 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Hi everybody, we're back in Orlando, Florida. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and my co-host Jeff Frick, Jeff, our fifth year doing knowledge. Amazing. We've talked over the years about ServiceNow extending its platform into the line of business, and one of those areas is HR. We've had a number of guests on the HR, and we're pleased to invite Deepak Bharadwaj, who is the general manager of the HR business unit. Great to see you Deepak, thanks for coming on again. Thanks Dave, pleasure. So off from the keynote this morning, I had tweeted out it was the best IT demo I'd ever seen, no technology, just people with football, soccer balls, taking us through an HR example, but so before we get there, the keynote today, huge audience, a lot of interest in HR and bringing ServiceNow to HR. Yeah, absolutely, I think the, what we've recognized is HR is where a lot of these processes related to life events start, and then that has implications to many other departments, right? So you think about onboarding, offboarding, transfers, relocations, extended leave of absence, almost all of these processes cut across all departments, and the department that gets the biggest workload, oftentimes is IT. So one of the reasons we see all that interest from IT in HR type use cases is because they are at the receiving end of all of that action, if you will, and if we can solve it for IT, we solve it for HR, we're ultimately solving it for the employee, and that's what we're all about. So it's truly exciting to see the interest, both in my HR topic keynote yesterday, as well as today, there are slightly different audiences. My topic keynote was more geared towards the HR audience, and we actually have a lot of them at the show, which is always encouraging, and today's keynote was more geared towards what we call our IT champions, who want to encourage HR to embrace the platform, and that's absolutely what we like to see as well. Yeah, so the momentum in the business is quite good. I know you guys don't break out the numbers specifically for your business unit, but you talked about a lot of pioneer, light speed, HR customers, you gave some examples. One of the examples you gave was your recent, your personal experience. Everybody can relate to HR, but your recent name change. So give us an update sort of on the business, and talk a little bit more about why HR is so critical to service now. I think the opportunity to transform the enterprise is huge with HR, and just looking at the traction that we're seeing from the marketplace, it's almost the next adjacency after IT, where there's just a lot of inefficiency, and if you think about our work at light speed motto, we're really going after unstructured work patterns, and guess where the most unstructured work happens today? It's in HR, and so I think it's a nice adjacency for us to place well with our platform, the core of what we do with service management. And it's a market that's been underserved for years. And so customers have told us, this is what we would like you to do, and that's how the HR business unit itself was formed. That's why I came here, that's how I got this job. And since then, we've just seen just dramatic traction, especially as the emphasis moves more and more towards making that experience truly consumerized, the service experience for the employee consumerized across all of the departments within the enterprise. So how do you treat your employees as, just like you would your customers? That's kind of a theme that you see cut across the entire customer base, and they're really wanting to get on that bandwagon and service now is an excellent platform to be accomplishing that. It's just so interesting how we see these great successes built in companies recently, just attacking kind of unidentified inefficiency, right? So cloud identified just a ridiculously low utilization rate at corporate data centers and unlocked the value of that efficiency. Uber unlocked the inefficiency of all these cars sitting around not being used. And as you guys have identified, there's so much inefficiency in these unstructured processes that go across multiple channels, phone, text, email, Slack, you know, Jira, pick your favorite name. I mean, they're all over the place. So it's really this huge value opportunity to grab because it is just grossly inefficient and almost so inefficient we don't even recognize that there's a much, much better way until you actually do it in a much, much better way. Yeah, no Jeff, that's absolutely right. So like you mentioned, there's a technology aspect to this, right? So there's just multiple systems and that leads to inefficiency. And then when you don't get what you want from the technology, what do you do? You resort to people. And so for years, HR has dealt with this problem by just throwing more people at it. And the way I like to think about it is we've gone from this era of trying to essentially create reincarnations of things that were already automated. So I come from the HCM space, if you will, talent management, recruiting. And so we've taken a recruiting system and then tried to make that better and better and better, put it in the cloud and so on and so forth. And if you look at core HR and some of these other technologies, that's what they do. And they do a great job at that. But what we've recognized is, yes, that is obviously important and necessary. But really, like I said earlier, when you have a life event, you're looking for just information. So you can make the choices that you want to be making during that life event. You want step-by-step guidance. You want access to some real person that can help answer those questions. And when you don't get those types of things, now you're back to unstructured emails and sending text messages to somebody in HR. And that's not their job. Their job is to be helping you with providing strategic support. And so how can we take the, unlock the utilization, if you will, of those HR professionals, the people as an asset within HR, and make them more productive. That's what we're all about. And then jump on the latest, greatest trend. Just cloud, obviously you guys have cloud application, a little bit of software automation, a little bit data support into that automation. And then, ta-da, hopefully it's a whole lot smoother process. Yeah, yeah. What has to happen for a customer to take advantage of HR within service? Now, we had one guest on yesterday that actually started at HR, but generally that's not the case, right? Normally it's an extension of ITSM. So what's the typical case and what are the prerequisites for customers? I think the, in my mind, a couple of things have to happen. One is HR has to be bought in. So we've got a lot of IT champions, which is great, but like I encourage them to go out and do, give these HR people a hug, literally, right? Because they need to understand what the platform can do for HR and how it can unlock that productivity that you just spoke about, Jeff. And HR has to be bought in. They need to be educated on the problem that they have. A lot of times they don't even recognize that there is a problem because they've just gotten used to doing things a certain way. And now there is this revolutionary platform that can help them. So getting them on board, getting that buy-in, I think is important. I think the other thing that has to happen is these organizations need to identify very specific set of problems that they want to go after because if you look at the set, problem set that we can address, everything from just simple case management all the way to automating business processes like onboarding. You can start wherever you want in that spectrum, but you need to figure out what your priorities are and start there. And if it's case management, that's fine. You figure that out. Now you can actually measure progress and move from there. If you want to start with onboarding and automating a business process, that's fine as well. But very often I find that our customers need some help in trying to identify the priority projects that they can tackle. And that's a blessing and a curse of having such a powerful platform. It can do everything. And oftentimes it's just getting to the right set of priorities that you want to tackle. But that, the flexibility of the platform, like you say, it's a two-sided coin. But I want to ask you a question. You're a software executive, been in the business a while. You know one of the complaints of software historically is if I have a process that's fossilized, a lot of times when I bring in new software, I have to change that process to adapt to the way in which the software handles it. And that's been a headwind for a lot of adoption. If I have a process that's baked, can I just sort of use that within ServiceNow and apply the existing processes? And is that typically how it happens? Or do customers sit back and say, hey, there's a better way to do this? Yeah, I would say it's probably a mix of the two. There is the, where do I start? I have a process. Can I just take that and put it into ServiceNow? And absolutely, that's been happening since ServiceNow has been in its existence, right? That's the core of what we do, being able to structure work, being able to automate it through workflows, things like that. But oftentimes what will happen is then they get the analytics, you know, using performance analytics or reporting solutions, you can now start to look at what's working, what's not, and then make some adjustments. So for example, with HR, you might start off with, hey, everything is a general inquiry, right? And so now you're getting a number of things that are tagged as general inquiries, but then you look at analytics data and it says, well, 30% of those are actually going to the payroll department. So guess what? Now we need to restructure our processes so that we've got some special handling for payroll because that tends to be a friction point for employees. And that's how, you know, our platform can provide that visibility so you can evolve as your needs evolve and as you mature. Now it's going to say, I'm sure people are wondering, you know, there's other big HCM applications out there. You've worked for some of them. How does the service now offering suite fix into kind of their existing HR application infrastructure? Great question. So this is probably the number one question that our customers ask us. You know, they're trying to figure out where does service now start and where do these other applications begin? And I think the answer is it depends. And we want to provide customers with choices. What we are trying to optimize for is that employee service experience. What does that look like and how do we make it as consumerized as possible? So there's maybe three broad use cases where these solutions fit in. So one might be I am within one of these systems. So let's say I'm doing a performance review within a workday or success factors. And now I have a question. You know, I'm stuck here. Now you're in service now and you're submitting a case asking a question searching a knowledge article as an example. That's one use case. The second use case is something happened in my life. I'm going to have a baby or somebody in my family is sick and I need to tend to them or I need to relocate an employee from a different country. Where do I even begin? So you start with service now potentially you figure out what do you want to do and then you submit the request and eventually you might end up, you know, completing a transaction in one of those systems. But what we do is help guide that employee to where they need to be going. And the third one really is the use case we explored this morning which is around onboarding, offboarding, transfers. How do we take what's happening within those systems and extend that to all the other departments. So there may be aspects of onboarding as an example that's happening in a recruiting system. How do we take that and then extended into IT and finance and facilities and so on and so forth, right? Great. Deepak, can you share with us some early customer experiences some maybe metrics, proof points? Sure, yeah, I actually had a couple of those on the screen this morning. So I'll use Sally Beauty as an example, beauty supply retailer. And they started with the employee relations function and trying to optimize that. And the challenge they were having is all of the employee relations questions from the field and they got a number of stores and all of these associates were sending in these questions to an inquiries and complaints in some cases to the HR business partners. So there were regional business partners in each of the regions and they were getting all of these questions. So as a result that HR business partner who is supposed to be thinking about how to help staff new stores and just provide more strategic support to the managers, district managers, they are feeling employee, first level questions about employee relations. And so what they did was they centralized that function, the HR service delivery function so that there is all these calls to go to a central location and they just had two people now manning it and we did some value calculations with them and what we recognized is they had saved the equivalent of seven people's time, worth of time that could then be repurposed back into something else, right? So they've centralized the function, they've moved work from high cost business partners to lower cost HR support personnel and each person that you can free up is at least $100,000 a year fully loaded. So that math starts to add up pretty fast and very quickly this is just employee relations. You extend that to benefits and payroll and so on and so forth. You're in millions of dollars a year. Yeah, so that's a pretty powerful example and even though they're not getting rid of people but they're avoiding potentially new hires and as you say they're driving new value, every company we talk to is trying to do some kind of digital transformation or what they don't want to do is route paper. So is that what you're seeing is where are they putting the resources that they're saving? What are you seeing? Some examples of what customers are doing. Yeah, it's all sorts of things, right? I think analyzing the data, I think is a big area, just the data science piece of it. So if you look at a service center, would you rather be looking at how to reorganize your resources or would you rather respond via email to all these unstructured queries, right? Clearly the former is a much more higher value added work. So that's one area that you see a lot of repurposing. The other that I talk about is how can you improve the quality of service itself? So instead of you answering questions about my benefits plan, go find me a better benefits plan. You know, do some research and look at what else is out there, right? That's where you should be spending time. And then the classic one is really around talent, right? There's just a lot of talent management-type activities that need to take place from sourcing, recruiting, managing succession, planning processes and things like that. Again, you should not be telling me how to put a job requisition online, what pay grade to select and what area to post this in. All of that should be available as some sort of a knowledge based item. You should be actually going out there and doing your job of sourcing high quality candidates, right? So that's how these things really compliment each other and unlock the potential of the HR team. Spend your time sharpening the saw and not whacking at the tree, right? Exactly. I got an automated tree whacker. I can actually focus on where I want to go next. All right, real quick, limited time here, but the announcements that you're making today, we haven't touched on that yet, so give us the rundown. Yeah, so what we've done essentially is look at processes that require, and the way we categorize it is these are processes that are usually long running, processes that require action across multiple parties, multiple departments, and they have a specific sequence. So we looked at that as the baseline and we said, hey, what fits into this? Because if we could create a structure that models this out in a very easy to configure manner, then what problems could we solve? Obviously we used onboarding as the example of where we wanted to go, but we found out that model is easily applicable for transfers, off-boarding, things like that, and so what we've done is taken the underlying workflow capabilities of the platform, so underneath the covers, it's still a workflow that is running, but we've essentially created a very clean data model on top, and the imagery that I use is when you go into these HR, visit any HR customer, if they're going through an exercise of revamping their onboarding process, you'll see a wall with sticky notes, posted sticky notes, different colors, right? And we took that and we said, how can we get that into the software where you'll see phases, right? There is day, offer stage, pre-boarding, week one, month one, and so on and so forth, and each of those stickies, they actually represent activities within the application. So we've created a model that lets you take that visual imagery and put it in the product, so it's just easy for them, easy for HR to be able to configure this without needing any technical expertise, and that's where I think there's a lot of IP. It helps them with change management, it'll help with adoption, and hopefully it'll bring a true transformation, not just to HR, but across the enterprise. Excellent, well Deepak, thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE, it was good to see you again. My pleasure, Dave, Jeff, thank you so much. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge 17, and we'll be right back.