hey everyone welcome back to my channel it is so good to have you here today we're focusing on the power of the servicenow platform by showcasing another awesome solution built on it so i've invited the founder of one of the most popular apps on the servicenow store mitch stuttler of vivid charts hey mitch hey rob thanks for having me excited no problem it's been 10 minutes since we last talked that's right luckily i get to talk to you quite a bit throughout the week so of course i know the answer to all these questions because i actually work with you at vivid charts but could you tell us about the genesis of vivid charts yeah definitely my entire career has been on the servicenow platform even back in college i was interning for fruition partners and i was actually doing a lot of consulting and started getting a specialty while at cloud sherp was an accenture of doing custom interfaces whether i was cms back in the day or service portal after that came out and i actually was lucky enough to learn under brad tilton if any of you have heard of him he's great but i was doing all sorts of ui work and for whatever reason anytime we had a custom reporting or chart requirement it got passed to me and i noticed that was happening more and more frequently and i just started filing that in the back of my head okay a lot of people have these custom reporting requirements that just aren't getting met on platform for whatever reason i didn't really know what the reasons were back then i just stored that away and i always kept a list of potential ideas of businesses if i ever wanted to start a business and basically came around time where i'd really getting that itch to start a business and start solving problems and in 2018 that's when we started vivid charts and that's where i really realized that there's a lot of space in the reporting side of things in platform on servicenow so that's really how we got rolling we didn't have a great idea of what exactly we were solving in the beginning but we knew there were people who would want to work with us and we just started there that's an interesting take that you know that there was something vaguely that had some demand in the market but you didn't know where the precise point was how did you make that first couple sales really it was just showing that we're trying to help it was like okay we hear you we hear that you're not getting everything you need in platform with reporting again for whatever reason we were just showing that we want to help so we put something out there really early minimal viable product which still had a lot of the core components to what we're using today it's really that flexible architecture that lets you do that really almost anything with reporting in platforms so we just went to these customers and said hey we know you're probably having problems please tell us what they are and how we can help and we want to partner up with you and figure this out together how would you say that the product has changed since that first day the big thing is in the beginning it was very much so an admin function like you'd have to be a pretty powerful servicenow user to wield what we had put together you do some really cool things once you got it figured out but i'd still say the learning curve was it was definitely there something we near the end of 2018 and really ever since i've focused on is the ability to make it reach throughout the organization so if you have a user in the hr org who wants to be able to report on her data and she might not be a servicenow expert we want to make it easy enough that anybody could get their hands on it and get into that data with relative ease i'd say that's the biggest thing that's changed found in my journey that when people talk about reporting there tends to be this paradigm where they they abstract they just say let's do reporting and as we know just at a base platform that that could mean two or three distinct things could be just building queries with the report engine could be managing list views it could be some real in-depth stuff on performance analytics so what does vivid charts bring to the reporting world yeah it's a good question so the way i think about it is those three things you just mentioned are covering a lot of use cases and i know reporting sometimes gets a bad rap in service now uh a bad rep because people think it should solve every single thing under the sun and that's just not fair to ask for it i guess it's fair to ask for it but um it's just not there yet so what we're seeing is when these reporting use cases aren't being met in platform it ultimately ends up leaving the platform the data leaves the platform to solve that problem elsewhere sometimes it's something really advanced like an integration into one of servicenow's competitors tableau and salesforce or power bi and more often it's something much more rudimentary like excel or powerpoint because the people who are creating these reports are falling back on the tools they know how to use to get what they need so that's really the angle we're helping solve is your data is leaving the platform why let's stop doing that we can help specifically what is it vivid charts does that your leads and your customers take a look at and say oh wow finally someone gets me yeah i think oftentimes it's that portion of data leaving the platform ultimately it's for some pretty sound reasons like getting in front of a larger group of people within the organization and that sometimes has some certain aesthetic requirements you know it can't look like an admin view or an admin report it's gotta look polished it's gotta look branded and with that what really resonates is the periodic manual effort so when we hear about people having to put together a weekly report in powerpoint or a monthly or quarterly that's where the the light bulbs go off for our customers okay we could do that we can make it look the way you need it keep it in platform and we can automate that so you're not gonna have to do this every week or month what's one of your favorite use cases from one of your customers i think my favorite use case just because it shows the power of how much you can automate these manual reporting and presentation cycles we've got this one customer a service now msp so they've got a group of like a thousand customers living in their domain separated environment of service now and they have contractual obligations to report on a monthly or quarterly basis the performance they've been providing in their instance of service now whether that's how many different incidents there were maybe that's what they've done with slas there's all sorts of things they have to report on and it was a largely manual effort literally for these hundreds or thousands of customers every single month they had a group of three or four people manually creating these powerpoint decks by pulling data out of service now it was basically a full-time job for those people and so they came to us and they had the idea of automating this whole process in vivid charts directly in platform uh so now on the first of every month it generates all of these slide decks in vivid charts pulling directly from the servicenow data and then it's basically just one of their team members now that spends about a day just polishing those off making sure they understand what they're looking at and then they deliver them to their sdms or service delivery managers to take to the customers themselves so that is just a huge time savings and there's also tons of other advantages to that being in platform as well it's just a crazy use case i think back to how i said in the beginning of 2018 we had no idea really what we were trying to solve but this hit that on the head the automation of the reporting cycle people really underestimate how much time is spent doing that i remember when i was a servicenow product owner and since i was the only one who really understood the data structure and there was no real presentation level reports and sometimes you did need some finagling that you couldn't get done in the platform i was perpetually exporting stuff messing with it in excel and then getting it to the people that needed it and i'd spend as much time doing that as i would building new solutions it's nuts it's nuts and it's widespread everybody's doing it i i'm still doing it unfortunately it's crazy um tell me if you want to scrap this question if you feel like you've answered it enough already but how would a customer get value the fastest like say they love the features how do your customers get value the fastest the way i like to approach it is sort of like a snowball effect so if you think about your team's monthly allocation and think about how much time they're spending reporting which by the way on average it's 74 hours per month per team working in service now not just your whole org it's per team in service now the way i like to think about it is take that 74 hours a month and figure out what is the smallest use case that we are currently dealing with where we're exporting data for a presentation or a report and let's tackle that first so like think small so let's knock out the one that takes you one hour a week or two hours a week once we do that then we have that time back where we could reallocate it to try tackling the next biggest one and it just has that snowball effect where you're getting all this time back a month over months so it's really an approach where you could start small and immediately start getting value out of it just by getting that little bit of time back each month that's awesome man and i've seen it myself too the one use case gets to three the three use cases get to five and then you gotta think of it as this was a great investment not just this was money well spent i'm getting literal return on that investment that's right what would you say has been from the business side from the platform side whatever what's been the hardest hurdle so far yeah i think it's getting awareness because the store even though there's a lot of apps out in it i think the store is still at a very young phase and i think it's continually maturing and getting out there more and more but you know we still run into customers even two and a half years into it servicenow customers who will meet them and they'll be like oh this is perfect timing we had no clue you existed but this is exactly what we need and so it's crazy to me that we haven't been able to do as good of a job as i would have hoped really getting that awareness across the servicenow customer base because we know we could help every single one of those customers this isn't a tiny little problem that's just a small subset it's widespread so really getting that awareness has been the toughest thing in my opinion so of all the features that you've put on vivid charts since the beginning what's the one that's your favorite the one that is the most impactful the one that's really let customers start doing some pretty crazy things is our slate editor which is essentially an in platform i liken it most to a powerpoint slide editor it's this really free form visual editor where you could put charts on it you could put text you could put shapes you could style things and i think that's really let people do a lot more with it both aesthetically and just you know people are going to lean on tool sets and experiences that they're used to when they're trying to meet requirements so this is let people who are really familiar with a powerpoint type editor start doing some pretty crazy things in service now with vivid charts we talk about all this data going off platform but to some extent so what what's so bad about the data being off platform well i mean inherently when the data is leaving the platform that means you're actually doing some manual work there so first off there's potential for wasted time not potential it's like a high likelihood that you're spending more time there secondly once that data leaves the platform there's some problems first off it's stale as soon as it leaves it's no longer current that's just the nature of it and you can get close to real time but you'll never be right there like if you were in platform along with that once the data leaves it's you know just immediately a security concern in the sense that you don't know how that date is going to be manipulated to craft somebody's story or maybe even lost or maybe if it's an excel sheet it can get sent to the wrong person you never know if it's not in platform and then the last thing i'd say to that is you've invested so much in the servicenow platform you've invested so much in automating all of your workflows when you pull this data out it's almost like a disgrace to all that work you've put in um that data belongs in platform there's obviously use cases where it makes sense for it to leave but to the best of your ability that should be living in platform and helping drive those other workflows and this should actually become a strategic asset tell me more about strategic asset the way we think about reporting in platform and i don't think many people think about it this way i know the most successful service now customers do but we think about it is reporting a strategic asset or is it an organizational requirement like is somebody telling you give me this report every month or is this actually something that you're getting behind and is becoming powerful and for the large part most customers are just doing it because they're told to do it whereas if you make it a strategic asset it could actually help move the needle for your organization that once you get this reporting automated and keep it in platform all sorts of doors open up so it really should be viewed as a strategic asset tell me about a customer experience on vivid charts where they really exemplified this report is a strategic asset not just an operational necessity yeah i think there's a lot of good stories around customers doing just that and the one that comes to my mind first is this customer who is essentially pulling data out of service now every single month to manually manipulate it and then present it to their cto and this was taken up a bunch of this person's time and they came to us wanting to automate that in vivid charts and so they were able to get all that time back that they were manually spending putting that together but along with that one of the unlocked benefits that they didn't even think about initially is in the past life that data was only available 12 times a year it was once a month after he ran that report and did what did his thing now when it's automated whenever that cto needs to look at that data he just pulls up that vivid charts dashboard and it's live data and with that you could get right into that underlying data with a click if needed so i think that really shows both sides to why you want this in platform and why you should be automating it all right so if a customer is listening to this and they want to free themselves from the chains of exporting the data off platform and they're worried about the reliability or they need that extra aesthetic kick what would they do get a hold of us however you're most comfortable obviously we make it very easy to get a hold of us whether through our website emailing us whatever that might be along with that we've got plenty of videos really outlining the product and how to use it we've even got a free certification training path that takes probably about an hour that you're welcome to take which you can find on our website as well so uh really i'd say figure out at your own pace what you'd like to do if you want a trial feel free to go to the store and request a trial lots of ways to explore and lots of ways for us to help so i just urge you to give us a look all right cool thanks for your time mitch for those of you who want to explore vivid charts further all the links will be in the description thanks for watching