Welcome to gossip about gossip powered by Hedera hashgraph, and each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for a sole. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the gossip about gossip podcast. My name is Zenobia God's chalk and I am the SVP of communications at Hedera Hashgraph. Today, I am excited to be with Nicola Pacheco and Alicia Harrington from ServiceNow. Hey guys, how are you doing? Well, thank you. Hi Hello. Nicolette, tell me a little bit about the company and your role there. OK so ServiceNow is a cloud provider, and we like to say that our mission is to make the world of work work better for people. And really, ServiceNow is all about work and workflows. And we are able to orchestrate the activities of people in the enterprise and across the enterprises, in customer service, in technology, in hr, in employee experience and a lot of other disciplines that are today key to the modern enterprise. And my role specifically, I'm a DLT blockchain solution engineer since a few weeks, let's say, in the innovation team, and I'm dealing specifically with the use case that require support from a DLT technology like identification. Congratulations on the new role. And Alicia, you work in something called the chief innovation office over there. Can you tell us a little bit about that group and your role there? Absolutely so being part of the chief innovation office, also, it's part of the same wider group as alongside Nicola. We're really helping customers take an outside in view. We're looking at what are the emerging technology, what are some of the data trends in the industry? Thinking more outside the box of how customers can reimagine their value chains, how they can innovate their core operations and really as an evangelist in my role, I'm very deep in industry and academic research trying to translate that back to an individual customer perspective and starting to see how these industries are evolving and adapting. And so really, we're bringing some of the best solutions. And so that our customers can also innovate new products and services on the ServiceNow platform. Wow that's a big role. A big lot to look at there. We are in we're in sort of the springtime. April, may. A lot of people talking about being energy efficient, being green, that means a lot of different things to both people and companies. What does that mean to you and to ServiceNow and to the Office of innovation? Absolutely so ultimately, it really means let's take from an enterprise company perspective, which is really our main set of customers. We think about that by helping organizations understand what it means to say, transition to cleaner sources of energy, reducing overall environmental footprint or impact on the environment, and being able to start to look at their core power sources and operations whereby they can transition from a Brown energy source through to a green energy source. And really, that's what it means over time. But it's also extending when we say, being green or being sustainable. You know, the majority of sustainability impacts actually result from a company's activities in their supply chain, as well as third parties, suppliers and all of the vendors and partners within that company's wider ecosystem. So it's also about helping the ecosystem drive more of a net zero mission and reduce, you know, a carbon intensive operations at the end of the day. So when we think about that from different industries perspective, it really is different. Per industry industries, it's very different coming from a, you know, a manufacturing company that's more looking at sustainable product design, looking at raw materials that have a lower impact on the environment. And then when we cross over into the financial services sector, it's really about funding more green investments and looking at how the banks can assess their customer base in terms of total emissions. So we really look at sustainability or being green is something that's very, very different by the industry sets. And it's really important to see how that's evolving in these different areas. Yeah, Yeah. That sounds like a much more holistic view and very well thought out across a number of different industries. How did you first learn about, you know, public ledgers, DLT and then specifically, haddara? Well but then in 2017, I would say discovering blockchain at that time and becoming passionate about the possibilities of blockchain and DLT. And I think I learned something about that there at that time. But I had the opportunity to dig a lot deeper in the last 12 months while we were establishing our partnership, and ServiceNow had the opportunity to join the daera governing council. And that was really the time that I really started digging deep in the capability of the era and on topics like the consensus service, the token service and more recently, the smart contract and investigating which are the use cases, more compelling for ServiceNow customers in terms of utilization of this kind of platform. So that's the story behind that. Great and why are your customers saying that they want or need to incorporate public ledger capabilities into their applications? Well, I think there are different perspective on that topic, but Uh, it's very important to understand that data tiering that customers have in order to understand their needs in that sense. So from one side, there are data which are like publicly available. For example, what is related to ESG disclosure that must be made available for the public and must be certified and must be guaranteed that there are no modification of this data and everything is tamper proof. On the other side, there are some data which are internal private to the enterprise, but you still want the customer to commit on this data and be able to verify later that this data is consistent. For example, this can be data around the parties or their other master data, which as required in the business network and business network, is really a key concept. We are seeing more and more customers, which are willing to not only digitize internal processes, but more and more digitized processes across different organizations. So in the supply chain between the focus company and their supplier and supplier of supplier and on the other side, the customer which are receiving goods and services from these entities. So these are all, let's say, key capabilities which are required, but also customer are looking more and more in topics like tokenization for different enterprise usage and also decentralized identity, which is becoming very important to establish any kind of credential really in the ecosystem. Great and Alicia, the innovation office is doing a tour around the country in the US here. Can you talk about some of the early use cases that you're demonstrating to customers? Absolutely so first and foremost, we're really looking at the carbon offset project marketplace that banks need to effectively fund a lot of enterprises that are looking to offset their emissions. So we are using Hedera distributed ledger technology to effectively be able to tokenize a digital asset, which is the Carbon Project and allow for customers of the bank to purchase those carbon offset credits and be able to reduce their emissions over time. So we do see that banks will be needing to interrogate blockchains not only in that use case, but another use case would be, for example, the actual customer of the banks footprint, say, in the supply chain, where a bank can interrogate that particular blockchain with all of that environmental footprint data and know that it is verifiable, it's sourced, it's auditable, it's traceable back to the source as well, and has all of those protocols in place to really establish evidence for not only the bank, but the financial system for the regulators so that we really have this transparency and ecosystem more broadly. So there is some of the use cases that we are working with customers and showcasing at the moment here at ServiceNow. That's very exciting and you've talked a little bit about that transparency that you get that you can share with regulators, probably with your end customers. What other kinds of benefits do you expect for your customers to see from the adoption of this technology? As Nicola was mentioning rightfully earlier, you know, DLT ultimately brings transparency. Through the ecosystems, whether it's the supply chain examples we're providing or the financial services, but what it means is not only reducing the cost of auditing and monitoring, but let's say an example in financial services, which is really clean cut, we can use a key capability like a smart contract feature, which can be utilized to create a contract among multiple entities. And these digital roles can be stored on the blockchain, and we can execute that automatically when, say, a condition is met. And that key capability can be used in areas of, say, commercial settlements within the commercial part of the bank, which overall reduces what we call counterparty credit risk. So what happens usually is a bank is usually transacting and providing funds to the end bank. Let's say, for a physical commodity shipment going from one country to the next, we can execute that smart contract and reduce that settlement risk and that counterparty credit risk and really making sure that the process is efficient along the way. And so that these settlement times are really rapidly executed and both banks can trust each other set of rules, all on the blockchain. Very exciting. I love to hear about some of these real world use cases. Nicolette, what is next for the integration between ServiceNow and haddara? Well, we have already established the capability to use DLT capability inside the ServiceNow ecosystem. So this is very exciting, I believe, because ServiceNow is all about developing application, building low code application in a very simple way. So having available all the capability that DLT provide in this kind of format, empower customers and partners really to develop different kind of use case on the platform. But really, we are looking in the possibility to activate business network between customers. This is something that we believe is very exciting and allow customers to digitize the process between them. We are seeing then that across multiple industry, we are seeing that in banking, of course, between the bank, the customer and ecological project, more and more in ESG. But we are seeing that also in all other industries. Supply chain is one of them where business networks are, let's say, everywhere because you need to manage this long chain of. Goods and services and finance, but also, for example, telco are currently very active in the concept of business network because, for example, there is a need to manage distributed asset networks between different organizations, either companies and partners and maintainers, and that require a single source of truth. That cannot be maintained by an individual organization, but needs to be something that is available to the entire network of participants. So this concept of business network, we think, is very key and is strongly related to the concept of value chain in the different industries and all the different capability that ServiceNow is able to provide for business all across the world. That's very exciting. Having all of those pieces come together and communicate and be able to share data. As you all both have said very transparently, I love the vision. Nicola and Alicia, thank you so much for spending time with us today. We really appreciate it, and we hope you will join us again at some point in the future and keep us updated on everything that ServiceNow is doing.
