Bill McVicker, Global Managing Director for Accenture, discussed the company’s partnership with ServiceNow during his visit to theCUBE. There he met with co-hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick, live at the ServiceNow Knowledge14 conference.

Commenting on Accenture’s involvement in the ServiceNow community, McVicker explained they “started in 2009 with our first project” and then signed a global agreement in 2012. “We are building the practice and offerings and have a great relationship with ServiceNow.”

“We have to be conscious that we have the relationships within IT and at the CEO level, that’s where ServiceN0w wants to start,” McVicker said. “We bring folks from a particular industry, team up with IT and ServiceNow folks and bring a complete solution to our customers. The great combination is taking the service management expertise that we’ve built over 20 years and start to apply it to other services outside IT.”

Asked to define the intelligent infrastructure, McVicker said “we know that this new, ubiquitous world is really founded on infrastructure. Everything touches everything. We are based in infrastructure. Infrastructure has to get smarter, it has to be self-aware, it has to understand what it can provide to its customers. We’re really driving our clients to think about ‘how do I make my infra smarter and smarter.'”

“As we start to move into this hybrid world, where more and more of IT sits outside the walls of IT, it starts to bring some interesting paradigms,” McVicker continued, noting the main challenge is how to provide services when 50 percent of them are not from inside, how to front end that to customers.

“We’re trying to move into an experience where custoemers can click and order from a catalog,” McVicker stated. In that context, organizations have to start thinking how they can stay relevant to their customers.

After the automation phase, enterprises are now getting into service orientation. As McVicker explained, enterprises “have to be able to automate, but also provide that customer experience, while also having to get behind the scene.”

“A lot of people are at the automation level,” he said. Unless they move into this new phase of service orientation, they won’t stay relevant to their customers.

Giving an example of a customer at that level of automation, McVicker mentioned a very large financial services company. When they started working with Accenture, “we walked in and asked, ‘what kind of services you provide?'”

They were offering 700 items of which 80-90 percent, were unrecognizable to their customers, McVicker explained, going on to say that “to be relevant to your customers, you have to determine what are your services, and get them in a way that they understand them and care about them.”