welcome everyone to another episode of glide chat my name is michael lombardo ceo of glidefast consulting and i am with brandon barrett today sdm at glidefast hey brandon hey mike how's it going oh not too bad i know for us it's friday for the listeners who knows but how was your week so far so far i've actually had a great week uh it's been busy but just busy enough you know every day there's been some challenges but we've gotten through them and yeah and now it's it seems like it was monday just yesterday and now here we are it's friday so yeah i'm actually really curious how did you get involved in the servicenow space yeah so it's kind of an interesting story i was working as a web developer for a few years and i was working for a company in dayton ohio and they downsized and i lost my job and so i went out with a friend and i was kind of having a woe is me kind of night and uh you know i don't know what to do next i'm kind of done with web development i don't really know what the next step is he's like well he was a network engineer at the time so he kind of uh thought about it for a second he goes i'll tell you what there's a platform called servicenow it's not quite web development which you know not much of us it's it's hard to define but yeah he said it's not web development but we use it for ticketing and yeah okay and so uh got on i think it was indeed the next day uh looked for job postings and i found a posting for an entry-level job at uh cloud pyres in cincinnati and i looked at it for a couple days thought about getting into it and eventually just sent the uh sent the job application and was interviewed and jumped right in so yeah i i applaud you for taking a risk like that because you know it's uh it's crazy how i think we all kind of stumble into the servicenow space right and definitely uh but but yours was a little bit more of a risk right uh you know companies like glide fast and cloud pyres now we're all glide fast but those names are really interesting too right so it's like it's like uh all right i got service now and notice how they're all two syllables right right servicenow glide fast qualifiers i wonder if that was intentional uh by the way yeah well it was it was funny because people kept getting the name wrong when i first started working there cloud spires cloud peers yeah i did too yeah and i didn't realize i guess what a risk it was at first it was a three month training program there and went through the training and i think it hit me about this maybe the second month just how deep of a dive it was going to be to kind of come up to speed on the platform uh yeah i wouldn't trade it for the world it was a great experience made a lot of really good friends and here we are you know it's just three years later unbelievable now and now you're you're actually running that program right yeah yeah um yeah so i'm part of the transition team uh i helped teach in the first round of the glide fast university program last year and once we got through the three month program i you know i kind of moved off and now i'm managing some of the newer developers that came out of that program and it's it's gone really well so far everyone's just diving into work and i'm kind of even some of these developers i'm looking at and i'm thinking you know when i got out of that training program was i was i this prepared and that's you know it's it's crazy to think about that was just three years ago it seems like forever ago but it's pretty amazing i mean it's it's pretty amazing to be a part of that you know i think i've talked about a program year up where i got into the technology world and got my entry level help desk job so many years ago but i just really it's it's so similar to me because you know year up is a program where they teach six months of school and then six months internship and you're paid throughout the whole time and nobody could quite grasp like it was really hard like what's the catch here wait you're gonna pay us the whole time sure and you know we're gonna get a career and an internship and a chance to prove ourselves in the in the real world uh and that's kind of what you know we're doing here a little bit more accelerated and obviously very more focused uh on service now but you know i i look back and i'm so proud to be a part of it because you know we're doing i feel like we're doing such good out there where we're taking people who who who definitely wouldn't have an opportunity to get into a career as successful as or you know possibility of being successful as a servicenow world and and you know we're really incentivizing people by by paying them and uh and we're making the economics work right so we have a plan to you know to be self-sustainable where we don't need you know necessarily funding or to be a non-profit to do it sure uh we have the economics so yeah i really applaud you and thank you for all your uh contributions to that program and absolutely it's really interesting i was just talking with another developer actually earlier today and we're just talking about kind of breaking into the servicenow space how a lot of entry level jobs in the space will ask for some amount of experience and how what we're doing here is a unique this gives you the experience it gives you the learning you're not just kind of thrown out there and yeah it's something you can turn into a career it's not just a you know a three month long boot camp that you get out and then you have to try and figure out what to do next i mean the path is just kind of laid out before you so yeah we're definitely setting people up for success it's not easy right you know no no it's not it's definitely that's what and that's one like warning we give like listen this is not just but we we're setting you up for success right what what's your what's your favorite part of the platform so for me i since i came from web development i started on the service portal i still love the service portal but i've worked in customer service management which is you know it's kind of a nice little bridge from service portal into the csm world i like csm a whole lot i've been on quite a few projects there i've actually done some software asset management too and i enjoyed that but service portal is still kind of where my heart is it's uh it's to me you know and i was never a portal guy and like i always joke you know nobody lets me have the admin role anymore but the the portal was just it it always seemed like the most fun because it's just like the one the thing people get to click around in and just it's always so beautiful and you know it's like seems like the the fun part the portal is a really interesting part of the platform in that you can customize it and tailor it so much to a client's you know exact specifications but you also still have to kind of keep in mind we want to stay as close out of the box as we possibly can and so it's always that fine line but you can do some really amazing things and yeah plus it's i mean a lot of people like it because they i want to do the portal because it's pretty you know yeah i want to build that yeah it's almost like the the most uh web development aspect starts now right where so much of the rest of uh the platform is like configuring and code snippets yep um things like that but brandon what do you what do you think uh like the future of servicenow where do you think it's going because we've seen so much innovation you know we've seen a lot of industry focus what do you think the future is for servicenow absolutely i think so for me it's kind of interesting i think servicenow is going to continue to go forward on the low code no code path and kind of tread that way but then we've also seen you know the more code heavy the the ui builder and different elements like that and i think probably what servicenow is going to do if i had to guess they're going to try to branch out into to newer industries um obviously their ticketing and everything like that is just so well established um for it departments and they continue to i know there's uh fso there's um oh there's the well i mean we just saw the you know the vaccine status all of those different modules they brought out yeah and i think they'll continue to kind of look at what's going on around them and bring out a product that you can just kind of bring out of the box and use yep i i just don't see any i don't see the demand um waning anytime soon no i absolutely think you're like the beauty of it is it is a platform right and it's one source of truth right it's one one source of truth for many different processes so i think the use cases are almost infinite where as long as there's a there's a workflow there's a process there's a task that needs to be completed somewhere in in the world you know who knows maybe yeah we've already stepped out of just the corporate world right we're in the government we're in the citizen fulfillment worlds wherever there's a workflow servicenow will be there whatever there's a task service now will be there yeah and it's just kind of to that point for newer developers starting out i think that's yeah that's what takes you a while to wrap your arms around is you might get the technical side of the platform pretty quickly but it's the actual business process side of the platform that can take several projects or several iterations of going through to see how customers are actually using the platform and i think we're going to continue to see that you know new types of customers gravitating toward the platform and using it for different things so 100 yeah all right as we like to leave each glide chat out if you have one thing one piece of advice maybe to newer developers or developers out there what would it be well the first piece of advice always check your update set always i've made that mistake many times but no the piece of advice i would give is you know don't give up even if it seems difficult at first if you're just diving into any kind of a tech platform just don't give up it things always get harder before they get easier and you know i'm kind of a testament to that i'm sitting here today and helping new developers learn so there were definitely times where i was just kind of sitting there staring at the screen going i have no idea why this isn't working you know am i cut out for this is this and now it's it's getting to be second nature so yeah and then sometimes you're like how did i get this to work i don't know it's working yeah right and then it's as long as it works for the demo you're okay you have to get it working so brandon thank you for uh another episode of glidechat and uh hey have a good weekend you do the same thanks mike [Music] you