Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back, welcome everybody to San Francisco. This is theCUBE, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We've been talking this week off and on about the hackathon that ServiceNow has every year. There's a little subculture going on here and you know, you got the Innovation Awards where people sort of gather and submit and they're like, hey, what's going on? What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? You know, we have the awards where people sort of gather and submit innovations and the hackathon is something that we covered last year with a remote camera. We talked to Rob Fedork who's also here again today, yesterday, and he's joined by Chris York who's in the hot seat in the middle, to my right. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. So you guys are finalists of, you're welcome. You're the finalists in the hackathon. So, these gentlemen are really service now practitioners, I mean, in terms of their vocation. That's really what they do well. Chris, you were saying that you were trained in the early days by Fred Luddy. Yeah, absolutely. When was this? 2005, Fred and I sat down together when he was first building the product and taught me how to use it and develop on the platform back then. So, what was that like?  So, as soon as I saw that, I knew my career had changed from that point forward. That's awesome. We had Fred on, and he took us back to the early days. We had him on last year. We didn't go into the early days this year, but he said, yeah, I developed this thing on an airplane or something. I'm sure he's told you that story. And then I started shopping around and telling people, look, I got this platform. They said, what can you do with it? He said, anything. And they said, all right, but what do I do with it? He took his experience from Peregrine, wrote this IT service management application, and the rest is history. But so, what were you doing before you were trained by Fred? Well, I knew Fred back at Peregrine Systems. Him and I worked together then. So, I was doing consulting in the Peregrine world. Okay, so. HP at the time, they had acquired Peregrine. And Rob, you're also very much a service now practitioner. Not quite 2005, but, well, I guess let's see 2009, roughly, is when you started. Yeah, somewhere around there. Yeah, so pretty substantial. And so, you've been in this space for a while. IT service management, change management, et cetera. How, I wonder if we could start with this question before we get into the hackathon. How has that space evolved from your standpoint? And Chris, I'm gonna ask you the same question. So, think about it. Well, I think the ITSM space has really provided a catalyst for, it's gonna sound really crazy, but allowing the business to kind of think like IT, right, and have them adopt kind of this process focus. And they all have processes and they all have ways of interacting and engaging with their customers. Like, and I'm not talking the business to its customers, but within the business, each of the silos of the business talking to its internal customers. And so, I think what people have been looking to IT and some of the ways it's organized and the way it destructures its processes and the way their tools help them do that. And service now is the first platform to really allow the rest of the business to capitalize on that lesson. You know, that's really interesting. That's the first time I've heard that. A lot of the business that think more like IT, on the one hand, people might say, well, why would we wanna do that? Here's why.  So somebody goes out and books a big deal and you say, hey, let's have a party, let's celebrate, and the delivery is a little spotty, but hey, you made a lot of money, great stuff. Whereas IT, you don't have that blanket, that security blanket to cover you. You don't have a revenue party. You have to deliver or you get shot, right? So, all right, Chris, so same question to you. From your standpoint, how has IT service management evolved in the last, in your case, I guess, eight, 10 years? Yeah, well, when I first got into IT, it was a pretty wild west environment. You know, a lot of cowboys out there, everybody doing their own things, and the resulted in a lot of outages and downtime. So I think ITSM has really stabilized that, focused people on, let's get a standardized process. Let's put some controls around places, and now that we have a much more stable environment and you can rely on the architecture, we need to shift into more of an, let's use IT for an innovation source. And so, if everybody's doing the same thing and you're always following the process, that's not very innovative, right, but we need to branch away from that and say, okay, now that we've stabilized, let's tap into those creative resources and use them. All right, let's get it to the hackathon. So, you guys developed something called the social loop, right? So let's start with what the hackathon is all about. We talked about this yesterday, Rob. So of course, take a stab at it. So the hackathon, the genesis, how'd you get involved, and what's it all about? Yeah, I would have never called myself a hacker before last year's first entry into the hackathon. Are you not a programmer? Well, I programmed, but I wouldn't say I'm a hacker, right? Yeah, okay. You know, I write software and customize software. So this whole concept of a hacker was kind of new to me. So I entered the hackathon last year for the first time thinking, oh, this could be fun. And it was quite frankly the highlight of the conference for me, you know? You pull together a team, you come up with ideas, you build it, and you have such a short window to do it, it just fast tracks what you do in your day-to-day life in eight hours, and it's quite exhilarating to be able to accomplish something by the end of the day. It just seems, I mean, I'm very impressed because it seems to me the hardest part about what you just described is just the idea, the creativity, you know? So how did you guys get together and talk a little bit, Rob, about the idea? So how did we get together is we all, we're all hackathon winners, so we all kind of knew each other from that space, and it was just really easy to kind of come up with a team in our hurry. So you kind of created the, you stacked the dream team of hackathon winners? There's a lot of good competition, right? We were lucky enough to compete and win in the last three. As far as the idea generation, that's kind of a funny story because we did a lot of work up front in terms of like making sure that the idea was sound, making sure that some of our more technical hurdles could be actually overcome in that eight hour period. And then we got here and they demonstrated Eureka, and the bulk of what we had wanted to do is kind of already accounted for in the next version, which we could develop on during the hackathon, so we didn't want to look like- You said you could or you could not develop on it. We could develop on a new version. Eureka was available. It would be like, do we want to grab the Eureka version, add a couple of fields to it and say we hacked something? So we were kind of on the spot. We had a very limited time to come up with it. We had a call in Audible. Exactly, exactly. So that's why we're, I'm really personally very, very proud of our team because where other teams may have had their idea kind of survive day one of the conference, we had to literally, we had 12 hours maybe from ideation to execution. Well, and even right up to the moment we walked into the door of the hackathon, the idea that we had decided on in those 12 hours, we didn't do that. We picked a brand new idea right away. Right, right. So you had to start all over. So you had fair amount of preparatory work up front. For another idea. That we threw away. And you just tossed it. Not to. So it's in the tool now. So you're like, oh wow, it's like that Mr. Skin moment and what was that movie? Yeah, whatever it was, but anyway. Okay, so you started with ideation which all your competitors had already done, right? Well, we assume. I didn't talk to all of them. Well, yeah, I mean, but that's the best practice, right?  You want to start coding. Yes, right, exactly. Okay, so the smart money says, all right, let's do that up front. Maybe have a couple of conference calls, do some whiteboard. Okay, so you came in ostensibly with that disadvantage. So how much time did you have to spend on the concept then? It was evolving as we were going. And that was actually one of the brilliant things we did was we involved a customer throughout the entire thing. So we talked to somebody that had a problem and we kept pulling them into the hackathon. Tell me more about this. Tell me more about this. And it evolved as we went along through the night. So we were collecting requirements on the fly and building it. What are the constraints? So you can meet beforehand, that's cool, but you can't start coding beforehand, right? That's a no. You can't bring any code with you, right? So what we would plan to do each time is we would, if we perceived a technical hurdle, we'd try and solve that outside the hackathon. And then having done it already, we would come to the hackathons. We already know how to rebuild it. So, okay, so you solve it. Technically, you know it's feasible. You conceptually know how to do it. You've thought through the logic. Okay, just can't bring the code with us. But you have to write all your code there in the hackathon. Okay. Okay, that's cool. So now, how much time do you have to do this? Approximately eight hours. So you had eight hours to go from idea and concept to finished product. Yeah. Okay, so how much time did you spend on the idea? No more than four hours. No more than four hours. Really? So you spent half the time. Well, we had a direction. So you started coding right away? Yes. We had a direction within 30 minutes. Okay, so roughly 30 minutes you lost up front and then you could start coding. Yeah. Okay, so not too bad. Not too bad of a head start. Although a head start in eight hours and 30 minutes is pretty good. Yeah. Everybody else, okay. And then, and I, you said to this before, you applied this anyway, the idea sort of shifted and evolved. So what was the idea? So the idea is to help marketing groups engage social communities. And there's two primary features that we were focused on. One is storing the social digital assets, right? So if Gartner writes a white paper or a Forrester Research writes a white paper or a customer blogs about, let's say, service now and then, let's say they do all this stuff tomorrow. What service now needs to do is keep track of those as if they're assets, right? So if they come to Knowledge 15, are they gonna remember from their heads or their browser bookmarks where those social digital assets work, right? And so what we do is we've created a repository that anybody could interact with, add content, rate content. And then they're treated like company assets. They're in the repository, they're not in our brains. Then what they could use is to utilize those assets to push them out to their passionate brand advocates. So everybody who knows me knows if service now tweets it, I usually retweet it. But I have to be awake and I have to not be at work, right? So what? You see it in your Twitter stream, right? Exactly, you see it in my Twitter stream. So with somebody who's passionate as I am with service now and I wanna advocate for service now, I could potentially just tell service now, here's my credentials tweet on my behalf for your social campaigns. Yeah, so we talked about this yesterday. So the application, because I said, okay, you don't actually do the tweeting and you said, yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. So you interface with the Twitter API and then push it out there. Okay. Now, so how did you sort of package it and what was the instantiation of the submission? So what did you actually use? Gartner white papers and other digital assets? No, we came up with one use case. We just said, we're only gonna have time to do kind of one social stream. So we picked Twitter and we were just kind of assembling Twitter posts on the fly into the content repository. And then, as we were demonstrating it to the people coming to our little area, we would launch it and they could see the tweets go out and we'd pull up Twitter and they could see our accounts and see that the tweets had been made. It's actually kind of interesting that we actually launched a campaign at the hackathon to promote our hackathon entry and we only used our tool to do it. We did not go out there on our own and do tweets. We used our tool to launch the campaign for us. Okay, so you never, sorry. So you never tweeted from Twitter. No, you just always tweeted from the app through the API. Now, and you queued them up, right? So it wasn't always manual, is that correct? Right, so we made a mock up campaign, right? Which is our, you know, come see our show and visit us and vote for us. So, now Twitter, doesn't Twitter have thresholds on, so it's just trying to make sure that you're not a bot? So did you have to sort of design those in and how did that? Well, what we did was we integrated the authentication part into it. So from your user record inside of ServiceNow, you could launch the authentication portal that basically says provide my username and password, grab that security object for that and then we'll use that to tweet on your behalf from that point forward. So you could tweet a thousand tweets and it wouldn't, Twitter wouldn't flag you. You've authorized ServiceNow to send on your behalf, so it's essentially sending for you. It's not like you're doing it from one account, you're doing it from as many accounts as are your brand ambassadors. And that's the brilliant part about it because typically corporations broadcast the message from a corporate account. It has a limited reach of followers, but if you could have that exponentially grown because you're sending for on behalf of all your employees, the reach is far greater. Yeah, so I'm in, I'm taking a look at the corpus of Twitter data around ServiceNow and you can see a lot of action here, right? So social loop is all one word, drop the double L or you'll probably find a much better results here. Oh great, okay, so we're even getting stuff, maybe it's just getting other people's typos. So here you go. Yeah, look at all the action. So those things came from the application. Okay, so all these tweets, right? Hey, nice job. Okay, that's some of this is social loop. Last chance to vote for social loop. Yep, yep. So that came from. That came from the campaign that we launched within ServiceNow. And then what is this? This is some kind of deep link back to the asset, is that right? That's, that might be a link to a YouTube video that we created to. Oh, okay. So once again, we're curating and, so this is part of our campaign here. So that went out as part of the tool that you built and then it gets embedded into Twitter so you can now just see it on the Twitter sphere, on the Twitter stream, awesome. Okay, good. So, well congratulations on making the finals. And like I say, you're up against a lot of competition. You had that, you gave everybody a head start at least 30 minutes and some serious panic. You know, even though we didn't win, I'd no regrets at all. I think it was a fantastic experience. You know, brought the team together. Some of the people I'd never met before, we came together at the conference for the first time. Now, will this app live or was it, is it, yes. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Okay, so you got use cases for it and you'll share it. The feedback we got from the people we showed it to was, I want that now, you know. Yeah, we've had two people solicit us for prices. Awesome. In order to buy it, yeah. That's great. All right, well congratulations guys. Really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Rob, good to see you again. Thanks for having us again. All right, thank you very much, Chris. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be right back to wrap up from Service Now Knowledge. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back.