 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18, live from Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Raja Ranganathan. He is the Vice President of Cloud Services at Cognizant Technology Solutions. I should say welcome back. No, it's not just welcome, it's welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, Rebecca. So tell us, tell our viewers a little bit about Cognizant Technology. What do you do, what does your company do, and what do you do there? Okay, so I had the Cloud Services for Cognizant in the capacity of a Vice President. Cognizant is a world leading professional services company. Our objective is to help our clients to navigate the shift to digital. So we have three pillars, you know, go to market, we have Cognizant Digital Business, which focuses on the user experience, data related, and we have the Cognizant Digital Operations, which is predominantly a middle office, backend processing in an enterprise, and the third pillar is Cognizant Digital Systems and Technology, which is basically modernizing the platform systems that is required to create the digital foundation. Okay, and you're also, this just this week, be called a certified global partner of ServiceNow. So explain how that works. Our relationship with ServiceNow goes back like six years, right? Today I think this ServiceNow line of business, which is under the Cloud Services, is one of the fastest growing business unit for us. The key thing in any platform such as ServiceNow is the human intellectual capital, right? So that is where we gave a lot of importance, okay, while technology is created by ServiceNow, someone has to go and execute and implement the technology. So that's where we spend time and started hiring people, reskilling the people, and then get them certified across different facets of what ServiceNow recommends as a part of their education system. So today we have about 850 plus certified people across the globe, and we also do the delivery across our global operation centers. We also call it as RDCs, Regional Delivery Centers. We have one in Budapest, one in Phoenix, and one in Buenos Aires. So all these three centers get us to different service areas of ServiceNow, right? So as a part of this RDC, we're also adding, creating an experience zone. The ServiceNow experience zone, so when client walks in, they don't only see our associates working on projects, but they also get the panoramic view or the panoramic experience of how ServiceNow orchestration happens, how automation happens, how HR module works, and things like that. So because of the people we have in terms of reskilling and certification, we have been at just as the best overall global partner award yesterday in Knowledge 18. Congratulations. Thank you. When you were searching for these people, and as you said, you had to do a lot of hiring, what were the kind of skills you were looking for when you were trying to find the top talent? Top talent. So if you look at Cognizant, there's a 265,000 plus organization, right? We know the art of hiring people, right? We have all the best practices. It is an art. It absolutely is an art. It's an art, right, yeah. So our approach is, one is we go to the campus, hire the fresh grads out of the campus. If you look at Off-Late, the kids that are coming out of the campus, they are pretty smart in the sense like, they come with the latest digital technologies, artificial intelligence, mission learning, natural language processing, understanding and things like that. So we take them and then within 30 days, we completely format them for ServiceNow. This is one approach. The second approach is we go to the lateral market and we hire and we bring them up to speed on the ServiceNow related technologies. The third option is with 265,000 people we have, the raw material is inside Cognizant. So we take people from other, what is it, business units, other domain and then try to format them and then do that, right? But Off-Late, what we have started, especially within the US footprint is, we go to all the community colleges and also we go to all the veterans association, veterans, you know, those type of organizations and we hire them. So if you look at our Phoenix RDC, I'm proud to say that it is a women-powered delivery center when it comes to ServiceNow with a pretty good mix of veterans. Okay, so these are the different approaches we use to hire people towards the ServiceNow practice. And they've been successful. They have been successful and if you look at how long, I mean, can they continue in ServiceNow for till they retire? No, so we do job rotation. Every three years, we give them opportunity. I have a unique advantage since I run the cloud services. I always rotate my people from ServiceNow to go to Amazon or to Microsoft as you're in different technologies. Every 24 to 36 months, we do the job rotation. In that way, I think I'm managing my retention well. So we know that the role of IT is really changing in so many organizations around the world. What are you hearing from customers? What are their pain points? What are the challenges that you're trying to solve? I think that's a great question, Rebecca, right? We are in a very interesting time, right? And the customers have a tremendous problem in their hand because they need to stay relevant in their business because business models are changing, right? And if you look at, for a retailer, the competition is not from the same industry. Similarly, for a pharmaceutical company, the competition is not from the same pharma industry, right? Everybody wanted to know, a pharma company wanted to know why Google is hiring 100 physicians, right? So the disruption is going to happen not in your industry, outside your industry. So that is the biggest challenge, right? The second thing is they need to continue to reinvent the business model. They cannot operate. We are hearing many stories like, you know, a lot of retail stores are closing because they didn't stay relevant to the business, to the customers. The third thing, if you look at, let's take a healthcare industry. Typically, patients expect, you know, historically, they were asked to maintain their prescription and medical records. But today, in the new age, patients are expecting the hospitals to manage everything because keep the data and intelligently apply the data, right? Because data is the new fuel or new oxygen, whatever you want to call it, right? Fuel, oxygen, one of those analysis. Yes, right. So data is going to play a critical role for any business, right? So every business is looking for, how do I take the data and apply intelligently in the process, how do I elevate experience? When I say experience, it's both customer experience and also employee experience. So that's why if we look at, going back to the purpose of service now when John Donahoe was presenting in the keynote, he said we are in the world, you know, to make people's work better, right? The work is basically the experience, right? So we know about all the digital, I mean, every client is adopting the digital because of the advent of the cloud, you know, and the technologies around that AI, machine learning, et cetera. Everybody is having a clear charter of the digital transformation charter as a part of their enterprises, right? So that is where we, companies like Cognizant, we go to them and then, you know, help them in truly being digital. How do you get there? That is where technologies like ServiceNow plays a critical role. And so it is the mission of ServiceNow and it sounds like also the mission of Cognizant to make the world of work work better for people. So give me some examples of ways that you are creatively solving employee headaches. How are you making the world of work better? Okay, so I'll just give, I'll give a couple of examples to start with, right? For a leading, what do you say, a manufacturing company, they have a lot of equipments distributed, dispersed across the field. So, we use IoT technology, sensors, and we collect the data, and the data gets analyzed and, you know, and then we give a dashboard to our customers. When they say customer, it's the chief customer support officer, he or she can look at the dashboard and send the technician for any wear and tear, right? So instead of, imagine if the cloud was not there, and moreover, we use ServiceNow as a platform to do all the orchestration. If the cloud was not there, if products like ServiceNow was not there, this could have been a humongous, you know, task. But we are helping the problem for the customer. Today, with one click, the chief customer support officer can know which machine is giving which problem, accordingly, dispatch a technician, right? This is one example. The second example is, we are helping some agricultural companies, you know, where, in fact, this came out during our hackathon, which I will talk about you a little bit later. All these agricultural farms, the lands are there, right? I think when you wanted to grow something, you also need to know every day what is the moisture of the soil, what is the temperature, et cetera. So we apply IoT technology and then, you know, collect the data and use ServiceNow, you know, dashboard to, you know, give it back to the customer. These are all real-time problems, you know, the customers are facing, right? Like there are so many examples. But if you look at most of the solutions and the outcome, what we give it to the customer, it's all triggered by our innovation. So we are the only company I can proudly say, you know, with you, conducted three hackathons with ServiceNow. When you say hackathon, all the people are put under one room and then, you know, ideas were given and end of the day, you know, you'll get like 100 plus ideas. Recently, we did about a month back, we did a global hackathon. First time, we wanted to try India at three continents, seven cities, India, Budapest, Phoenix, 20 hours of, you know, continuous time, right? We generated about 115 ideas. Now, out of the 115 ideas, right, I think we are going to convert certain ideas and then put that back into ServiceNow App Store. We have close to six plus apps already running on the ServiceNow Store. Now, our plan for the next six months is to add another, about 10 plus apps, you know, onto the ServiceNow Store. Well, that is the other, the question that begs, is are hackathons the best way in your mind to sort of spark energy and innovation and create? Especially with the millennials. The millennials, yes, definitely, because they don't want to do very mundane routine work. They wanted to, they wanted challenge. They're asking for challenge, right? So this hackathon is one of the ways to keep them happy, right, because the future of workforce is changing, right, and with millennials coming in and, you know, so as a job, they're also expecting, but even in my team, people wanted to change every 12 months, right, so we got to, while, you know, we need to address our customers, we also need to take care of their expectations also, right? So let's think about the future a little bit now. What do you see your customers' future demands and where do you see Cognizant and ServiceNow being able to provide solutions to the problems they don't even know they're having? Yes, you're right, right. So digital is the heartbeat. So when I say digital is the heartbeat, the outcome is all about experience, because if someone asked me, digital is not technology, digital is all about experience, right? So in order to give that experience, customers wanted multiple technologies, you know, they wanted to reinvent, rewire, rethink their business models, right? So that is where we wanted to go as a Cognizant, right? For example, if you take ServiceNow, if you're taking that platform to them, how can I digitize your enterprise process, digitize your entire workflow and create automation, et cetera, and then bring a collaborative work environment within your ecosystem? So this is what they are expecting, right? Nobody wants, you know, non-value add, you know, mundane task, everything they wanted to get operated, operated in an automation manner, right? So that is where we are helping, basically anything that changes the experience or gives a new way to the experience, that is where we at Cognizant, we are constantly reinvesting on people, process, technology, and then taking that back to our customers. It's a great note to end on. Raja, we'll look forward to seeing you again at Knowledge19 next year. Thank you, definitely. I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 in just a little bit.