPF program is compatible with the gpl if it's not and doesn't have that licensing then the kernel will reject that eBPF program because it's not doesn't have a compatible license and Not all eBPF helper functions are gpl only however as Alexi would say he's one of the co-founders and co-maintainers of eBPF that all meaningful BPF programs are gpl license so the practical answer at the end of this is yes eBPF programs need to be gpl licensed and And One example to kind of show why the practical answer is yes is talking about this Helper function to generate log outputs So if you have a non-gpl license eBPF program, but you want to add this in for debugging purposes you actually need to change the license to be able to get the kernel to accept the program and That's why it's pretty highly impractical to avoid Licensing eBPF by code not as gpl And so as you're thinking about adding eBPF into your project you should think about how gpl licensing fits into that overall And so as bill just said that the kernel actually has a very specific set of function calls where you Tell the kernel which license you're about to upload in terms of your eBPF program So right even we have program program you have to basically mark it as saying this is licensed a certain way separate from the other licensing auditing you're doing this is actually a Call you make to tell the the kernel runtime or the eBPF verifier That it's acceptable to use of certain helper functions, right? And it's a different this is a different nomenclature than what you'll see in the header files So it comes down to what is what does the kernel? Want you to choose or what what is available? There's actually a list in the in the kernel licensing documentation about acceptable licenses Generally the you know you're gonna want to pick a dual license You can do gpl2, but it's it's generally especially in cncf I think you'll want to choose a dual license here What matters is is that it's gpl compatible at runtime when the when the eBPF program loads into the kernel but cncf doesn't actually allow gpl as a as of a license under its IP policy, so programs have had to Or I should say cncf projects that have used eBPF. I've had to ask for an exception And that makes it difficult historically to basically add eBPF and get it through the process But before we talk about that about there's been some recent changes there I want to finish up just talking about the other licensing issues. You may have run into in discussion the other the other issue other than the eBPF side is Can the why do you have to do with the user space executables that are interacting with these eBPF programs and you know the truest answer is complicated contact your lawyer, but the documented intent from the Linux kernel developers is that this should be sort of a normal reasonable practice Because everything in the user space here is using the Linux syscall API, which has a very specific carve-out as an exception So that it's treated as user space and not part of the kernel There are a lot of terms associated with licensing and before I go any deeper I think it's important to sort of Reflect on what these terms are especially in the GPL licensing right what what are we really interacting with here? What are the what are the terminology? So one of the big issues is you know is eBPF programs Derived works of the kernel right and that's up that's sort of why they have to be considered GPL licensed and on If you think about kernel modules, they absolutely are right because you're interacting with With a very specific Linux kernel you have to link against a specific version Whereas eBPF programs It is a little more complicated but The compiled by code even if it's separate sources the compiled by code because it's interacting with the Linux kernel and using functions Is considered a derived work? Generally or at least that's the intent again. We're not lawyers and then The other issue is whether or not when you decide to take your bytecode and your application code at the same time and package them together Is that a modular program or is it an aggregate and the document in intent? Is that they should be treated as aggregates when it's eBPF because the eBPF program is Using the syscall API and and and the thing with aggregates is if you have two programs even if they're interacting, right? If they're using provided Normal mechanisms by the OS Normally you would see like if your shell if you're interacting via pipe or file descriptors The the Linux syscall API is meant to be similar to that where you're able to interact across the syscall And it's considered separate programs from that point on so even though you've developed them together And they're intended to interact They are considered an aggregate when you package them and you're able to load bytecode from the application And like I said, it's all it's all comes out of the intent around the Linux syscall API License exception note. I think the Linux kernel developers have done a really good job to document the intent here They actually provide this syscall note on all the on all the header files that make up the syscall API so that you can you can be Clear about their intent as to where the boundary is between user space and Linux the kernel itself So just a little diagram about why I'm talking about like when I'm in a modern ebp f user space application You'll bundle that bytecode that you compile does just a just a data blob, right? And then you use you use the Linux syscall API is to load that across the boundary And this is why it's considered an aggregate because we're using that syscall boundary instead of just loading it into memory inside user space is sort of two highly connected functions or applications And this is not this is the reference from why I say I The there's clearly defined intent here from the Linux kernels developer side, there's actually Some documentation that specifically says that generally They expect to be able to have user space program proprietary license that interact with ebp f programs And this is again about the intent that it's been documented There are other remaining question here about aggregates versus modular is ebp f maps if two programs share memory that's highly Detailed or or between the two applications like you have to know the internals Of the memory you may have to consider that as a modular program and so so a question can come up about whether maps are these sort of structures and Again, it's complicated contact the lawyer But the practical answer is because these maps are being uploaded in an interface to via the syscall It is practically speaking meant to be considered as an app the intent is to consider these as functions and aggregate can take advantage of and Is a great example the bpf tool which is used by everybody as a diagnostic to see what maps are doing, right? independently developed has access to all the maps that all the other programs are running on the system, so You aren't so intimately tied to even though you're providing the map as part of spin up When your application is loading their bytecode bpf tool can actually access that right and you can get information diagnostically from it one word about that though is You should think about documenting your maps a lot of the map types are sort of self-dictus. They're simple They're defined by the links kernel Side right, but there are a couple of types that are very flexible Which can appear as Sort of a blob of data. You can't really peer into them diagnostically. There's actually a solution here If you're if you're already writing a modern compile once run everywhere Bpf program You're already sort of getting documentation of these types for free automatically because there's a thing called The bpf type format and to make core work You have to implement that and then once you have once you have used that bpf tool Can see inside your your message trucks and actually give you diagnostic information, so It's important. It's an important thing to do from an intent standpoint because you want your own users You need to diagnose these things be able to look into these maps So a real quick licensing recap after all of this, you know user space Effectively practically Can be licensed however you want if you're cncf program project. That's not true You have to so by by the cncf Policy and and pick a license that cncf is okay with And then for the bytecode side for the epf bytecode side Generally, you're going to want to choose to do dual license with the GPL with some other permissive open-source license and for cncf projects That has been an exception to the rule. So let's talk about that now So cncf and the GPL has as Jeff has been hinting to been an exceptional relationship So it's kind of interesting right the the cncf is a sub foundation of the Linux foundation Which obviously hosts the Linux kernel and obviously the Linux foundation likes or supports the GPL However, cncf as being a sub foundation has its own separate IP policy And the key one here is all up on code will be made available under the Apache license version 2 So that's what Jeff was talking about all the user space applications for cncf projects have to be Apache 2.0 However, like in this IP policy, they can also ask for exemptions from the governing board. So Using ebpf in a cncf project has historically been complicated because the GPL is not specifically allowed within the cncf's IP policy However That's not really going to work and the governing board saw that there's really no stopping ebpf in cloud native There's cilium falco blixt istio pixie inspector gadget and even kubernetes are using ebpf right now a Lot more projects are considering it and I wouldn't be surprised if almost every single project on the cncf Landscape was using ebpf in some way in the future So to really take advantage of ebpf we need to reconsider how we think about the licensing considerations and the big news here Jeff has been hinting to there's actually recently a Blanket ebpf licensing exception approved by the governing board says great news and essentially saying that the cncf allows projects to have ebpf By code license as gpl 2.0 or later and this is great news because now we can have ebpf programs in cncf projects So that's the state of the licensing but you still have to do some things in your project so that you can simplify this And make sure that you manifest the state of intent that we've been discussing so The first thing These are my personal opinions. These are a nile lawyer This is not legal advice This isn't even my employer's opinions nor is it bill's opinions. These are mine Sorry bill so So we can use Cillium as a guide here as a project that's basically doing some things that The cncf has already looked over as sort of okay practice even before the exception So the first Things you should probably think about doing is you want to make sure that ebpf source code that's going to have to be GPL compatible is compartmentalized in your project a little bit you can doesn't have to be its own repo It can be a subtree, but it needs to sort of hang together And be obvious right to everybody who's looking that this is the part portion of the code that will make up Or be compiled into BUPF by code I think you should probably choose a dual license instead of just GPL by itself for reasons that sort of future-proofing a little bit and You want to make sure that you know this? complies with the intent that Associated with the documentation around the epf One thing you'll also have to watch out for is that the mechanism that I spoke of how the you tell the Linux kernel It's GPL. It's different than your license audit Mechanism right at the that the file level you'll you'll need to have the spdx license headers, right? Which is a different terminology than what you see Inside the function call that the kernel requires so Make sure and keep up with that that you don't have drift there. You don't accidentally put the the wrong or incompatible nomenclature right between the the license header at the top of the file and what you actually Say to the Linux kernel. It's a it can drift and so you have to watch out for that So going above and beyond that Again my personal opinion Do what you can to document those maps that you should think about the maps as being an as being a user space-facing interface which means that you should think about it as an API that you document, right and and I don't probably there's probably not a single project that does it 100% to the extent that I would like to see it but the btf Format gets us really close like to the point where you can actually debug these these These complicated map structures that applications are using from user space Which practically speaking is like a big benefit to everybody even even developers and when they're interacting with their own users, right? Being able to debug these things so and I sort of feel like there's an opportunity here to go a little further Like maybe we can get some more automated tooling and do Better sort of generated documentation, but that's sort of a future concern So what are the future concerns? If all the things that we told you right now had to be thrown out the window. Where does that leave us? As I said before ebpf came from the Linux kernel, but it's not the only place you can implement it It's possible to implement ebpf for other operating systems for things meant for it microcontrollers or Windows ebpf for Windows is a project on github right now You can go check it out and ebpf is coming to other types of operating systems so Because these other operating systems may not be gpl License that means that the ebpf programs may not need to be gpl licensed either Some of these implementations for maybe edge computing or running Windows nodes on Kubernetes are going to be relevant to cncf projects I guess one open question to take away from this is like can cncf get ahead of Windows ebpf licensing requirements before they start showing up as requests from projects because We want to keep we don't want to go through this again. We don't want to go through this again short story So that's the end and we're just gonna kind of wrap up here If you want to learn more about ebpf, I recommend checking ebpf.io It is also available in multiple languages including French Italian and Portuguese We're also looking for people to help translate it into more languages to bring ebpf to other regions. I know there's currently translations in process for Italian Swahili China and Chinese So if you're another language, please talk to me after this talk and last thing shameless self-promotion I just released the book. I haven't even seen it yet because it's arrived at the shipping dock at 10 30 this morning The book buzzing across space the illustrated children's guide to ebpf I'll be signing at 1 30 at the psyllium experience center If you want to see it at the same time I do for the first time then come by So with that, thank you for coming and unfortunately we do have a little bit of time for questions and we're not lawyers, so But we can't take any questions you want to have Maybe I start with the so I'm like novice to this ebpf You know add a little bit of it, but if I have to start learning we do we do a start Where do you start with ebpf? Yeah Yeah, so I'd check out the resources that I was recommending so ebpf.io has a lot of like good ways to get started The children's book is also breaking it down like pretty simply and then if you want to go past that There's also two more books. What is ebpf and learning ebpf available on the ice available website? Thank you Yeah, any other questions last call Okay, thank you for coming today. See you around the conference


Hello, good afternoon. My name is Philip Preston and I'd like to welcome you to today's webinar express leading through turn around and transformation organized by CIM Southwest. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. The presentation will last approximately 30 to 35 minutes, followed by a short 10 minute Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the Ask a Question chat box in the Q&A panel, which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen if watching on a laptop or across the top if you're watching on a tablet or smartphone. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and we'll attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If you want to show your thoughts on social media, we're using the hashtag CIM events. The webinar has been recorded and we'll share the link to the recording with you over the next few days. And finally, you'll also be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which would love you to complete. It'll only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. So, I'd now like to hand over to Gordon Seapright, who was our guest speaker today. Well, thank you very much, Phil. This is me. I'm now Chief Executive of Creative Land Trust. I've only been there a year, so it is not yet time for a turnaround or transformation. But what I am going to talk about is some of the stuff I've done before that. And immediately before, and up to about a year ago, I was the Chief Executive of the Eden Project down in Cornwall. I was there for about five years. Before that, I ran the National Cycling Charity and spent a period running the Royal Horticultural Society. So why should I be able to say anything about transformations? Well, here's the great transformation. The first of three transformations I'll talk about at Eden. And this is the one that I think gives me and I hope everybody faith in the possibility of achieving the impossible through transformation. So this is a picture of the landscape that became Eden from just when the idea had come up. And it's an insane idea to take the most destroyed landscape in the poorest part of the UK. So there's an hostile area of Cornwall and turn it into something really, really special. It was a China clay quarry. To get China clay, you blast away all the rock with high pressure water hoses and you are left ultimately with a big hole.  So this is probably the finest example of how man can destroy a landscape. And so the first transformation that Eden had was moving it to this. This photo was taken last year. I mean it's now an absolutely beautiful place. It's got the world's largest rainforest in captivity in a bubble there. It's got mature plants all the way around. It's described as the eighth wonder of the world. There's 5000 rock pins holding up the sides. The bottom is 14 meters below the water table. So there's all sorts of interesting engineering going on. And more importantly it shows that which is possible and it was intended to show people that we shouldn't despair. There's never much of a mess that people have made of the earth. If we all work together in communities and in harmony with nature, then it is possible to save a place. And that was the first transformation and 2 million people came the first year and it was an amazing success and it has transformed Cornwall as well as the Eden project. But then came the need for the second transformation because over time there was a bit of drift and a lack of investment in the site and the visitor numbers fall away. However, completely wonderful the attraction is people have seen it once and they thought that they'd seen it enough and we reached the point that we were down around 700,000 visitors a year. And that really wasn't enough to pay the bills and started getting a bit of a circle of problems with the debt levels growing. Therefore the lack of investment in the proposition therefore fewer people coming to see it. And also a loss of support from the from the local community who taking it for granted for a number of reasons that I can go into and a bit of a drift away from what the initial purpose was. And Eden got into a bit of trouble and it was still bumping along OK. And then we had 2012, which where there was a sort of perfect storm and combination of the Olympics, hoovering up all the tourists and unfavorable weather meant that Eden really hit them buffers financially. And it was time for another turnaround. They began just before I arrived bringing about a turnaround and I'll say something about that turnaround. And my observation is that turnarounds have three phases. There's the one that everybody knows about the one that makes the newspapers the financial turnaround. And at Eden that was fairly dramatic. It was about driving down the debt and therefore being making it possible to focus whatever expenditure there was focus that expenditure on investment on stuff that people wanted to come and see. Including events being ruthless on other costs and therefore starting to get the visitor numbers up and getting into a virtual circle of increased profitability and reduced indebtedness less money going out in interest payments. That's the bit of turnaround that everybody is I guess familiar with and it's a story that you often hear about corporate entities as well as charities. And I would say without being glib about it that's the straightforward bit of turnaround. It's not easy, but it is fairly simple. Spend less, focus your investment. My learning at Eden was that there are two other phases of turnaround which are trickier. And the second is how the rest of the world feels about you. And we found that the rest of the world didn't like us quite as much as we thought. And we look back afterwards and we got a good understanding of that. We realized that as one of my colleagues always said we'd sort of behave like unruly teenagers as though the world owes us a bit of a living and was lucky to have us there. And actually when push came to shove, we didn't have quite as many friends as we had hoped. We couldn't get quite as much support either from local government initially or from national government. That came as a bit of a shock. So then we had to do a lot of work on changing the way the rest of the world felt about us. And that actually meant doing the hard yards of going out there and changing our attitude and showing that to people. All my colleagues, we all served on any number of other boards to try and make ourselves useful. And we turned Eden into a bit of a convening space. We used to say if Cornwall was a village, we wanted to be the village hall where people came together. And over time, we felt we made Cornwall fall back in love with us. But even that's not the hardest part of the transformation. The hardest part of the transformation is how you feel about yourselves. And it was unsurprising that after a couple of hundred redundancies, people at Eden felt pretty battered. And they were finding it hard to feel proud of the place they worked. And so a huge amount of effort went in to turning that around. And I had learned something in my time at the Royal Horticultural Society on what that meant. It meant face to face time. Eden has a little bit more than 500 staff. That is not so many that you can't actually speak to everybody in small groups and talk about what's going on. And bang on about what the plan is to turn it around and get everybody engaged in that plan. And crucially give everybody a clear focus. The focus we came up with was this. And it might surprise you, but although everybody originally knew what Eden was there for, there hadn't been what I would call a strategy. There hadn't been a clear plan of what we were going to do. And the danger there is that you're relying on everybody's shared understanding without knowing that it exists. And you have the risk that people start doing stuff that they know kind of fits with the ethos. But effectively it's pursuing hobbies. It's doing it in the most well-intentioned way. But you can end up with a group of intellectual magpies who are all running towards the latest shiny thing. And that matters because when you've got limited resources, you need to focus them in the right place. And so a huge part of what we did, that first couple of years of turnaround, was actually the very basic thing of clarifying what are we here for, agreeing it, finding a form of shared words that we could all use and getting everybody lined up behind it and making sure and there is no limit to the number of times that you can say this stuff and share this stuff and share conversations about it. And so at the bottom of the slide there you can see that we came up with a strap line which was around transformation. And we went through our second transformation. And that is a nice recovery story. But it's not a recovery story that ends there. Von Moltker, the general, doesn't honestly have many things to commend him. But he did say this very profound thing, that no plan reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy. Mike Tyson, the boxer, put it in another way. He said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Well, that was the experience for us. And we had no sooner got our place in shape than these things happened. Now, Eden is there to show the power of transformation. It's an environmental charity. And yet we still found ourselves a little bit wrong-footed by a 15-year-old, she was then Swedish schoolgirl, and by the Extinction Rebellion guys. We found that actually the stuff we'd been talking about in what we thought was a very clear way for 18 years at that point, well, we were at risk of being pushed aside, of being ignored, of being irrelevant in the debate, because the world had moved on. And we had to figure out what we were going to do about that. For the benefit of anybody who's interested in business school diagrams, I put it onto this. We described it as our pivot point, that our start point was that we had become stable. We had looked after the organization that we were to the point that we could feel confident again.  And there were other things going on as well. The key one being that we needed to show that we were still relevant. And we were at real risk of not bearing that. So we had to figure out what to do about that threat. And the thing that we had learned from our previous transformation, our second transformation, about bringing everybody together came in again. We brought the whole team together. We brought everybody into gatherings where we talked about this issue. And we were on some occasions quite surprised by the results. We found, for example, that loads of the Eden team were urging us to declare a climate emergency. And of course, a lot of organizations were doing that. It surprised us because we kind of thought that we declared a climate emergency by founding the place. But actually, we needed to be explicit. And we pulled together all the stuff that came from our team. We wrote up another strategy. We created an action plan. It sounds like jargon, but actually we needed a plan because Eden's a complex place. And we needed to focus all our resources and all the possible channels that we had on bringing about the changes that we needed to retain our relevance and make a difference. After all, nobody works in a charity, getting paid too little and working too long hours. If they're not passionate about making a difference. So we did a number of things. One of the most important things in the Eden year is the summer program. In simple terms, Eden needs to get about a quarter of a million people through the doors during the summer holiday six weeks in order to fund what's going on during the rest of the year. And that's the nature of business in Cornwall. But we were perhaps weren't using our time with those quarter of a million people as well as we could have done to tell the stories that really mattered. So we changed our summer program. And instead of doing a blockbuster on the stuff we had done before like space or dinosaurs, we did a rather daring summer program on the subject of biodiversity and mass extinction. It's not classic box office, but actually we found that it gave us the opportunity to share thoughts and concerns and hope with that quarter of a million people. And while they were there, seeing what we can share with them about the planet, seeing a rainforest in the southwest of the UK, learning stories about the charities who are doing great work and the countries who are doing great work, but also learning about what we're losing and how quickly we're losing it. We asked them a load of questions and we gave them a load of tools. We set up these kiosks where people could get advice on what they could do to make a difference. We called it make the change, just little things that they could do. Now we weren't trying to be po-faced about it. The people who come to Eden in that summer six weeks, generally it's their one holiday week of the year. God holidays, remember that? And they would come and not want to be preached at. So it was more about giving people that sense of hope and possibility of what they could do and therefore showing them that Eden had something to tell them. And we got people to make pledges if they wanted to, and almost two-thirds of people who came made a pledge. And it might be as simple as I'm going to put my recycling in the right bin. It all helps. It all adds up. And inspired by our experience with that, we decided to carry it through to our other programs when we were really busy. So this is a picture actually of that year's Christmas campaign. And we've been inside one of the biomes. We put massive artworks by an artist called Luke Jerem. It's called, as you can imagine, Earth. And we would hang that up so that, and it is huge, and play lights on it. So that at that moment when people were perhaps listening to a choir and drinking some mild wine, they also had a reason to reflect on the fragility and beauty of our planet.  The Father Christmas story had a strong environmental action angle. It gave kids something they could take away and do that would make a difference. Just out of frame here, there's actually a Christmas jumper swap shop. So instead of going to Asda to buy a new hideous acrylic Christmas jumper, you could swap your hideous acrylic Christmas jumper with somebody else. A whole set of activities that made Christmas relevant to our message around the environment. We also invested heavily in art. Art, as you can imagine from my current job, is a bit of a passion of mine. We raised money to install a number of major artworks, notably the one on the left here and no photograph is ever going to do infinity blue justice. But what it is is an eight and a half meter tall ceramic sculpture of a cyanobacteria, which is a microscopic creature that billions of years ago belched and farted enough oxygen into the atmosphere that life could evolve. And you can see our cyanobacteria belching out smoke rings. Smoke rings are O's, O's for oxygen. A very literal and yet artistic way of championing a hero of the environment. The other picture is of an artwork called Bird's Eyes, and that's a hundred replica eyes of birds that either... of UK-based birds that either are extinct through man's activities or are on the verge of extinction and they're reflective. And so when you are leaving the site at night, they stare back at you.  We had a way of telling the same story with food as well. We all know that we've got to eat less meat and more plant-based products. But again, you don't want to preach your people. They're supposed to be having fun. We turned one of our cafes into an entirely vegetarian and vegan outlook, but it doesn't actually say that anyway. You wouldn't know it. We just tried to put on the most delicious menu of plant-based meals that we possibly could.  We put the vegetarian options higher than the Cornish pasty on the menu. Over time, we got up to about 36% of the meals that we sold were vegetarian or vegan in a country where 11% of people are vegans. So we nudged people along with that. We nudged people along by simply getting rid of selling bottles of water. It cost us a lot of money, about £150,000 of water bottles a year we were selling. But we just did away with it and we put taps around the place and encouraged people to use their own reusable water containers. And for our gigs, one of the nicest things at Eden is the eight or 10 concerts a year that we would hold in the middle of the site. We moved them away entirely from single-use plastic. And I remember the first time we did it, at the end of the gig, what the team always do is go around tidying up any left behind beer glasses. And that used to be a one and a half hour job. And the first gig we did away with single-use plastic, we only had eight glasses that we had to pick up. So we're using the site to tell some stories. And then we went beyond that as well. And one of the things we did was rescue an initiative called the National Wildflower Centre, which was a millennium project based up in Liverpool that had fallen on hard times. And the National Wildflower Centre is a wonderful thing now based at Eden in Cornwall. And it's fairly obvious what it does. It encourages the growth of wildflowers around the place for the sake of biodiversity and for carbon reasons. And just to encourage beauty, beauty in all things. We felt it would be lovely if we could live in a country where kids were told, do pick the flowers. And so we set this, we acquired it and then we sort of really ramped it up to offer wildflower growing around the country and to build wildflowers into development schemes. There's a road in Cornwall now that is the first road, I think, in the UK to be built with the support of an environmental charity. Because it's absolutely festooned with wildflowers and orchards and the like all the way along. We also thought, well, we're an educational charity. We already have 50,000 school kids a year coming here, but we need to influence, we need to have even more influence. So we went in two directions on that. We went to younger children and we set up an outdoor preschool for kids to learn through play in the outdoors. Because if kids play in the outdoors, they're going to care more about the environment when they grow up. And we set up degree courses, notably here. Sustainable tourism and sustainable festival management. There was some in horticulture as well. You can see again the link back to the transformation that we were trying to bring about. And then finally among these things, a geothermal energy. You may have be aware that the southwest of England sits on very hot rocks. And if you drill a hole deep enough, and it's a deep hole, it's four and a half kilometers deep, you get down to about 180 degree temperatures. In simple terms, if you drop some cold water down the hole and wait for it to come up, a neighboring hole, you can stick a turbine on top and you can generate electricity. And this was a way that we saw that Cornwall and Devon could transform the rest of the UK's energy use. And so we invested in a geothermal energy scheme and they're drilling right now. So that was a whole set of things that added up to a third transformation for Eden. And the outcome has been that I think I feel safe in saying that Eden is absolutely environmentally credible. And I'm excited, even though I'm no longer there, to see much press reference to this. This is the plan for Eden North, a new Eden project in Morkham on the Lancashire coast, which is going to tell similar stories in a different way based on the sort of the tidal rhythms, the amazing seascapes. The key thing, I think, is that Eden is sufficiently robust financially through its second turnaround and inspirational environmentally through its third to be credible in creating the first of what I hope will be a series of new Eden's. So I did my five years there and it was time to do a different sort of transformation and I really wanted to work in the arts and I wanted to work in London. So I moved across this new charity, the Creative Land Trust. I've been able to use the things I've learned about what works in what I would call 21st century transformational leadership at the Creative Land Trust. These are qualities like humility, always sounds ironic when a guest speaker talks about humility, but you get my drift. Kindness, decency, authenticity, basic stuff. I used to cycle around Eden instead of driving. Having your sleeves rolled up. The thing I would always bang on about with my colleagues there was about, you know, we wanted people who were on the pitch playing rather than in the stands shouting. If you want to bring about a turnaround, that is absolutely what you need. A flat hierarchy, hugely important at both Eden and at my current place. A lot of people report to me. I think it's absolutely nonsense to say everybody should have four or six direct reports. Actually, if you want to be able to pull all the levers, then you don't want hierarchy. You don't want people focused on the big boss at the top. You want everybody sharing and a relentless focus, relentless. Everything's got to be in service of that big plan. So Creative Land Trust, as I say, we've been set up to bring about a transformation. We've been set up because a number of people, notably the Mayor of London and the Arts Council for England and also Bloomberg philanthropies, realize that London has this amazing quality of creativity, which it stands behind the success of the city over hundreds of years. Why is London a globally successful financial centre? Well, it's not down to the weather that bring people here. It's because it's the most creative city. The trouble is artists tend to be the ones who move into a difficult area and they make it a really fun area, really exciting and vibrant area. And then the next thing that happens is they get priced out of it. And that's not mattered so much as long as there was another bit of time for them to move into. But it matters now because there isn't another bit of London for them to move into. So our job is to make sure that we have a creative workspace that is affordable for artists and that is bringing about vibrant, dynamic, creative clusters all over London, bringing neighbourhoods to life, giving jobs to young people especially, creating workspace for all those young people who come out of our arts university. We've got 35,000 arts graduates a year coming out and looking for places to work and they generally can't find anywhere that they can afford. So we're using the money that we raise to acquire places in the long term. The idea is to try and solve this problem once and for all and prove that it's possible to do that. Incidentally, no global city has yet managed to do this, which is part of the appeal. So we're not interested in taking places in the short term. There are plenty of very good studio organisations who do that. We're interested in permanent solutions by which we mean we take freeholds or we take ideally very long leases. In certain circumstances we look at mid-time leases. We're looking at reasonably big buildings, 10,000 square feet and up because art is one of those things that benefits from people working together, collaborating and the serendipity of collisions of ideas and we want to try and curate that if you like. And we've got to work way below market rent. 12 to 15 pounds a square foot including service charge is what is rated regarded by the Greater London Authority as affordable for artists. That is anybody who's dealing with London workspace will know that is way below market rate. So we have to dream up clever ways of doing that and then work with experienced studio providers. There's about 250 of them in London to make the space available. And how are we doing that? Well, we've got to dream up. I haven't proved it yet, but this is how we're going to do it. We're dreaming up a new blended finance model and it will bring together a number of streams of money. One will be Philanthropies. So Philanthropists have long been able to invest their money in art galleries or artworks, but not really before the places where young artists start their practice. So we're creating a donor scheme for Philanthropists. Investment. We are convinced that there is a market there for what I would call patient impact investors who give a damn about art and culture to earn a respectable return secured on London property in the long term. And so to serve art and culture but also make what probably rather more money than they make from investing in those places at the moment. We think that we'll be successful in blending into that some grants. We think that trusts and foundations and quasi-governmental organisations will be inclined to support us given what we do and the credibility that we hope we're bringing to this area of work. And the teeny tiny area of a bit of finance that we'll bring in will be our operating surplus. And that will be tiny because we'll be working stock market and we're a charity. So we won't be making any more money than we have to but we would love to be contributing to the overall ourselves not just covering our running costs. We fairly quickly realised that just doing that is going to take a long time to solve this problem for London. So we're also working a lot through strategic partnerships which is a much-overused phrase. What we mean is we're conveying the value of creative workspace the value that art brings to a place and we're working in partnership now with developers and councils and landowners so that they can feel the benefit of that and the way that the arts bring their spaces to life and we can benefit from getting sub-market or off-market opportunities to acquire and operate space. And then finally, policy and influencing. We don't aim to speak for the sector but we are trying to bring about a transformation of the UK or London's initially and then the UK's arts and culture scene. We're trying to bring creativity to the heart of our cities and in part to do that we've got to be able to influence things like planning policy, like development policy for cities got to get affordable creative workspace right to the heart of things. I rattled through some of the things that I feel are important in 21st century transformational leadership some of the things that matter for transformations and for turnarounds. The single most important thing that I've learned though is this, it's a quote. I don't often do quotes on the office wall that's a bit hackneyed but I can't resist this one. Harry S. Truman maybe the most underrated of American presidents and he lived by this. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit and my observation about successful transformations and turnarounds is if you want them to stick that's what's going to work. If you want to get in the newspapers and just do that financial bit where you cut stuff and stay in business then yeah you can go for the big man somehow it's always a man isn't it? The big man vision and making lots of noise and somebody gets the headlines but actually if you really want to bring about true change then you work with a group of people who just want to deliver the change and don't care too much whether they come out smelling of roses. That's me. Do please feel free to get in touch with me at Creative Land Trust if you want to be a part of that transformation and otherwise I will be very happy now to hand back to Phil and to take any questions that you might have. Okay yeah thanks very much. Great story telling there. We're now going to have a short 10 minute Q&A session. As a reminder you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the Q&A panel. There's quite a few questions actually so I'll try and get through as many as possible. Our first question then is I can back through the early part of the presentation on Eden Project. During these challenging times for all businesses what do you think is more important seizing commercial opportunities or embracing your brand values? Seizing commercial opportunities without being true to your brand values I think is a very short-term way of going about things and I appreciate that some of us at the moment feel as though we've got to be short-term. One of the first things I've done since arriving at Creative Land Trust has been carry out a piece of work on our brand identity so that we can fully understand well how is it that we want to appear to the world and I think that's important because I guess like most organizations we're planning to stick around for a while and we didn't want to take shortcuts. We want to have a reputation for being the good guys and for doing the right thing and so my perception is you've got to be true to yourself and if you are true to yourself and if your brand values are the right ones then the commercial opportunities absolutely will come. Next question. In transformation and alignment of people beyond speaking with them what part of the message works? It's crystal clarity I think. It's not just speaking with them, I should say it is listening. It's a two-way conversation. One of the things that I was fortunate enough to be able to do at Eden was once a year have a thing called the gathering and the gathering is a two-day affair where every single member of staff spends that two days doing shared stuff in a room. The site is closed which is unusual even normally apart from that really only closes on Christmas day but we'd have two days when everybody was together and that had a couple of things that were valuable for really driving home transformation and making sure everybody was sharing it. One is I learned that there is no limit to the number of times you can say a thing and it being valuable so that Harry S Truman quote has been used many many times and I would imagine there are a few people at Eden who could quote it back but alongside that I mentioned the strategy that we wrote up. Well we created a sort of graphic form of it so that you could grasp the whole thing and how it worked on one page and we used that enough so everybody could quote it back but the other great value of bringing people together and doing that face to face and I know that's hard work but you know it works it's important. The other great thing of that was being able to feel what's going on in the room and each year I would get up on the stage to open this thing and I could feel how people were feeling and the first couple of years you can imagine they just had massive redundancies and you could feel a tension. Is he going to get up and say we're losing another 100 jobs and I knew that we'd really turned a corner on that thing I was talking about the way that you feel about yourselves. I knew we turned a corner when I just got up and there was a warm buzz and you could feel the whole room were sort of comfortable and excited about what was coming next so yes there's other stuff but there is nothing to my mind that substitutes for just spending time with the whole team. Do you think environmental messages generally got lost because of the pandemic? We had a number of questions relating to the pandemic so this is the first one. I think kind of everything has been has disappeared down the headlines but actually when you think about it the pandemic is in part an environmental crisis and I think the things that we talk about in the environmental movement have never been so important. You can't imagine the pandemic without things like deforestation for example without agriculture stretching into areas where agriculture doesn't belong so even if we've been chased out of the headlines for a while I think we'll be coming back and the solution to the pandemic is absolutely going to be around solving the same problems that we need to tackle environmentally. So how is the project managing the current situation? Has it done anything different to get through this sort of virtual world that we're currently living in? Well I'm not at Eden anymore but I'd still follow the place closely. I'm a lot of timing in Cornwall when I'm allowed to go to Cornwall and what Eden has been doing is I think a very sensible policy when open of trying to allow as many people as possible to experience the wonder of the rainforest as possible but also continuing this plan to take the Eden message beyond beyond that bottom left corner of the UK and I've been really interested in seeing the progress of not only Eden North but also the work that's been going on towards Eden's in other places notably China and then the southern hemisphere. I think that's really important because however good Eden is in Cornwall it's only ever going to get a million maybe in a great year, two million people that it can influence and actually trying to change the world so you need to do that on a bigger scale. Question mate two-door current position actually RCLT's large workspace plans still in the works does COVID impact upon these plans? It does how it impacts is that's the tricky thing actually it may bring about a situation where there is more workspace available and landowners are keen to take a lower market price for it it may it's going to bring about some challenges especially in high streets of course because retail is not coming back the way that we're used to it and there's a challenge for residential developers in that a lot of residential developments are founded on what they call activation bringing them to life through the stuff that's going on the ground floor and typically that is shops and coffee shops and that dog's probably not going to hunt anymore so there may very well be opportunities there the flip side of that of course is that studio providers have been closed for months artists haven't been able to sell their stuff for months if they've been working they've been having to do it in their bedroom or their kitchen so the arts the creative sector has had a torrid time and you'd say there have been some sectors with huge respect to fishing there have been some sectors that seem to have monopolised the government's attention and there are other sectors and the creative industries which are so important to the UK somehow seem not to be of such interest to the current government and so I think we have a we have a lot of ground to make up general question now how can you identify the need for a transformation before your organisation hits the buttons you know if you're not close enough to the action to spot that before it comes then something's very wrong and yes I take it on the chin about the environmental transformation that was required about Eden the financial one we should never have got ourselves into that pickle so if you need a transformation or a turnaround that's going to deal with those sort of those financial fundamentals of an organisation yeah you really ought to see that coming the environmental one came as a bit of a surprise I think perhaps because I use the harsh word complacency we kind of just assumed that everybody knew we were the we were on the right side of the environmental argument and we're a little bit surprised when suddenly others started getting traction but helpfully you know we were at least it wasn't like we needed to turn the whole super tanker around we were in the position that we were doing something we knew about in hindsight what would you have done differently prioritize more to accelerate change in these projects that's a really really good question I think I just ran through some of the things that we ended up doing because we made them part of the change I think there are things among that because it's quite a long list I know there are things among that notably the geothermal energy project which have been sort of hanging around with us wanting to do it for a long time and I think we got to the right place but there were perhaps things that we could have driven along rather faster to get there but the other thing was I guess the horizon scanning part of it now as a leader part of my job is I know it's another terrible bit of business jargon but part of my job is horizon scanning and I think I mean I adore Cornwall I love living in Cornwall but there is a challenge for you when you live and work in Cornwall that you can perhaps become very focused on what's going on in the south west and maybe we did that and we should have been looking at the international changes a bit more management must make increasingly different decisions about the important issues but they always come with costs or trade-offs what compromises should we not be making now we're in 2021 come back to the point I made about the points I mentioned about decency and authenticity and the one trade-off you can't make here I think is pushing it all on to people lower in the organisation in the organisational hierarchy if there is change to be made and if there is pain to be felt in a turnaround situation oh and there is by the way this change is difficult it has to go right the way through everybody has to take their bit of it and the one area where I would be completely uncompromising is to say that absolutely throughout the hierarchy from chair of the board right the way through everybody has to has to be a part of bringing about that change I think I used the phrase earlier we want is people who are playing on the pitch rather than shouting from the stands I think as a leader in any organisation you have a pretty good idea quite quickly of who is in each of those categories and certainly the ones who are in the stands are never much fun to be around but in a transformational turnaround situation where there tends to be a bit of an emergency you absolutely can't afford them thank you very much some great questions and some great answers so that's all the time we have for our Q&A session today I'd like to say thank you to Gordon for today's presentation to CIM South West for organising the event and I thank you to you for attending we do hope that you've found it interesting and worthwhile our next webinar express the darker side of Nudging is on Thursday the 10th of February at 1pm hosted by the CIM charity and social marketing group you'll find it listed on the events page on the CIM website where you'll be able to find more information and to register for the session once again you'll surely be receiving a survey on today's event and we'd really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback so on behalf of CIM thank you for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day goodbye


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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.  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?  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.  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.