 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE, on Wikibon's theCUBE. Our footage and event coverage. We go out to the events, they start to signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jen Strauss, Senior Director and General Manager of the HR applications within ServiceNow. Former customer, now General Manager. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here. Okay, get the ServiceNow shirt on, the jersey, the number, everything's here. I'm official. How does it feel? So give us a quick, you know, dark side. There's always a dark side, but I want to say which one it is. Because I always say with the VCs, you join the dark side when entrepreneurs join the VC ranks. But in this case, ServiceNow, pumping on all cylinders, it's like a well-oiled machine. The fast side. Yeah. It's fast. What's it like? Give us the perspective. It's been tremendous. I've been to two knowledge events before, but as a customer, very different perspective on this side. And it's been fabulous. Very fast. You move fast here. You have to keep up. But it's been wonderful for me to engage with the partners and the customers here to see all the great things that customers are doing with the platform and with our product. And also understanding where they want to see us take the product going forward. It's a culture like at ServiceNow as a company. You're in there asking there for profit. They're going to generate revenue from customers. They have a product. They bring it to the customer to get paid for that. What's it like internally? What's the culture like? What's the people like? It's been incredible to be a part of this culture. And it wasn't what I expected. I knew it was going to be very fast paced, but coming in and being able to rely on everyone to make sure you're successful, everybody is interested in everybody being successful. And I think that starts from Frank on down. He's created that culture. And so that's what it's about. Everyone is steering in the same direction and we're... I've always said in Silicon Valley, people, you know, high flyers come, go. There's a lot of people coming in and out, but building a sustainable business is really hard. You got to give props to Frank Slubman. Talk about what you've learned. Now see HR managers are out there struggling. This is in the press now. Small, medium-sized businesses. All kinds of stuff. Certainly in Silicon Valley, where I live, you know, eight lawsuits coming from, just not keeping your eye on the ball, little things. Like, oh, someone was offended in a meeting. Boom, lawsuit. I was discriminated against. So there's all kinds of stuff happening just by having shoddy HR practices. So talk about what that means, why that's happening. Is it just because they're lazy or the game's changed, the technology's changed? What's going on in the HR application space? I think some other people have said it. And my colleague, Eric Hemmer, who's a solution consultant, now leads the enterprise practice, said it. HR is kind of a 10 to 15. Well, five to 10 years behind IT. They're finally understanding that you can't manage with spreadsheets and email anymore. And we're seeing it. I don't care the size of the organization or what their annual revenues are. There are many organizations struggling with the same thing. How do they provide a better experience for their employees and how do they do it in a consistent way? And so that's, we're seeing it out there. The opportunity is large and small with customers. So it's very consistent. Frank mentions the real-time piece. What's your perspective on that? I mean, being real-time means servicing complaints and managing that. I'm sorry, Dave, I know. It's okay, let's go. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's, you want to be able to support your employees in a way that they're used to being supported and interacting outside of work, right? And especially the younger generation, they come in and they want to work with a company that understands how to do that, not managing through emails. And so they want to come in with a hit company that gets it. So ServiceNow is able to provide that type of experience. So the state of technology in HR is changing quite dramatically. We were talking, I was talking earlier guys from KPMG, PeopleSoft gets acquired by Oracle. It sets off this chain reaction, teleo, success factors. Workday comes into the market space. And so the tech base is changing. And then all of a sudden, ServiceNow starts to play and people are confused. People asked you yesterday and the analysts to me, well, are you competing with Workday? And of course, no, although, you know- But we've been asked eight or nine times already for the past two days. I'm sure, and you'll continue to be asked. And then you said something just recently to John that people, they can't manage effectively with spreadsheets and the like. So there's a lot of confusion because there's a ton of technology that's been going into human capital management for decades. There's some new cool cloud techs coming out, technologies, Workday's just one example, success factors, many others. And then ServiceNow with service management tied to the HRP. So what's happening on the technology substrate? How would you describe the changes that are going on? It's amazing. I mean, the companies are understanding very quickly and you look at companies that have done results from their 2014 surveys of leading HR organizations. They understand that they have to change and to leverage SaaS technology in order to be able to keep up. So like you were indicating, we don't have any plan to compete with the Workday's or the SAP's or PeopleSoft out there. Our whole philosophy is, let's figure out how we compliment what they do and give, like Frank said yesterday, and I love what he said, let's give our customers choices. Let's give them good choices that they can have a good choice of what they want to do. Okay, so you're an HR pro. So many people in our audience have the same question that you've been asked nine times today. You're not competing with the transaction component that is Workday. You don't go to service now to change my data about myself. But we could if you want to though. Okay, so. We could be that front end. So, I mean, again, that's ultimately. So you start there. Sure. And that makes sense. Go through service now, so every request. But we're not going to store that information. We're not the system of record. You're not the system of record there. That's the difference, right? Okay, but now we'll flip it. So you're not going to compete with Workday. But if I'm Workday and I'm saying, wow, this company's service now is doing really well. They're growing at 50 plus percent a year. They got this great market cap. Maybe I should start doing some of that stuff. Now, they could. But they're not going to do the other things. Salesforce, like Frank said the other day, well, hey, I talk to Benioff all the time. You know, we're birds of a feather in a lot of ways. We're developing apps. They're developing apps. So a company like ServiceNow with a market tam of 40 plus billion, you're playing in a lot of places, especially when I have a platform that can do anything. That's right. So where do you see that all going? Well, I mean, in my view, when I look at what I want to provide HR leaders, I want to provide them out of the box, a product that meets the majority of their needs and delivering services to their employees. And I want it to continue to, and we'll expand on this in future releases, look and feel a great user interface because it's all about the employee experience with HR. IT doesn't care about the employee experience. HR cares about the employee experience. So really, really working on that user interface and that experience and the workflows, for me, the possibilities are limitless in terms of what we can do. The Workday is a comprehensive system, but optimizing workflows is interesting because there's so many different workflows in HR. So that stands like the strategy. It's almost like IT in a sense. Pick a few critical workflows. Could be trendy. Hey, we got, this is, new law comes out, or the long-boarding, of course, is the big one that everybody's talking about, right? So what is those use cases? What are the key ones you guys are focusing on? Well, I mean, you have leave of absence is a big use case. Every HR organization, and it's one that can be very sticky, it can also bleed into legal and other areas of the business. So leave of absence, managing those, leave of absence requests. Some basic ones that are easy. Tuition reimbursement, employment verification. Really standard that we will be offering out of the box to our customers. PTO requests, managing time off. Those are all standard things. Yeah, so the learning fruit to you is just automation. Automation. And the other ones are just more, that's rewire something or, you know, could be exposed here. That's right, yeah. What percent of companies in your experience do performance reviews? I just want to ask you as an HR pro. Too many. Too many? Too many. So you think it's counterproductive? I think the, so this is another probably great reason why I joined this organization is in Frank's and Shelley's philosophy on performance reviews. It's not formal the way we consider it formal or HR, many HR organizations do with, you know, the whole performance review and setting goals. He really believes that that whole responsibility lives with the manager and HR is there to support the manager and I love that philosophy. But we have to, as we're developing our product, understand that unfortunately many organizations don't share Frank's philosophies. Oh, okay, so you're saying that many organizations have the HR function do the performance reviews? Oh, they do. I feel like a neophyte. I didn't know that. That's insane. Absolutely. Why would you have the HR department do the performance reviews? Well, and I don't necessarily, I don't agree with it, but it absolutely, I would say in the majority of organizations, HR still manages the whole performance. So the syntax, they have the structure and process which controls the behavior of the manager. So they can take a box. I mean, it's a whole, they don't do the reviews. It's a machine. No, they don't do the reviews but they set the schedule and you must have your reviews done by this time and you must establish your goals and all of this. It's like going to dentist and get your teeth pulled. Yeah. Basically, that's what happens. And then they're constantly pounding on managers when they don't get it done to get it done, get it done, get it done. I mean, that's the way it was in my previous company. No offense, but it just doesn't, it doesn't work. So what does work? What Frank's philosophy and Shelley's philosophy is here and that is managers are responsible for the performance of their team and you reward people for their performance and then people who don't perform. It's like the bogey comes in the last place. Sorry, you know prize for you. So I want to ask a question about systems of engagement versus systems of record. This comes up a lot and I look at it a little bit differently because I don't look at it from the HR perspective. I look at it from the big data side. What's your view of it from an HR perspective? What is the definitions of those? Systems of engagement, systems of record. I can also imagine. So I look at it and this is from, this is my philosophy when I was on the customer side. I wanted to create that one stop shot where my employees could come where they knew exactly. I took all the guesswork out for them. Here's where you come to do everything. Now, ultimately they may be interacting and engaging with a form and service now and that was going to feed via an integration to our HRS IS system, which was Oracle, that's fine, but they don't need to know that. For them, I wanted to create that standard look and feel, standard system of engagement that was predictable for them, easy to use and that's really what you want to provide employees. You want to make it easy for them to be an employee. That's the app, that's a user interface, user experience, flows and clicks, clicks streams. Where all the information is ultimately stored is a whole different matter and not necessarily important to me other than I want to be able to integrate with those systems. Bad UI, bad UX, taking that to the next level means you don't get the data you need for the systems record, so the engagement data is pretty critical. Engagement is absolutely critical if you want your employees to use it. If it is a bad UI, if it isn't a good experience, they're going to go, I'm not going to use this and they're going to, employees make themselves heard very loudly. So they'll let you know if it's a bad experience. So that creating that great system of engagement where it's easy to use and they know how to use it, that's important. How about mobile? As it relates specifically in HR context, that's the conversation we're having. Are you happy with where you are with mobile? Is there a lot more work to do there? Very happy with where we are, but as with everything, I think we can continue to enhance what we offer. It's absolutely a necessity in HR. As you think about where many of the employees make their benefit decisions, it's not at the office on their lunch break. It's at home with their families and so they may be looking for information in a knowledge base or making a benefit selection on their mobile device at home, not at the office. So being able to provide that capability on a mobile or iPad device is very critical. So you guys talk a lot about the affinity with Workday. Of course, I know Anil and Frank, birds of a feather and friendly, but there's a lot of other HR platforms out there, Oracle, SAP, many others. What about those? We also, so right now we're focusing just because the market, there's a lot of shift and interest in Workday, so it's cloud. It's cloud, yeah. But the other ones are also coming up with, they have cloud as well. Access factors is cloud. Yeah, so with Geneva, we'll have a two-way integration with Workday to make that easier for our customers, but then we'll be focusing on additional out-of-the-box integrations with those other HRIS systems as well. So does it have to be cloud-based? I mean, everybody's cloud now, right? Everybody is. You just like it better as your clients. It's just part of the mantra. It's easier. It's easier for you. It's easier for the customers. But it doesn't have to be. It's more of a satisfaction. Okay. Yeah. So what's your goals? Now that you're in there, get your running shoes on, three feet in a cloud of dust, making things happy, you got some teammates to support you, service now. Yeah. What's next? What are you going to work on? What's your plan? Well, we're still not known enough in the HR industry as a trusted platform in HR, so we've got our work cut out for us there. And so it is about what we're building in the product that's going to help us, but it's also going to help us getting out HR tech that's coming here, Mandalay Bay in October, will be here, other events, working with analysts as well to help them understand what we're doing. And really it's going to be about creating more success and a great customer base so that this time next year, I hope to be able to say, we really are one of those vendors that HR looks to first, and not us trying to get in there to have them. Because I think once they do, and once they look at what we have to offer, it's very intriguing for them, but we really want to be at the top of their mind. So it sounds like your strategy then is to say, hey, you know what, you make all the big decisions, we're going to come in, create some value, pretty nimble, pretty agile, land and expand, and if that grows, it grows, and not really mutually exclusive to some other platform. And we absolutely are concentrating right now on where we are very successful, so we have a lot of great customers already on the IT side, so they all have HR departments, so we're absolutely focused there in 2015, but beyond, we really want to expand and be first. Okay, Jim, will we keep it track and we'll be following you if you need any help, let us know, we always roll out theCUBE to HR TechCon in October. It's theCUBE, we are live here in Las Vegas, extracting the sales from the noise-shared night with you, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break with our next guest, stay tuned. Awesome.