ServiceNow 2016 is boasting over 11,000 attendees, and the audience has continued to grow over the years. Chris Pope, Office of the CSO at ServiceNow, Inc., feels that the event still supplies an intimate feel. He described the vibe as having a great deal of energy and happy people.

Pope joined theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, and spoke with cohosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) about customer acceptance and the changing roles within the IT organization.

Gaining acceptance

Vellante asked Pope about the company’s TAM (total addressable market) expansion and how ServiceNow goes beyond stodgy IT to bring excitement to users. Pope broke it down in two ways.

He explained that there is still the core constituency in the IT space that has to be served because these guys keep the lights on. “They keep it running,” he said. “But then you go beyond that and what we’ve found is point solutions have been left behind. We displace the traditional …but there are still point solutions out there and over time as our platform grows, TAM grows.” He continued to say, “Those point solutions are now the targets because they want a single platform and want a way for it all to work together seamlessly.”

In the past, technology providers relied on IT to gather insight into what a company was doing, but they don’t have the insight into the IT world and there is a big disconnect. “We join those dots now perfectly, and it is a natural, easy transition to do it,” he siad.

Reskilling IT

“There is a big shift. You have less of the geek with their hands on the till in the data center,” Pope said. “You used to be absolutely accountable and responsible for service. Now, though, you’re still accountable for the accountability of the data they are running shifted.”

It might be in another cloud or it might be somewhere else, and you’re still are accountable for that business, he added. “So the guys in IT and the gals in IT now are kind of service brokers … if you look at the account contact we have with our customers around planning upgrades and patches and different things like that, they’re that service broker now and have the relationship with us and the transparency we give them into the availability and all the other controls we give them through self-service. You never used to have that, so the roles in IT are changing.”

Pope also discussed recent mergers and acquisitions, new changes in the ecosystem and the different requirements needed by companies in different regions. Always the salesman, Pope departed from theCUBE set leaving baked goods as a bribe to become the next ServiceNow customer.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE