[Music] welcome everyone i'm karen glazier senior marketing director here at crossviews and i have the pleasure of speaking with ash townsend from our uk office he's head of our pre-sales there and uh we're going to talk about servicenow orlando so ash how are you doing today very good thank you yeah not too bad working from home so everything's a little bit different but surviving yeah yeah i think that's uh kind of what we're all doing in this world today is uh honkering home and doing the best we can but i think this is a great time for us to talk about service now orlando right so you know i know you know a lot about it it's a big buzz out there uh in the market servicenow community right now and and i think we could help our viewers better understand what the platform's all about what's in orlando and what some of the real key highlights are so i think we'll spend probably less than 15 minutes i imagine so i will uh i'll try to waffle on a little bit but keep it short and sweet mostly perfect perfect well any insight you have is of value so i'm sure people would love the the time we got today with you so let's let's dive into our first i guess question we want to we want to chat about a little bit is what are the what's the big so what about orlando um what's what's the big buzz about the new upgrade can you talk a little bit about that yes so that there's probably no one thing i imagine um you know most people familiar with servicenow will be fairly familiar and and expect um a large quantity of features and functionality to come out with each release orlando's no different it's it's following that trend um but there are probably a few highlights that we could pick up on today and then maybe dr dive into a little bit deeper in um in sort of following on sessions so some of those would be around the intelligence of the platform so now intelligence to help sort of highlight kind of areas around natural language improvement virtual agent that sort of thing that's an area that i suspect people will care about cloud insights that this is uh a level of improvement in this and new functionality and certainly the mobile side of things so servicenow are always pushing mobile and we've seen businesses try to pick up on uh sort of rolling out a mobile initiative and strategy for their end users servicenow's picked up on that and they've included things like mobile analytics mobile branding a whole host of options which we can talk about today which is great right the world's the world is mobile especially it's pretty opportune timing right yes it really is so that's another exciting feature i think in the orlando upgrade so why don't we jump down into the now intelligence and maybe you can kind of walk us through what's the impact servicenow users can expect with now intelligence and what kind of value would that deliver for them which would be new in the platform yeah so the uh the term now intelligence and the concepts around it is it a platform feature entirely designed for helping users of the platform work smarter and make better business decisions so to your point around the impact in value it should largely be around that area the um the business decisions that your key stakeholders are making users of this platform whether that be service desk users or you know people running customer service management cases or project portfolio management they should be enabled enough to have an impactful value um in the work that they're doing and so probably the the way to look at this it's designed effectively to either present intelligent information or potentially make predictions for you so the platform figures out what what you're about to do and predict that uh and indeed the the kind of core concept is uh autonomous repetitive tasks things that you shouldn't really be spending day in day out doing that that could be automated to sort of enable your users to uh focus on strategic work so um you know maybe a good example people familiar with virtual agent uh that sort of chatbot functionality the the ability to run conversations without necessarily having a service desk individual running that conversation um you may use the added sort of natural language modeling to help improve those conversations helping your end users identify and resolve their issues quicker and potentially without any interaction with someone in your service desk um so you'll you'll be able to see the sort of business value there that service test team are able to pick up on other work they're not dragged down potentially through sort of incident deflection as an industry term thrown around um so there's a lot of value under this now intelligence banner yeah it's interesting too with the way again our our new norm that we're dealing with the customer service side of thing is quite large quite big right so i know just from personal experience calling the different businesses i have my accounts at and that sort of thing which i've been on the phone with some of them waiting the periods of waiting is very long online mobile is not where it really needs to be and i think with the now intelligence all of that's going to add more efficiency i would think to giving that really great customer experience so when call volumes or any omni channel starts to in increase uh the customer can go ahead and get serviced a lot faster and with more accuracy i would think correct legally agree completely agree because those delays that you're experiencing as a consumer kind of the the um kind of interaction that you're having presumably those delays are just because the core system supporting your interaction doesn't have the information or the agent dealing with that interaction doesn't have the information and now intelligence is is about providing that intel intelligent sort of information to the agent immediately helping that yeah in your example customer service cycle move quicker and more fluidly yeah that holistic view that one view of the customers is so critical today especially today um so so that's great ash why don't we shift to gears a little bit and talk about cloud insights which is the new cloud spend management and optimization tool want to dive into some examples and use cases of that yes so the uh so you exactly right hit the nail on the head it's it's around uh as the name alludes to sort of in insights into your cloud spend and cloud usage um and so you know it's probably fairly obvious to people using some of the cloud automation and provisioning in servicenow already that your use cases are are going to be um the ability to figure out where your spend is you you would leverage this cloud insight functionality to potentially see spend optimization reports so that you can identify which cloud resources are unnecessarily provisioned which ones are running potentially outside of business hours that sort of thing and so using that information you in that scenario would you know potentially remove those out of hours wasted cloud costs uh through through auto automation you've got the platform um reducing your cloud spend uh when you don't necessarily need those resources so it's all about uh i think this this piece is about visibility and the ability to act against uh now what you're able to see within the system where potentially you know you you didn't necessarily have a full view as to your cloud usage and if we consider where we're at today we're all working remotely we probably don't have a great view as to how our development and operations teams are spinning things up and spinning things down if i was provided with some sort of spend optimization report to understand in real time well this is this is the resource that's getting leveraged there are some other virtual instances out there that don't need to be running in these hours d provision them save the business a ton of money yeah and i could see two it's a cost savings it's also a budgetary tool right so as you look into the future and you start saying well we're really heavy over here we should be putting maybe more of our budget over here because it's higher use for our absolutely employees or our customers whoever's using that particular platform so i could see that as helping with budgetary efforts as well as you know year to year and trying to make sure that we're putting the money where it's best allocated completely agree great so what about we touched a little bit early on about mobile so what about mobile analytics huge piece to the whole uh efficiency workflow efficiency knowing that we're all working now especially today from home and that sort of thing but why what about the mobile analytics side of orlando how is that looking a bit different and adding more value yeah so the reason i think this is um a hot pick from the orlando release so to speak is uh is sort of the enhancement and visibility that we're now getting into mobile so servicenow have rolled out mobile applications for for a number of releases but this mobile analytics is new functionality designed to effectively provide the business with trend information that you'd need to understand how your users are using those mobile apps or in some cases not using them right so where are they connecting from the time spent in each part of that application and really the efficiency and areas for improvement in your mobile apps so today or you know pre-orlando a lot of businesses and and we we hear this across views feedback from our customers they need a lot of guidance because they'll roll out these mobile apps but you know without a set of procedures and processes and you know maybe even a level of training for their end users as to what what they should be expecting to to use these mobile apps for their falling foul of potentially just using using a a phone call instead or going on the portal bypassing that mobile app rollout gotcha now that makes that makes sense that's that's going to be an exciting addition i think to the to the upgrade for sure so ash where can people learn more about orlando i mean there's a lot of great features we just went through three of them of course and there's a lot more behind those three i'm sure but where can they go to really get a good picture of what is in orlando and again those benefits that orlando can deliver for them yeah uh so the uh it would be remiss me not to not to mention the cross use account managers that our customers would have so if you uh if you are interested in orlando clearly we've supported a number of upgrades throughout our our time supporting our servicenow customers so reach out to them indeed you could send an email i think it's let's talk crosstews.com um those cross used channels are really going to work out our website likewise has some information around this additionally check out the servicenow website obviously go to the latest release page you'll see all the information around orlando details on release notes kind of topic areas such as the ones we've spoken about and many more great great and before i let you go do you have any tips for folks that are looking to upgrade to orlando for a successful and smooth upgrade do you have anything to kind of secret tips you can give them to make sure that works out well yeah well so uh delivery will probably shoot me they're the experts on this but the uh you know the first thing i would say is engage your servicenow partner you know clearly you know here across views we've supported thousands of deployments and upgrades and if you can leverage that sort of experience not go it alone you're gonna see a lot of value i would suspect outside of that go through the servicenow upgrade checklist that they normally publish per per upgrade per release use the time to identify problem areas in your platform if there are areas that you have been putting off potentially this this release upgrade will leverage some sort of change freeze use that time wisely plan for it utilize the atf automated test framework if you've got it for your testing phase there's a load of stuff but you should absolutely plan your process figure it out how are you going to do it in dev is devon a suitable position push to test and promote into production at an appropriate time any execution takes great upfront planning right so we all know that but that's wonderful that's great and um i think that will really help folks understand not just the value of what's in orlando but how to make sure they can pull out all that value in a in a strategic way so that users can get the most out of it from the from day one of implementation so so ash as always it's always great to talk with you i'm sure our viewers got some really good information from our discussion today i do look forward to our next chat and in the meantime i want to thank all the viewers that took the time to to listen in and if you have any questions you want to keep this conversation going be sure to shoot us an email at let's talk at crossfuse.com thanks a lot ash take care thank you [Music]