welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans reaches a wide audience of servicenow admins developers architects and product owners so if you want your brand in front of this audience check out the description below for how to contact me about sponsorship opportunities if you want to know what i'm up to lately i invite you to discover vivid charts vivid charts is a visualization and storytelling platform built on servicenow stop exporting data off platform to get the aesthetic control and storytelling experiences that you want hey everyone welcome back to another episode of titans of now it is so good to have you here ladies and gentlemen i have for you an epic player in the servicenow space a gentleman i have competed with on the field of hackathon battles aplenty like me he is a multi-service now hackathon winner he is also the founder of elite service partner cloud pyres ladies and gentlemen mr matt saxon matt how you doing sorry about that thanks robert for having me yeah it's my pleasure man everybody who's seen the show knows that we started to start how about you tell us how you got your start in service now my start in it actually started in high school i had the opportunity to go to one of the first it high schools in the nation taft information technology high school and so got my love of technology there and i was lucky enough to get an internship while in high school at a local company and i got my first taste of believe it or not remedy back then i can believe it yeah and i really saw where this technology was going and then right after high school to stinton college make it sound like a prison sentence but it didn't work out and i got into help desk where i continued my remedy training there i got picked up by a bank worked in help desk for a few years there and at the bank crisis if we all remember that the bank had to divest to raise capital they sold the company off we got bought and a company called vantiv was born and that's where i got my start when we switched companies we said hey remy's really old actually my business partner his name is matt barter he had been using servicenow since o8 and said okay guys remedy gotta go we need to switch to service now and i was lucky enough to get in pretty early and that was in 2013. wow 2008 2013 huh it was a long journey yeah what was your first oh wow moment when did it hit you what were you doing i just remember actually being able to write code right sitting down at a computer typing in code and being able to do itsm workflows it was amazing business triggers in the previous system were terrible and the ability to customize and script out solutions was amazing saved so much time and really allowed me to take that to the next step did you get into any non-i.t stuff in those first stages like facilities something like that yeah i just remember when i first started i think what made the organization say holy cow we can do this was we were doing an onboarding application and then we started looping in non-iit components of the onboarding process and then everybody started saying oh what's this servicenow thing and can we get some yeah so ours i guess it was security right so we were a bank right and we still had people signing paper forms for security access it was terrible we found out people forged them who would have thought right [Music] you know wait a second this guy doesn't work here what it really came down to is we needed a good audit trail and we did when servicenow came in we had to kind of claw our way into places that was really strange i guess the old tank of remedy was still around and where it took us forever to turn something around and i remember we went through their first i'm not kidding 100 requests because they had a lot and we were able to condense that down those hundred documents down to about 10 requests put in workflows put in approvals and then all of a sudden the floodgates opened and we could not stop the roll tide of people coming in can i get on the platform can i get on the platform so we had to hire a bunch of people and train them and that's really hit soared from there what was your favorite thing that you built there i guess if we go fun we can go to a couple of fun ones every year we had our own internal hackathons you could say between platforms of the company and it was to educate people what these platforms could do and i love doing that because i always said what can i do with servicenow that people wouldn't think so one of the years i literally took a javascript mortal kombat clone i imported it into servicenow i rewrote some of the code inside to track players i got it to work with one of those joystick boards and then i took our cio and cto slapped their faces on it and let them battle it out in the front of our parking lot that was a hit people played that game all day and all night and you put that on service now put it on service now it was really cool another one is i remember probably just before that same thing right we're a ticketing platform that's what we do and we were fighting to get another business unit to use our software because we're like hey look we can do what you're asking to do you don't have to spend all this money go buy this technology we can do it and they're like oh you're a ticketing platform so i remember we got the chance to pitch and of course what do you do when you pitch you build your slide deck you practice right well why not build the slide that can service now right and not tell them don't tell them so that's that's what i did i took impress.js and i built out a 3d slide deck similar to prezi and i remember just giving the presentation and going through and we can do this in servicenow and we've done that and going through it and i just remember the best part you know you got to do the apple one more thing right and the one more thing was i hit the escape key and i point it up and there's the servicenow url like this whole presentation's on service now i'm desperately resisting the urge to brag about vivid charts because we love it because yeah if you're interested in seeing a presentation interface on servicenow i urge you to check out my day job vividcharts.com and sort we'll get back to matt matt no and i can attest to vivid charts seriously i love that feature when it came out i was like finally yes because let me tell you when i wrote that and impress it took 30 hours and i could do the same thing in vivid charts and maybe two just kudos there yeah i appreciate that man and as cloud pyres is an excellent partner of ours and you know thank you for everything even just today we just sealed another deal with you guys so thank you for that that's awesome yeah absolutely we're on the topic of hackathons and let's talk about that because we've competed in almost every hackathon i can remember yes except one like that were you at the first fruit dev con i wasn't i was at the second yeah i remember last one i remember every time i'm like i'm so glad i'm not competing in that guy's category the feeling was mutual you know it can be intimidating sometimes but it's all in good fun right so it's good to see what the folks come up with and how they push it forward and let's talk about some of the things you've built remember the fru devcon you built was it a music streaming service in servicenow yeah so it's one of those things that i miss going to the old school ui 15. i miss the left-hand menu bar with the iframe that you could customize i know you can go back to it and sometimes i do but it was cool it was cool because you could embed a ui page there you could do some cool stuff i'm like even now you could do a service portal page embedded on that left-hand menu that's live that's neat stuff back to the hackathon so it was kind of like what could we do that's cool with that and since it's on the left hand menu it's an iframe you could embed a music player and as you switch pages it would stay with you right and that was really cool so we had a ui page embedded in there and then used at the time there's a service called rdo and we were able to use their api and you could sign in to your audio account and bam play music through it and actually control it using servicenow we weren't an iframe into audio we were literally in service now making commands to audio and using their api to play music back so stream music on the platform that's insane i also want you to talk about the because i still think about this one because it was one of those ones where i'm like what are you doing it in the because you always competed in the left field category right just build something and it didn't have to have a big practical application but there was one year you did the buttons the like push button received service and i'm like why did you go in the crazy category you could have come into the practical category and stomped all over us yeah i don't know the categories were kind of ambiguous and maybe it was or 30 about that time that we picked you know but yeah that was an interesting one i remember probably a week before going i'm trying to think of hackathon ideas and i'm reading about this guy who hacked amazon dash buttons to turn on lights and stuff i'm like that's interesting i wonder if we could do some buttons as a service and it turned out to be incredibly easy using a servicenow mid server you could pick up the network signals and trigger it's very basic i think chuck tomasi expanded on that when they actually came up with the api and it was way more elegant than my solution but it was a fun one for those not familiar with amazon buttons in the audience why don't you tell people what exactly it did yeah so they called them dash buttons and essentially what they were was a single use simple ordering button right you could order a tied one and you could put it on your washer and when you saw your low on site you would click the button it would blink blink link and then literally place an order with amazon and then two days it showed up pretty revolutionary really i still think about it man because i think about you know me i i've always been thinking about how servicenow fully breaches exits the i.t space and gets into something that's like truly mass commercial or industrial scale right and what has more scale than just a button you press to get more of i'm just amazing i'm thinking like warehouses at least the ones that aren't fully automated anymore but emergency services different types of facilities management services this has got to have a broad-ranging application and so all those years ago and that solution is still inspiring me and for those of you out there who are in those domains like think about it what would you do with servicenow if you could just press a button press a physical button on your desk and it would fire a workflow off to you and then check out cloudpyres and matt saxton because matt's the guy who made it happen first time yeah and i can't take all the credit right i mean we had tyler hogue on our team who's an amazing engineer and he's also the one that was on the original rdo team as well it's truly a collaboration right funny story about that so it was probably about a year after the amazon dash button thing and what was cool was during our pitch we were like hey think of these things as surveys going into a place where somebody doesn't feel comfortable filling out a survey such as a bathroom's dirty right not just i need new toilet paper like a bathroom's dirty and that was in our original pitch and i swear to you a year later i think it was actually an o'hare airport it's like who was there this is definitely running service now i bet you yeah if anybody's not been to o'hare they have these things in the bathroom it's just like rate your experience and it's a happy sad and neutral face and you just tap it on your way out of the bathroom it's one of those god i hope people wash their hands i have to say o'hare bathroom if you haven't been go because there's some weird stuff going on there i remember like the like the toilet the there was like a seat covers moving i was like whoa what is this no let's see how we can cross-reference that with servicenow okay so we've talked about the good times has there been a time in your servicenow experience where your back was against the wall you're out of time out of energy out of ideas and you're like i'm not gonna make it oh the shot clock moments right the ones where you're in game five in its steward eye yeah of course right we've all run into those um i remember one time we were going out to a customer site we flew out there they flew their people out there to all get trained and this is before a go live but the go live was happening the next day and i remember going in there and it was one of the coldest days probably negative 30 in washington dc not kidding types burst in the place we were staying so cold and i'm tired and we're going through this and i'm not kidding you we couldn't get through one example not one in this application and my face is flustered i'm flustered we're using a mic because there's that many people there oh right there and can't get through none of it and basically i was like okay guys i'm so sorry we're gonna have to shut this down it's not working and we went back there's a team of three of us and we worked i'm not kidding all the way to the next morning did not sleep and then went for day two and got it to finally work and trust me it was being held with bubble gum and tape in the background we had just enough time to get it working for production the next day it was one of those things that q a is super important before training right so underestimated so let's just put it back on a happy track because that just that just gave me the goosebumps man oh man being on stage and it's just not working that bill gates blue screen of death moment oh man i just i got the goosebumps like it turns my stomach just i can't imagine thinking about being in that position and just oh god what am i gonna do but i'm glad to hear you got through it what about okay but putting it back on a happier track what about a time where you're just like slam dunk besides the hackathons and besides getting your elite status take the good ones away right i mean it's the thrill of landing the customer if we go outside the technical aspect it's when you are founding a company and i say that in the terms of it's not just you it's your family right my wife supported me i had a business partner there was customers here all those people both supporting and relying on you and when you're new it's do or die you know this as well as i do and when you don't think you're gonna land that customer because you're the small guy and you go in and you crush the demo you answer every questions you see them geeking out on what you're talking about that to me is the best i love the technology aspect but winning the hearts and minds of the people that you know when you're going in may be naysayers to you that's the best part i always tell people the most applicable skill in all the servicenow space is being able to tell a story oh yes because you just we've done it in the hackathons you've done it getting all your customers for for cloud pyres i do it every day for vivid charts and so everybody out there just take heed it's one thing to know the tech but it's the storytelling that wins the day you hit the nail on the head i don't care how technical you are if you can't put it into simple terms for people that make decisions to believe in what you're saying you're not going to go anywhere and it's an underrated skill right it's the steve jobs to the steve wozniak right yeah who's the well-known one right mm-hmm so it's important it's an important skill yeah what part of the platform do you most resonate well i don't even know if you like do you do much on the platform now are you 100 running cloud pyres yeah so good question i spend the most amount of time building on the platform that i can so if that helps i still build on the platform constantly i'm still making apps i've got another app ready to go to share if i can find the time to get around that the new technologies that are coming is that what you're asking oh it doesn't have to be new just has to be what part of the platform that exists do you most resonate with yeah well i mean or you could or you could take that to be like what are you most excited about coming down the pipe i'll take you sure i'll cross a couple of those planes so i've always been interested in the outliers of servicenow that people don't know just because i think that people are more not necessarily impressed by it but they just don't know what tools they have in their tool belt right so an example and i know this is this one's going away processors right i love writing things with processors because you could do amazing things i've always liked processors ui pages i really love service portal one of my first apps that i wrote a long time ago was in angular on servicenow using ui page when they came out with service portal i was like whoa why did i just do this they're ahead of the curve i love service portal i'm starting to learn web components and just the power that they are going to wield when it comes to the new interfaces in servicenow i think using cli tools is the future that's how you're going to get most modern web developers and i just i can't wait with all these modern tools that they're coming out to see the developers they attract and see how far they push it there's a lot of hype and actually a lot of closeted questions i think about this new paradigm you're talking about seismic right yes uh seismic i think they're calling it canvas or an outdesign system they get like 20 names to it based on what you've seen before and what you're excited about can you give the audience an example of something that the everyman servicenow person could sink their teeth into and say oh yeah that is going to be awesome or is it more something that only a developer is going to jazz out about to people in the regular world it's not going to matter because if you're building custom interfaces with seismic or canvas or now design system versus servicenow service portal they should be irrelevant to you right but what it means on the back end is the important part that these web components are almost individually scoped so they're interchangeable that's what's so amazing you could say well widgets are interchangeable but they are but but are they are they really you build a lot of custom things when it comes to one of those widgets and trying to move it from one instance to the other can not work as intended but these scoped items as far as i'm understanding it they're way more flexible when it comes to that and they're not going to be tied to angular and that's the key right right if you could change the ecosystem or the product in any way what would you do that's a good question i like the power of mid servers i think the things that servicenow can't do they can do but i don't like how mid servers are treated as an extension of servicenow truly they're they feel like you know how servicenow they buy something and they put it on the platform and it feels native mid servers just they don't feel native they feel alien they truly do imagine that you could have basically your own servicenow node and i'm not saying like full service now i'm saying maybe a node lite where it gets some generalized servicenow apis and you can execute code on there and make it feel native you can call it up and you can write codes so you could do data.io right data streams that servicenow can't do socket i meant socket io sorry you could do socket i o that's incredible you can do real real-time mouse cursor stuff you can't do that on native service now things like that that i think you could really extend the platform i think it would be hard to support but hey i'm a vendor all day long right so right uh i'm a third party but stuff like that i think is cool and i think extending on the mid server is difficult and if they could figure out how to make that easier it's kind of like have they done with remote tables how you can have a rest call now feel like a native table query something like that that allows us to use these custom libraries easier and on the cloud i got to get you on a call with michael barr and and mark scott we're going to have everybody thinking there the mid-server jedi council and and have a just big mid server powwow god love it it's funny i almost like because i i tell people i'm not the best developer in the servicenow universe but i almost have an instant check in my head like if somebody starts talking mid server to a high degree i'm like yeah that person's that's an apex service now deb really probably what it came down to is some necessity right they're you know well discovered right i mean they needed something they needed something that was between the four walls that could talk back up and they it almost seems like they accidentally made it like really powerful right by being able to run scripts and and whatnot i guess they needed that for discovery but you got to wonder were they thinking about beyond discovery when they had that there probably not but a lot of tools like that probably exist out there that grow in this they morph and grow into something else more powerful than what they were intended those emergent features right all right so we're at time i'm going to give you the last question here for people who are just starting on their servicenow journey i ask this question all the time because i just i get this question every day but from somebody how should i start if i'm just starting in service now today you know back in the day was much harder you had to go to servicenow guru you had to go to john anderson you had to go through the wiki go through communities look for rob fedoric and follow all of his posts right now i have to say that servicenow has done a really good job on unlearning obviously there's some javascript stuff you can take at code academy but you gotta understand cloud fires is a learning company and we put our people through it and they come out really good now granted mentorship and experience and all of that is probably our secret sauce but if you're new they give it to you you get a free instance you get the basic learning go do it practice it practice it 10 minutes every day and that's probably the best advice i could give you all right matt thanks so much for joining us again we'll have all match links in the descriptions be sure to check them out at cloudpyres and once again matt thanks for joining us hey thank you so much if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow 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