software as a service player. I like to think of us as a companion to the Cube. We're here every morning trying to extract the signal from the noise. Where the Cube excels in event coverage, we're working to bring that experience to you consistently every morning. We use the top stories of the day to provide you with breaking analysis so that you can forecast future trends.  We're creating a fundamental change in news coverage. Laying the foundation and setting the standard and this is just the beginning. Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. We're here at Knowledge, the conference for ServiceNow users and we're at the Aria hotel. We're in Las Vegas earlier today. We're broadcasting SAP Sapphire. SAP Sapphire is on Silicon Angle 2 so you can check that coverage up. But we're here with the whole team, the Cube team. Jeff Frick is here. My co-host for this week will be broadcasting live today, tomorrow and part of Thursday. We've got ServiceNow executives but more importantly we've got tons of ServiceNow customers coming on but we've been talking about all week, Jeff, about this single system of record. This sort of secret sauce behind ServiceNow. Yes, it's cloud platform. Yes, it's SaaS but this notion of a single record database, a CMDB, a configuration management database. It sounds trivial. It's not. Chris Pope is here. He's the director of product management for ServiceNow. We're going to double-click on this notion of single record. Chris, welcome to the Cube. Thank you very much for having us. Great to have you here, guys. It should be exciting. Yeah, and we're thrilled to be here with Jeff and I. We're walking around last night talking to customers, talking to perspective customers. A lot of excitement. I heard that figure that 30% of the audience is perspective customers. That's a nice number so hopefully your sales guys are here with you know. It's time to go to work. Yeah, it's time to go home and go to work. Right, so let's talk about this notion of a CMDB. We hear a lot about it. It sounds pretty straightforward. How come everybody doesn't have one? Well, I think a lot of people try and have one and there's so many disparate data sources in IT now and with big data and data exploding and data centers growing worldwide it's kind of how do you wrap your arms around this stuff and having that single source of truth. It's great you can collect the data and bring it together but can you truly trust it and if you're going to use it to drive decisions and impact analysis, risk analysis and make changes in your business in an agile way.  Bob's going to go away at some point and if you're driving workflow and you're making decisions on a daily, even a minute-by-minute basis in some occasions, you need good trusted data in a single source of truth and then people don't worry about the data now. They focus on delivering the tasks, the services or whatever it is they're implementing knowing that they've got an accurate record they can trust them to move forward with. Yeah, so again, it sounds so straightforward but it's not trivial to build a platform that is flexible that you can design pretty much any business process around it. How is it that you guys have been able to successfully do what nobody else seems to have been able to do? I think one of the big things is it's organic. We have one platform, one single system of record, one database, one data model and I think a lot of the legacy vendors and I'm sure others have talked about this a little bit have grown up through M&A and there's a lot of glue. We have no glue. It's core and when Fred who's our founder designed the system and put it together, it was with a focus not necessarily on the technology but what's the easiest way to complete the task I need to complete and that's kind of core of what we do and why we do and if you can do it in three steps, do it in three. You don't need 10, you don't need 20 and really focus on what you need to accomplish the task versus the nice to have and I think a lot of CMDB projects fail because they're seen as a technology issue versus we're running a workshop tomorrow on this. What do you need to drive process or make decisions? Have that data available? The rest of it could be useful at a point in time to make an additional decision or maybe you need a tiebreaker but for this task right here right now, I can make a decision I can move on and we make it very easy for you to have that single system of record and you don't need to integrate with many other things. It's all there. It's really if you can draw it on a board, you can implement it in service now but what you find with a lot of customers who are kind of less agile in nature and a little bit monolithic is they struggle to even draw it on the board. And therefore putting in a tool will only help you fail faster. If you go back to figuring out what it is you actually want to do then use the tool to accelerate and automate, you've got a much higher chance of success. So that's interesting because I've been saying all weekend I came in here with the premise that the real interesting business impact of service now is that it allows me to change my business processes the way I want to run my business processes. I don't have to design them around some module or so we'll lose this feature if we can't do that. So that's critical but you're saying start with the whiteboard start there and figure out your business and then we'll be able to accommodate virtually anything. Is it really that flexible? It is and you know I've been a customer three times so I've kind of got the war stories and I've worked with the dinosaurs out there and you know made the dinosaurs extinct in a lot of accounts I've worked in and I worked with a lot of customers and you know it's easy to focus on the technology right it's here it's very available consumer led and driven but it's you know if you step back and say what problem do you actually want to solve and let's draw the picture and even in the workshop I'm running tomorrow we have 30 whiteboards in the session and we're going to make the audience get up and work and design and draw and solve the problem and then we'll build it in the solution during the session live on stage and because we've taken away a lot of those things of you know the infrastructure the data center managing the tin it's just not cool anymore right nobody really wants to do it you know they can focus on solving the problem not wow it's going to take me six weeks to install servers and databases and storage all that's gone away and it's like okay if I can draw this and I can draw it in the tool and I can make it work and I can give it to my end users in a very consumer like way and off they go they can see about an iPad a mobile device whatever it's going to be that's the natural behavior they have now of interacting with software so why should it be any different in the enterprise and clearly you know that's a big mantra for Fred and what he does and how he drives us to do things and you know and that's why we've got this phenomenal success so well so when you go into a customer for a new customer implementation they obviously been doing things away before you got there so is it greenfield let's start with the whiteboard and leave those in places how do you just place the way they've done it now are you doing so I think integration from what they have sitting on the top yes we you know we come out of the box you know aligned to itil and it's best practices but it's a framework it's kind of you know this is great but now where do you go with it what you want to do and every customer slightly different but maybe the core seventy eighty percent is pretty consistent and then it's about you know I talk a lot about being disruptive challenge the way of thinking just because you've done it that way for twenty years doesn't mean it's the right way to do it going forward and I was just meeting with a customer downstairs on exactly this and you know let's sit down and try and solve the problem let's figure out the what what is it you want to do and why and then the how is the technology to deliver that solution and then if the technology enables you to do those things easier even better because you can solve the next problem and you know we we make it as interactive as we can and try and learn from them what they actually want to achieve. IT is very good at proposing solutions but they're not always sure what questions being asked so you know certainly what I do and you know traveling the planet as I do I always try and find out what it is you actually want to do kind of normalize the technology if you could have anything what would you actually like to do and then here's where service now fits in and there will be pieces of the pie that we don't do it's not a core capability or our DNA and that's where we've got some amazing vendors and partners we work with who do fit in in certain places that augment what we do. So on the transformative nature of what you enable I would imagine most customers are not picking up the phone to call you guys because they they're all vested in IT transformation or are they you know usually it's a burning issue problem and the phones ringing off the hook and I mean a lot of the time you know out of adversity comes triumph right and they've usually had some very large outage you know the banks and healthcare over there from the security breach to ATM networks being down or people not paying bills online it's typically a compelling event CIOs tend to have a fairly short lifespan you know it's what they need to do in that short lifespan is do something different or disruptive or you know they're going to be out on their ear kind of thing anyway right so there's often see compelling events but then when you technology events around upgrades and moving to new systems a lot of our competitors takes 18 to 24 months I mean even the customer I just spoke to downstairs took them a year just to upgrade the software that was out even looking at process change and doing something different so I think a lot of what we do enables that very simply and easily and they focus on the what necessarily the hell yeah a lot of times talk about CIO the half-life of the CIOs you know yes so yeah right so but a lot of times CIOs that you know they want to make a mark but they're risk averse because if there's a disaster under their watch you know they're cooked it seems like Service Now is a great initiative for them to transform relatively low risk but what are the risks involved you've been practitioner you know on one side what are the risks that need to be managed when you're when you're bringing in something like a Service Now platform yeah I think you know we were the first disruptive technology that started to a challenges and and it's cloud-based right you know so the immediate ones around trust security where is my data if it's not in my four walls of my data center I feel uncomfortable right and with data breaches and everything that goes on in the world people get very nervous about that stuff and I think what Service Now is brought to the table is look you know we do this well this is all we do and we are very very good at it and therefore you can trust us and oftentimes you know we'll put our security up against another customer and say okay let's go toe-toe and let's prove how good we are and what we've done and here's you know all our certifications and and certificates to operate and things like that and I think then it's just that little bit of mindset and I think what a lot of people forget is switching out a tool is a tool right and it could be any tool it doesn't matter there's an organizational change that comes with this and a lot of our keynotes this morning and I've worked very closely with Allison at the Coca-Cola company it's a mindset and if you can win the hearts of minds and then make the solution complementary to their day-to-day tasks people are going to use it right and you know like sending an email okay that's fairly simple but now setting up a meeting or tweeting or whatever it's just a natural behavior it's in you're out and you're moving on to the next task whereas before you know if you were to submit a change request it was a tedious task because you got technical people doing things that's alien to them and they don't want to so the more you enable it for how they work on a daily basis the more chance of success you've got of making it you know making it successful. So you mentioned you brought up security obviously that one of the areas that everybody talks about when you go to the cloud do you feel like your security is better than most of your customers and prospective customers? Absolutely and you know I haven't been told to say that but yeah I mean I was at the New York Stock Exchange when we did that implementation UBS another great customer in Switzerland you know all of those things it's you know let's take the emotion out of the decision-making process yes it feels uncomfortable and it's different but that's okay so here's you know the facts the figures take the politics and the decision-making out of the process and if you look at just a features comparison on what we do yeah we absolutely stack up against everybody else and we beat them in so many cases and you know the phenomenal success you see here with the customers you know they've done the Kool-Aid they see what we do and you know we have everything from federal to government to financials, farmer, FDA regulated they're all here you know it's clearly working and we've got more work to do as we know but you know it's a great success story and we go to what we do. Let's talk a little bit about IT governance it's thrown around it's buzzword people always trying to sort of grasp get their arms around it what do you mean by IT governance and how are people using ServiceNow's platform to affect IT governance? Typically you know if you mentioned the word governance or audit in IT they run for the hells right they're big scary words and typically you'd think people are going to get upset or fired as a result right and someone's going to get caught lifting the carpet but I think it's more around the controls and the processes and in ServiceNow we have that governance process we use our own technology to certify our own data centers and our own people for what we need to do to operate and I think it's more around looking at those operational controls and how do they roll up and there's a couple of customers here who have passed HIPAA SOX audits using ServiceNow out of the box for those controls as policies and what they need to do and with a you know a single platform it's all tightly integrated the audit team the governance team whoever they may be who aren't always in the IT operation space who are the practitioners that can really influence this it's a single system of record joined together I can now know why they're asking this question or why you want my operational processes this way because it rolls up to a bigger thing that basically says if I do X I may expose customer data for the wrong reason my operational processes this way for a clear reason and I can tie the two together whereas if you put an IT guy and a governance person in the room I mean it's chalk and cheese right they're never going to really get on so the technology really enables that it brings down the silo and the barriers and they kind of move on to solving problems the technology is not in the way I love the I love the English idiom idioms bless your cotton socks there you go all right we have we're almost out of time Chris but I want to give you the last word you you're a practitioner turned you know technology evangelist you've been through it now a few times on the buy side what advice would you give to fellow practitioners that are trying to get their arms around IT service management they're trying to automate they've got this you know we're seeing a pattern develop this this sort of stovepipe mess what's your main area of advice I think you know think differently and be disruptive right challenge the world the real world operational way of thinking I tell ITSM there's many frameworks out there take what works for you and implement what works best for you and then find a platform that allows you to focus on solving the problem not managing the technology we do that for you and we do it very well focus on solving the real problems you've got in your environment and the technology is a huge enabler for that and as I said if you can draw it you can make it workflow and then you can automate it and you only manage the failures and the exceptions if your process works 98% of the time you have a very small amount of work to do to solve that last two percent and you're focusing on the real issues rather than you know trying to understand the bigger picture Chris Pope you got some serious street cred so I really appreciate you come on the cube and sharing your perspectives and knowledge with our audience keep it right there everybody so first of all thank you for coming out thank you guys really appreciate it so Fred Lottie is up next we're going to have a break and then Fred Lottie who developed the service now platform back in 2003 I believe started this we're going to go deep with him actually on some new announcements that service now made this week around mobile so keep it right there this is the cube I'm Dave Vellante I'm here with Jeff Rick keep watching everybody right back after this short break