good afternoon everybody it feels like morning for me i'm exhausted uh so alex beachy i am the one of the navy account executives for servicenow and i came out of came into servicenow out of the marine corps where i spent quite a few years uh breeding in different domains and uh so today i'm going to talk to you a little bit about operating in disconnected environments and so quick show of hands who flew in from uh conus to be here today all right out of that who lost internet while they were flying on a tin can for this guy actually quite a few i did too and so congratulations you officially operated in a disconnected environment um what is the one thing you didn't lose when internet connectivity went down though yeah your media right so a lot of you know the way that we need to kind of reframe our thought process around disconnected operations is by really focusing on on what are the things that we need to do in those disconnected operations right american airlines doesn't really care if i have email right they don't care if i have chat that's not what we're in the business of that's not what they're in the business of they need to keep me entertained they also need to throw marriott advertisements at me every time i start a new movie so they need to make sure that they're making money along the way so what they do is they establish the necessary services on their aircraft so that they can provide those back to the back to their customer base right operating in a disconnected environment and the military is no different it's focusing first and foremost on what is the what is the domain in which we're operating so we often hear the term tactical edge and that's what we often think about when we're talking disconnected operations we're thinking of like the tactical edge but what is the tactical edge right to i was an aviator the tactical edge to me was my aircraft but the marines in the back the tactical edge was them the out in the fight you know beyond enemy lines that wasn't you know they didn't really care and if we look to to surface fleet the tactical edge is the fleet because that's our fighting domain right um submarines same thing you know they're the tactical edge but in their domain so and first and foremost we have to look and peel back sort of what is the operational domain that we're considering when we're dealing with disconnected operations and so from there we can start to then layer down into what are the operators in those operational environments so i talked about the marine corps the marines they're the tactical edge right so um we have to look at that and so american airlines near the operators right we're their tactical edge we just need to be fed lots and lots of content so we remain happy i didn't get fed any boos which seemed really disappointing though um but somehow delta airlines seemed to do that so i don't know what's going on i think i need to hop over to another airline but i'm too it's sunk cost at this point it's like the v22 i'm just in it to win it now um i'm gonna see one out of the ch-53 guys so i like to give the v22 guys a hard time so once we can establish you know the operating environment and define who the operator is is then when we can start to really pinpoint what are the things the services the capabilities the digital capabilities that we need to provide at that player and so if you look at at a marine you know when i was at mps my research was devoted to establishing self-healing mobile ad hoc networks and what i did was i built a a mesh network using cell phones you know because the idea at the time was give every marine a tactical handheld right well there's three different radios typically on a handheld device you've got your bluetooth you've got your wi-fi and you got your cellular so um the idea being that let's start with bluetooth right the lowest common denominator and sync those all together so that we can start to share data and communicate and we largely tested it using chat just because that was a simple capability to push across and the the mobile network could you could establish who the who the platoon was and that was our focus area so we had our operators we had the operational domain and then we allowed to let them move around the battlefield and the networks would tear apart they would still chat with each other if they had connectivity and when they all come together in close hold the data would synchronize across it but there was a lot of concern about the security of things hey what kind of information are we really pushing to the edge and again much like american airlines do we really need to be pushing email to that tactical edge on a ship yeah right when i was at uh when i was on one of my deployments on the uss bonhomme richard we spent 128 days at sea straight and we spent about 60 of those in river city and so disconnected operations to the extreme right that was one of the longest times that uh one of the muse had spent in river city and we still needed to get email done we still needed to do some of the gcss work and so we were sending marines to shore calling them up telling them to do the transactions on gcss so that we could still do all the supply chain stuff that we needed to um so again defining that tactical domain and the operators on it and the things that they need to do but the security aspects of it on the tactical edge of a marine was assumed to be low risk because the kinds of data that we're pushing to them we can use some basic encryption and ultimately the the uh stability of that data 72 you know 96 hours after it's been transmitted is probably irrelevant the marines have moved on from that location they've stopped sharing that kind of uh kind of data so do we really need to put encryption on it that's gonna ultimately you know be uncrackable for ten thousand years no we just need to make it where it's it's irrelevant a week after they're gone and we can't crack it up to that point so again we have to think about things in context right so we can't apply the same rules at all operating levels in all domains um and so then that gets down to the actual uh the data supporting it right so we have the applications we have to think through what they want and then the data security and the data types that they that they do so getting to how does this all roll into service now right we have to stop thinking beyond the programs of records themselves sometimes those things are very important but do we need to put an enterprise business system onto every ship do we need to put it onto the submarines onto an aircraft no you probably need to have some sort of capability that's tied together with the operations that are taking place on a ship right we need to know how maintenance applies to cost schedule performance for acquisitions back and uh you know back at nav c but it doesn't mean you actually have to place it there and sometimes that's where we can strain ourselves by our own ideas we think that's what we built we built this thing now let's try and figure out how to slam it into a ship you know workflow the things that happen at a ship are meant for the operators on that ship they need to just get their jobs done so if we start thinking through so many integrations putting the platform like servicenow on the ship and lo and behold you know sometimes uh it's better to be lucky than good um that's usually how i operate and we had that arise last year when we were working with the chaplain's corps a very atypical i.t domain and they had a need they wanted to modernize some of their workflows some of their processes it was largely around trying to understand do they have the right chaplin and write rp's in the right locations providing the right services so we worked with them on this uh on this application and what they identified is like hey we need to be able to do this on ship so we tested it out they were on uh the arleigh burke and they went out and they did reach back capability and we got terrible reviews from the chaplains that were on the ship they're like it's taking me forever to just enter a few pieces of data and it's like well of course you're flying across the satellites bouncing down going through the network coming back over and so every time you do a click it's going to take a while to get back to you and so then they were like all right we can't we can't keep doing it this way right because that's how the navy is already doing it back to the gcss use case right that's how they were having to do it every click took the leap back and forth so we had to put marines on shore where we could just process things faster and so we said well we're just some platform even though we're cloud-based doesn't mean we have to be right let's go on-prem there's lots of communities that use us on-prem and this isn't a unique use case and i'm like we need to be talking to you know disney cruise lines about this too and so we tested it out we put it on a keynes operate you know kings test network so we didn't use a real ship i would love to entertain that moment but uh so we did it out of san diego and we tested putting it on chip and then synchronizing it with the shore and so we simulated all that we got down to we did no connectivity right and really at that point you're just operating with a servicenow instance on the ship your milliseconds are fractions of a millisecond away from the servers that are providing you those digital services doing all the work that they need to do and when the pipe is up and operational we synchronize the data back at goss and then we dropped out and then we went full open we did full close and then we started to scale and mess around with the uh the bandwidth a little bit we got down to about 650 milliseconds of delay our latency kilobit per second pipe and 25 packet loss and we tested it out again had them had the sailors the chaplain cooler go through it do the work that they would normally do and they don't notice a difference why because they're not working in the cloud they're working on the ship the work they're doing isn't leaving the skin of the ship random side story my shoes left the skin of the ship one day when we were doing operation tomodachi and i had to do we had to do a supply run for uh some some japanese local japanese and deliver some supplies and i walked around i greeted everybody and they're super enthusiastic i came back they scanned me and what's the one thing that is uh radiated my boots and they took my favorite pair of boots so they left the skin of the ship but the chaplain score they didn't have to leave the skin of the ship with their data and so um and then it took longer right for the data synchronization to take place and they had to uh but they don't notice the difference but everything synchronized took minutes longer than the normal you know the normal transmission would have taken but now that you have that on the ship right they're going through the process of trying to put it on ship actually actually accomplish that what does that open up for the rest of the navy rest of the marine corps right think of those enterprise business systems you know think of gcss marine corps think of the things that hey my navy hr do we really need all of that capability on the ship are there specific use cases specific things that they need to do day in and day out in a disconnected environment that we can workflow and that we can integrate with those business systems and synchronize compress the data down that's going back all with out-of-the-box capabilities i mean this isn't redesigning something that already exists this is using something that already exists we're now to the point where you know the the dod is always going to win at building you know ships and planes and doing unique things i give i give a hard time to the v22 but nobody else was going to build that outside the dvd outside of the dod not initially right nobody was going to invest in it that way but i t doesn't work that way anymore commercial is moving faster than dd or d king can even adopt it so what we need to do is we don't necessarily have to change those programs of record right what we need to think about is how can we use modern technologies in the locations where we need it the most to do disconnected operations i just like to always think that you know i was uh back when i was in the marine corps we were trying to start uh my my organization my last organization provided services back to marine corps systems command and so we were always trying to gain more programs of record to consume our services we were providing service to the fleet to make sure that the marines actually knew how to use the gear that they were that they were issued understand what problems were taking place and so one of the one of the programs of record i was trying to get under my belt was uh the nodum network on the move program and i'm out in san diego i'm doing work on my phone i fly over to quantico i meet with the program office and they're like you know nadam's really hard marines are having a really hard time with it this is a complex operation i'm sitting there i'm thinking i was on my cell phone doing work in the entire uber ride down that i use my cell phone to book i get in the airplane and i continue at 550 nautical miles an hour and i'm still doing work and i land and i'm doing work on my way here i'm like what's difficult about that we're talking about moving at 30 you know 30 miles an hour in a humvee using the same technologies nothing unique right the dod has some hard problems but not uncommon solutions right there's modern technologies that we can use out there servicenow just happens to be the first to the door and sort of this domain right not a lot of cloud technologies they're talking about how do you do it on ship doesn't mean that we're not the only ones that can't right you just have the opportunity to show the dod there's new ways to do this right there's new thought processes we can apply without disrupting the big acquisition life cycles that take place and so that's what i want to leave you with today i'm going to leave you with the idea that there are hard problems out there but there are not hard solutions we just need to reframe our perspective on how we can adopt technologies to serve largely the fleet right the operating forces that don't have the time to wait for big acquisition life cycle to give them give them the capabilities that they need and that's all i've got any questions what i do on time pretty close yes sir you know getting getting into broader infrastructures that go to see being the keynesian network builds into broader infrastructures via you know the shore side where we have elite network operation centers and security operation centers you know the the point of sale is the integrator right it's the end of the industry and industry partners right because i felt like maybe the old days um where peos and bmws would buy point solutions to figure out how to integrate themselves we really try hard not to do that anymore yeah so so how from a strategy perspective how do you guys kind of tack on that so you'll have a real fighting chance of getting under the hood as an agile data management infrastructure with replication and you know edge distribution and so forth you've got to get into the ecosystem you can't sell this correctly right right um i i really love the opportunity that we're doing with the chaplain corps because it's outside of the realm of what anybody would normally think of right and i'm not going to say this is going to work every time you know sort of look into the crystal ball we're trying to see how how do you how do you insert this without disrupting the ecosystem at large and to me it's really the partnership but we have to be willing to uh and we being the dod a technology vendor the system integrators and and the pmws all working together you know we've been uh like i said lucky than good right better to be lucky than good so we've got the chaplain's course who's non-it they happen to get awareness from admiral small and navwor so all of a sudden he sees what they're doing he's like i want that literally on a linkedin post made from uh somebody at peo digital he's like i want this and that those three words disrupted everything but we also had to come to the table with you know we as a service now we go who are the best of breed who are the people we need to be tied to on this as a partnership to get things going so we we grab two different partners of our system integrated partners one who's really good at on-prem installs and kind of understanding that technology how things work in the disconnected operation and adam worked with them on that and then we also brought in cdwg who's really good at the keynes understand kings because that's the world we didn't really know and so we and we did it wasn't like they were the first ones we went to we actually went to a different si and they said sort of hey we we can't or unwilling to kind of play in this space and go okay that's fine appreciate it early early discussion on it but then outside of that we had you know so we had the vendors involved in the sis we had the mission owner but then we also got opnav was the one who brought the chaplain core to the table so the dto was there um the peo both peos i work with peo digital mlb they're both now involved but it's not it's none of the normal pmws operating outside their space and while we're running this test scenario uh one of the op nav dto folks happens to go down to naval to to do a random event with naval x and he said he happens to be sitting next to uh captain dame from pmw 160. and she's like what are you doing here they introduced each other they didn't know each other and he was like oh we're running a cane stuss event using servicenow and disconnected operations and she's like i'm very curious so i want to learn more about that so in some ways i don't have the perfect answer for that but i think it's it's what i've seen and what i i think really helps with that is it's been a constant collaboration nobody's holding back tech uh you know this the sis that we've happened to partner with are putting skin in the game before it's even before it's even a contract and to me that's really important because a lot of guys will wait till it's a contract and then they're having these discussions and fleshing it out and understanding things it's like we need to come with a big solution right we need to we need to solve this before they say solve this here's your hug requirements does that kind of answer the question a little bit uh it seems like the challenge from a business development and an integration perspective is know how to get into the ecosystem and through csi yes later on i think today we'll talk about opportunities with you know 5g rdt and the intel core same thing you know you've got 12 or 14 or 15 primes on 5g experimental networks how many of those baselines are you guys going to be in right in the output yeah data management replication and you know sort of use case integration capability right yeah it's it's uh yeah there's um i mean 5g living labs you know what it came out of from the marine corps and uh that we're not in that space we talk with them but again it's we have to sell to the sis to sell to the uh to the dod which is you know i tried to when i was at mctissa i tried to separate technology and services and so i think that's where you know and it may not work for every pmw but um i like the concept of i own the technology i get to make the decisions about what direction we want to go and make those changes and i have the sis and i find the right ss aside to do that job and service provider to to use that you know because i had contractors who weren't sis they were just helping me provide a service to the fleet but they had to use the technologies that i gave them um and what it allows is the flexibility to divest yourself of one or the other or both if you want to go a different direction technologically cool i get to make that call if i want to get rid of the si because they're not doing what i'm asking them to cool i get to make that call so that's another thing too any other questions great questions thank you