ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] [Operator Instructions] We've also added a resource panel located in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, where you can get a copy of the slides as well as some more information on this topic. We've also added some widgets look at it at the very bottom of your screen. And if you click on the icon that looks like a sheet of paper and pen that's the survey, and we'd appreciate your feedback. We'll also post it at the very end of today's session. During today's presentation, we'll ask for your feedback by voting on a couple of polling questions, which will appear in the slide viewing area. To place your vote, just click on the radio button that corresponds to your answer and then click on the submit button within the slide again to place your vote. And finally, if you experience any technical difficulties during today's event, please enter into the Q&A panel stating your technical issue, and we'll be more than happy to help you resolve any difficulties you may be experiencing. Now I will pause for a moment while I start the recording. Now without further delay, I'd like to turn today's call over to your first speaker, Adam Smith-Cairns. Adam, you have the floor.

Very good. Thank you, everyone, for joining this webinar on the asset life cycle. We're going to go through the entire life cycle, and we're going to talk about certain things that we think you can automate. And at the same time, we're going to have a little fun with it, and you'll see what I mean by that. Before we get started, we always like to start with the safe harbor notice that there might be some forward-looking statements. Going back through it, I don't think we have anything. But just in case this is here, unless, of course, Eric put something in one of the demos that I didn't realize. So the speakers today are myself, Adam Smith-Cairns. I'm in product marketing. And Eric Martinez is the technical product marketing person. And as we get into this, I'll just quickly go over here. We had some conversations, and I decided to record the conversations, and they were pretty good. And when we talked about it, I threw a challenge at Eric and said, let's do this. Let's use some of your acting skills. And so this conversation is about how that played out. And it wasn't just one conversation. I also had another follow-up conversation with him to kind of complete the life cycle. So Eric, is there anything you want to say before we jump into our conversation?

Welcome. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for joining us today, and I hope you enjoy our presentation. We wanted to have a little fun with how we presented the information. So I -- if you have any questions, please put them in the question box, but we hope you look forward to this presentation. Slightly different, but I think it will be very informative.

Yes. We -- I just want to put a disclaimer out there that we do take IT asset management very seriously at ServiceNow. But at the same time, we don't take ourselves too seriously. So here we go. Hey, Eric?

Hey, Adam. How's it going?

I'm doing great. How about yourself?

I am doing very, very well.

Okay. Well, thanks for joining me today. I thought it would be fun to challenge some of your acting skills.

Yes. Okay. We can do that.

Yes. And I sent you a little information before. So I think you'll be able to play with this. One will be yourself, which is Eric, the expert. And then you'll have 2 other parts. You'll have Samuel software and Harvey hardware. So let me see those characters.

Okay. So let's see. So Eric, the expert, that works. And then Samuel software. So it's Samuel, and let's get Samuel right. So Samuel.

You were prepared.

Then -- and there we go.

Little more down to earth, that Harvey.

Little more down to earth, a little more lower pitch.

Okay. Sounds good.

Okay, got you. I think we can do this. This will be fun.

So let me just kick it off. By the way, I'm Adam, asset life cycle coach. And that's the part I'll be playing, most of this...

Adam, the life cycle coach. I love it. Perfect for you.

Okay. So let's just kick it off and just say, I'm glad you've taken the time to visit with me today and talk through some of these things about the life cycle, and let's see if we can coach you in a few different areas. So tell me about your current work situation and maybe what things you've tried and -- to try to achieve your goals already.

Yes. So hello. My name is Samuel Software, and I'm software asset manager for a large global company. Our company has used spreadsheets for so long to track hardware and software. When it comes to the time to figure out how much software we own, I mean the process is incredibly time-consuming and manual. I mean, honestly, I'm not ever sure we end up with the correct total after all that work. Sorry, I'm a little nervous. But that's not a good place to be during an audit or contract negotiation.

How about you, Harvey?

Like Samuel, our processes are way too manual and involve too many spreadsheets. Individual departments in our company have been using spreadsheets for so long that they feel like they can't live without them. So we're very siloed with lots of manual processes. And when it comes time for a refresh or for leased equipment to be returned, the process is really painful for our staff.

I get that. Well, I'm glad you both joined me here, and we'll be bringing in Eric, the expert, sometimes to give you some advice on that. So I'm glad you joined me for this session. So you're looking at spreadsheets all day and you don't have much visibility. That would make sense because everything is isolated in silos when you've got spreadsheets managing everything. Have you tried a vision board?

Vision board?

Oh, sorry, that's life coaching. Sorry, Maybe a lucid chart.

I think I have. But since we are a global company, we have locations, stock rooms and data centers all over the world. As IT asset managers, we need visibility into the hardware and the software that's installed in each of those places.

I get that.

Like Harvey, we need to know what software versions are running in the environment. So life cycle coach, how can we get that view of both software and hardware to help us manage all of our IT assets.

I think that's a good time to bring in Eric, the expert. Eric, what do you think?

Well, Harvey and Samuel, I have the answer for you. To get visibility into all your IT assets, you need to have one place to go to where all your asset data resides. I imagine you have a lot of tools in your environment that manage or track some small portion of your hardware and or software. And each of those tools is limited to what it can track. You need all those tools to talk to each other. But as you know, that is not easy to do unless you have the right platform.

That's right. You need platform for something like that, right?

Absolutely. And you know what, ServiceNow is that platform, the platform for all your IT needs. Not only can you take advantage of all of the functionality that ServiceNow provides, you can integrate your existing tools, all of those small point tools that you use to track hardware and software into ServiceNow, into one place where ServiceNow has one database engine with built-in reconciliation and deduplication of all your asset data.

What will that do for their confidence, Eric?

And since all of your data will reside in one place, the silo teams will start using ServiceNow as their go-to source of reporting, not only because it's a one-stop source of data, but because the data is accurate and complete, and that's the secret. And as all the teams gain confidence in the data you're providing, then they'll say, goodbye to tracking asset data on spreadsheets.

That sounds really good. Well, Eric, thanks for that. You're obviously excited when everything comes together, right?

Absolutely.

And Harvey and Samuel, it sounds to me like you might be lost in how to get started. So let's start at the beginning of the life cycle and walk through some of that. What's missing there, I wonder? Harvey? Let's see if he can pull his character out of his shirt.

I've always felt that we are missing out on a lot of information. From the point we purchase hardware and software, from vendor and price information to warranty and support, all of this just gets lost along the way. There have been times when having that information during renewals and contract negotiations or even audits would have been really helpful. How can we start capturing that information?

Don't poke yourself in the eye there.

Exactly. Well, Harvey and Samuel, don't poke yourself in the eye, first thing. But Harvey and Samuel, you are correct. There's so much information that is available during the early stages of the asset life cycle. Starting off early is critical because, as you said, trying to find that purchase information later in the life cycle, it's almost impossible. So let's talk about how to do this. We need to incorporate your request and fulfillment processes into ServiceNow. ServiceNow has a built-in catalog that can manage the full request ordering and sourcing functions. External ordering and purchasing tools can also be integrated into the process. And the important part is that we want to use the ServiceNow platform to capture all this information and automatically tie this to your hardware and software assets. Adam, everyone, I want to introduce you to a couple of hard-working IT asset managers. We have Hannah Anderson. She's a hardware asset manager for a global Fortune 500 company. And we have Casey Koon, who's a software asset manager working alongside Hannah Anderson to manage all their IT asset estates. So let's take a look at how they manage the beginning of the life cycle.

Yes. Let's see the demo.

And now we have our IT asset managers that manage their IT asset estates to the asset life cycle. Casey Koon is our software asset manager, and Hannah Anderson is our hardware asset manager. Casey and Hannah track all of their assets on the ServiceNow platform, which supports every state of the IT asset life cycle from request all the way through disposal. Let's start with Hannah and see how she tracks hardware assets on the ServiceNow platform. Starting from the service catalog where hardware is requested, Hannah and her team can source the hardware directly from ServiceNow, whether the source of the hardware is a local stock, transfer stock or a new purchase, all of this information is tracked within ServiceNow from the beginning of the asset's life cycle. And if the hardware is part of a new purchase order, Hannah and her team can use the ServiceNow Agent app on their mobile phones to receive the new hardware and have that new asset data automatically associated to the purchase order and to the sourcing request. And if Hannah receives advance shipping notifications from the manufacturer or the vendor of the hardware, then she can import those notifications to create the asset data and to use those to receive the hardware when they come in. And again, all of this is associated to the sorting request. Now let's see how Casey tracks software and SaaS applications on the ServiceNow platform. When software is requested from the service catalog, Casey is tracking this asset from the very first stage of its life cycle, all within ServiceNow. And as the software asset goes from sourcing to ordering to receipt, all of the cost, maintenance and contract information is captured and associated to the software asset. And upon receipt of the software, a software entitlement is automatically created.

So we saw some really good things in that demo. As we move down the life cycle, what are some other things they can expect to have?

So Harvey, we definitely need to incorporate our ordering and receipt process into ServiceNow. But one big problem we have is that we always buy more and more software. I am sure it's the same for you, Harvey? Yes. We just don't know what we have. So instead, we just keep buying more. Question, how can we do a better job of knowing what we have before we spend more money?

Can you answer that, Eric?

That is a great question. So let me answer first from hardware, and then Samuel I'll answer for software, okay? For hardware, we need to know where everything is. So let's start with that favorite job of hardware asset managers, taking inventory. Keeping track of the devices that are not deployed and are not connected to the network can be really difficult. But knowing what you have in your inventory can save you a lot of money. So the answer is the process of taking inventory needs to be easy, and it needs to automatically update your data. For now, Samuel, for you, it's slightly different. And for tracking the software [indiscernible] ServiceNow, then we need to know 2 things. One, do we need about all of your software purchases made in our company? And two, do we know how many of those licenses we have already purchased are available to be currently used? When you first buy something before you deploy it, this is your chance to get a handle on the whole life cycle. It's right there in front of you. You miss it here, and you'll be missing it all along the way. So let's go back to Hannah and Casey and let's see how they handle these questions. Now let's see how Hannah easily manages her hardware inventory. Using their mobile phones and the ServiceNow Agent app, Hannah and her team can inventory any stockroom or location, even those stock rooms and locations with limited to no Internet connectivity. After selecting a stockroom audit record from the list, Hannah and her team can begin scanning the devices in this stock room. After device's asset tag is scanned, the asset tag number is displayed on the screen as well as the ability to review the total number of devices that have already been scanned. And if more than one technician happens to scan the same device, ServiceNow will automatically deduplicate that duplicated scan so that an individual list of all devices scanned can be reviewed and submitted. After submitting the scan devices, Hannah can see the total number of devices that were scanned and expected stand and not expected to be found in that stock room, those devices that were expected to be found in that stock room but were not scanned and finally, new devices where there is no current asset record for that device. When the stock room audit is complete, the stock room audit is removed from the list and the hardware asset data in ServiceNow is automatically updated to reflect the result of the stock room audit. Now let's see how Casey manages her software inventory. Casey can go to spend detection and look at overlapping software. Here, she can see software products by category that provide the same functionality. She can see overlapping software by count and by spend. And when she opens up one of those categories, she can see detailed information about those products that make up that category and then choose to create a demand to investigate who purchased the software or how it was purchased and then decide what is the best course of action for this product.

Let's just summarize a few of these things, okay?

Absolutely.

So first of all, you really should start your automation of your life cycle earlier on, right?

Absolutely.

You just -- you stand lots of chances of losing data and just not having data. And along with that data, you have integrations that are key. So you need to integrate with things like your service desk and with employee onboarding and things like that and requests and other things.

Your company has already made those investments in those tools. There's no reason to stop that and not utilize them because there is some benefit. Just figure out what do they bring in to supplement with ServiceNow. Our ServiceNow gives you bunch of data. How do those supplement it? And what does it give you? And that's the answer. It's all about building slowly.

And one of the things that ServiceNow does is especially keep the big 5, I can say big 5, they're more than that at bay. And those are those big vendors who are watching very closely what you're doing with their licenses.

Absolutely.

So it's important to have a really good broad view of what they're doing and then being able to drill down into that as well.

Absolutely.

So I know this. What are some other things there, Eric?

Well, like we saw in Hannah and Casey, they're obviously a team of one. And yes, it's a fictionalized demo, but it really represents a lot of the IT asset management teams out there are very small. They have minimal resources. So what are you going to do with that time you have between Monday and Friday, and hopefully not Saturday and Sunday? But what are you going to do with that time? If you let your platform do a lot of that work for you, then you can focus your time on other things, more strategic, interesting, more business-critical activity versus the mundane manual processes. So finding that platform like ServiceNow is key, like you said, start at the beginning, but let that automation work for you throughout that life cycle.

Yes. And it will give you a chance to tackle some bigger things like inventory, making sure your inventory management is really on point. And just doing all those things, you're going to reduce your risk and you're going to reduce the costs, a lot more cost savings.

Absolutely.

Very good. All right. We're back live. Let me see if I can jump to the next slide. Well, I had a lot of fun editing that because watching Eric do his little impersonations of these characters was a lot of fun. I had a lot of chuckles about it and there were some things that we did that we didn't make the cut, but they were quite funny. However, I do want to address these characters and Eric. For instance, Eric has actually played in real life all of these characters. So he has been a software asset manager. He has been a hardware asset manager. And obviously he's an expert and it's kind of fun to see those characters. Eric, which was your favorite character to play?

No, I think it's fun that we presented it in this way. And it's true like, in most companies, the IT asset manager wears a lot of hats. So it's funny thing that we played it this way. But it's true, we have limited resources and we have a lot of assets to manage. And that list and grouping of how big that assets' data keeps growing and growing, and it becomes harder and harder. And so I would say all of them because they go back to points in my life where I have to do those things where I was in the warehouse scanning into -- in Excel spreadsheets all those devices that we found, trying to find things that hadn't been disposed of, looking at software contracts and dusty boxes and basements. And it's part of the process. And so one of the things we really want to do is make it easier. And so it was fun to kind of relive those memories and then also think back to, if I was back in that time how I wish it had been easier sometimes because there were a lot of manual processes, a lot of spreadsheets and how I wish I had some of the answers that ServiceNow provides today would make my life so much easier. So I don't really have a favorite. They're all pretty cool.

Okay. I can tell you, I think Harvey was my favorite. I could just imagine him getting in a truck and going down a dirt road or something like that. And then there was Eric, the expert. There were times that I felt like there was acting going on there. But other times, as you got into it, that was just you coming out. So -- and you are Eric the expert. So hey, we want to get the participants involved in this. So we want to ask the question. We talked about spreadsheets a few times. Go ahead and take this poll. How much of the entire asset life cycle do you estimate you use spreadsheets for tracking and managing? So this is an interesting question. How much of that entire process do you do? Give you just a couple more seconds and we'll find out the results from everyone. What? Nobody voted? Let's go back. Can I go back? Did everybody vote? Put this in your chat. That would be 75. So let me put [indiscernible]. Let's see if it will work again. I don't know if it will work again, try it again, maybe it was closed out and we don't get to see what everybody thought.

People are voting. Yes.

Okay. Okay. As long as they can still vote. Okay. Candy says she -- I guess Candy says voted. Okay. Very good. Okay. Countdown 5, 4, 3, 2. Let's see if we have some results this time. Here we go. Nice. Okay. Less than 25%. That's good. That's good. So if you're using spreadsheets only in certain aspects of it, you still want to eventually automate those things, but then there's a good chunk at 50% to 74%. So there's a good chunk of the life cycle, 75% to 100%. That's a good chunk too. So when you add all of those together, there's still a lot of spreadsheets going on out there. Other comments, Eric, when you look at this?

No, I think it just depends on what you're managing. And so I think when we look at the next section, we'll really look at how do you keep moving forward and continually improve by decreasing that percentage. And so we'll present ideas on how to get those other teams, those other departments that are in your company to stop using them and build trust in your data. It can be a slow process. But with that slow process, with that continual improvement comes dramatic results at the end when you get people to buy into what you're doing and to having your ServiceNow instance be your single source of truth. And so there's a lot of power in that. And it can be slow, but those small incremental improvements are really important. So I'll let that play a little bit more in the next section, but I wanted to kind of highlight that, that is, that's something we all deal with.

Very good. We talked about the earlier stages of the life cycle. Now we'll go kind of into the mid-life and then jump to the end of the life cycle. So we'll cover all of those and cover a few other demos during this next section, which was, by the way, filmed at a different time. So it is a different session just as presented. So here we go. Well, welcome back. I'm glad you made it back for our next life cycle session.

I'm looking forward to it.

I know you've mentioned in the past session that you have control issues. And I'm referring to Samuel and Harvey. What can you control about this situation with your assets?

Control? To monitor the hardware and software in our environment, we have to go to multiple tools to pull that information, and then we have to manually reconcile all that data to make sure we have no duplicate data. This is all so time consuming. And for all that effort, we're still not sure we have accounted for every asset. Is there a way to monitor our environment from one place to make it easier?

Well, how does that make you feel, Samuel, the control thing? And do you have anything to add, Harvey? How about -- how do you feel about this?

Well, I feel out of control with our hardware. Same here. Help us, please.

Okay. Samuel, Harvey, what you're feeling is very normal. And there are lot of issues within the asset life cycle that seem out of control, but there are things that we can do to bring them back into control, understand what's going on, that's the first thing is the awareness stage of things, and then to move step by step and make improvements, and that's where those automations come. So Eric, how about you? What do you think they could do to gain a little bit more control?

Absolutely. Harvey, Samuel, your life cycle coach is right. You have a lot of moving assets. So the concept of control really feels like playing whack a mole, right? You're never going to really get there if you're always just looking for the next thing, where is that fire going from one issue to another. It never feels like you get ahead. But managing to the life cycle is one way to advance your IT asset management program. With each life cycle stage, you're tackling very specific issues. And ServiceNow is automation built on best-in-class standards that address these issues. So maintaining those spreadsheets and keeping up those manual processes, each stage is no longer necessary. Let the automated workflows in ServiceNow do that work for you. So you can use your time for bigger, more strategic problems. So for example, let's talk a little bit about discovery. Discovery of assets in your environment. So discovery is the automation that keeps an up-to-date inventory of what hardware and software is deployed in your environment. This discovery automation can be agentless such as ServiceNow Discovery, which uses a device's IP address and then credentials to log into that device to then pull information from that device. But we can also do discovery through an agent, an agent would be an installed application that checks into a system when that device connects to the network. So there are third-party tools that do this, and we have an agent client collector as well at ServiceNow that does this. And with each of these agent lists or agent, there are definitely pros and cons to either method. So my advice to both Harvey and Samuel, start with agentless ServiceNow Discovery as your primary base for this automation. This gives you beautiful data that's clean, deduplicated, reconciled and has built-in relationships that are coordinated through each of your data pieces. So this is a great base to have both your CMDB and your asset data. And then use service graph connectors, which are these integrations that you can use to connect your other tools into ServiceNow. And these point tools can provide useful supplementary information to your data that you're already collecting in ServiceNow via Discovery. So let's go back to Casey and Hannah and let's see how they monitor their environment. Now let's see how Casey tracks software and SaaS applications on the ServiceNow platform or asset analytics dashboard on the license summary tab, Casey can see the total software spend . But also more importantly, the percentage of that total spend that is not in use and then drill down to see that the percentage of spend that's not being currently used has been increasing over time. So how can Casey start to address this? She goes to the license workbench and opens up the tile for Adobe Systems. She sees that Acrobat DC Professional is not compliant. She can remediate over licensing by removing unlicensed installs or removing unallocated installs. These would create new removal candidates. She can then kick off the reclamation workflow for each of these removal candidates. This will remove the software installs and harvest those software rights to be used to fulfill new user request for that software and eliminating the need to buy more software. Casey can then go to in design and look at unlicensed subscriptions. She can create removal candidates for subscriptions and kick off the reclamation workflow to remove those unlicensed installs and subscriptions. And similar to on-premise subscription usage, Casey is concerned with SaaS usage. She can go to the SaaS overview dashboard and see the total current subscription spend, the total percentage of unused subscriptions as well as the potential savings. And to manage usage for over 6,700 SaaS applications, Casey has set up single sign-on integrations to both Okta and Azure Active Directory. And when she opens up the single sign-on integration for Okta, she sees a list of all the SaaS applications that authenticate through Okta and by opening up any of those applications, Casey, can see a list of all the users that authenticate into this application through Okta, their associated subscription and an automatically generated list of subscriptions that are candidates for reclamation based on low usage.

So Eric, Discovery is really important to the monitoring stage. And many times, people come into the monitoring stage because they already have everything out there and they need to discover what they have. So if they're trying to get a handle on all of their assets, they may even start in the monitoring stage to begin with until they really have the life cycle down in other areas, right? But as a life cycle coach, I want to know more about how you really support your hardware and software when they need help kind of during that monitor or service stage?

Absolutely, and that's exactly correct. So not only do you need to now work things where things are, right? An important part of monitoring is knowing when your assets need help, support, maintenance, patching, this is all very important. And you definitely do not want to wait until something breaks or wait until a vulnerability is exploited in your environment. This is where your contracts and life cycle dates come in. So let's start with life cycle dates. When a publisher announces that they're going to end of support or end of life, we need to decide whether we want to upgrade or not. If a publisher puts out a new patch for software, you want to decide how up to date you want to be on your patches. These are important decisions about software.

Very good. What about hardware? Tracking your warranty information and your maintenance contracts with your hardware asset data . You can make decisions about repairs, while they're still under contract instead of paying additional fees and taking care of things after they're out of warranty where the contract is expired because those things get costly.

Mr. Life Cycle, you've been standing up on your hardware asset management. I'm impressed. If anything, Harvey, over to you.

Well, occasionally, I do wear glasses. So I look intelligent once in a while. But we want to keep our services branding and our employees working with this little downtime as possible. Let's take a quick look at how Casey and how to maintain support to patch their hardware and software assets.

Let's look at this. Take a look. Let's see how Hannah handles the monitoring and servicing of our hardware assets. When an incident has entered dealing with hardware directly from the incident record, Hannah can perform several asset tasks to handle the issue reported in the incident. Depending on the incident, Hannah can send the device to be updated or repaired, can be swapped with another asset in inventory or the device with the problem can be retired. These asset tasks automate the process of these actions and automatically update the asset data. Now let's see how Casey not only monitors her Red Hat installations, but removes allocations and optimizes her licensing. Casey then navigates to the licensed workbench and sees that Red Hat is compliant, but she wants to see more details. So she selects the Red Hat tile. She expands the Red Hat Enterprise Linux list and then opens 2019 server and select per socket pair. On the rights used by tab, Casey can see that of the 40 rights allocated to this server cluster, only 18 of those allocations are in use, while 22 are not being used. She clicks on the 40 rights used to see the list of the 33 licensed installs. From this list, she can select the 22 licensed installs that are not in use with the 22 install records selected. By pressing the remove allocation button, she can start the process of removing allocations for those 22 rights that are not being used. This will help her reduce costs, but she wants to see how her licenses could be optimized. Casey then goes back to the software asset menu and selects overview to see the software asset analytics dashboard. She then selects the licensed summary tab. On this dashboard, he can see the potential savings by optimizing licenses. This is exactly what Casey was looking for. She wants to see how she can save money by optimizing the current licenses she is using. She opens up that widget and then in the upper right corner selects show records. Here, she can see that the almost $7,000 in savings came from just the licensing of that one server cluster. This optimization record shows her that based on using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2019 server edition, she is using 18 rights. But if she moved the server cluster over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2020 Virtual Data Center addition to license the same 3 physical hosts and 30 virtual machines would only take 3 license rights, and thus saving her almost 7,000 to license only this server cluster.

So you're moving into retirement. Have you saved enough?

Question?

That's right. We're talking about assets here. But actually, they're very similar because in retirement, you should be able to save money as well in the retirement process with assets. And there's nothing wrong with getting old. It just all happens. It's part of the life cycle. So what exactly are we worried about in this stage?

Let's take it over to Harvey and see with he thinks.

Let's go Harvey.

So our company has always used the approach of if it's not broken, don't fix it. This approach is not working. With hardware purchased at different times, how do I know when it's time to replace that hardware before it breaks. What about running older software in environment? We use a lot of different software in our company. I mean we have well over 1,500 titles. And I'm not sure if I even trust that account, trying to Google information about all the software editions and versions, I mean it's possible. How can we make this easier? Samuel, that's a great question. The end of the life cycle from asset is often overlooked and under managed in a lot of ways. So a lot of companies focus on keeping the lights on, which is completely understandable. But Harvey, you're right, it is very much about devices or software not breaking critical business services. But let's look at it this way. As we look at being more proactive in minimizing risk, we want to make sure we know which devices and software in our environment are still important and which are not, and we want to know which have known vulnerabilities. With this information, we can make better decisions about the use of those assets beyond just when they're going to break.

Right. When you mentioned about that break, if you're using that process of if it's not broken, don't fix it, your processes are broken. So you really need to take a look at that. Samuel, as you mentioned, you were trying to capture this information already, but Googling is really time consuming isn't it and not sustainable really. So Eric, what do you think about some of the things with that?

Absolutely. So Samuel, like you said, keeping track with life cycle dates for your hardware and software is really important. But luckily ServiceNow already captures and categorizes that life cycle data for you. As we mentioned normalization before, as your hardware and software normalize, they are matched to these important life cycle dates. So now you have continual automatic updates of these important publisher and manufacturer dates that align with your normalized data. So this will affect how you use your hardware and software by having that information all done automatically for you.

So how is your disposal processes working for you? Companies often think that old hardware devices are in the warehouse and not in our environment, so it will never be used again, right? Well, we all know that people go to the warehouse, find something there and think, "Oh, I can salvage this and put it back into service." And that creates some headaches, right?

That's exactly what happens. The technician just doesn't know when a device should or should not be used. If it's sitting on a shelf in a warehouse, we'll take that device. They have a request. They have a ticket to fulfill, and they'll go and install in the new environment. This now puts an out-of-support potentially vulnerable device in your environment, just waiting for vulnerabilities to be exploited. So the same can be said for software, leaving license keys available for older, no longer use software, while a person with admin rights can now install that software onto their device, into your environment, leaving you vulnerable. And not only vulnerable, it leaves you in a potentially negative compliance position when the software publisher decides that they want to audit you or come true of time. "Well, what can we do to make sure we don't miss anything and not end up in a heap of trouble and also make sure our data stays up to date. When you make the decision to retire a device or software title, you need to follow it through to the end of the life cycle.

And you make sure that it's certified that it's actually gone through the process of disposal, for environmental protection reasons, right?

Absolutely. And the nice thing is we'll see Casey and Hannah follow the retirement and disposal process and see how ServiceNow helps them manage the complete process.

Let's go back and take a look at Hannah and Casey.

Absolutely. Finally, let's see how Hannah manages hardware assets at the end of their life. At any time, Hannah can go to the hardware asset dashboard to get full visibility into our hardware asset estate. And when she is concerned about which hardware models will go end-of-life, hardware model normalization automatically associates important life cycle dates that come from the manufacturer directly to the hardware model. She trusts that hardware model normalization has grouped together all the hardware devices that are the same, no matter where they are located. And when hardware assets are nearing end of life, Hannah and her team can perform a hardware asset refresh to pull those assets out of the environment and replace them with newer assets. The asset refresh process includes preparing the replacement asset, then scheduling with the user when the refresh take place, deploying the new replacement asset and then reclaiming the aged asset. At the end of the asset refresh process, the replacement asset will be in use in the environment and the old asset that was refreshed will be in stock ready for disposal. And now that those hardware devices that are nearing end of life are ready for disposal, Hannah and her team can use the disposal order process to accurately and completely dispose of these assets. Now let's see how Casey tracks software and SaaS applications on the ServiceNow platform. Now let's see how Casey manages software assets at the end of their life. Casey can go to the software asset analytics dashboard. And under the end-of-life products widget, she can see which products are going end of support this year, end of extended support this year and most importantly, which will go end of life within 1 year. And by clicking on end of life, she can see the specific software models that are going end of life, including the date that each model will go end of life and the associated risk. And with this information, Casey can make proactive decisions about whether to upgrade or replace these products in her environment.

So Eric, Samuel, Harvey, whichever one you prefer, we're going to wrap up this section of the life cycle and talk about a few things. First of all, don't wait until it's broken. And like we said before, it's important to make sure that your processes consider the -- what would you say, the activity of the hardware and how well it's being used and how close it is to its end of life, its end of warranty, right?

And we can make decisions to lead things in our environment, but the option of making a decision because we know when it's supposed to be end of life, that's the important part. We need information to make those decisions, not just rely on guesswork or waiting till it's broken.

So right information helps you get the right decisions. Also, especially in this area, talking about the reduced risk, especially with disposals, as we mentioned before. It's important to cover all the bases, make sure that you reach the end and complete that life cycle and get into the habit. So what are some habits that you should get into in this case, Eric?

Absolutely. So like you talked about, making sure that things are properly disposed and certified. So there's so much critical data that is on your devices that you want to make sure that those are disclosed properly because the amount of risk that comes from a vulnerability that may come from the data that's exposed out there in the environment because it wasn't properly disposed of, that risk is too high.

And there's a lot to take in from this life cycle, but one of the areas, Eric, and maybe you can hammer this home is that you shouldn't get overwhelmed, right?

It seems overwhelming, but make it into smaller pieces. Tackle what you can, prioritize what you can and work by the life cycle. So you say, I'm going to handle software in the fulfillment stage, great. Or if that's too much, you start I'm going to do Microsoft products in this stage. The stage allows you to manage all of your assets during the life cycle, but also being able to break it up into manageable, successful part.

Yes. You mentioned it's continuous improvement model that you're trying to adapt here. So some of the things that you should be looking at is find something to automate. Somewhere in the life cycle, automate it. And the next time around through the life cycle automate something else or automate as much as you can, when you can find something for insights. So your life cycle should provide insights into how you're using your assets, where they're at, and what you should do with them next, finding something that adds value to the life cycle and then to other teams. So we mentioned something about vulnerabilities and so security. How does your life cycle, if you automate it, really fit into the security life cycle? And then when you try to do something new, let us know how it's working for you.

Absolutely.

Like a life cycle coach would say, how is it working for you?

How is it working for you? You feel supported, providing value to your company, providing value to those teams, it actually just keeps building on itself. As you said, continuous improvement program. Every step makes the next step easier and better, and you just keep growing until ServiceNow becomes the one-stop shop for everyone. Thank you for having us here today. I appreciate all the insight and the tips and tricks for ServiceNow.

Thank you, Harvey.

And I really think this will be really good for us. So thank you, Mr. Life Cycle Coach.

I appreciate that, Samuel. Well, hopefully, you'll sleep well tonight, Eric, and have multiple voices in your head. It's great to have this little session with you and do this little acting. I don't know what you call it juggling, I guess, acting, juggling. It's kind of fun that you've played these parts. And again, you play them in real life, so you have great insights. And we'd love to share more of those insights with the people who are participating in this webinar.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me today.

All right. That was a lot of fun. It really was. Let's see. I hit the right thing. There were some additional thoughts after we went through this and maybe even some things we cut out. First of all, really your goal should be to be the life cycle coach for your company. And as we talked about in each 1 of these life cycle stages that you need to get some buy-in from the rest of your organization. And I think Eric was really good at talking about don't let it overwhelm you, make sure you break it into manageable chunks and work on those things, whether it's just at one stage or even a piece of that one stage. And everything you do that you improve that life cycle will help you down the road, and that's an important thing. So -- and also, there's many times that you'll be jumping into the life cycle at different stages, as we talked about, especially with Discovery, many times you're jumping in at the monitoring stage because the assets are already in place. So those were just a couple of other thoughts. But we have just a couple of surveys we want to do and answer some questions. So I'm going to jump to the demo highlights. Was there anything, Eric, that you had that you really wanted to call out about some of the demos [indiscernible]?

I think as I was reviewing it, and we'll put in some things that got headed out, there's just so many features and capabilities that cut across all these life cycle stages that it was really hard to pair them down to just a couple for each of these stages. I love talking about this, but there's just so much you can do to manage to the life cycle. So I think there are some of the things I will highlight will be answering the questions that I've been looking at. So I'll hold off right now.

Okay. Good. Well, let's go ahead and do -- in which life cycle stage you have the most difficulty tracking and managing your hardware? So this is kind of part A where we'll talk about hardware. Go ahead and select that. I'll give you a little bit of time there. The next one will be asking about software. So keep that in mind as he get ready . Give you a few more seconds, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. All right. Let's see what the results are. All right. The mid. Okay, it's the main one, deploy, monitor service. So when those assets are actually out there in the wild, it's a little bit more difficult to manage. Anything surprise you there, Eric?

No, I think that's actually -- I would say we -- in the early stages, you still have control of them. There -- as a physical device, it's still in your management, it's still right there in front of you. Software is still in control. And it's when you deploy it, as Adam referred to, it is kind of the Wild West and sometimes, and it's like you're putting it out there and things are moving and things are changing so quickly. And you don't have control over all those variables of does someone have admin rights? Will this get lost? Is each employee taking all the required security measures? So I completely agree with that. The middle section is always the most difficult. And so using the early section to prepare -- early stages to prepare for that mid-section really helps us. And a great example would be with the COVID pandemic. When we had to immediately get all our employees to remote workers, to keep them working so that they're still providing value to the company, if we had a really solid inventory of software and hardware prior to that happening, the remoteness of the last year would have been a little easier to handle. So I just go back to -- starting early really helps us, especially in unforeseen events like what happened over the last year.

Got you. Yes. Okay. The second part is software, very similar question, what life cycle stage is most difficult for you to track and manage for your software. So give you just a few moments to do that, and we'll quickly go through it and do some Q&A afterwards because we have quite a few queued up, and we'll get back to you on some that we are not able to answer at this time, because of time. All right, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and here you go early. Okay. So on this one early and mid or -- well, they're tied 30.8. Very good. And late, not so much. That makes more sense. Late is a little bit more difficult with hardware than it is with software, but it still can get you. Any quick pointers before we go to Q&A on that?

I think that is exactly what I would have expected. Look, we want Q&A. There's an interesting question.

Lots to do it. Well, before we get to Q&A, I just -- you got to wear a hat. I'm going to wear my hat. So I'm putting on my ServiceNow hat. When we talk about the platform, it has lots of pieces and parts. And we only talked about the IT workflows and specifically ITAM workflows, within the IT workflows of security and service management and others. There are many other things that ServiceNow does such as the employee workflows, the customer workflows, the creator workflows, which is low code or no code programming development. So the platform really is the basis for work flowing everything that you have that your business is facing. And so we often refer to it as the platform of platforms. Very good. Now I can take off my hat. And we can talk in Q&A. All right. There are some questions out there, Eric. Let's hear some of the ones that were interesting, all of them.

Yes. So I know we're running out of time. So I'm going to combine a few of them around life cycle dates. So one of the things that got edited on the floor was about normalization. And so normalization is really about grouping like things. So when things come into your system -- so any of the tools you're using or even ServiceNow Discovery, depending on how it's been deployed onto that machine will produce different results. So it can be like Adobe Acrobat versus Adobe Acrobat Standard. And those variations can lead to misreporting or not being able to update things or pass things appropriately because they look like different pieces of software and hardware. So this is where normalization comes in. Normalization, having that done automatically by ServiceNow saves you a lot of time, especially if you had to do spreadsheets and try to reconcile that manually can be tedious and you're often miss things. So with that automatic normalization that happens for both software and hardware, those life cycle dates are automatically associated to those normalized models. And so we'll go back to the Adobe Acrobat. When that Adobe Acrobat model is normalized and you have all your installations that are associated to it, you now have life cycle dates that come from the publisher from Adobe Systems and they're automatically associated to each of those installations so that you can make -- you now know where all of the Adobe Acrobat standard of this version are installed and then you have information about when those important dates are coming. So that's all done automatically. When those dates -- if those dates happen to change, then they are automatically updated in the content library for both hardware and software and then updated on those models and then associated to the installations or deployments of that hardware and software. So that is all done automatically. So that saves you a lot of time. Let's see what were some of the other questions about that.

There was one -- you set to start early. How important is it to have an integration with your procurement system as opposed to relying on discovery populated data [indiscernible]?

Absolutely. Yes, yes. So important thing about discovery is that it comes later in the life cycle. It's really about the monitoring part, right? You're talking about discovering anything that's actually in the environment. So by that point, you're already -- you're not only missing out on things that they aren't deployed. So they're in inventory, but you're not capturing that cost information. The deployment part of it won't give you the associated things that you've already paid for. So for example, if you aren't bringing in stuff earlier, like, say, from Coupa or Ariba, some of these integrations to contracts or procurement systems, you're missing out on the potential value of, did it come with warranty? How much did we spend on it? Which vendor did we use to buy this? So whether you service now for -- or you're integrating with your current procurement or contract systems, it's really important to start there because you're going to get a lot more information about those early stages and things you might miss out on because you bought -- that's where you're spending your money. In the deployment stage, it's more about the monitoring of what's out there and how do you maintain the security of it. So I really think starting early will give you the bigger picture of everything you bought. Deployment will be a smaller piece of that, meaning if you buy 100 servers, you may only deploy 90 of them. Well, if you're only tracking from the Discovery part of it or any Discovery tool, they're going to miss out almost 10 that are sitting somewhere. So to get the accurate view, you've got to start earlier.

Okay. Very good. Well, I know we're running out of time. There were some good questions there. We need to get as many as we could.

I will say that. I'll go through If I haven't answered them already or if I rushed through because we're running out of time, I will answer these and mail these out to the attendees. So -- and I thank you for posting your questions. We'll try to get you the best answer we can.

Yes. There were some good questions even about if you don't have software and hardware managers there in your environment, it falls to everybody, how can that help? There were questions specific ones about certain things, the software and how it interacts. So very good questions. Thank you. And we'll get back to you on some of those things. Let's just kind of wrap up here. First of all, we're coming up close on Knowledge '21. In fact, we're wrapping up some of the final recordings that we're presenting. And if you register for it, it's free to see 200 -- I think there's 200-plus sessions that you can attend and watch. There are other ones that are paid ones that you can get more live interaction with experts and watch some things and participate in the labs and other things like that. And then there's a learning one, too. So check that out. The other one is that just like this webinar, there are plenty of other on-demand webinars that are out there and can be accessed. This one will be out there as an on-demand webinar, so you can refer it to other people. There are some other resources we mentioned, and I just want to do that in closing is we have a white paper that's about the hardware asset management life cycle. We also have Eric wrote a series of blogs that talks about something similar to Hannah and Casey Koon, I believe. And it's kind of a really good way of marching through the life cycle as well. There is also a new white paper out there, which is about Discovery. It's probably the most extensive one we've done about Discovery and how to get that information about your assets into your system. So anyway, the final thought is take it one step at a time. Improve that life cycle, and let's make our lives a little bit easier as we go through this, okay? And with that, I want to thank all of you for joining us. And hope you have and make it a great day.

Thank you, everyone.