Mike Carraway, the senior IT director for Red Hat, discussed the company’s experience as a ServiceNow customer, their specific IT challenges, and their experiences as early adopters, with theCUBE co-hosts Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante, live from the ServiceNow Knowledge14 event.

Vellante started the interview by noting how Red Hat has been transforming, demonstrating rapid growth. “You’ve got people’s attention,” he said, pointing out how, after becoming a billion dollar company, Red Hat is now going after some big prizes.

Carraway then explained that Red Hat is now focused on tackling the challenges that come from growth within product set, customer base, associates, and employees.

Asked if there was a difference in being an IT manager for Red Hat compared to smaller companies, Carraway said “in my entire career, I had customers that thought they knew more than I did. Since coming to Red Hat I have some that actually do. We try to use a lot of our tools in the beta stage,” he added, explaining that trying to enable a dynamic organization creates a lot of specific IT challenges.

“In the places where the IT job overlaps with Red Hat products, we use our own tools,”  including their own cloud service, and the OpenStack platform. “We are really excited with what we’re seeing,” Carraway explained.
 

 
“As early adopters, you have to be the proving ground,” Vellante pointed out.

Carraway agreed, saying “we are trying to be a proving ground around cloud in general. We as an IT shop are making a big push into the cloud.”

The company was also an early and heavy adopter as SaaS.

Commenting on their experience with ServiceNow, Carraway said Red Hat had been the company’s customer for a couple of years.

“We had a system that was referred to as ‘soul crushing’. It was a legacy IT service management (ITSM) tool. As a growing organization, we felt we needed a lot more flexibility. We wanted tools that didn’t just work for IT, but worked throughout the enterprise,” Carraway recalled, ultimately selecting ServiceNow for that transformation. “We’re looking to what we can do to continue the automation and orchestration,” and interface it with the cloud, he said.

Asked if there were any ‘bake a cake moments’ in the ServiceNow collaboration, Carraway said there definitely were, and “it excites us. We see that kind of zealous nature and passion around the tools.”

Commenting on future projects, Carraway said the company was focusing on social productivity.

“Our staff grew with about 20 percent over the last year. Productivity has become really important. We are looking at cloud based solution around that,” as well as better tools for collaboration and communication.