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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. After our recent event in Orlando, we had a lot of feedback from members saying you keep assuming that the transition to cloud is complete, and it's not. And today, we're going to be talking about some of the challenges and moving to the cloud. And we've got an interesting panel. We have one person from ServiceNow, which is one of the best-known, born-in-the-cloud companies. And I have someone from Aruba HPE, which is obviously a legacy company. It's been around a long time, but they've made a lot more progress towards the cloud and as a service than a lot of their competitors. So it's going to be a really interesting discussion. So on that topic of -- is that move to the cloud complete, this is some data just to show that it's still very much a work-in-transition. If you look at the members in our customer success, support services and professional services, research practices, you can see that in the customer success world and most companies focusing heavily on customer success are cloud companies, more than half of revenue is coming from technology subscriptions. But if you look at our support services and professional services members, a significant portion is still coming from product and license revenue. So this move to the cloud is still a work in progress. Some companies have made huge progress and are almost there. Other companies are still struggling to get off the ground. And something that I know you have all seen many, many times from TSIA is this diagram, which we call the fish model. And the challenge here is that when you're moving from legacy on-premise hardware and/or software to selling as-a-service technology, there are some realities of the finances that you've got to come to terms with. Initially, you're going to see a drop in revenue because instead of giving those multimillion dollar contracts paid upfront, as we did in an on-premise world, you're getting that subscription. So it's revenue over a longer term. And you're also initially going to see your costs rising because you've got to set up these data centers and all of the hosting equipment and services that go along with them. But over time, you do see that those costs stabilize, revenue goes up. And ultimately, you should end up with higher revenue and more scalable operations than you did before. But we're talking today about companies that are, at some point, in this transition. And I know a lot of you out there and looking at the companies attending. Some of you are already complete, and some of you are still struggling a bit with buy-in. So just one more data point to show that the maturity of cloud businesses sometimes leaves a bit to be desired. This was an audience poll from our Orlando event. We had about 1,000 in-person and 1,000 virtual people weighing in on these polls. And only 18% of companies said that the framework for modeling the financial objectives of the SaaS offer was in place. And only about 1/3 of companies feel that the team tasked with doing this has been clearly identified. So it looks like there's still a lot of immaturity in the SaaS models. So each of us are going to give a few thoughts on where we think the industry is and our position in the world. And I would like to first turn things over to John Spencer, Head of Product, Technology Industry for ServiceNow. John, welcome to the webinar.

Thank you so much. It's awesome to be here, John, and we'll try not to spill a lot of going back and forth on the John things. But yes. So yes, thank you. I've been in ServiceNow about 5 years. And for the last year -- just a little bit about what I do in ServiceNow, what my team does. I'm responsible for our technology industry as a vertical and what our product strategy is. And we've really been focused on as -- the primary theme has been around how to use our platform to drive more automation, to drive better experiences for everything as a service. So traditionally in technology companies in that industry, if we look at across managed service providers, traditional tech companies, cloud companies, that actually makes up about just under 20% of ServiceNow's customer base, and that's the customer base that I interact with every day. And kind of my customer zero is our internal cloud operations, IT operations, customer support teams. They're my customer zero or client zero. So when I combine all those conversations, there's a couple of clear themes that are really driving what we're thinking about every day and what we're working on. And the first is that we still -- as an industry, we spent a ton of time on the front-end customer experience, a lot of the investments have been around an amazing portal, omnichannel, great self-service capabilities, which is all fantastic. But a lot of the work and a lot of the processes actually get more complicated as you go to as a service, because you've got operations and partners have a different role in data center providers and Telco. Like they're just -- and multi-cloud, which we're all dealing with around the world, adds to even more complex processes on the back end, and you just can't service the customer well when the 2 sides aren't working together. The customers does not have visibility and support organizations do have visibility to how problems are getting solved. And so we just have this fundamental first problem around how do I make the core operation teams and my partners that are essential to my operations now as I go to as a service, more tightly integrated. So I can provide great experiences. And then since one theme, and we talk about this from a perspective. Internally at ServiceNow, we call this unified engineering. So how can I make all of the processes and line of sight between a support organization, my success organization, my engineering and my different operations teams around the world, and my key suppliers make those as integrated as possible. And we just call that theme unified engineering. And we're all trying to get to the same place of tightly integrating those processes end-to-end. So I can truly deliver proactive service, so I can know as fast as possible, what the impact -- what customers are impacted and notify them. Because with the shift to cloud, to IaaS or SaaS or whatever, the flavor of product is that customer is losing visibility, but the customer needs that visibility to run and be successful. So the better integrated, you can have your whole stack back from the core monitoring and from your partners that are helping you run this service to customers, the better off, the better experience they're going to have. And then the other trend, we'll talk a little bit about, I think, later in the session is really this need to be more and more integrated, down to the process level, to have digital workflows that are going from the customer systems all the way through to -- on the back end to your suppliers and to your partners, and getting out of this mindset of -- here's a great portal that you can go to and that can consolidate everything from you. More and more the requirement that we're seeing is that the enterprise customer wants you to meet them where they are. And a lot of times, that's within their ITSM system, whatever tools they're managing their technology and their application stacks in, and you got to plug into that. So it's a big integration ask. That is -- the gap is actually widening and what the customers are asking for and the experience they're asking the providers to present versus what's available in the market today. And I just look internally at our customer base, it's -- we can't say red, green or yellow around the service anymore. And yes, everything is great, and we'll give you an availability report that you can download and print out at the end of the month or whatever you want through this beautiful portal. Customers want to know exactly what's going on all the time and get absorbability level type information down into their systems. Because they have a lot of different applications and providers working together being orchestrated together on their side, and they need that kind of data down on -- into their systems. So that's the other big thing I'm seeing, just this whole transparency and the need for a whole another level of integration across the [ IT ] ecosystem.

All right. So with that, I wanted to introduce and talk a little bit about Aruba and their transition and how they've been maturing and introduce Ganesh to talk about that.

Thank you. Thanks for the great insights in the as-a-service space John and John. I'm here to talk about how Aruba is transitioning into the as-a-service journey. This is Ganesh, and I've been with Aruba for close to 10 years now. And I'm responsible for the Aruba NaaS product management, along with the NaaS platform, wherein we incubate new features and we create delight for our customers. Today, I'm here to talk to you about how we are partnering with ServiceNow to create a differentiated experience for our NaaS customers. So before we delve a little deeper into how we are partnering with ServiceNow, I would wanted to provide you with an understanding of what NaaS is all about, right? So NaaS is an industry-wide nomenclature, and Aruba's NaaS is branded under HPE as GreenLake for Aruba, right? So what is NaaS all about, right? NaaS is not your network as a -- network attached storage, if you come from the traditional storage world. So it is network-as-a-service. And that is a flexible way to consume enterprise network infrastructure, which is going to enable organizations to keep up the pace with rapidly changing technologies, business needs and the need to be innovative all the time. All of that clubbed together to provide a unique cloud-like experience, more of the subscription model, what we call in the SaaS world. So how does NaaS work, right? So instead of taking a waterfall development approach, by investing significant upfront capital and resources to design, build and operate networking infrastructure, organizations are now pivoting more towards an agile approach of consuming key infrastructure services, paying only for what they consume. That way, they are able to ensure that they are agile with the business needs. And at the same time, they are always up-to-date from an innovation perspective, right? So how is NaaS achieving this? A couple of key things, right? One is from a budgeting perspective. NaaS simplifies the budgeting process by combining all of your hardware, software services in a single or inclusive monthly subscription, but it also ensures that upgrades happen when needed through the pay-as-you-go capabilities, right? And if you look into the network planning umbrella, a retailer, for example, doesn't need to guess how many locations are going to be active across a 3- or a 5-year period and then budget for these locations centrally. Instead, NaaS is going to allow the services to be expensed and funded on a per store level, right? Imagine how painful it was for organizations before the pandemic to developed stringent 3-, 5-, 7-year network plans, and they could count on things the remaining unchanged, right? But the pandemic has showed us how quickly and drastically these plans change upside down. Some organizations were not prepared to rapidly transition their business, and that is what the flexibility NaaS provides. From a customer experience perspective, customers can view their entire network infrastructure on a single pane of glass, knowing what inventories are running, what software versions, how many incidents/cases are raised against a specific asset, and so on and so forth. From a network operations perspective, right, the day-to-day process of setup of the network infrastructure, onboarding, management of devices, troubleshooting, upgrading, et cetera, puts additional pressure on the lean IT organizations that are already stretched too thin, right? For example, keeping up with software upgrades itself is a full-time job. And you can imagine the amount of effort the teams put in to upgrade and keep their software up-to-date on their majority of their network infrastructure. So in the NaaS model, the day-to-day management of the network can be offloaded to a third-party provider so that a network team doesn't need to worry about patching new softwares and so on and so forth. NaaS also automates a lot of manual processes, such as troubleshooting and onboarding. And that way, you take benefits of troubleshooting issues even before they arise, and that is what is called proactive monitoring. We'll delve a little more into those in the upcoming discussions. So going into this slide, right, the key takeaway here is 2 things, right? How are we, as Aruba, partnering with ServiceNow, to deliver a differentiated experience to Aruba's NaaS customers? And what are some of the unique challenges we are solving in this NaaS space, right? So this is a busy slide, and I would like to take your attention from the top to the bottom, right? The top most box represents the different services, which are offered under the NaaS portfolio. These do not encompass all the offers and represent only a subset of those. The second box represents the service capabilities via these offers. And the third box represents the various elements within a NaaS customer's journey. And if you look at it, it's broken down into 3 primary blocks, right? One is the service strategy and design, the other one goes into service transition, the final block goes into service operation. And in other words, we call it day 0, day 1 and day 2 specifically. And if you look at the horizontal bar in the bottom, which says Aruba Service Manager, so Aruba Service Manager is the heart and soul of NaaS delivery, and this is built on the top of ServiceNow. So imagine this is a sandwich where there is ServiceNow in the back end and then there is some secret sauce which Aruba has got. And together is what we call it as the Aruba Service Manager, and that is how we deliver the NaaS experience for our customers. The last box represents the various systems and subsystems within which we integrate in the back end. And as you can see, we leverage a lot of the modules from the ServiceNow idle ideas and capabilities like incident, problem, change, management and so on and so forth. And if you look at some of the unique challenges we are solving under the NaaS space, right? Imagine delivering a project across 2,000 to 3,000 sites spread across 50-plus countries, right? And how are we doing this? We're using a lot of, I would say, core project management capabilities from the ServiceNow platform, along with notification, alerting and, I would say, intense coordination with cross-functional geographical teams, right? The other key aspect to delivering NaaS scheme, right, we will need to deliver projects being agile, but at the same time being efficient. This puts an additional bonus on us to basically onboard customers, automate the onboarding process, automate the monitoring process and so on and so forth. And again, when it comes to proactive notifications and alerting, we'll delve about that and little more, but we use a lot of, I would say, automation built on the top of ServiceNow and ASM to deliver that experience. NaaS is in a very interesting phase of growth and innovation, and we are continuously looking for ways to drive improvements to processes. And again, I wanted to thank you all for listening into some of the insights with respect to how we are delivering NaaS. I'll now pass the ball over to John Ragsdale to help us delve a little deeper into some of the areas discussed.

Thank you. Well, thanks to both of you, and I want to dive into some questions, put you both on the spot a little bit. But Ganesh, I want to start with you. I referenced the TSIA's fish model earlier in my opening slides. Could you talk about where you are in this fish model journey towards SaaS, but also profitable is that?

Absolutely, absolutely. That's a great question. So if you look at the fish model, right? The different phases it has, right, from align, announcing, demonstrate and declare phases in the fish model. So we have been in this journey for quite some time right now. And I would say, for Aruba, we are between the demonstrate and declare phase, right? So if you look at what we did in the announcement phases, we basically aligned ourselves, aligned our offers to ensure that we are on board the as-a-service experience. We announced -- built some of the capabilities, which are basically market-leading innovators in the as-a-service space. We also demonstrated successfully how we could deliver on NaaS, right, which is all the benefits which I had explained previously. So we currently have more than 40-odd customers where we have demonstrated some of the core capabilities of NaaS, right, be it subscription versus consumption, be it proactive monitoring and so on and so forth, right? So now our need for us, if you look at the fish diagram, is to transition from the demonstrate phase to the declare phase, right? So that is where we are looking to identify items to streamline our operations and basically looking to understanding how can we scale more efficiently, right? My team's focus is primarily on continuing the journey from day 2, which is your 24/7 proactive monitoring, into day 1 and day 0, basically trying to provide a single pane of glass as we help deliver the NaaS experience.

Yes, I think it's fair to say that when the as-a-service movement first started, that networking companies were kind of at ground zero. And it -- let's face it. Some of your competitors were dragging their feet a little bit on making that transition and they're not as far along as you. Was this just the culture of Aruba that was open to change? Did you have a great vision? Why do you think that you've been more successful than other companies in starting this journey?

I would say we've got a great vision, great strategy in front of us. But we were also able to partner with a lot of industry leaders, thought leaders in the industry, to understand how do we pivot ourselves into this as a service transition. And then we started working backwards to understand key facets of what it needs for us to deliver these innovations into models which we can build and deliver on successfully. And as you can see, we've not just proven ourselves, but now we are looking into scaling those to ensure that we are able to scale our operations.

So John, if I could turn to you, obviously, you started in the cloud, so you didn't have to make that journey at ServiceNow. But I get copied on your quarterly financials, and I think the profitable piece is looking really good for ServiceNow. You want to talk about that?

Yes. And actually, when I look at the fish model, it's still really relevant to us as you think of we're constantly incubating new businesses that aren't transitioning. They're always born in the cloud, born on our platform, but the phases that you go through to find the fit and the profitability of those new offerings or new product lines has always got to be closely watched. Because like you said, like at the end of the day, like we -- we've been very fortunate and we crossed kind of, I don't know, crossed that chasm or whatever to net profit 3 years ago. And so I think we've had 12 quarters in a row where we've shown a profit. We've been managing that really closely, obviously. And at the -- on the one side, it's always focus on cost of delivering these services. We're having to make more and more investments in multi-cloud and regional data centers to meet data sovereignty requirements all of the time. So we've got to manage that while we're growing our customer base, roughly 30%, 35% a year. And that's all about automation. So we look at how do we stay efficient and get more efficient, it's all about automation changes. We need to hover around 99% of changes being fully automated in our environment to keep our operations cost in check. And we look at support, right now, we just covered -- got through one milestone of 1/3 of incidents or solved -- fully solved through AI, which is a big milestone. And we can do better, we need to get that to 50% and go higher, but that's kind of the second thing we've been focused on. And overall, in those operations teams, we've really focused on measuring the manual workload. And overall, what's the savings. And the metric we're hitting right now is around 50% of manual work has been -- is taken out of the processes, and that's our goal. The other part to this model is, okay, how do we grow revenue. And this is a land-and-expand model, right, in line with layer and TSIA kind of best practice. And that's just listening to our customers and constantly bringing in new products, but doing that efficiently. So our strategy has been to listen to our customers, innovate quickly on top of our existing platform and organically grow new products so that -- under the covers, we're much more efficient in bringing that new product to market and what it would cost us to stand up a complete new set of capabilities. And you see like in the last month, we released new ESG applications and then at the PaaS level, new RPA applications. And that's really how we're driving that top line, because it's within our customer base is where most new revenue is going to come from. And so we have to keep innovating and bringing in those new capabilities that customers can expand within our model, within our platform.

For the younger folks in our audience, they may not know how really controversial ServiceNow was when they first launched. I've known Fred Luddy, who was the founder for 20-plus years. And when he came out with the cloud offering for IT Help Desk and iToll technology, it was really at a time when many IT shops were really hostile towards the cloud because they saw it as a threat to job security. And I know when he first announced this, a lot of people told me he was crazy. But he was definitely an early adopter specifically for technology for IT, but clearly, IT has jumped on this bandwagon by now.

Yes. Fortunately, it has been a very profitable journey for a Fred and the ServiceNow teams. But yes, and it's -- one of the things that we had talked about in the pre-brief was, that's kind of a transition for me and what I'm talking to customers about in terms of now we're getting into, okay, yes, cloud, that we want to get to cloud. But now we're talking about regional clouds, regulated industry clouds to meet those customer requirements that are more on the compliance or privacy perspective, and that's adding a tremendous amount of complexity to our operations. So in terms of managing how do we continue to grow and caveat growth rate but at a reasonable cost, that's one of the things that we've got to -- make sure we've got as much automation as much thought as possible around because, otherwise, your cost could get out of control pretty quickly.

So John, let me stick with you for my next question. Proactive service has been a core part of ServiceNow's messaging from the very beginning, and it's very applicable not only to the IT audience, but your CRM audience as well. Could you talk about proactive support and give us some examples of what that really means for the enterprise customers? And why is it so important?

Yes. So when I think of Proactive service, Proactive support, kind of 3 phases. First is just really effective problem management, still surprising to me how underinvested problem management is. The first thing to do is if you see a pattern, permanently fix it, get out of workarounds. And so having a robust problem management discipline and process in your support organization that's tightly aligned your engineering, and a commitment to get there's problems prioritized as soon as possible. It's reactive, but it's proactive for all those other customers that are finding it, putting workarounds out there, known bugs, like they just have to get out of the system as fast as possible. Second phase is you're going to have issues in your operations. Like these are complex clouds around the world that we're running, you're going to have issues. Let your customers know as soon as possible. And there's a lot of fundamental friction around making that change to say, hey, have an issue in this data center with this provider with this software release that we put out, immediately understanding the impact and letting the customer know. So that the customer doesn't find out from their end users. Worst case is one of your customers finds out from their end user that you're having a bad day. You need to proactively tell them you're having a bad day, that they can manage and they can meet their SLAs. Because they were proactive with their end users that, yes, Zoom -- or I shouldn't use a specific company, but whatever service or SaaS application having a bad day, we know about it, we're on it. Great. No incidents come in, I meet my metrics. But a lot of times, the metrics in the support organization are not to create cases or to have friction before we notify the customer, or we can't accurately map the impact down to the customer level and what the right contacts because we don't have the processes and different teams are sitting in different systems. It's kind of the second phase. When I think of Proactive service and where we need to get to, is your customer or your champion is dying for more visibility, and they want to know when you have a bad day. They want to know. They passionately want to know. They need to know. And that's an area where companies will differentiate in the future. SaaS companies will differentiate by providing, orders of magnitude, more transparency than we do today into our operations. And then the third, when you think about Proactive service is stop thinking about issues, problems, incidents and just where could the customer get more value. Like we're in the cloud. We're SaaS. We know what industry. We know what capabilities you're using. We know how your peers are doing with our products in these different processes. We need to proactively be guiding you to value. Like there's such a talent shortage. We're constantly releasing innovations and new capabilities, customers can't keep up. So we have to be much more thoughtful about on-demand providing proactive guidance and insights to how to get more value out of our products. And like, we have to take that ownership on it. It'd just be a passion in everything we build. So I know it's kind of the last proactive. When I think of proactive service, that lasts like it is how you're going to make your customers successful and really how you're going to grow.

Well, it's really kind of an expanding concept of what it means to be proactive. I love that you mentioned transparency. That is probably my single biggest pet peeve is when a SaaS application I use crashes. It's down for an hour and yet their outage website says 100% up, no outages. And everybody in a certain region is complaining on Twitter that there's an outage, and they never acknowledge it. That's not helping.

Yes, yes. Well -- and if you're the CIO, and I had a great meeting last week with one of our enterprise [ pack ] members. And they were saying, every day, I'm losing visibility. Every day, I've got a commitment to get to SaaS, to everything as a service, whatever we want to call it, and my team is losing the ability to do their job. And that's like, yes -- so yes, agree.

That's going to bite you on the renewal, I can guarantee. Well, Ganesh, let's talk about concept to reality here. I know Aruba has got a lot of programs around Proactive. Could you give us some examples?

Absolutely. If you look at NaaS, right, I mean, the way I think of being proactive is we offering a proactive experience to our customers is one of the centerpieces of NaaS experience, right? And how we do that, right? So if you look at that sandwich, which I've previously explained, I'm going to add another layer to the sandwich, but then that would probably highlight how we're probably doing it. So we have our cloud network management platform called Aruba Central, which monitors all the Aruba assets which are deployed on the customer's infrastructure. What we do is we are the cloud platform, the cloud platform, which is the Aruba Cloud platform, talks to the ASM, which is our NaaS delivery platform, which is, as I said, built on the top of ServiceNow. So the cloud platform has all of the cutting-edge AI/Ops, AI/ML algorithms running on it, wherein we are able to proactively flag errors, not exactly like, I would say, fix it -- but we also do some level of fixing, I'll probably talk about that in the future slides or the sections. But what we actually do is when we detect an issue or a potential issue, we would auto create incidents on the NaaS platform, wherein our NOC teams will be looking into, and then we would proactively create those incident cases for the NOC team to inspect even before those alerts go to the customers. So that way, we take much of the noise or, I would say, noise filtering on our end and we basically let the customer know of only specific issues where we need their involvement. Now we spoke about a lot of -- I know a lot about transparency. So we're not hiding anything from the customers. But what we are trying to do is to just have them action work with us only on areas where we need them to. And we have -- and as I said, we have -- they have access onto our platform. So they will be able to view, I would say, 100 incidents, which our NOC team actioned upon. Out of those 100 incidents or so, only 5 or 6 will probably need a customer interaction. So we are transparent in a way, wherein we provide all of that information onto the customers, but we also let our customers know that, hey, out of 100 odd incidents which happened, only 4 out of 5 needed a specific action on their end. So that is how we are basically filtering noise for the customers. And at the same time, we are inspecting the issues. We are working on troubleshooting those issues, and then we correct them even before it hits the customers and goes down to impact the end user, which is the core for us to deliver the NaaS experience.

So this whole topic of Proactive, I mean, ultimately, it's lowering customer effort. It's improving the experience. And I want to ask one final question to both of you before we go to audience Q&A. And that's how do you see as-a-service companies improving the customer experience? John, could we start with you?

Certainly. So when I think about customer experience, one of the big investments like ServiceNow is making and we're seeing some really good examples in the industry, like Cisco recently put together what they call their Customer Experience Cloud and their Partner Experience Cloud. They are very similar concepts. And we've seen this almost a dozen times in other tech companies, where there's a really thoughtful redesign to that customer-facing digital experience. And within ServiceNow today, we've got 9 different portals for different types of information. This year, we'll get that down to 4. We need to get that down to 1, and it's kind of that maniacal focus on thinking about who the customers are, making it personalized and putting the information together in one digestible place that people can get to it. So that's one avenue. It's just what we have today out there, just it's a proliferation of portals and customers can't navigate it, because they're dealing with 20, 50 different vendors. The other side on the customer experience is really if we think it's consumer -- and consumer customer experience, you talked about meeting the customers where they are. They want to interact with you on the mobile platform, they want to interact with you in-store, whatever, the customer chooses and you meet them where they are. So one of the things that we're really focused on -- and actually, from my team, it's one of our top -- it's our top engineering priority, is to make it easy for providers to meet their customers within their ServiceNow environment. So within their ITSM environment, we're seeing a lot of need for wherever the customers are running their technology and their applications and those core processes for providers to integrate directly into those processes. There's not a separate, hey, I've got an issue that monitoring's pick up, I'm going to go open up a case, like that should be a seamless, transparent. Where I'm going to request an additional capability or more capacity or whatever, integrate those processes right down to where your customer is living, and that's often time within their ITSM system is the other big experience thing we're pushing on.

So Ganesh, could you give us any examples of how Aruba is working through some of these topics around experience and transparency and integration?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Kind of like following up on John thoughts, we are building digitized ITSM workflows from us to our customers, right? It is a key aspect to NaaS. Because we not just offer transparency, but that also creates values. Because whatever incidents we might raise at our end, we might have change management or specific actions which the customers need to follow up on. But if you look at it overall, it would affect an SLO or an SLA, right, for a specific time to resolve. So what we actually have done is we have integrated our ASM or the ServiceNow platform with the customer ServiceNow systems, and have digitized some of the workflows together. So that way, we and the customers together have the same single pane of glass, there is complete transparency. And at the same time, from a reporting aspect, we all have similar metrics to report from. Like for example, like we had one of the largest -- we were actually doing the deployment for one of the largest customers, NaaS customers, who had close to 3,000 sites globally, right? And if you look at it, we had partners who are doing site survey, site installations, but both us and the customers have to be abreast of what were the issues or what could be some of the artifacts coming from those specific journeys. So what we did was we basically integrated both the ServiceNow systems together, and we were able to track changes, we were able to share artifacts, like a site survey result or like a cabling diagram, right, post-site survey results and whatnot, between us and the customers. So together, we were collaborating much more effectively than ever before, and everything was assimilated on this common platform and we were able to move much faster. And we were also able to have a lot of, I would say, global cross-functional coordination, right? And that is very key for us to deliver NaaS. Because you see these customers who got multiple sites and it's across multiple countries, this is one of the key aspects, building digitized ITSM workflows. And that is what we've done. We are in integration with the ServiceNow systems, I would say.

Fantastic. Well, I thank you both for being patient with my questions, but I see we've got a lot of questions coming in from the audience. So Vanessa, I'll turn it over to you.

Great. And since we do still have some time left, if you would like to submit a question for any of our speakers, please enter in the ask a question box and we'll get through as many questions as time allows. Our first question comes from Megan and they ask, "How is ServiceNow managing the ecosystem today from an application and/or tech stack perspective?"

It's a really good question, and I'll talk about it from a couple of lenses. So one is we have everything represented in one CMDB. So we've got a very complex multi-cloud world that we're managing with customer instances being spread out across, I think, 17 different data center payers, and that's probably across 3 or 4 different providers that we work for. And then when you look at the actual technology that we're running on, sometimes that's Azure, for example, sometimes that's our own stack top to bottom. So one is to have one picture of that. And we drive a ton of automation and a ton of value because we spend the time to have accurate CMDB that we update and close to real time globally. So that's like a core. So we know what the foundation is. We know what the impact of any changes are. We can run a lot of automation. And we spend a lot of time upfront with any new technologies coming in the door to make sure that the monitoring and the discovery is all automated with that tech stack. The other side and how we're working with vendors is all on the vendor management risk, and now more and more ESG type information. To have that fully modeled out as well and to have a focus on workflows where stuff is getting manual and all the management of those relationships. And then kind of the third avenue, I would say, is when we're working together to solve problems. And the focus goes back to what we were just talking about around integrations. So can I drive more and more integrated processes where I am not having to go and manage a ticket in my ITSM system, and then have a team at a vendor or multiple vendors all in their different systems, and we're collaborating ad hoc through e-mail, through Slack groups or channels, like how can we get that to more structured and integrated processes, where we can troubleshoot. And the other big thing that we're hitting from a compliance perspective is how -- like any change, any access to -- you have a cage, for example, around the world, for any reason, needs to be documented in our systems for us to meet our compliance requirements. Like how do we just get those processes to be as seamless as possible and the approval processes. But I don't know if that answers your question, but it's on a couple of different levels, but it really comes back to having one system of record that we can run workflows and automation out of.

Okay. Well, unfortunately, we have run out of time today for the live Q&A portion. However, I know there are quite a few questions that we haven't answered live. So just know that we haven't forgotten about you, and we will respond. That being said, since we have come to the conclusion of today's webinar, a few more reminders before we sign off for today. There will be an exit survey at the end of today's webinar. Please take a few minutes to provide your feedback on the content and your experience by filling out that brief survey and the link to the recorded version of today's webinar will be sent out within the next to 24 hours. And now, I'd like to thank our presenters, both John Ragsdale and John Spencer. And of course, along with Ganesh Subramanian for delivering an outstanding session. And thank you to everyone for taking the time out of your busy schedules for today's live webinar: Powering Your Everything-as-a-Service Business, brought to you by Technology and Services Industry Association and sponsored by ServiceNow. We look forward to seeing you at our next TSIA webinar. Take care, everyone.