At this year’s ServiceNow Knowledge conference, a wide array of approaches and perspectives on the modern tech landscape are coming together to share their data, with enrichment for all as the goal.

Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research, Inc., sat down to talk with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about some of the market changes he sees coming, how to adapt to them and from where he sees the next big changes coming.

Getting the basics

Wang started off by correcting a common misunderstanding. “I think what people don’t understand is ServiceNow is a platform, there’s a business-model platform,” he said. “What’s changed is, because everything’s in the cloud, what we now have the ability to do is abstract, orchestrate and do it in a way that we’ve never seen before.”

To Wang, some of the advantages this enables include the way “you can take specific business problems, take the heart of what’s actually happening, [and] use it to not just manage the process, but also do the analytics and the monitoring.”

Racing forward

There’s also a path forward clearly laid out by these improvements, with Wang noting, “IoT’s really about having a set of smart services, and being able to put that in a construct is a lot of the opportunity that we see going forward.” He went into further detail by exploring how “package apps have kind of been at a standstill for innovation compared to what’s going on on the customs side. And so every so often, we see that flip on platforms; this is the beginning of that flip.”

Wang also said: “We’re in a post-sale, on-demand attention economy. What that means is, everything after the sale is what’s happening right now, that’s the service, that’s the experience piece. The on-demand piece is we’re accessing smaller and smaller slices of a product; maybe not even a product, a service; maybe not even a service, an insight; maybe not even an insight, an experience. And then, more importantly, it’s an attention economy. If you’re not capturing my time and attention … or if you’re not saving me time and money, I don’t care.”

For enterprises to recognize this finite resource on the part of their customers and do their best to properly utilize it with best practices is essential, Wang explained. But beyond those refinements of marketing and delivery resides a potential tech landscape that holds bold new potential waiting to be achieved.

“We’re actually using technology to augment our ability to do decisions and handle a lot more automation than we had before, but then cognitive assistance popped up, and they help make us smarter, and they learn from our different interactions, and all that’s starting to come into the workplace, which is exciting and a little bit creepy and scary at the same time.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE