Converging IT Management- German Bertot, ServiceNow

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We're here with her. Mom bertoll who is vice president in general manager for it Asset Management. It's servicenow.

And we're talking about the future of how it is going to get managed her mom. Welcome to shop. Hey Michael, thank you.

Thank you for having me. We've been working on this Cloud thing now for the better part of 10 years and we have seen over that time almost in a lot of organizations two teams emerge one is a cloud team and one is the traditional it management team are these things finally going to converge or we just gonna start treating the cloud as a natural extension Yvonne prime minister, maybe on premises and natural extension in the cloud either way, but is it time to bring them all together? Well, you know in some cases that that transition is already happening, right?

So when we talk about Cloud, we usually think about you know, the cloud as infrastructure, right there's a service and but there's also the SAS component right which is clearly in the in the house of the it asset managers responsibility today. So this teams are likely going to come together as they already share you some of the same Charters, you know, these they are in charge of figuring out how they are spending money in Cloud both from a SAS perspective from a cloud infrastructure perspective. There are forecasting this pen.

They are looking at how allocate how to locate the cost to the different business units that they're supporting and so on and so forth. So a lot of that is common to the organizations and we are seeing slow transition into you know, these two groups coming into either a single organ. Station or eventually becoming a single team.

Some of our customers are already operating that way the asset management teams already have responsibilities for the cloud spend not so much for the operations part of it, but for the cloud spend management, so we think that this is going to be a trend that will continue to accelerate. Is there some Tipping Point that pushes people over the edge to converge these teams that have my work clothes are in the cloud or you know, what? Have you seen amongst organizations in terms of what provides the impetus for them to go do this?

You know, some of it is just in the way these teams came about in a specific company, so that that's a very specific to an organization. But in other cases it has to deal with as they migrate the workloads from on-premises data centers onto the cloud, you know, what are the key challenges and in some cases this becomes, you know how to manage the the hybrid licenses for software that you know, people traditionally purchase perpetually in dude running their data centers, and now they are looking to deploy those licenses on to the clouds. So depending on on the organization these organizations are already operating very closely together.

So the transitioning to a single team is a lot easier in other cases. They operate as independent organizations. For example, Cloud Center of Excellence supporting.

And business unit developing technology for their customers. So in those cases the the way the the teams came about we're not really close together. So those would take a little bit longer as we see more and more workloads transition into the cloud the you know, this will this will eventually happen Do you think the current economy May accelerate this trend because you know, if I look at the cost of it, it's generally labor is still the biggest pain point.

I'm also having a hard time finding those people anyway, but well that push people more towards convergence of these teams. Absolutely. I think the the current inflationary environment and you know, the very cost conscious companies are going to see that the opportunity for spend rationalization and and spend optimization is gonna be a big driver in their ability to continue to accelerate some of the other digital transformation initiatives.

These are areas where the cost saving opportunities are real both on cloud deployments as well as on on fast. So the condition the market conditions are appropriate for for that acceleration to happen and you know these things I know how to manage their their costs. So it's only natural and makes only makes sense for them to come together.

Do you think we'll also have some interesting issues around software licenses to sort out? Because if I look at the first phase of the cloud it's lift and shift and I had yeah something that I was paying for as Perpetual license and now I shifted it over to the cloud but the infrastructure itself is paid for and kind of a monthly basis. So do we need to reconcile these things or can they just leave side by side forever or what will happen?

You know under the first thing to know is that the different software Publishers allow companies to port and move their on-premises Perpetual licenses to cover deployments in the cloud. So that's step one making sure that you as a transition workloads to the cloud you fully take advantage of your existing Investments. So you don't have to pay for brand new licenses.

Thereby duplicating some of this pens. So there are very specific rules on what what you can do as far as porting these licenses and they are very specific to each publisher some Publishers favor their own private their own public Cloud, you know, my Christmas Microsoft will be an example. So teams need to be very conscious and careful about how they approach the problem at service now as part of our software for us and management application we help All with that evaluation understanding the Perpetual licenses that they have and how they can be transitioned and deployed to cover, you know, SAS or on the cloud and deployments.

Do you think that in some odd way are concerns or our issues around cybersecurity these days is making Asset Management cool again, and I'm asking the question because it seems like you know our issues are not so much our security tools. It's just a simple fact that we have so many things out there to secure in the platforms keep expanding and nobody has any idea or anything is, you know, do we need to start with some fundamentals? It is absolutely right.

We are seeing that from our customers as well. The one of the key issues is having full visibility into all the assets that they own where they are deployed how they are being utilized. And when you think about cybersecurity, you know, there's the regular scanners that run constantly and they take some time to complete those kinds.

So we are looking at an approach where if we have full inventory of this software that's deployed everywhere in the organization. As soon as a new vulnerability gets reported we can match that woman ability against the software that we have in our inventory, which that what that means is you have a much more real faster time to identifying the the issue while the traditional scanning tools continue to do their work. So what you can get especially to see how they type women abilities you can get in much faster reaction time.

Once your best advice to folks about how to achieve this conversion, so I just take everybody involved and lock them in a room to figure out who's going to be actually running. What or is there some more intelligent way to go about achieving this goal. I have to wait to go about it.

Um, you know, typically the the teams In This Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm not only looking at costs and also looking at and you know, what are the templates that they need to provide to their organizations to have the right configurations when they deploy the new virtual machine in in Cloud if you look at containers as well. So there are certain areas of expertise in the cloud Center of Excellence that are not duplicated with what the typical asset managers too.

So in those situations the common elements around cost management and spend allocation and so on those are the pieces where I expect things to kind of merge and and then the others will be more complementary so they will be working closer together but it's not gonna be one team absorbing the other I don't expect that to happen. I think it's going to be more what are the Sense that people bring to the table and how they can be better aligned to work together in a single team. Herman what's the one thing you see it organizations doing that makes you shake your head just drives you crazy and says geez why can't we just move beyond that?

The struggles that it organizations have is as they transition to Cloud. And the Very onset of those projects they have certain expectations in terms of cost savings that they will achieve as they move to Cloud. But without the right governance program in place, they spend on in the cloud can go out of control and the the promised savings and the promised value realization.

They were expecting to to get as they migrate to Cloud. Don't really materialize. It's not that hard in this age and this time to to figure out what are the right governance controls that you can put in place to make sure that you understand how money is being spent and don't get surprised if people were to take the time not just to focus on the migration but also on the steady state once they move to Cloud they will really get a lot more benefits in that migration and they will not be surprised by overspending which is something that is really really not very uncommon.

It's happens all the time. So their projects will be a lot more successful and it doesn't really take it a lot more effort on their part is just getting the right mindset and getting the right Tools in place. And of course at service now, we we feel very confident that we can help customers in that in that process both in the transition to cloud and then running the steady state.

in the cloud Alright as they say nothing's for free. Hey Herman. Thanks for being on the show.

Hey Michael, he was it my pleasure. Thank you for having me. All right back to you guys in the studio.