welcome to another episode of glide chat my name is michael lombardo with me is our chief technology officer aaron johnson aaron how are you i am great mike how are you good i think technically now you're our chief architect you've had a lot of different c-level titles here but you are the official first employee of glyfest there's a lot of controversy around this no controversy no controversy yes i was the first employee actually hired okay has been a contractor a little bit longer than i have okay so mia was our first like re the first developer at clyde fast correct but you were technically the first w-2 yes okay i was hired about a month before mia and mia was a contractor about a month before i was so you and i met long ago jeez you were long before glide fast 18 my first yeah i think i was 19 years old my first internship at partners healthcare yeah yeah so we both had the same boss back then we both worked for uh well two couple guys uh carlos savero carlo yeah i love carl and jim mccomb who's a good friend of both of ours as well yeah at the service desk at partners way back when i was running the uh service center yep which is kind of a precursor to servicenow and a different itsm platform and yeah well you were you're an analyst right yeah yep so peregrine service center and then became hp service center it's still alive you know believe it or not it is who was i talking to i was talking to one of the guys that works with i it may have been ryan gillespie i think he uh no no shut up ryan shout out to ryan somebody was mentioning that that one of their customers was was still using it to this day wow which is unbelievable to me because that system was dated when i stopped using it which is about 10 years ago now or right around there maybe uh eight nine years ago something like that but yes people are still using hp service manager which was great in the day yeah yeah it's very flexible yeah um flexible i wouldn't say very i wouldn't say it's flexible it is flexible and extremely difficult to actually administer i know you can have them both ways i remember when you made this scrolling text yeah when we had like a team that you know their their on-call schedule or something yes yes and i remember that was like a big to-do we were so excited we were excited to get that and now that's like that's like a layup and service now that's like you know that's that's too easy i remember one of the first things that carlo wanted when we decided to put in and this was long after you had obviously left partners but one of the things carlo wanted with servicenow was hey can we get our scroll and banners back i'm like no maybe not scroll and we can pop a message yeah we can do some really cool things but quite honestly that was a nightmare to maintain yeah and it took so many resources it went down i remember going down all the time we'd always use the web backup all the time why was it going down i was always curious like why well a number of things i mean one essentially i became responsible for like every aspect of it from running the server exactly the infrastructure for it so the actual servers it was running on the database to a certain extent the clients like you name it it ended up being my responsibility and i'm not a server guy per se i don't know you know how to properly size a windows server yeah that's some of it and it was just legacy you know applications so it it was originally meant to run on a mainframe yeah back in the day that's the and they imported this stuff over the years to run on you know uh windows boxes and sql server and all that yeah but a lot of that wasn't baked into the platform to begin with so it was not it was not a robust system but i'll tell you you know take the system aside and this is how i later on my career looking back i i realized that the technology is only half the battle that help desk was so well run absolutely i mean that was my first experience with the service desk and we had kpis metrics you know we every month carla would post those stats on there like who took the most calls who resolved the most call and i didn't know idle at all i didn't even know i've never heard that term ever but then when i went to boston medical center i left partners went to boston medical center it wasn't as well run it was a smaller shop right technology wasn't there either but just like i'm like wow how do we didn't have a knowledge base you know like right we i remember we had the the k base at partners that i think like joe king and a couple other guys yeah joe king that they built like a homegrown website and it was just like everything you needed all the info we needed one place yep and that's what i when i went to bmc that was one of the first things i started working on i built my own i wanted to do it for the team i did end up going for the i didn't tell anybody at first built like a basically a website with all the data because they were going to g drive sharepoint all this i'm like you guys need a gay base right so i built that first and that was actually how when they chose servicenow a couple years later they were like hey mike you you built a knowledge base this has a knowledge base do you want to be the admin i was like yes i didn't know what servicenow was but i was like sign me up yeah you know originally i was actually i had built up that that hp service manager peregrine service center platform and it's it had a sister product too called asset center i built that up over the course of 10 12 years and it really was my baby and at the time at partners we had um this was in around 2011 2012. we had a new director come in and he was already familiar with servicenow yeah i wanted nothing to do with it yeah i'm like i'm just going to replace my baby yeah no and then kind of the first time i ever saw it i'm like i was just blown away like everything that i had to do in four or five six different tools yeah was all baked into the one platform i didn't have to worry about any of that infrastructure you know uh the platform obviously has come quite a ways in that time right like crazy ten years you know the seeing the cmdb map and the discovery i'm like holy moly this is amazing isn't it crazy how it's been able to scale yeah and improve like because hp service center that's hit a brick wall like there's nothing yeah take it through sorry hp but yeah you know but it's the truth like you can't improve that service now i i think it was just because obviously the architecture but i think it was built at a time that 2005 past 2000 i think you know the way it was built allowed it the possibility to scale it's just newer technology and that's where i think some of the challenges with like salesforce it's the same kind of thing like you can't kind of get past that boxy aol 1995 you know infrastructure and the development is not easy to do like we you know we dabbled in salesforce originally early days of glidefast sorry servicenow we we tried it and we did a couple implementations but the the development was just cumbersome the ui was tough you know yeah and service now luckily i think again i think just the technology was built on allowed it to improve the ui allowed it to add new features and now we have this mammoth you know i know it's it blows me away how much the platform has continued to improve and continue to add uh really cool features on to it uh over the course of what would you say 2005 2004 so yeah they're coming up on 20 years and they do not stop innovating right that and i think a lot of that you know is thanks to fred waddy and his initial team yeah they really they didn't plan for it to necessarily even be an icsm platform they didn't want it to be a platform yeah he didn't want it to be right but it was it was too card a concept to kind of sell the idea of just a platform i think now it would be a gateway drug itsm was the gateway exactly you know just get them in get our foot in the door right and that's what we're seeing even now i mean it's you know we see it every day it's like it's a all right procurement's gonna try this right we've got facilities that wants to try you know just these little onesie twosie workflows and then all of a sudden before you know it you're in every corner of the business you know well and i don't think servicenow likes to say this out loud but honestly you could replace the majority of your business applications with the one platform right and that's no small fee believe me no we have customers that would love to do exactly that yeah it's a challenge it's absolutely a challenge because these legacy applications have been around for decades or you know longer in some cases some of our larger customers have been using the same types of processes for 40 50 years yeah and and how do you stop your day-to-day jobs right you know it's like okay we gotta we gotta analyze how we do all this write it down talk about it whiteboard it yeah get a vendor in here to help us right solution this the right way because the other challenge of servicenow is there's a lot of ways you can do these things that's absolutely true and but there's there's one best way there's one absolute best solution and if you're not looking at the big picture if you're not factoring these things in you can you know sometimes get and that's why partners and expertise are really crucial to this absolutely so local we were talking about the low code stuff like yeah it's a low code platform but that doesn't mean you don't need experts and that's absolutely true because to your point there's a right way to do things and there's a wrong way to do things yeah and if if you're just coming into service now not a lot of knowledge about it and you don't go and learn about the platform yeah you can still make some pretty serious you can definitely make mistakes and and we all have i mean i'm not i'm not ashamed i am by no means perfect i've made my share of mistakes we all have we all learn yeah so it really is important that especially when you're starting off in your servicenow journey you know as a customer or somebody that's newly implementing service now that you bring in somebody that really knows it yeah and can tell you an overall strategy as to how you should use it right and that i think is one of the bigger challenges with bringing in these legacy apps is they want to bring in the legacy app as well as the legacy process yeah you got to take a step back exactly and you got to say no just because we've been doing it this way for 20 years is that the best way how is that process going to interact with this other process over here you you don't have to necessarily know every nut and bolt right away but you should have a general plan as to how these things are going to interact exactly and a service now is providing a way for those processes to interact normally i would say try that way first servicenow has given us a lot of thought you don't have to go back to the drawing board and start from something brand new it just doesn't make sense no it doesn't leverage it exactly it's not i mean yes it is a platform and if there's a specific type of business functionality that you need that hasn't already been built in we'll build it build it yeah absolutely go for it but if it's if it's a common practice or common process that servicenow's already doing try this try to in the i always like go back to this like everybody wants to try to be perfect day one and and i'm like just use it like obviously we're gonna have to do configuration personalization we're gonna have to build some stuff because and a lot of times you hear people like petrified like we don't want this to be a customization you know it's like listen we gotta avoid bad practice follow good practices get best solutions but yeah don't be afr like servicenow is not done we're not going to implement this for phase one and you're stuck with this for the next 30 years absolutely a lot of it we don't know yet right you don't know we don't know we got to use it a little bit and say you know what if we would auto populate this field when we do this it's going to make our lives easier hey if we automatically and sometimes you don't realize because you're such you're you've been stuck in an archaic processes and systems the that possibility of automation hasn't occurred to you yet so it's like you need to first you know just get your feet wet use it and then continue to go it's never done and that's the beauty of servicenow like absolutely their their road map's never done they're always going to be continually proven and you should be as a business all the time it re you know reinventing yourselves continual service improves my favorite step of idle yeah yeah yeah i and i think that's it's a challenge for a lot of these uh customers they really are not in kind of that agile mindset where things continue to evolve over time exactly there's a saying that i love that perfect is the enemy of god you're never going to achieve that's perfection don't aim for perfection aim for 90 percent right better just aim for better even for better exactly and i know it's hard to say because especially companies are making a big investment here sure i mean you gotta you got that's the challenge with with that with a lot of these implementations too it's a big investment uh people are putting their names on the line right we've seen it where things don't go well it doesn't go well for the leaders i think that's why glyphs has really been super successful is because from the beginning the message we would always say is like listen challenges are going to come up we have your back yeah we're not gonna like we're not lawyers here we're not holding your feet to the fire like you know we're here to be a long-term partner with you help you be successful challenges are gonna come up on your side challenging to come up on our side we're going to do we're going to pivot where we need to and make things right yep and it it's you know it's it's a level of trust i mean like you you know you've been in some of your clients you've been in for like since the beginning are you still on that one i am still on that one god they are still hanging they won't let you go huh absolutely not and you know i love them yeah i wouldn't want them to go so that that's totally fine with me it it becomes like personal you know it's like it is you go to like war together you know well and to your point earlier we don't want to be this this partner that's coming in and charging a whole mess of money and then just walking out the door yeah no it's more important for us to build a long-term relationship where we truly are your partner right and if you go down we go down if you are exactly stand up we stand up right it it all works out in the end and i think that makes us different than a lot of other partners we you know we're more concerned with the long-term health of the customer and making sure that the choices that they're making with servicenow and elsewhere are the right choices that's awesome and so you're number one number one and a half whatever it is like what's special about clyde fast to you like what why do you stay yeah yeah well one of the uh there's a few reasons um one of the the things that i love about glidefast the most is how much we're willing to share information with each other right i've been here since the beginning with you and mia and lloyd i don't mind you know i don't know everything obviously yeah i don't mind going out and asking that question yeah it doesn't matter if you're me or somebody that's brand new to servicenow i want everybody to be comfortable asking questions and getting the answers and everybody is willing to help i think that's that's especially one of the absolutely defining features of who we are yeah right is sharing that that information with everybody we've you know the the main project i'm working on now we've you know kind of instilled that within the team and and made sure that everybody is aware because some of these folks uh you know haven't been with glidefast a long time they've been you know serviced now a while yeah ask questions right there's no shame in asking yeah we're not we're not here to point finger like we're truly in it together and like that's something we can't lose you know that's so important it is crucial to who we because we got big growth plans we got we have big plans for the future but it doesn't work if we lose our team like if we lose our sure if we're who we are that's who we are and like it starts to get you know i'm above this person or put you know yeah and that's like just something from the beginning it's like we don't need to do that no no it's never been that way it's you'll be more successful in your career anywhere not just glide fast yeah by helping other people and in life by the way yeah absolutely like when i do something for somebody it's it's more for me than them i know it sounds weird to say but it makes me feel good like like just like going going something like helping my grandmother with something like you know setting up a tv or remote control for something like makes her so happy it makes me feel good to make her happy i'm not yeah i'm doing it for her but like it makes me feel good so it's more self-serving to like help the people around you and and what i what we always talk about at glidefast is like listen then when you need somebody somebody else somebody's got your back and that's the secret sauce yeah and and other partners either don't know that or don't care i don't think they care to know that i think it's more about money for a lot of partners maybe it's never been about money for us no it really has been about improving ourselves yeah and helping our customers improve as well right that's the ultimate goal and if you follow those things you're going to win it's it's going to come natural you know i know over the years that you and everybody else on the team has put their heart and soul into making sure that that works starting with you yeah yeah we all have absolutely we all have and shout out to everybody at clydefest that that has i mean absolutely uh it's been a hell of a ride it's not i mean it's just it's funny it's always feel like day one right it always you know in it we have these achievements and it's like people like man you must like part i'll tell you the biggest time we partied you were there it was the we got the servicenow partner of the year award yeah like that was like the biggest like all right i'm gonna go and have fun about this when we the apex acquisition like i haven't had like a party night because it's like we got work to do you know what i mean like that's we're not taking our victory lap you know the partner of the year thing meant more to me than anything because like that's recognition validation of all of that hard work it absolutely is and you know we never really got like respect in the early 90s not initially not initially but now now it's like you know mcdermott's on speed dial you know but um yeah we're now the first guy you call not the last guy yeah yep so yeah it is very validating to have that happen these days well aaron thank you for uh all your hard work dedication i love you brother and love you too man and uh look forward to the future same here mike thank you all right everybody have a good one [Music] you