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

Okay. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoy that little housekeeping video. I know for me, usually, I'm used to Zoom. So this platform has a lot going on, but I hope you guys can utilize everything and take advantage of the chat feature, the Q&A because we have people responding to those. So excited to kick off today's webinar. The topic for today is mastering asset life cycle management to drive growth, and we're going to be discussing how to improve your asset life cycle management with ServiceNow ITAM. So the main topics we're going to hit are how ServiceNow helps optimize investments across software or hard, cloud and physical assets. We're also going to discuss why a single platform makes more sense in maintaining a transparent, adaptive asset estates. And with that, let's kind of introduce ourselves first. So I'm Faith, marketing associate for ITAM, and I'm here at ServiceNow, and I'm joined here by Michelle.

Hi, everyone. I'm Michelle Campos, and I'm an ITAM solution consultant, so specializing in ITAM -- or excuse me, IT asset management space. I joined ServiceNow about 2 years ago and came from a customer. So I've been a practitioner in the ITAM framework for quite some time. I won't age myself, but have been in your shoes and looking forward to the discussion today.

Thanks, Michelle. Love your introduction. Let's go over our agenda really quickly before we get started. We're going to open this webinar by discussing some ITAM challenges that we commonly see in the business. And then we're going to go over how ServiceNow can help you solve any of these challenges. Then to the main segment of this webinar, we're going to be going over the asset-like cycle with Michelle. She's going to be doing a couple of really awesome demos, awesome key points and I want to hit that are particularly relevant for ITAM. And then lastly, we're going to wrap up today's presentation with a time for Q&A. All right. And just before we get started, a safe harbor notice for any forward-looking statements. Please note that this presentation may contain forward-looking statements that are based on our beliefs and assumptions on the information currently available to us. Please do not make any purchasing decisions based on this presentation. All right. So we wanted to open up by discussing some common ITAM use cases that we usually see. We've noticed that we see 3 common use cases time and time again. Those being proactive risk management, cost control and operational efficiency and responsive user experience. For the first one, proactive risk management, this usually encompasses customers needing to maintain readiness for vendor and regulatory audits and anything to do with kind of upkeeping with their assets. So that could be planning of end of life, maybe upgrades, asset refresh, asset disposal or improvement, anything in that sort. The next bucket that we tend to see is cost control and operational efficiency. This usually means anything that has to do with optimizing maybe, hardware, software, cloud spend to kind of maximize return on all of those tech investments. With this category, this also relates to anything that has to do with the efficiencies, making sure that workloads are standardized, automated and that any asset updates are automated as well. And the last one we usually tend to see is responsive user experience. So this usually tends to relate to anything to do with the visibility of asset estate. So this could mean being able to track, locate, monitor your assets, maybe real-time awareness of where your assets are, the status and the condition of them and also being able to respond to any asset request at a quick speed. So just kind of I sum it up, the basic 3 categories are maintaining our assets, making sure that your workflow is optimized and automated and also knowing where your assets are. All right. So we're going to have a little pull time now. So we want to hear for all of you. When it comes to introducing innovation and new technologies, which factors are most challenging for your ITAM team? Please select all of the answers that apply. So I was just going to give you guys a minute here to think about that and answer what you want to, and then we're going to go over it. So the options we have are: a, hybrid and multi-cloud management; b, complexity of software licensing; c, skills and staff shortage; d, ESG reporting and requirements; e, enterprise-wide reporting and cross-department processes; f, support for security operations; and g, ITAM tools and processes can't keep up with changes. So take a moment, think about it, you can select all that apply. And then just kind of submit that, and then we're going to move on. What it looks like a good amount of people have responded.

Really excited to see what the answers and responses that we get because over time, you've kind of seen a shift, right? So the skills and staff shortage used to be something that I would see all the time in my practitioner days and actually somebody having the skills and knowledge around license compliance and the complexities around that. But now I started seeing a real shift towards the security side of it. And I'm talking to customers all day and -- all day long about are they -- do they know the inventory so that they can make sure that they're securing it. So a lot of times, my CSOs are on the calls engaged just as actively as the ITAM staff. So kind of excited to see what we find out. All right. I don't know if you want to go ahead and show the results. I think it's given enough time. Let's see what they answer.

Yes. All right. All interesting, okay. So as our top result, we have enterprise-wide reporting across department processes. And then also at a high percentage, we're seeing skills and staff shortage, complexity of software licensing and then the other ones are kind of rounding out the bottom of the pack. So that's really interesting because we're going to compare it to a survey we actually took in 2023. We wanted to kind of see how you guys feel right now. It's been a little bit of time in 2024 versus this bigger sample pool that we have. So this is actually the results we got in our large survey that EMA conducted for us in 2023. That was kind of just to help us understand the current state and your term outlook of asset management. The people surveyed were a diverse mix of people from different industries, all of them are represented like tech, finance, manufacturing, health care, and there's a variety of company sizes represented as well. Some companies as small as 1,000 to 2,000 and some larger than 10,000. Primarily in the survey, we heard from Director and VP levels, but there's also some responses from the CXO level and the practitioner level. But yes, from out of this survey, when asked to identify the biggest challenges to innovation, we saw hybrid and multi-cloud management and complexity your software licensing as the top results. So if you go back to you guys' poll response is really quick. We see that complexity solver licensing is pretty high, but we're not seeing as much representation with hybrid and multi-cloud management. And it seems like for this audience, there was a big representation for enterprise-wide reporting. Going back to the survey, we do see enterprise-wide reporting, pretty high still at 23%. The survey had a pretty big sample size. It was really interesting to compare and see what everyone is feeling. I guess some other trends that we noticed from the survey was that a unified approach to ITAM tended to face a few challenges to innovations. And as Michelle was talking about, Security and Cloud are really big themes that we're seeing lately. So those are big challenges to optimize ITAM. When also broken down to the different kind of level, I guess, we would see that the CXO people responding, tended to see it like a tools and silos as the biggest challenges. Meanwhile, individual contributors would see skills and staff shortages as the main challenges. And the managers kind of in the middle, mostly saw cloud and hybrid. And then we have another question from the exact same survey that we thought it would be good to highlight. This one was what changes to asset management requirements do you see in the next 6 to 18 months? So with a survey, we saw higher levels of automation at the highest at 40.2%, which makes a lot of sense. That was kind of to be expected. And then also at second and third place, we saw greater attention to ESG initiatives at 36% and expansion beyond IT assets at 34%. And we did see that a lot of IT leaders in particular, think about ESG is going to be a big hot topic in the near future. We also saw increased use of AI and machine learning, start to sneak up at 29.9%. And we really predict that in next year's survey, that's going to probably be a lot higher because we didn't see that's a big theme. Our customers are really looking for more AI, more machine learning, and that's something that ServiceNow is definitely working to deliver.

It's definitely a hot topic, right, AI? Tell me, you can't have a conversation without hearing AI come up and whether you're talking about asset management or just anything in general around your life, right? So it's definitely something I could see being higher on the list next year for sure.

Yes, definitely. Now we also wanted to discuss the ever-changing asset estate and how it depends on the workflow. So I know you guys have probably heard of the crawl, walk, run model. But we kind of have another model that we think of it as complex, transparent, adaptive because this is kind of how we think about the workflow. So complex, this is what a lot of businesses are in unfortunately. This kind of means that the business is probably using legacy tools, point solutions or self-built solution. So there's not a lot of harmony among different parts of the business. There's a big lack of visibility. And this means that when problems come up, it's really difficult to try to figure out how to address the bigger picture. Usually, people only address a small thing, point solution, but that leads to a greater, more incurred costs, less visibility and kind of a lot of jumbles. So then the next stage that we want to get to is transparent. So transparent, you have visibility. You are able to see that bigger picture, kind of all your ducks are in a row, but that's not the final stage of the workflow. What we're trying to get to is adaptive. So adaptive is like transparent. You're able to kind of see where everything is. You have that visibility. We're kind of at the next step, where you're able to pivot [indiscernible] notice. So if the change happens, your business is able to adapt without incurring extra costs, wasting time, keeping us really flexible. So that could be maybe you're able to transfer based on the business need. You're able to look at yourself or applications and say, "Hey, this is redundant. Let's take this out really easily instead of having all these duplicate softwares." You're able to scale your software services up or down depending on what you think is needed. You also know what to do when your assets are expired or out of use. You know how to disclose them sustainably and responsibly. You know how to replace them and you know when to refresh them. So that's kind of our main goal, to want to get everyone to this adaptive workflow so that you're able to respond to the ever-changing business atmosphere without having any struggles. Okay. And then just kind of one more part from the survey that we mentioned that we wanted to go over because it kind of relates to this whole adaptive workflow mindset that we just talked about. We are noticing that a trend of -- the silo mentality is starting to break down, which we really, really are happy to see because that's something that we really, really create and share at ServiceNow. So when the people in the survey were asked, which statement best describes our organization's approach to asset management, we saw the highest response 34%, responding to all asset classes and types are managed together. So when you're able to have that unified approach, that's what allows you to have an adaptive workflow when everything is siloed, that usually means you're having that workflow where you don't have the visibility. So we saw that there was an increase from the 2022 survey. You can see in the dark green, 2023 was light green. So it jumps 11%, which is a pretty big increase. We also saw that a lot of people are starting to manage their hardware, software and cloud together, but enterprise assets are separately, which we also consider unified enterprise kind of a different category. We are still seeing some people with a siloed workflow. There is 28% of respondents to separate teams and tools are specific to each asset type, which is we don't want to see, but there was a decrease from last year. So we're starting to see kind of the trend that we are looking for here. All right. And with that, I'm going to pass it off to Michelle. I'm just kind of going to discuss how ServiceNow as a single platform for asset management can help you get to that adaptive workflow.

Thank you, Faith. So when we're talking about asset management, today, we're kind of talking about the IT assets of the world, but it can really span across a lot of different areas. And again, we're going to focus on the software and hardware asset management. On the software, anything from the applications, the end-user devices, SaaS. On the hardware, it could be anywhere from an end-user device such as a laptop or a computer, mobile devices, network and data center devices as well. But we also span into cloud assets, managing the cloud spend and in identifying and optimizing that cloud spend as well as enterprise assets. So anything outside of the IT space, this could be anything from office equipment to vehicles, anything that you can think of that doesn't fall into IT, would be able to be managed within the platform. And we give you the workflows that really help to transform this information. So not only are you maintaining all of your assets in one location and ultimately being able to provide that information to each business that needs it, but you're also able to put workflows around the work. So being like on the enterprise side, being able to put maintenance agreements in place and take actions on those maintenance agreements or having IT support tickets put in around those hardware and software assets and correlating that back to the life cycle. If you have any questions about cloud assets and how we help you manage that or enterprise assets and how we help you manage that, please reach out to your accounting executive. They can get you in touch with a representative very similar to myself and actually have you do -- have them come in and do a one-on-one demo and provide you some great insights around that. We're going to go ahead and move on. And when you're looking at this slide, what really stands out is the life cycle. And when you're talking about asset management, you'll hear life cycle as kind of this ever -- this word that keeps repeating itself over and over again. But what does that mean? So we're talking about life cycle to be anything from a request to acquire receiving that asset, deploying it, maintaining inventory, retire and then ultimately disposing of it and maintaining the records that are associated with it. So on the software side, a lot of times when you do purchases, you have to remain -- you have to retain those purchase orders and that information around it for up to 7 years after the actual software has been retired out of your environment. On the hardware side, it can be even longer than that, especially whenever you're looking at things that have data on there or that could end up in a landfill that ultimately didn't need to be there, right? So the environmental piece of that. So maintaining those records in a database where you can actually be able to go in and open it up and source the information that you need to is really important. But where we take that life cycle a step further within ServiceNow is we put automation behind this workflow. So it's not that you're manually going in and updating these records and manually going one by one, taking each record that has a change with it. These are automations. You're being able to put workflows around it to make sure, like, for example, when a request moves to a player, making sure that it ultimately gets to the next piece of the puzzle where the employee actually has it in their hands and it is ready to do their work. But putting automations and leveraging the workflow capabilities of the platform is really what distinguishes us along with the fact that you're able to manage all assets in one location. So here is what we call the asset management -- or excuse me, an asset journey, right? And so each journey can look a little bit different, but this is kind of a way to show you what it looks like when an asset comes into the environment and then ultimately leaves the environment, whether that's software or hardware. In this case, what you'll see is the first step of the asset life cycle is a request. That could be a request from an individual employee requesting on items such as a laptop. It could be a request for fulfilling stock, like a large order, it could be a request for ordering software. But ultimately, in some cases, that does require some of the self-service capabilities where employees can ultimately go in and make the request that they need when they need it. Then we move on to onboarding. What does it look like to get that asset into the environment? Do we need to provision it, what software needs to be on it and the hardware side of it. Are we discovering this asset once it's been on the network, are we making sure that we're maintaining the accurate information of where it's checking in location. Do we have controls? Are we mapping this to -- on the software side, are we mapping these softwares to a service in our application, larger service? That's the business application side of it. And then vulnerabilities will always rear their heads up. You'll always see vulnerabilities coming around. So how are you ensuring that you're securing -- making security decisions around these vulnerabilities based on having the asset information in hand. And then towards the end of this is how are you capturing with end of life in to support that really goes hand-in-hand with security. If it's end of life into support, it's no longer being patched ultimately giving a way for the bad people to come into that environment and expose that vulnerability, right? So life cycle and vulnerability management really go hand-in-hand in the in the ServiceNow platform, and we ultimately kind of do a handshake within the platform itself. And then lastly, when it does -- as an asset ages over time, what does it look like to decommission it, make sure that, again, we're getting the proper disposal information, maintaining those certificates over time and making sure that we have followed any regulations that we needed to within that disposal process. So today, we will -- as Faith said earlier, we will be going through a couple of demos. And I'm going to kind of use this roadmap to show some of the specific areas that we can cover. With time, it's only going to allow me to kind of show a few of the areas on this. If you were wanting to see like this full demonstration on how we can -- ServiceNow can support you throughout the full life cycle, please, again, reach out to your accounting executive. But we'll take a step -- we're going to take a minute to run through what it looks like for a self-service request. Able will be our hiring manager. He's going to be sourcing assets for his new employee that's about to onboard. So we'll run through the asset request and a little bit of the onboarding piece. Before we get started in the demo, I do want to talk about some of that -- the way that they can ultimately source those assets, what we have as Employee Center. Employee Center is a way for all of your employees to know where to go to ultimately do their job? Is it that they need to put in a ticket request to support something, something broken? Do they need a catalog to be able to go in and request software or hardware assets? Is there notifications that need to be sent out as in, maybe a holiday that needs to be published out to your employees? Lots of different ways to come in and configure employee center to meet your needs. But we're going to start our demonstration in the Employee Center, and then we're going to move into the platform and show you how we can ultimately source those assets whether it's through current inventory or through a purchase order. So give me just 1 second as I go through and get my demonstration or my Instance App. All right. We landed on the Employee Center. Today, we'll be able as a hiring manager that he needs to make sure that his employee gets onboarded and have the access in their hand prior to day one. So he's gone ahead and decided that Employee Center is where he needs to land. And the reason is because this is where all of his information is to do his job. This could be anything from understanding policies and procedures, requesting, as you can see, a password reset, maybe coming in and ordering equipment or software, lots of different ways that he can ultimately get his job done. But again, he's going to come in here and onboard an employee. Since he's done this before, he went ahead and save it as his favorite. So he's going to come in here. He is going to see this ordering guide. This guide has been set up to standardize the equipment that ultimately each employee gets. So in his case, he's manager of the finance department. So in finance, they would get this standard set up. He's going to go ahead and order this again for the finance team. The employee will not be remote, and they will be reporting for our Tennessee office. We're going to go ahead and hit next. Able is going to get a description of all of the equipment exactly what he's looking for, send some software in there, the MacBook. In this case, we -- it's been decided that Timothy does not -- so the Timothy is a new hire, Timothy does not need a monitor. So we're just going to opt out of that. When we go ahead and place this order -- when we place an order, we want to make sure we place it on behalf of Timothy. So that way, these assets will automatically be updated to show him as the owner of the asset once they've been delivered. Now Able is able to see at what stage this asset is in or this request is in. So it's at our approval stage. And at any point, he can come back and check as these stages progress over time. You will also get a notification once this asset -- once these assets have been delivered and the employee is ready to go. So at this point, let's go ahead and transition over to Casey. Casey is going to be -- Casey is our software and hardware asset manager. She is responsible for making sure that we source this equipment from inventory, making sure that we're pulling from inventory where it makes sense and then maybe placing orders with the vendors as needed. So in this case, you can see her request on this landing -- this front page of her dashboard. She's going to come in here and start sourcing the request. So there's the request on behalf of Timothy. As she drives in, she can start seeing exactly what's being requested. So it looks like it's a standard request. She is going to go ahead and go through the process of approving. So there were 2 approvers though with Casey and Eric and which you'll notice is once Casey is approved, Eric no longer needs to approve. So Eric was Able's manager. So this gives the ability to ultimately make sure that we're getting approval in a timely fashion, right, giving the ability for multiple people to approve. We're going to go ahead now and go into the task and start sourcing this equipment. So as we source it, it's going to pull in everything that we have in inventory. You can see here, we have some MacBooks. We don't have anything in local stock. We have some stuff that we could transfer or purchase and go ahead and go through the purchase order for this specifically. And the reason is because we have it where the employees are actually -- excuse me, our vendors are actually sourcing this hardware and mailing it directly or shipping it directly to the employees' location. Here, we're going to go ahead and allocate a license to Timothy on the Zoom, and we're going to do the same thing on the Microsoft side. As we've gone through and allocated that, we have that purchase order. We're going to go ahead and submit. So what you'll notice is it's going to update the allocations tab. So these allocation is going to show me that Timothy has been allocated a license out of the Zoom and Microsoft ensuring that we're not duplicating the licenses. So it does a check to make sure that he hasn't already been assigned a license. And then it also tracks that information. So when the next request is sourced, those numbers will be reduced to make sure that we're not overallocating software. Now we're going to come into this purchase order, and we're going to go through the process of finishing the order out. So I'm going to go ahead and we normally do a standard 2-day ground. We do net 30. I want to make sure that it's coming from the finance department budget. So we're going to go ahead put finance in there, and they were going to place the order. Now once this order has been placed, we have an integration on the back end with our Insight team and Insight does a 0 touch refresh flow. So what it does is once the [indiscernible] has been placed, Insight will go out. They'll order the equipment on behalf of us or pull the equipment from their inventory. They'll package it up and actually ship it to our employee. So there's no requirement for it to be shipped to our warehouse and then ultimately repackaged and shipped to the employees so that helps us save on shipping, but also on time, making sure that we're efficient and we're getting the equipment to them quickly. All right. So now let's go ahead and we're going to kind of fast forward on time. We're going to jump over to the mobile app and show how Timothy is going to be notified as this equipment is delivered to him. Okay, now Timothy received a notification through his app, showing him that the MacBook is on its way. They can also come in here and see any -- if you can request IT assistance, he could see any task that he had left remaining for his onboarding. In this case, he doesn't have any task, but he can see that he has an asset. This asset showing in transit, and that's because, again, our Insight team has gone ahead and created the asset in our Instance, they've gone ahead and packaged it and shipped it for us. So once Timothy receives it at his doorstep, now it's time for him to go ahead and show that he's received it. So rather than e-mail Casey and say, "Casey, hey I received this asset, can you update the asset or any additional tasks being routed to somebody else." He's actually going to act on our behalf and he's going to update this asset by scanning it. So he's going to come in here, he's going to use his mobile device and the camera on the mobile device to be able to scan the asset into inventory and basically show it in use. So what you could see now is it's been updated in real time. The asset now is in use, and he can go on with this day. So really simple. We do have the ability for him to scan asset tag and serial number, just if you wanted to. And then there are guardrails on the back end. So for some reason, he was to scan a different asset tag by accident, it would prevent him from moving forward and then it'd be notified that he needs to reach out to his asset manager, in this case, Casey, to ultimately make sure that the information is entered accurately into the ServiceNow. So that's one way that you can ultimately do with that portion of the life cycle, making sure that you're ultimately ordering from -- or leveraging the inventory you have in stock, ordering new equipment that you need to. And in this case, this was a 0 touch and the fact that nobody in our warehouse had to be involved in this process. We leveraged our network -- our vendor to ultimately get that asset into the employees' hands on day 1. All right. So now we're going to take another look back at this journey, and we're going to take it into a little bit further down that journey. So again, very similar to what we just talked about. But we're going to take a look at what it entails when we provide you life cycle events. So the things that have been published by the vendors out there, so that could be anything from a Microsoft publisher defining what an end of support looks like for a specific product or a manufacturer product on the hardware side and deciding that they're no longer selling or the hardware is end of life. So in the next demonstration, I'll take you through how our content service ultimately provides that information. We'll run through what it looks like to decommission that asset as well. So before we jump in, I want to kind of give some information about what the content service is. So the content service is our content library, along with our research team that's going out and betting information that's out in the wild. And so we talk about software. There's lots of different software that's coming out on a daily, weekly, probably every second, there is new software that's ultimately being developed and out there. And our team is going out, finding out this information. We are providing that back into the content library that's ultimately going to normalize the information, so where normalization really becomes useful is being able to pull accurate reporting. And normalization is, for an example, whenever I was a customer, depending on different ways that our products were being identified, whether that was ServiceNow Discovery or SCCM or JAMF, it would come into our environment, and I'm just going to use Dell as an example. It would come in as Dell, Dell Inc, Dell Inc. So whenever I went to do reporting, just on Dell itself, not even down to the product level, I would have to at least pull 3 different -- 3 different manufacturer names and then normalize that information outside of the platform. Well, when we turned on HAM Pro, we had got the normalization, it automatically normalized everything to Dell Inc. So then I didn't have to export, manipulate the reporting and then ultimately provide that reporting back to my finance team or to my support team that need to do asset refreshes. We were able to give that information directly to them through an automated report. No requirement, again, of exporting or importing that information. But when you're talking about software and hardware content as well, you can also be -- you can also see on the left-hand side, we're going to provide life cycle dates. Where life cycle dates are really important. is very -- as we said earlier, is really around understanding what's out there in the environment that has vulnerability concerns. And anything that's no longer patched and -- anything that's no longer supportive, means that they're no longer receiving patches, which ultimately becomes vulnerable concerns for the security team. So we provide the life cycle dates. And then based on that information, whether it correlates to the security team, whether it correlates to a project on the application portfolio management team, ultimately, you can take those dates and run with the information and start putting actions behind updating those assets. And in the demonstration, you'll see how on the hardware side and the software side, one of the ways that you can ultimately do that. Again, multiple ways to reach the end result, depending on what your priorities are and your processes are. But I'm going to kind of give you an example of what it looks like for you to run through it just in my demo instance. So give me just 1 second, let me get my demo Instance up. Okay. So now we're back in the hardware asset overview. We're on that landing page that Casey comes in and takes actions on specific things that she needs to work on throughout the day like we saw earlier in the asset request. But actually scrolls down and she'll start seeing some of the reporting capabilities as well. And if we take a look at specifically that content service and how we're populating some of that end of life, end of cell, end of support, things of that nature as far as the life cycle, whether that's a publisher on the software side or manufacturer on the hardware side has actually gone out and released. We're going to provide that into your Instance on a weekly basis, as we said earlier. But what you'll see here is we can start drilling into the stuff that's out there in our environment. And Casey in this case is specifically looking for some surfaces that she knows she's ready to have reduced completely out of her environment. She's been working on this project for quite some time. Again, she was brought to this information based on that report. And so she's been a kind of a project around making sure these assets are ultimately removed. In this case, she can see -- I'm sorry, let's go back. So she can come in and she can see the model information. She can come in here and see that life cycle information. So it looks like it went in this report as of 2022. Do you can also see all the assets that are remaining in her environment. So it does look like all of them are in repair pending disposal. So it looks like this is her last step to ultimately have these devices removed out of her environment. So we're going to transition over to the workflow disposal -- or excuse me, the disposal workflow. She's already created this disposal workflow to make sure that she is getting all those assets. So you can see here, we got the 26 assets that were verified at end of life. She can also see that she's verified these assets, are the ones that she's ready for disposal, and she's in the process of scheduling the pickup. So let's go ahead and schedule this pickup with our vendor. You can see our vendor is Iron Mountain. We're going to go ahead and schedule this for tomorrow. We're going to go ahead and schedule this vendor order numbers. So we'll just do Iron Mountain through here and then Mike Smith will be who picks this up. We're going to go ahead and close this task. As we close each one of these tasks, what you'll notice is it's going to advance to the next task. In this case, Casey, is going through and doing all of these tasks. And the reason is because we're in a limited environment. I'm having to show this in a short period of time. But in most cases, what this is, a multiple people are working on this disposal. So you might have a few people in the warehouse where one would do the scheduling and then one does the actual verification, once the assets are ready for disposal. And so by having it in the workflow, anybody that wants to come in and understand where is that in the process is able to do that, but as well, they are getting notifications that they are task waiting on them to be completed, right? So here, the next task is we're ready to verify these assets. Multiple ways [Technical Difficulty] time. I'm going to go through and select all of these [Technical Difficulty] that they're ready to depart. You can also use our mobile app similar to what you saw earlier, leveraging the camera on the mobile app to make sure that they are ultimately scanned and confirmed that they are ready to dispose those. So these -- we're going to go ahead and click depart, which I'll notice is now the state has moved from in transit -- or excuse me, removed from pending disposal to in transit, and now we're going to go ahead and close this task. We didn't -- we didn't have to go into each one of those assets and update them manually. All of them automatically updated as we're moving through this workflow. The next phase of this workflow would be a confirmation. So the vendor has ultimately loaded up the assets on to his truck. He is now ready to leave, but before he leaves, I ask for a chain of custody. So I asked for a document that says, "Hey, ultimately, these are leaving my environment. I have no control over them. Please provide me with the signed off document saying that you have taken these assets." This could be something from a PDF version, the excel version where they ultimately signed something. But again, just making sure that we're covering ourselves if for some reason, these assets were to end up in the landfills or end up in the wrong hand. So we're going to go ahead and close this task. And the very last task that will be open, and in most cases, it's going to be open for quite a while, is that certificate of destruction. Usually, that takes anywhere from multiple weeks to months to get back. And again, by having this in a workflow and having it track, notifications will be automatically -- Casey will be automatically notified that these are -- we're still pending the certificate. So that way, she can ultimately make sure that we get the certificate and it doesn't go unnoticed that we missed it. So here, we're going to attach the -- we're going to say, "Yes, we got the certificate." We're going to come in and we're going to attach this certificate that they provided to us. And then we're going to come in here to be shipped assets, and we're going to show that these assets are ready to be shipped. And what you'll notice is the state will now be updated to retired and disposed off. If I go into one of these assets, you'll see that the asset record -- each one of these assets have been updated against status retired, disposed off and the disposal information has been updated as well. So that way, it's tied back to that certificate. So that's one way. So now they've all been completely disposed off and all of the tasks have been completed. So Casey has been successful in her project, ultimately getting rid of those end-of-life devices, the [indiscernible] and out of our environment and now can move on to some other activity or maybe to the next item that's end of life in her environment and work on getting those out of there as well. So that's one way of being able to do it. We're going to go ahead and transition over to the software side of the house and how we can leverage this information for software. Okay. On the software side, what you can see here is very similar look and feel to the hardware side. A lot of times the temps will be residing in both. And so we wanted to make sure that it's kind of cohesive and easy to get around in. So in this case, very -- a lot of detailed information and reports that are drillable and very similar to the hardware side. But we're going to jump down here to the end of life, end of support, end of extended support and kind of stay with that theme of how can we leverage the information that ServiceNow content library is providing to us and ultimately take actions behind this. So in this case, we're going to look at software that's end of life. I can see this Citrix desktop. We have 4 installs out there. If I drill down in there, I can see specifically where this software is installed, what device is on. I can see who is the owners of the device. If I wanted to take an additional step further, I can actually come into the asset. I can see all of the software that's installed on this device. So we can see again that Zendesk application is installed. So now it doesn't make sense to just have that information and do no actions behind it. So on -- what Casey is going to basically do is coming here because she has asset management on the platform where she also is able to create and route incidences to the software team or maybe to the technical support team so that they can take actions on it. So she's going to come in here -- she is not going to bug the end user that's trying to get their job done. She's going to come in here and create an incident on her behalf. So in this case, Casey would be the one calling it in. I'm going to fill in to some basic information, but we're going to say update software, that's end of life. And then here, we'll say, please update Zendesk software to the latest version, product is end of life. So this is an end-user computer. If we were to do it on a server in a server situation, you wouldn't want to create an incident. But if you kind of -- if we go back and take a look at this, I have the ability to create a change request to get as well. So if you're managing your change request within the platform, I could go down that route and have it as a scheduled update. But in this case, let's go ahead and finish this. We're going to go ahead and assign it to the software team. And then the software team will go ahead and start taking actions on it. So we're going to go ahead and save that. It's going to create the incident and it's going to route that incident to that software team so that they can go ahead and take actions. And if we come over here, we can see that incident. So that's another way of leveraging the platform and the capabilities that we have within the platform to ultimately take the information that you have around end of life, end of support and move it in a direction to remediate it, whether that's disposing off the hardware as we saw on the disposal workflow or ultimately taking that information on the software, not disturbing the end user, but having that software updated through a back-end process. So picking it and taking action on it. All right. Great. I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to you if you're out there still.

I'm still here, didn't leave yet. Thanks, Michelle, for those awesome demos. I learned a lot. I hope you all did. It's always really helpful for me to see kind of a visual, I guess, walk through things because I feel like it's hard for me to picture it in my head. So is this super helpful. Now let us start to round out our presentation before we go into Q&A. But we first want to discuss kind of some key areas that you need to hit, if you want to better manage your technology and enterprise assets. So the first real important area is cost reduction. So you want to focus on the right asset investments to achieve desired business results. This means that you want to match tightening budgets. You want to be able to reduce your cost, but still operate at full efficiency. Next, the really important area that we see is transparency. As we talked about earlier in his presentation, it's really important to have full visibility and transparency across the organization. When you have this, this means that you're able to centralize your asset formation, you can empower your teams, you can all work together. You can have that harmony. Without transparency, it's hard to be adaptive and know how to pivot and when to pivot. And lastly, we need to see utilization. This means you need to make sure you're using everything to the max. So using all your assets for their full asset life. You're not taking them out early. You're not using the past expiration. You're reducing waste. So you're maximizing the value of every asset and improving its sustainability. So you're kind of knowing ones you keep using it, ones you replace it, ones you refresh it, etcetera. So when you have all of these 3 key areas, that's where you're kind of able to shift into those better management of technology and enterprise assets. All right. And then we have one more poll question that we want to ask. So kind of look at these questions and think about, are you still in the SaaS cloud? Select all that apply. Okay. There's also a none option. I'm going to read through all of them. So the first one is, is all your asset data centralized? B, are your life cycle processes automated? C, are your employees getting the best service when it comes to their assets. D, are you able to avoid unbudgeted costs and risks. E, are you confident your teams are monetizing the value of assets. And F, none of the above? So select all that apply. If none apply, you can pick none. You can kind of think of this as more of an argue out of the status quo, perhaps. So that's kind of a little hint for the next slide, I guess. We ask to select anything that applies to kind of think about where you are right now and how your business is doing. Just going to give it a little bit. I know this question is a little bit of a long one, but hopefully, kind of can serve as a reflection slide to kind of finish out this presentation. And when we get those responses, then we're going to move on and kind of discuss them before we enter our time of announcements and then Q&A. Okay. I'm just going to give it one more second. I see a couple of more responses tripling in. All right. I think that will be good. Okay. So we're seeing a lot of people say, none of the above. But we are seeing out of these, the most people are thinking that their asset data is centralized and maybe they are confident of the teams monetizing the value of assets. So we're seeing a bit of a lower response in automation, abling to avoid unbudgeted costs and risks. So basically, if you didn't select every single response, that means you might still be in the status quo because. That means that if you're not able to avoid unbudgeted risks, if your employees aren't seeing the best service, if you're not automated, that means that you're probably still somewhat in the status quo or maybe you're in between a transparent workflow. You aren't really maybe at adaptive stage yet. So if you feel like there's still improvements to be made, definitely contact your account executive. We can discuss how we can help you get out of the status quo and kind of make sure that everything is centralized and that you're operating ample efficiency. All right. And now I have some questions. I'm going to ask Michelle that we hear really common in the business place, and she's kind of going to answer them with her expertise and her customer based background. Okay, so Michelle. What are the main outcomes our customers plan to achieve, by using ServiceNow software asset management and/or hardware asset management?

Yes. So a lot of customers that I'm talking to on a daily basis, kind of fall into 2 buckets or it seems to be 2 buckets, right? And it depends on where they are and what kind of industry they have. But a lot of them are either looking to drive savings or looking to drive regulatory requirements. That could be compliance around licensing or requirements outside based on the regulatory governance around what they do, like the banking industry is one of the examples, I'd like to talk about. And what I talk to them about is really telling them that it's not a one or other. Asset management can really span across a lot of different functionalities as we saw earlier. But ultimately, can stand around a lot of different outcomes. And so what we want to really talk to the customers about is like even though this is your priority #1, let's look further down the line and see how else we can help you, right? And then as we said earlier, the security. Security has really been a high driver and a lot of the customers are talking to. I had one CISO recently tell me, I can't secure the assets I don't know about. So having a live real-time inventory is very important to that person in order to make sure she can secure her assets because she's driving those conversations, and I hear that a lot as well.

Okay. Thanks, Michelle. That's super helpful. I feel like not knowing what you -- or if you don't see it and you don't know about it, you can help. I feel like that really relates to the whole team of transparency that we've been talking about. So it's good to know that that's really relating to our customers, and that's kind of something that we're all working on.

100%.

Okay. The next question is, if you could do it all over again, what would you do differently? What are the lessons learned this year?

Yes. So this is when I talk to, again to a lot of customers. This is coming from my practitioner background, is always scope your implementation. Never go out and I think that you're going to do everything in day 1. Find out what's important to you day 1, and what's something that you might look at prioritizing in 6 months from now or a year from now. Asset management, it's not a do it one time and it succeeded over the whole lifetime of the company. It is something that you'll tweak and you'll constantly grow over time. But when you're looking at actually going out and implementing a program, there is some -- it's definitely making sure that you scope it, make sure you have the right stakeholders involved when you're having discussions about what's important to the business. So that's the one key thing that I would -- I wish I had known a little bit earlier. I was always eager to get out and implement right away.

Yes, I love that. I feel like that's a common thing for me, too. It's like when you get excited about a project, you just want to go all in. But if you don't really think about it, have a plan, you don't have a good counsel to help you with it, it's hard to actually execute. So that's a great intent. And then lastly, what's next for ITAM in 2024?

Yes. So let's take a look at some of the road map session or some of the road maps that we have. So on the software side, you can see how we've grown over time. But we recently did our Washington release, which was earlier -- which was last month. And I'm not going to talk about all the features that have come out within the Washington release, but I'm going to talk about the 2 that I find most important are the 2 that I found really exciting from a practitioner standpoint. The first one is the SAM Maturity program, very first to roll it on here. And what it is, is it's part of the goal section within SAM. And what it does is it gives you the ability to kind of define what a crawl-walk-run stage is in your environment. So we'll give you some examples of what it could look like. You're able to tweak those based on what is important to your company. But ultimately, we do kind of give you that how you can mature on the platform within software asset management. And the second one I'm excited about is the machine -- the machine learning contract analysis. This is in the innovation lab, but what it will eventually be able to do is read contracts, ultimately being able to pull out the entitlements, and helping you create entitlements within your software asset management program. So this is one. Those are 2 of the things that I'd like to highlight within the Washington release, and you can always go out and look. We have plenty of content released out on YouTube that can go through all the details. On the hardware side, [indiscernible] pick the top 2 is -- we have the maturity programs or the crawl-walk-run within hardware assets as well. And then the second piece is the total cost of ownership. So a lot of customers are asking me like, we want to see what is costing us to deploy and maintain and repair assets over time. So that way we can make real-time decisions. Does it ultimately makes sense to get rid of the asset? Or does it make sense to continue supporting the asset? And within hardware asset management and kind of the insight to with EAM, we give you the capability to ultimately define, "Hey, does it make sense to start moving down the path of replacing those assets." Those are the 2 that I'm kind of excited about.

Yes. Thanks, Michelle. I also read about those. If you guys want to learn anything more about the latest Washington release, and you can go on the ServiceNow community site and you can report about it. And also the doc side, we have community blocks about it. There's another webinar. I am also in. If you want to see me again, you can watch the replay of that. But yes, we're just going to run through some announcements before we have time for Q&A. We might run maybe a couple of minutes over time, just to answer some of the biggest questions you guys have on the chat. So just a fair their heads up. But first, we want to say, connect with us at an upcoming event in May from the 7th to the 9th. We're going to be in Vegas at 2 different events that we would love to see you all out. The first one is ServiceNow Knowledge '24. This is a big annual ServiceNow conference. So all product teams will be there. It's going to be a really great big event at the Venetian from the May 7th to May 9th. So if you're interested in learning more about ServiceNow, just about anything, I really recommend that you stop by. You can scan this QR code if you're interested. We're also going to be at ACE, which is another conference also in Vegas at the M Resort at the exact same date. This one, however, is focused specifically on ITAM. So it's not a ServiceNow only conference. There's going to be other companies there. If you specifically want to hone in more on ITAM and learn more about what ServiceNow has to offer, this is a great conference to checkout. I recommend to scan the QR code. I'm also going to be there. You can say hi to me, if you want to do that? But yes, maybe you can also try to attend both if you are in the area. It's really convenient, at the same time. We're really excited to showcase all that we have to offer at these 2 conferences. And then we also want to encourage everyone to write a G2 review for ServiceNow. G2 is a peer-to-peer business software review site. Do you kind of think of it as like a Yelp for software businesses. So if you use ServiceNow ITAM, you love our product, do you want to give any feedback, we would love to hear anything you have to say. So you can scan this QR code right here and leave a review for us. Doing so, you can earn a $25 Amazon gift card if you're one of the first 20, I think, to respond. So if that sounds good to you, it sounds good to me, and I'd love to see a review from any of you guys. And also before I forget, quick plug that there's going to be a survey that pops up after you leave this webinar, and we would love to see you all fill it out. You can give us feedback on how we did today, anything that you loved or maybe what other topics you want to hear about in the future. So we can kind of think about that when we're planning any future webinars. So if you hit the clipboard icon, you can do that or I think when the webinar ends, you'll be able to do that. All right. I think that's all the announcements we have. So let's go through some questions really quickly. Let me just look at the inbox and see what we have.

Yes. It will be great. It's like 1 or 2 to go through with time permitting.

Yes, yes. I think, that's a good idea. Okay. What's the first step to evolve into an adaptive process?

Yes. So I would say the first step is really going in and defining the inventory, right? When you're talking about asset management, the foundation is what is your inventory look like? So making sure that you're connecting the right resources with ServiceNow. We are all about integrating. So it's not something that you have to necessarily buy ServiceNow integration -- or excuse me, ServiceNow Discovery to bring it in, although that's a great way to bring in any of that software and hardware out in your environment. But maybe you have like the SCCM or JAMF or Intune already on your environment. Let's integrate. Let's bring that inventory in and define it and make sure that it's accurate. So that's the process I say, as you can't build into the future without a correct inventory at the first level and that foundation. You have another one out there? If I come close enough.

Yes. There is one more. I think, that will be good. This is from Lisa for normalization, manually before HAM Pro. We found that updating the product model name, would not work as the information and the files would move asset over to a newly created product model record. Is the normalization based on product mode number and prevents the new product model from being created based on BIOS information?

Yes. So that's a really direct question. And we'll probably take that off-line. But to say -- to give a generic response, yes. So product -- we are providing that through the content service. There's some mapping that goes on that we ultimately have defined and then we're going to do that mapping for you. So it should not be creating new models for you. It would ultimately map what's already out there, very similar to what you saw in the demonstration where we went into the hardware side -- or the software side and we saw Citrix. It was showing me Citrix for all 4 installs under that one model. So it should automatically update that information without creating a new model for you.

Okay. Thanks, Michelle. I think just one final question to round off really quick. How can I find out more about SAM and HAM?

Yes. So as I said, anything with software asset management, hardware asset management, enterprise asset management, or cloud spend, reach out to your account executives. They can ultimately get you in touch with some of the experts on the team to come in and help you define what the process looks like for you in your environment and help you mature your program within asset management. All right. I think, Faith, we're at time, but actually a little over. So I think we're going to go ahead and tell everyone thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate the engagement and love all the questions. Any questions that haven't been answered, we will definitely be following up with you -- each one of you outside of the call. So thank you again for your time, and we appreciate that.

Yes. Thank you so much for joining us all today. See you next time.