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 to another episode of titans of now tonight i have one of the single greatest servicenow developers of all time and probably the world's largest store of integration's know-how on the platform so honored to welcome my close personal friend to the titans pantheon ladies and gentlemen king james neal you're too kind rob thank you great to be here this pleasure is mine man i've waited so long to get you on the show man so everybody knows routine at the start of the show we talk about how you got your start so i actually started out as a lighting engineer and i was doing controlled lighting installations for big buildings and yachts and other big industrial warehouses so i did that for about six years and at the end i just thought you know what i want to get back into computing i've always been into web design i started out on the php c-plus class to very old and legacy languages that no one really likes but i started back on them when i was about 15 16 built websites and stuff but didn't want to go down that path because of what i thought were the negative connotations of being at a desk you know i like being out i like doing things with my hands so being a lighting engineer on site working with people made sense for me it was only when i got to six years into that and found that i couldn't go anywhere else and i thought actually you know what i really want to get back into software engineering and i've still been doing php on the side and building websites for charities and other things like that and i thought i'm going to look around and see if i can get into that and just take a different career path into software and i t and it just so happened that a service partner in the uk had a job out for a junior implementation consultant i applied for it it was a little bit of a pay cut but i thought give up to get up so i took that opportunity they're very gracious in giving it to me and that's where i got my first intro into servicenow and i was thrown straight into jelly throwing straight into building integrations and definitely a very steep learning curve getting into servicenow trying to pick that up and yeah so i started as a junior implementation consultant essentially and then worked my way up from there and that was 10 years ago now so crazy crazy you're one of those jelly fans huh oh you've seen my uh i love jelly t-shirts knowledge yes i am i think it gets a bad rep it's used for things that it was never intended and actually one of the things that we use it for in our integration platform is doing actual xml processing which is what it's for and when you're doing that on the server side not trying to render a ui or bootstrap into it or something it's very very good and very handy so when you use a tool for what it is intended generally they're pretty good and jelly is one of those things don't really use it very much now certainly not for a ui perspective it does come in handy for xml generation i want to go back to stuff where you're talking about your lighting engineer experience yeah because i've always made the claim that some of the most interesting servicenow resources that i've ever had the pleasure of working with come from really diverse non-it backgrounds and apply perspectives from those backgrounds that nobody else has so could you talk for a second about anything from your lighting engineering days that informed your servicenow experience or gave you some kind of insight into possibility that maybe nobody else has seen first i was on my own i was often the only guy on site i had a laptop i was plugging into sort of ports everywhere lights on and off setting up control systems and hooking them into building management systems whilst i wasn't fully dedicated to being at a desk i was still very much heavily involved in iit in that case it just tickled both parts of what i liked it gave me the opportunity to get out and the opportunity to create things using software now one of the buildings i did 14 floors center of london 10 000 lights and all of them connected to one control system you can see everything it's just just very very cool in terms of what experience i got right out of that i was working with lots of different people and i think that is really important understanding who you're working with being able to communicate with people who don't necessarily want to be there or to do something and just understand what they're after and talk on their level and help them achieve what they need to do so that you can help get what you need to do working with other people is the most important thing when it comes to a job and understanding what they're wanting to do and how their jobs work makes it a lot easier to do your own job in a lot of cases i would work with electricians site engineers architects and even customers so just that broad array of people was the biggest thing that i got that allowed me to move forward and what do you think you got the most of do you think it refined your storytelling capability more or your ability to listen to their requirements from their worldview and then translate that into what you actually needed to get done listening to their requirements but also communicating what you needed as well if i needed to get some lights changed or something like that or i'm working with a customer and stuff has to change on drawing there's all sorts of communication back and forth you've got to make sure that what you're talking about is correct and you've got to make sure that you understand what they're saying i think we see this a lot in the industry is the customer asks something we put our interpretation on it we deliver what we think and then it's completely different to what the customer wants i guess i find myself on in a sense is doing a really good job at delivering what the customer actually wants and making them ecstatic about what they're getting and not oh i didn't quite ask for that what do we miss now pay attention to what james said here to him it was an experience of learning how to interact with people better but the knowledge of what's possible and the different types of work i've seen personally changed his view of what's possible on servicenow we were at a hackathon together him tim hugh and i and we were racking our brains the night before wondering hey what are we going to do for hackathon this year and james is all like hey why don't we just do industrial light management and we'll put everything on one dashboard that can calculate your carbon footprint and the cost of the power for your lights and see what happens if you reduce your luminosity or whatever and so he basically pulls this hackathon use case right out his back pocket and we go on to win the hackathon and talk about all the iot simulators that we did and then we actually beat you remember we beat the creatorcon folks to the punch when they were announcing metricbase yep so that was hilarious sitting in there you know there and being like hey that was us yeah i think there's been a few of those moments hasn't there been any couple yeah one or two [Laughter] i always tell my listeners embrace the backgrounds that aren't i.t that aren't servicenow and intertwine them with whatever it is you're thinking about right now in terms of the possibilities of what the platform can do i just wanted to tack on to that you know that it doesn't matter what you're doing servicenow is one of those great platforms where you can come from any background and apply your knowledge to it and get an awesome result at the back of it it just so happens for me because i've been developing in code for quite a while it just made good sense for me to move into that and it fitted really well not many people know this but i actually worked with james for a year or two at his company white space studios which was awesome and a white space studios has a tool that is pretty revolutionary but doesn't get enough publicity so james you want to talk us a little bit about unify absolutely yeah you say it doesn't get enough publicity you're absolutely right and that's been quite deliberate um we've been [Laughter] we've been building this product for the past five years um well it's actually been in the back of our minds in development for as long as i can remember in servicenow really all of the integration experience that i gathered and my co-founder tim gathered as well went into this product five years ago and see it's a a ticket exchange platform specifically for servicenow and our tagline is the definitive pro code integration platform and what we're targeting is integrations in servicenow not your standard data seeing stuff where you know you can just do an import set or something like that this is complex business process integrations where you need to know that the messages that you're sending and the integrations that you're building work flawlessly you know your business depends on these if you raise a priority one incident and you're sending it to a vendor you need to know that that vendor got that incident and if it didn't get that incident you want to know immediately why and be able to resolve it and so that is what unifi is about it's about bringing all of that operational experience to the front so that your business can manage its integrations very easily and on the plus side you know we make it very quick for developers to build these complex integrations without worrying about all of the low-level fundamentals of particular exchange and queuing and asynchronous requests and all this other stuff right it's all the stuff a developer who knew what they were doing in terms of integrations would have to build over and over and over again on their own absolutely and more there's a lot of code in this there's a lot of man hours in this and we're continually refining and building it you're talking thousands and thousands of hours of effort and knowledge gone into this when we start first designed this we didn't write any code at all we spent at least three if not four weeks um when i said we it says me and tim three or four weeks we spent just talking things through mapping out the architecture we tore down and threw away so much stuff that previously we've done but it was like this doesn't fit the use case or where people need flexibility and that's one of the key points and you'll remember as well rob you know flexibility is absolutely paramount when it comes to these kind of integrations there is no one-size-fits-all there is no plug-and-play you know you've got vendors who are just standing up their own custom integrations and you need to be able to build into them so creating a platform that allows that is not easy and so unifying is fully geared around allowing you to do whatever you need to do in the easiest way possible i know this wasn't a use case that we really went after but i was always captivated by the idea of mnas because many many times in my servicenow journey i saw big accounts merging with big accounts and we got two big customized essential servicenow deployments and how do we reconcile these two gosh let's spend six months putting a project plan together before we even start chunking this apart and just the project planning can run you six figures worth of cost and for way less than that you can have an integration platform that just sits in between them for the time being hey party a is way better at this process than party b so party b's tickets will just go over to party a and synchronize with them and you can just pick and choose your processes and you can have something that exists on two or more instances working perfectly seamlessly with a high degree of control and i feel with coronavirus and the new economic normal i feel like we're going to see a ton more m a's at large scales and people just need to take a look at your product man i appreciate that you're absolutely right though that m a scenario that we've seen more than once big big companies doing mergers and they stick unify on both ends and we have them connected in a couple of days and that's full-on integrations for their processes so besides unifi i know unify is kind of your crowning glory in the ecosystem but i wonder if you could rewind a bit when you're a beginner and tell us about that oh wow moment where you saw servicenow and you're oh the world's going to change because of this so that i went around in my journey actually started immediately and that oh wow moment was when i suddenly clicked an understood service now and realized that the app that i'd been building in my spare time in php of all things was essentially built in the same way by fred lovey um so seeing that decoupled database the server to front-end structure being able to create an app in a few minutes spinning up tables adding fields through a clickable interface that was all stuff i've been working on for quite a long time so seeing it as serious now i was just like wow okay cool that killed my project but still that was my biggest overwhelm moment right at the start that's some validation for you though it was it was beat me to my side project he did on the opposite side tell us about a time where it was like man am i am i gonna make it oh as a founder of a company and someone has been in the industry quite a while i think i've got quite a few struggles and horror stories the first one was you remember david um making him redundant so i hired family as i know you shouldn't do and it came to the point where we couldn't continue and you know i had to let him go and that was very painful yeah i remember that man that was not yeah yeah so advice to anyone listening to this working with close friends close family is just there is a reason they say don't do it and it's not because you don't work well together is because when it goes wrong it can really sort of stuff things up you just have to be careful there and that was that was just really tough we didn't want to do that but it didn't make sense and we were in a tough time in there so um i kind of got a top three really because there's been so many so the second one was trying to become a services partner and actually this is something we faced together yes yes and ultimately we just decided to cancel it after two years of trying i don't know that there was anything we did wrong i don't think the partner program did necessarily anything wrong we just fell through the cracks and it didn't happen so we still was obviously a technology partner so we still build apps on the store but we never got the services thing but actually in hindsight that's actually a good thing for us because we don't do services in that starts anymore just in the early days it was very very frustrating yeah i remember because the business model were like we need this it was silly because we were closing deals we were selling we're getting customers to buy stuff and we couldn't even get a deal that was painful or like an email back or anything the funny thing is when i speak to other founders it's like what you're not a services cup you didn't get a serious partner i don't i honestly don't know i really don't know yeah it's just one of those moments where life takes you the direction you need to go by punching you in the face so you face another direction it's like you got to be thankful for it after yeah after it just would have been so much easier the other way in many ways well i mean it could have divided our energies even further though i think that's when you and i friendly parted ways you only had the energy to do the product side so maybe that would have trapped white space in a way that we can't perceive now very likely it would have done i think at the time it was very much the case that you've got to keep the lights on in order to you know stay alive but you also want to invest in developing the things you're actually passionate about yeah you know the apps side of things is what we're passionate about and we're fortunate now that actually we don't need the services you know we still have a long way to go no doubt about that but we've really come a long way and we're really in a good place now i don't know if everybody knows this but james is actually the author of explore put it down on my links uh explore is the single most downloaded app on share and it's not even close [Laughter] at one point it had more downloads than everything else combined it was a de facto app you had to have everybody who does serious dev work on servicenow has to have explore tell us about the genesis of explore explore came about because i had been in the platform a few months i've been building some integrations macros the ui pages other bits and pieces and there was always annoying that i never knew quite what i was working with i didn't know what an object had in its properties i didn't know what functions i would call this was way back when we had the wiki before the docket new dock site so we didn't have access to all of the available methods and classes and all that kind of stuff it was just knowledge that you had to gain from somewhere from the ether and it was called explore because it allowed me to do exploratory programming the whole point was that i could put into like a guide session class and it would go away and tell me everything that i could do with guide session it was a very limited tool set for a long time i just had a script input box and you could put a script into it run it and it would give you the results out the back of it and that actually came in incredibly handy on more than one occasion for things like deleting a million records from a cmdb database when an import failed and created a huge amount of records all sorts of things like that we ended up doing with it and it was great when i started white space i just needed to do something better with it and i wanted other people to use it and benefit from the experience of being able to write some code click run and see what it did and that was outside of background script i wanted a bit more of a seamless interface i didn't want to lose my script i didn't want to have it crash on me and lose all the code that i'd written i wanted to be able to cancel it i wanted to see the stuff that came out without having to do a million gsd bug logs and so my own requirements and everyday use cases fed into that and i end up going and staying in a hotel and i spent two nights literally until about two three o'clock in the morning building this thing as a proper ui page with bootstrap of it so it just works a lot better and that is the start of the explore that we know today obviously one version four now which has a whole load more stuff in it but that's where it came from again if you're a servicenow developer and you haven't yet heard about explorer check out the description below we're gonna have links on how to get to it and also a training series i did on it way back in the day that shows you all the features or at least whatever features i was capable of understanding when james was teaching me all right if you could change the ecosystem or the product what would you do i love this question and at first i was like do you know what i don't know because it's great to see how much it's improved and developed over the years how much it's grown servicenow alone of thousands and thousands of people now let alone all the customers partners and developers but i think one thing that's really lacking at the moment is investment in the app store and i say that because i'm very very close to it and going back to dude our really old days when we were in wolf pack you know we were there at the same time you want to restart that no no we can go on the company that shall not be named way back in the day when you and i were there we built our own product and we were there for the launch and it was great it was very exciting with all these ambitions and plans and we were going to take over the world become multi-millionaires overnight because there was thousands of enterprise customers that needed what we had and that was going to be it all we had to do was get in front of them and they would buy it and the kind of sad reality is that that is not the case at all and i think the app store it is great but i think it's misunderstood by a lot of people and a sad in a sense but it goes back to what we expected at the start we were thinking it was going to mimic the iphone app store the apple app store and apple app store has millions and millions of customers and you've only got to get a few and you can make some good money yeah there's only thousands you're selling them for like 1.99 right yeah yeah yeah whereas there's only thousands of customers in the servicenow ecosystem and as of those thousands many still choose to build their own apps themselves they're too big they've got too many special requirements also there's still incumbent partners in with these companies with most of them you know and they're going to be saying well we'll just build a custom for you we can tailor it to what you want and in many cases that is what's needed but where it comes back to investment is educating people a bit more helping partners understand what the app store is really about and help customers understand what they can do with it i totally hear you on having a clear idea of how the store works if you're gonna venture into there and i will say i mean absolutely no disrespect to servicenow when i say this but you ever hear that expression god helps those who help themselves honestly that's exactly what i was going to say as well that is the fundamental truth of the store is you know servicenow will only invest in you if you're making money so you have to do the work yourself first yeah you've got to get success on your own if you're going to get any force multiplication from them yeah which is i mean they got to run a business too right and i'm sure that the store doesn't amount to a huge chunk of their revenue so they have to be cut throat in that way but it's still hard and nobody tells you that's the way it's going to be i think it's just as people underestimate the amount of effort that goes into building a product as well it's one thing to spin up an app that you think is great and maybe a lot of other people think is great but when it comes to actually marketing that and selling it and putting documentation together and doing all the work around it you suddenly realize actually building the app is 10 of what you need to do yeah yeah and if you're if you haven't got the knowledge to really kick that and get that into gear and get it in front of people and get them to buy it unfortunately it's just not gonna work yeah especially if you have a new exotic idea because that's what we did with hypercare was just i still daydream about hyper care oh it's such an awesome concept because it's new nobody's looking for it so you've got to teach the market where the gap is and there's a scale right vivid charts is kind of new too but everybody needs data visualization so it works but hypercare was such a out there it was i mean and that's kind of where one of those funny ironies is that it's easy to sell something that's already exists just pick a product build your version of it and you'll be able to sell it i have a friend who sells men's grooming accessories and he's gone from nothing to being quite successful at it and he dropped this wisdom bomb on me once he said a saturated market is a proven market absolutely yeah so he's like i would try and reinvent the wheel one of the big things for a lot of people myself included is that you build what you love you build what you're working with and if you've been with customers you build what they've asked for we had a customer we built an app for them that was pretty cool and we were like goodness me this is epic we can take this everywhere everyone needs this so we built it release it as a store app and it did nothing we demoed to hundreds of people at knowledge and other events and no one bought it no one was interested and that was probably partly our fault for just being so naive in terms of understanding communication and marketing and sales and all that kind of stuff sort of lesson learned is it's not as easy as lifting and shifting what you built for a customer and saying everyone else on the planet is going to want this yeah the big question they ask you when you win a hackathon is just going on the store and it was like hell yeah it's going on the store give me that money everything we should have about 10 apps on the store by now i think oh man again i still daydream about it someday that thing will be remade when the market's ready for it i keep thinking about building it in vivid charts and not so much the whole build a portal on the fly aspect of hypercare but yeah just presenting a customer consumable interface that tells them stuff about stuff that's upcoming like we got a major release coming up there's there's these changes and everybody thinks of change control in terms of like the cobb schedule nobody gives a bit about the cab schedule especially your customers i was gonna say especially the end users and customers they don't care they just want to know how it affects them and what they're doing yeah exactly so someday and i think maybe in vivid charts i'll give it a shot anyway final question do you have any advice for up and comers on their journey on servicenow yeah never give up this is a massive ecosystem now it can seem kind of daunting it can seem like there is too much to learn it can seem like where do you even start in a lot of cases but the reality is just accepting no one's going to know everything now i the way i look at it is the cream always rises to the top always even in saturated markets so yeah and this is why i'm more and more i'm telling people don't everybody asks me or probably even you right how do i get to where you are like don't do it the way i did because i had a narrow path and 12 years of time to figure it all out you got not even any of that so go narrow try a bunch of things but find something that you like and just go super deep on that and ignore everything else and then once you're really good at that and your cream is rising to the top but then worry about another knowledge domain don't get overwhelmed by the amount there is to learn in the ecosystem figure out what you love figure out what you're passionate about and make that your niche or your niche as i think you guys in americans say there's plenty of people out there doing things but becoming a jack of all trades is not a good thing in this industry you'll end up spreading yourself too thin so if you're passionate about workspace or you're passionate about crn or something else like that go and do that be the best at that learn that to the point where you are the absolute best in your field at that one thing all right brother we are at time i want to thank you again for joining uh it's been my honor you're very welcome absolute pleasure 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 implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high 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