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

Hello, and thank you for joining us everybody. Change is hard even when we know that it's beneficial to us. Think back to a time when you learned to type. Like many of us, you probably went from typing with just the 2 fingers of each hand, looking at the keyboard, looking for the keys to a touch typing, which is using all of the fingers of both of your hands without having to look at the screen, a process that is much more automated, much more efficient and much less error from. And you also may have benefited, like I did many years ago, from some resources to make that process of change that can be uncomfortable and kind of cumbersome, you may have benefited from things like a software program, maybe some training, some coaching, a class and that helped your -- both the process and the outcome more smooth and more successful. Now we are talking about a pretty simple individual example here. But when it comes to an organizational level change, like changing to or transitioning to our new technology platform, like ServiceNow, of course, our process is much more complex, the benefits are much, much more significant and the need for resources training, maybe something in the software is also more important and can really help with your transition process and your outcome again. And that's exactly what we'll be covering today as it pertains to switching to ServiceNow from whatever system you have. My name is Svetlana Zenkin. I'm a Senior Product Marketing Manager for our ITSM business unit, and I'm joined today by 2 colleagues, and I'll hand it over to Michael and Mark to introduce themselves.

Thanks, Svetlana. My name is Mike Hansen. I am in ITOM and CMDB marketing for ServiceNow. Before coming to ServiceNow, about 2 years ago, I was in the Partner Ecosystem for 12 years, both as a system admin for the U.S. federal government and also as a solution consultant with several partner companies, including DXC. I was really proud of the work that we did with DXC and before that Fruition Partners. We helped dozens of customers move off of their technical debt laden and customized applications into ServiceNow. When we did that, no one was better for helping us out than Mark Carvin, we are glad to have him with us today from DXC.

Good morning. My name is Mark Carvin. I'm a Certified Master Architect with DXC. I've been with the DXC for 10 years now and about 2 or 3 years in the Partner Ecosystem before that, and I've helped hundreds of customers implement ITSM, ITOM, and I just have a ton of real-world practical experience in trying to bring value to our customers and as quick a manner as possible. Svetlana?

Great. Thank you. Before we move on, we'd love to learn more about you and where you are on your ServiceNow journey or what you do, otherwise maybe you're helping others to implement ServiceNow. So please take a minute to answer this poll. We would like to hear the information so that we can tailor what we're saying a little better to our audience. And let's see, I'll read the questions and the answers and give you a couple of seconds. Where are you in your ServiceNow journey? Maybe you're researching ServiceNow, beginning your ServiceNow solution adoption, considering expanding the ServiceNow solution or maybe you're helping others implement ServiceNow or maybe something else? It really helps us and also helps you if you answer this. Research actually shows that if you participate in the webinar by answering polls and by submitting questions through the Q&A module, which you see on your screen, you get more out of the webinar as well. So we definitely encourage you to do that. And we also...

Now will be a good time, Svetlana, to point out that the -- in your panel views, you should have some resource that include videos and white papers that we think might be useful to you wherever you are on your ServiceNow journey. So check goes out.

Yes. Okay. It looks like we've got more than half submitted. Okay. So it looks like we've got a fairly even split. So a lots of folks are researching ServiceNow, some who are already beginning their adoption, that will be -- the content will be pertinent to you as well, expanding the ServiceNow solution, great, and helping others to implement. So thank you very much for providing this information. This will help all of us in the webinar today. Before we move on, let's just take a quick look at what we'll be covering today. First, we'll just briefly cover the challenges of the digital transformation and specifically moving to a new system and also discuss why the challenges of the digital transformation are better addressed when your services and operations are in the same platform, how they work so much better together. And after that, we'll look at what ServiceNow has in store and all of the tools and resources that are available to you to make that transition to make your implementation and adoption of ServiceNow easier. So this will include both the features and capabilities that are already baked into the system. And also the services and customer support that ServiceNow offers training opportunities as well as what our partner ecosystem offers, which is also very, very important and helpful to our customers. And finally, we will have time for Q&A. So let's step back and take a look at what's happening right now. You are probably very, very familiar with the problem, and that's why you are on this event. With the advent of the digital transformation, lots more services are going digital to help serve employees and customers better. And that's a great thing. We're moving in the right direction. But with that, there is just an explosion of incidents and not just the human-generated incidents from users, from customers, but also machine-generated incidents from the monitoring and event management tools that are also being added to systems. And that is just not sustainable. We are hearing from our customers all the time that they are just not keeping up with this massive increase in incidents. Maybe back in the day, they could address this by hiring a couple of extra staff, by just telling people to work a little more efficiently, a little harder, but that's not appropriate for a 20x increase in incidents. And what we are helping our customers do is address these by bringing services and operations together on the same platform. Now if your service and operations tools are siloed and fairly manual, then going back to our analogy of typing, if you have -- if you just have your service desk powered by a kind of a niche, small relatively manual point solution, it's like you're using just 1 or 2 fingers on one hand to type, not very efficient. If you add ITOM, it's like you're adding another hand to the mix, and that's definitely helpful. But if those hands are disconnected, they're not really working towards the same goal and can't kind of help each other out. Now adding both ITSM and ITOM on the same platform, it kind of transforms you into your touch type -- into a touch type or transforms your productivity and that's what ServiceNow does by combining our tools in the same powerful platform, coordinating and harmonizing them. It helps your organization become much more productive, much more efficient. And that creates also much better experiences for customers, for employees as well as your services and your operations teams. And we have analyst data to support that many companies moving to service operations have found that move transformative. Yes. And I'll hand it over -- so this -- I would like to hand it over to Michael and Mark to share their real world experience, implementing ServiceNow for customers and why those customers have found such benefits from ServiceNow.

Yes. I think one of the big reasons why this works so well is we're looking at an AI revolution that's going to come through and putting service operations together upskills all employees so that they're able to work with the different tool sets and different skills that are necessary. You know, Mark, the first time and I worked together was a U.S. national grocery store chain. And they had decided to -- first of all, to get off of their existing solution, which was heavily burdened with technical data and customized code. And they decided to implement ITSM, ITOM, I think they also put customer service management. And what was the other one, oh, field services all at once. At first, I thought, wow, that's a lot of change to take on at once. But as we got into the implementation, I started to realize that there were a lot of efficiencies, and this customer went on to be very successful. In fact, I think that's a pattern that we've seen among a lot of our customers is that those that work particularly with services and operations together see better results over time. Why do you -- are you seeing the same thing, Mark? And why do you think that, that is?

I do see it often, and it really starts with that foundation level, right? A lot of ServiceNow is built on a crawl, walk, run, fly model, but it's setting that foundation. If you have a good foundation and establish that trust, right, is you're making sure that my data is accurate, my data is clean, then it supports everything else that you want to do within the platform, right? You can't open an incident without having to tie it back to a CI of some sort. So the ITOM features get you that CI information in as clean and as quick and efficient manner as possible. So you just have that solid foundation to build everything up going forward.

Yes. And IT operations, which includes discovery, visibility, includes certificate and firewall management. That really does set the stage for a lot of other outcomes, doesn't it?

It does, right? And it can be staggered at times. We'll talk in a little bit about a couple of more examples from a few of the customers that I've had. But for this particular customer, it was a little tricky and challenging, but that's one of the reasons why we have the partner ecosystem that the partners have that depth of knowledge, the experience that you need to help implement these sometimes complex requirements in a more efficient manner.

Yes. Let's go to the next case. And we recently talked with the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. They are an academic hospital, one of the leading hospitals in the country. And they had a really great help desk. They had a really good service management process. But they were kind of plagued by the fact that because they were an academic hospital, the certificates and the IT support for their websites and applications were spread across sometimes a dozen different departments. Sometimes it might be with the help desk in an academic department, sometimes with hospital department, and what that was leading to the -- were some certificate related outages. Ohio State University Wexner takes that very seriously. As you can read here, they take anything that could put patient safety and care at risk with tremendous weight. And so they were able to go back to implement some of the discovery and features, find all of the certificates whatever apartment they were supported by, centralize them and then set up automatic renewal process and make sure that there was never another certificate related outage, and they haven't had that, an outage since they did this several years ago. But if they needed to build that trust, trust in the certificate inventory, trust in the CIs and technology elements that were supportive, and they needed to put those in front of the support staff so that they learned to trust the tool as the system of record. And while we're on that subject, ServiceNow is #1 in worldwide market share for both ITSM and IT operations as well as AI Ops. So we're well poised and, we're well trusted by our customers, by vendors that want to work with us to make sure that integrations work smoothly. And so when you implement ServiceNow, you're getting a known quantity, [ doing ] something that people are aware of. And as you get that discovery populated, as you start to automate those ITSM services, you'll start to see that trust grow even further. Let's take another poll right now. What opportunities are you most interested in? Or do you see first switching to ServiceNow and making that easier? Is it some in-software setup guidance do you think would be most helpful for you? Do you need tools to speed up your implementation guidelines, training for your in-house teams, implementation services? Are you not sure what would be most helpful? Go ahead and start replying to that poll, and we'll close it in a second. Mark, what we -- as a partner who's done this a lot, what do you think you would select if you were running your own company and needing to implement ServiceNow?

I think I like the in-software set of guidance, right? It allows you to walk through, you can see what you're doing, you're trying to do, you can track even what your partner is doing. It gives you that governance that you're looking for to make sure that your implementation is successful because honestly, without the governance, you're going to struggle all the way. That gives you -- to me, the best visibility of what's going on as -- through your entire journey of implementing.

Yes. And working with folks like you, I would have picked implementation services because there's just no substitute for experts and people to give mentoring and guidance. But let's see what you all put. It looked like fully, 1/4 of us are just not sure what would be the most useful for us. That's great. That's why we're giving this webinar today. But a quarter recognized that implementation service is really important. A number of them also looked for that set up guidance in the tool and a little less for the implementation guidelines and training for in-house teams. But let's move on to the next section. Most of the implementations that I did were 8 to 10 years ago. And at that time, as a new ServiceNow Asset Manager and Admin, I wish there was more guidance to help me get to value and to help me mature our instance and our ServiceNow implementation for the federal agencies that I worked for, and then later on for the customers. That kind of guidance is now available. First of all, as you pointed out, Mark, through guided setup. I just saw a great new wizard for guided set up for some of the Service Graph Connectors that we maintain. We'll be talking about those later on. But basically, any new feature in ServiceNow, the service operation workspace that you see here, the connectors and integrations, there's going to be a guided setup almost as soon as the feature releases that will help you step through the process, and we'll provide that back and forth that you talked about that visibility, Mark, and governance to how well the implementation is going and whether everything's been done that's necessary. So super valuable, and we'd love to share with you what areas you care most about and whether there's guided setup. But having help along the way with specific steps is no substitute for vision. I can't remember who said, where there is no vision, the people perish. And I think the same could be said of software implementation -- IT software implementation. You need that overarching vision. We recently released the Admin Center. The Admin Center is a place where newly [ minted ], maybe certified system admins, like myself, can go and find specific Adoption Blueprints tailored to your goal. So maybe you're trying to reduce costs, maybe you're trying to reduce your incidents, maybe you're trying to do more with less folks. All of those blueprints have specific features, specific automations that you can take advantage of, and you can go right into your instance see where you are on that journey and where you need to be and what the next step is. And I think that's very useful because you never want to be the guy who went on the cruise and didn't realize that the food was included and brought his own food along. You want to be able to take advantage of what's available to you and the Adoption Blueprints really give you the opportunity to do that. Yes. And for every feature, there is that in-house guidance. So there are Adoption Blueprints in each of those areas. One of the big elements that I have been excited about since I work so closely with the CMDB and ITOM is our Service Graph Connectors program. This goes back to that implementation that we were discussing earlier. There was an older guy, who would come to our implementation workshops. He, I think, had been there when the data center was first established, long hair, pull back in a ponytail. And he was just not sure about ServiceNow. We could see him in the back, kind of holding his chin, and he would make comments or questions that quickly let us know that he wasn't sure about this. We asked him because that's what we try to do is listen and find out where our customers are. He had been working with an IBM solution for years and years. And he had gotten it so that it covered his entire environment. He could use it for patching, to do reports on the nodes and mapping. And he wasn't -- he couldn't see why he needed and why the company needed another IT operations management tool. When we let him know that there was a Service Graph specifically for the tool that he was using, he realized that now instead of having to beg, borrow and plead people to come over to his tool, he was going to be able to put that information right underneath the fingertips of the service states agents, the noncooperators, and they were going to be able to use that, totally changed the conversation, and it made for a terrific implementation experience. Mark, I think you have an experience with one of your customers currently that was able to use a Service Graph Connector to get to value.

I do. It is a current customer. It's in the federal space. So this works across whether you're public or private. Our current issue is, is they need to be off of their tool by the end of June. And so while we are implementing ITOM, there are some technical challenges in reaching certain parts of their network. And we found that by using some Service Graph Connectors, we can get the same data that they're feeding into their old tool into ServiceNow, and it will help us have everything stood up and ready to go once June 30th hits. So it just speeds that time to adoption. So that what if it takes a little longer to get some of those security clearances or the network firewall rules adjusted or whatever, it gives back an option to implement fast, get that foundational data in that we were talking about earlier and onto the ServiceNow tool in a very short amount of time.

So let's look at what that actually looks like. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. We're just going to do a very basic demonstration here of what it means to have data in a CMDB, and how that can assist customers who want to begin to get a handle across teams and across their implementation. So we're looking at a record for a Windows server here. And we have a number of views, a view based on a service map, a view based on dependency and now a unified map that combines the best of both of these. But what it's going to show is how that server fits in to the overall service. It looks like in this case, that it provides some SAP services. They must be an older customer that's still doing SAP in-house on-prem, on their data center. But there are a number of front ways to look at this, maybe it makes more sense to have it in a horizontal. And there's also details that they can see. So for example, they can see the changes, incidents and problems that are associated with this particular server. That helps them plan better for changes. It helps them know what that's already ongoing with the system, and that just makes for smarter decisions, smarter projects that go smoother. And this is something that you can get to relatively quickly, and you can start to see the interrelationships between the technology. This was always my favorite part of an implementation was being able to show customers how their services fit together, how their technology elements fit in and how they work together. Mark, have you had experience with -- taking through customers to the dependency view? And what's the highlight for you.

I have. The highlight for me is using ITOM, right? I've done a lot of projects with discovery. And all of this stuff becomes automatic, okay? A lot of the stuff gets created as part of that discovery process. And then you can add on from there, right? You talked about the application service view and all the rest of that and service mapping and parts of the tool like that, that it just builds that, it gives you that visibility. So not only can you see what changes are there, but as you have maybe a change that's open, you can take a look and say, oh, well, this is going to affect the server or the service or it's going to -- taking out this database is of critical importance to business operations. It gives you that visibility that you're looking for. It also helps, again, as we're talking about the interrelationship with other parts of the platform. So I have a customer that we recently just finished with, and we'll talk about them in a minute, where we had implemented both ITOM and ITAM. And because we were able to build these views and build these relationships, we were also able to then feed that information into the ITAM module and then start establishing a life cycle with it. They can understand, okay, well, when should this come up for replacement or retirement or anything like that. There's also CMDB health dashboards in here that gives you not just to look at the single CI, but it gives you a look at your CMDB overall. And Mike, I think you have a slide on the CMDB dashboard coming up. Is that correct?

We're going to skip that one in the interest of time at this time, Mark. But yes, I want to just point out that the actual view that you'll get from ServiceNow with a unified map is even better, and there will be step-by-step guidance that will help you keep these relationships up to date. But it's all about automation. And now it's increasingly about artificial intelligence. In creating that service map, just as one example of many, we now have a machine language-assisted service mapping, which basically takes a look at all of the network traffic and automatically creates those maps based on some really neat Eulerian mathematics that we don't have time to go into, but it is...

And as you said, it is a massive benefit. I can tell you that we're working with the customer right now. We're about to go into Phase 2. And it's one of those things that we're talking about is because we have the solid data in the CMDB because we understand all of that stuff and they've configured things properly, we anticipate getting in dozens, if not more, service maps within a month, 2 months and really watch that take off and fly.

All right. Well, let's go to the next poll. How would you characterize your current visibility technology? Is it something where we're honest, we really don't have any idea what we own or support because everything is in different spreadsheets? Is it something where we have lots of tools to provide the details, but there's no way to tie it together into a single comprehensive view that's available to everyone? Are you in a place where there's a central platform, but you don't trust the data? Or do you feel like you've got a good data, but you just want to do more? Let us know where you're at with your visibility to your technology estate and really the technology visibility to your agents and operators. Give just a second for it to come through. Yes, when you were talking, Mark, the fact that you're able to do that in just a couple of months is amazing. You used to take up to a year before we would get that kind of value really for our customer. And so it's amazing what that mapping will do these days.

It really is about building relationships, right? And I know we're going to talk about that a little bit more. But the more you can build the relationships, the more powerful the tool becomes because you're just you're improving communication, you're communicating to your teams, hey, this relies on this, this relies on that. You're communicating up to your management, hey, this is what things should be looking like. There's all kinds of reporting and visibility tools in here that because you have all of this foundational data because it has got such a strong relationship to each other, everybody understands where you are in a very short period of time, just look at the dashboard, look at a workspace, things like that.

Yes. No. And it looks like a lot of people, but probably in the majorities have a lot of tools, but they don't have a way to link that together. So I think Service Graph Connector is a big part of the solution here, being able to do those integrations, certified, out-of-box and then having those comprehensive views that allow you to work all of that from a single pane of glass. Now we want to start taking a look not just about the technology relationships, but about the human relationship that make this easier. And we'll start off with what ServiceNow offers. If you're looking for a particular engagement, maybe it's an implementation or maybe you're looking to do something just a little above and beyond your initial [ stand ], we have expert services available for that. They can work on an engagement basis to help with implementation, to package services and to co-deliver services. This is -- this overlaps a lot with our partner ecosystem. Our partners can also provide this. And we partner with them on impact as well. That's a neat program that you can take advantage, where we'll come in, we'll look at your current implementation. We'll look at the way that it's been implemented, which automations are you taking advantage of, and we'll provide a report and some accelerators that help you get on stock and help you realize all the value, and that includes not just the software part, but some personalized training, some enablement as well. And Mark and DXC and some of our others partners will help us deliver some of this impact value. In addition to that, as a new system admin, I really needed help with how ServiceNow works and the training was exceptional. Now Learning, which we'll look at in just a second, and Now Create how a tremendous amount of technical resources that can help get any user of your system up to speed. Mark, you went through the Certified Master Architect Program. I did a couple of Certified Implementation Solutions. Being a Certified Master Architect, you need significant experience. But how did that training and the specific classes that you took and test that you took prepare you to help your customers make it a smoother experience?

Well, it really was all about forging that trust with the customer, right? And that gets done through demonstrated technical expertise. It is really what it is. I see there's a question in the Q&A, right? Is there an option for a little bit of this, a little bit of that. That's what as a Master Architect is my role is to come in, it's to talk to you, understand what your business needs are, understand what your business requirements are. And then help forge that path of, okay, this is what we should be implementing now, this is what we should be implementing a little bit down the future. And all of that comes from having that training and understanding the breadth of the platform and what's available to you. And giving you the proper guidance to make sure that we're getting you the biggest value and the best return on your investment in the shortest amount of time.

Yes. No, that's critical. And I can speak personally and to test to the fact that you're one of the best at the business in doing that. And the features that you're exposed to as part of those classes that they are a huge help in making sure you stay up to speed. So we've talked about Now Create or Now Learning within the Now Learning web pages a place called Now Create. This has very specific project plans, it has customer backed, it has sample agile stories that you might need as part of an implementation. They're really the best practice. Based on over 7,000 implementations of ServiceNow, what was the most valuable, what was the best use of time, what was the shortest road to value that's captured in that Now Create and really encourage you to take a look at that. Even if you're working with a partner, who's providing some of this for you, it's good to know what the baseline is. And so have a look at those resources. Mark, let me hand it over to you now to talk about the value of a certified partner and how those relationships work, how do you interact with customers? And how does that change over time?

It's about forging trust with the customer, right? It's about making sure that we're bringing to the table a depth of expertise within the platform. The platform grows so quickly, it's -- each partner is going to have its own bits of specialty. Each partner is going to be aware of certain maybe restrictions, conditions, whether you're dealing with -- you're in Europe and you're dealing with GDPR, a partner is going to have a better understanding of what some of those restrictions that you might be facing are and then can give you that better consultation because you have the expertise on the platform, but you also have expertise being local, right? We have a DXC years of partnership with ServiceNow. Again, I've been with the ServiceNow partner system with DXC for at least 10 years. And we just -- we've built that practice up. We are a Global Elite Services Partner, and I want -- I'm going to skip to the next slide here, and we'll come back to this, right? There's only 6 partners that have the Global Elite Partner designation. We're one of them. Our 4.5 CSAT that was just released is one of the highest that's available in the ecosystem among the Global Elite Partners. We have our own platform called DXC Platform X, it's the largest, or one of the largest multi-tenant instances of ServiceNow globally. So that means that if you're hesitant about using ServiceNow or want to -- don't have the availability to maintain ServiceNow on your own, DXC and some of the other partners have their own instances that will host ServiceNow and maintain that for you. So we have 1,500 -- more than 1,500 consultants. We have 35 master and technical architects worldwide, and ServiceNow trusts us. As Mike referenced that we are one of the partners that are out providing the impact services to customers. So Michael, I'll back up a slide here if you want to talk about the partner finder here for a second.

Yes, just want to make sure that everyone is aware that we do have a partner finder on our dot com website and that this will give you information about how many certified architects they have, how -- what awards they've been recognized for. And it'll also give you an idea of some of their special areas of expertise. So I encourage you to take advantage of that. I didn't know this, but in researching this webinar, there are over 2,000 partners, but only a few, like Mark said, fall in that upper league class, you can kind of look at those, find the right partner for you and your implementation. Let's go ahead and move forward. Thanks for introducing us to DXC a little bit and sharing some of that. I think, Mark, that you're going to be acknowledged, you're coming up in just about a month now. And you are sharing some of the work that you've done with one of your customers, right?

Yes. I referenced it a little bit earlier. We're going to -- I'm going to be speaking about implementing ITAM in the federal space. And part of the conversation is, why did the customer go to ServiceNow because they had a lot of security requirements and things like that. We're going to talk about some of the challenges of moving off of share well and how we were able to do that in an expedited manner. And we're also going to talk about the partnership and the relationship that we have with this customer going forward. We're on Phase 2 right now of the implementation. And we're already talking about Phase 3. So we've established that trust, we've proven the competency, and we've shown value to this organization that they are going further on their ServiceNow journey. We're able to get to stop 2, stop 3 on that road map, and that's what we're going to talk about that.

Yes. No, I think knowledge is -- for those that aren't familiar with it, is the trade show that we do once a year to really highlight customers that have had success. What did they do? What choices did they make? How did they get a smooth and simple implementation? Those are the kinds of sessions that you'll see. So I just wrap up that as I have been in the ecosystem, like I said, it's been about 12 years that I've been working with ServiceNow, I can't believe how much easier it's gotten to get to advanced outcomes quickly. There are tools in the platform. There are partnerships available. There are resources that were not there 5, 10, 12 years ago when we were helping people out of thorny situations. So it's even better now to get off of the existing platforms that might have a lot of technical depth, that might not be as competitive, that might not offer the kinds of maturity and depth of experience. And we encourage you to look for an opportunity to learn more. And let's just talk about if you want to schedule with us a discovery session, visit our website, reach out to your ServiceNow account executive. We'll show you what's possible, we'll build a business value assessment together, and then we'll measure your return on investment in ServiceNow through the life of the product. So really exciting stuff, especially as we come into AI, but let's take it to questions that folks have. Many of you've seen come through.

Yes. So thank you, everybody, for submitting all these great questions. We'll start with one that we hear and we kind of have addressed and probably is applicable to a lot of people. So if you're considering migrating from a software platform, which is similar to ServiceNow, but has a lot of custom code and configurations, can the customer -- can we bring our old code over directly? And how can we assure that the new platform, that ServiceNow will give us everything we have built over the years because we don't want to lose that.

So Mark, I'll let you take this one, but I'll start off by saying that a lot of times, the answer is that you really want better processes than the ones you have, not the same ones you have, but take us through that. When you see someone that's in a highly customized instance of another software solution, how do you approach that?

We're dealing with that with a couple of customers that we have right now. And the answer really is, can you bring that code over? Yes. Do you want to, or is that strongly advised? Well, that's what we're here and as a partner with you, to make that recommendation because, to your point, Michael, yes, your process probably needs that refinement. And there are pieces in the ServiceNow tool that you can program to find those process improvements, right? That's part of the AI and machine learning that's out there. But it's also, hey, you know what, we need to make sure that we're doing this better. So a lot of times, our recommendation is, let's take a look, let's talk about those processes before we implement the tool and let's design it. Now let's see, hey, you know what, if we use this out-of-box process, you can see automatically. So in a lot of cases, it's found that you don't have to bring over that old code because ServiceNow does that out of the box already. And we don't want to add that technical depth. We want to add that complexity. And as ServiceNow keeps growing and evolving, you get the updates to the platform, those updates, you get those because you're out of box, you stayed out of box, you're not customizing too much, that you get the benefit of that. The tool doesn't allow you to customize, but it's a case-by-case basis of what's going to be best for you in your business.

Right, right. I think there are 2 inflection points that I've seen with most customers. Number one is when they start thinking about their process. Is there a way to automate this? Or is a way to make this smoother and better? Number two is when they look at their data. What does the data tell us about how our processes are working. And those are a chance to make really big improvements, but they may not have even realized were possible. Sorry about that. Any other questions that we can take, Svetlana?

Yes. Let's see. Just one that came in. If I have data that we want to access from our previous ITSM tool assist [indiscernible] database, is the remote table feature my best option? I can read that again. I feel like...

I think it's a little technical for what we want to answer here because I need more information about the requirement. Please feel free to reach out to us whether ServiceNow or DXC as a partner, and we certainly would love to continue to have that conversation.

Okay. All right. This is another one that you have already kind of addressed, Mark, but we can answer it more, a little bit more broadly. We have a data governance process because we work in a highly regulated industry, so government banking, something like that. How can we make sure that ServiceNow meets our requirements, including our audit requirements and will be interoperable with our other existing corporate systems?

I think that that's part of that initial conversations, right? ServiceNow is highly secured. ServiceNow has a couple of 3 different types of instances, right? ServiceNow has a nonprofit sector business. They have in the U.S. called the FedRAMP platform, okay, where you're dealing with government and highly secure data that you have to meet certain requirements. We take that into consideration when we're setting you up with the ServiceNow platform to make sure that you're in the most secure environment that all of those governance and audit problems are resolved. One of the things that we find a lot is as folks are coming to ServiceNow is because they're failing audits left and right. And their current platform can't keep up. The reporting features, the visibility that ServiceNow gives you gets you over a lot of those audit hurdles in a very short period of time.

Yes, I just want to put a plug in here. One of the other products that you could extend on ServiceNow is a GRC product that will help you meet those regulatory requirements very explicitly, and we'll document your compliance to them. But almost every regulation I can think of having to do with privacy or security of data requires you to document how the systems are set up. So what better place to do that in ServiceNow with ITOM and that can meet a lot of regulatory requirements.

Okay. Great. We also got a question about with what CSAT's for, what that was mentioned on Mark's slide about DXC. It's a widely used term stands for customer satisfaction. Mark, could you speak to the CSAT question? And also, in parallel, we got a question about -- well, I'll hold that one. Yes, CSAT.

Okay. Yes. So CSAT is customer satisfaction. So after every implementation and every phase of implementation, ServiceNow will send out a survey to the customer asking how did your partner do? How -- what could be improved? How do you feel that these things went and so forth, right? And so it's based out of 5. And so being 4.5 out of 5 means that we receive high marks from almost every customer that we implement with.

And we [indiscernible], right? Like part of what we want to do as the owner of the software platform is make sure that we've got folks working for us who are able to really help our customers. And so yes, we ask that, we take that very seriously, and we keep track of who's doing well and who's not.

And there generally is a certain number of CSAT responses you have to have before you get posted or published with those rankings. So it's not just our 1 or 2 customers gave us CSAT scores or whatever, right? I don't know what the threshold number is, but it's based on some quantity of responses so that you have confidence that the partner that you're selecting has done this fairly often and is consistently good at what they do.

Great. Thank you. I got a question, how many CMAs are there in the world, Mark?

There are less than 250 worldwide. There are about 100 or so within the United States. The CMA program is a 6-month training course that you have to apply for, you have to do presentations and all the rest of that in order to be selected. And generally, they only select about 25 to 30 people per region, and there's 3 regions in the world. So like I said, it's a 6-month program. Once you're in there, it's a half a year before you get to that final exam and pass the certification.

No, let me interject there and say that we want to increase that number. It will -- there'll always be fewer Certified Master Architects than others because of the rigorous requirements. But we have a RiseUp program going on right now, where we're encouraging anyone who's interested in ServiceNow, a number of you respond that you're looking to help others in ServiceNow. We want to increase the number of certifications and certified ServiceNow folks out there. We understand that in the upcoming economy, the difference is going to be those who have people behind them that are well liked and well respected and can command kind of folks like Mark, who will come in, learn the platform and help them. And so we want to encourage everyone to go take some of that computer-based training to get signed up for a class, to join us in our RiseUp program. And hopefully, we can get that number of CM -- Certified Master Architects even higher.

Yes. And we can share details about the program after the webinar. So let's move...

Yes. The master architect program is the pinnacle of ServiceNow certifications, right? They're certified technical architects. But to your point, Michael, the RiseUp program is -- ServiceNow is for everybody, right? And that's the idea of the RiseUp program, so that you can have your own citizen developer teams to build tools and applications on the ServiceNow platforms to some of the questions that we had about customization and so forth, right. Is that you can do some of that and if you've set up your proper governance and set those -- set up the platform correctly, you can build almost anything that you can imagine on ServiceNow.

I'm sure with my kids that are graduating from college, I've shared it with some friends I have that are returning veterans. There's a lot of folks who could benefit this, and we're really happy to have them work with us.

Yes. Great. Thank you. So for our last question, this one might be challenging to answer, but we like a challenge here. How long would a typical implementation take for ITOM and ITSM together. What would you say? Because situations are different.

A lot less time than it used to. I don't know if you want to tackle this one, Mark. It's just -- it's so dependent on the complexity of the implementation. But I think if the environment, if the stacks are fairly simple, I could imagine, for example, a corporate headquarter situation, where we're not necessarily out into the factory floors. We love to do that, and we can do that. But a fairly simple discovery. It used to be that we would need to set up a bunch of mid servers, and we would need to take some time to get things flowing back. But I think with Service Graph Connectors, they can get all -- like for SCCM, for example, they can get all of their end point reporting in. And then if it's a simple data center or a simple cloud deployment, instead of months and months, which is what it used to be, I think we could for most customers get it much shorter than that. What would you say, Mark?

I'll tell you, the average is about 4 months, okay? It could be as little as 2 to 3, and your example of it is a very small simple setup, it could take 6 to 7 months. It depends on that complexity. But to the customer that we were talking about a little bit earlier, right, is we started this project at the end of February, and we're going to be live by the end of June. So I mean, they're going to be migrated off their platform on ServiceNow in 4 months. And that's about average for our implementations.

Great. Thank you. So we'll wrap up here. We will follow up. If there are any questions, of course, please encourage you to continue submitting them, check out the follow-up resources. As well as our many on-demand webinars, please come see us, acknowledge our sessions on ITSM and ITOM and service operations, lots of other things, AI, [ our booths ]. We would love to continue engaging with you, and thank you so much to our speakers today for all your time and expertise, and thank you to you all in the audience for attending and for hanging on until the end. Have a great rest of your day, evening, afternoon, wherever you are, which whatever time zone you're in.

Thanks, Svetlana. Thanks, Mark.

Thank you, everybody.