 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We have Deepak Bharadwaj joining us. He is the general manager of HR Business Unit at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Deepak. My pleasure. Glad to be here. Good to see you again, likewise. So we know that ServiceNow is expanding beyond IT, and HR is a huge business opportunity. Describe for our viewers how you view your role, and sort of how you see HR in the modern organization. Yeah, that's a great question. So what we are trying to do, really, is help our customers, HR organizations, provide their employees with what I call the Google Maps for their employee journey. So if you think about Google Maps and what it has done in terms of the transformation of the travel journey, it provides you proactively with the guidance that you need as you make your way. And so if you think about the employee journey, it could be long in an organization, it could be short, but they all have these moments that matter, whether they are personal, whether they are professional. So when you think about personal moments that could be birth of a baby, I changed my address, I got married, things like that. It could be professional if I'm a manager, I want to promote someone, if I'm a new hire, I'm being onboarded. So how do we help guide these employees through each of these moments that matter in that journey? And why that's important is because that's when employees need their organization support the most, and so if you don't get that right, then it starts to have an impact on everything from productivity and engagement, and eventually that starts to impact customer satisfaction, right? So if you really think about happy employees equals happy customers, you're going to have to bring it back to things like employment, brand, productivity, engagement, and really where the rubber meets the road and where things could fall apart is during these moments that matter. So what we do is we help HR departments manage that, provide the proactive guidance to these employees, provide high-touch help when they need it because not everything can be automated, but you might order a Starbucks on your app, but sometimes you just want to go and walk up and talk to the barista. And so we want to make sure that we can provide flexibility to our customers in being able to manage how they interact, how employees interact with these HR departments and make them feel like they've got the peace of mind, get the emotion and the stress out of these moments that matter and get them back into what they're doing best, which is their day-to-day job. You said that companies are investing in, when you were talking about investing in employees, in customer success, but that's really about investing in employee success because happier employees lead to happier customers. They're happier to come to work. Do companies get it? Do companies get that? I think they do. They get it at a philosophical level, it makes sense. I think where companies struggle with is they are trying to figure out how do they make that linkage happen and the reality is there's no silver bullet. It's not, you fix this one thing over here and that's going to make an impact. And so our approach is, while there may be many other things that you need to address, right? What we focus on really is making sure that we give this employee that guidance that help when they need it the most because we believe that that's where things could fall apart very easily. But on the other hand, if you actually take care of them during those moments that matter, that represents a great opportunity to differentiate themselves and create what we call competitive differentiation, right? In fact, the topic of my keynote this morning was how employee experience creates competitive differentiation and that's what we are here to enable. You guys talk a lot about the HR onboarding experience. You got to get a desk, you got to get a badge, you got to sign up on this portal, that portal and it's just a slow and somewhat painful, not really productive period in an employee's life. When I think, and you and I talked about this at headquarters, when I think about how I interact with Netflix and Fred Lutty talks about this all the time, bringing that consumer experience to the enterprise. I don't talk to Netflix's sales department or marketing department or customer service department, I just interact with Netflix. I'd like to interact with HR the same way. I believe that's what you're trying to do. Is that a reality? Can that happen in our lifetimes? Is it happening today? Absolutely, why not, right? We've got the technology for sure. It is a very well-known pain point. Everybody knows this pain exists. I think where we are in terms of maturity of the market for these types of solutions is trying to figure out, well, who owns this problem? So this is a very distributed problem. It's across the enterprise and anything across the enterprise we have serviced now do very well. But a lot of times it also means that we have to go and make the case or help our champions make the case with many departments. So in this case you need to get IT on board and facilities on board. Obviously HR has to be on board. It is a number of departments that have to come together. And so we still have to figure out who owns this problem? Who owns the budget? How are we planning to roll this out? Can we do this in a phased manner? And that's where we are today in terms of its maturity. But at this point, we launched the product last year. We had customers that were creating bespoke solutions. Before that we productized it. We launched enterprise onboarding and transitions last year at Knowledge, in fact. And we've seen, we're starting to see the early customers starting to implement based again on the foundation of case and knowledge management, start there, get your unstructured interactions more structured and then eventually start to automate the things that are going to make that difference, especially when they start to cut across these multiple departments. I know, I ask you this all the time, but for our viewers who aren't as familiar with what you guys are doing in HR, if I just brought in Workday or Success Factors or I'm a PeopleSoft customer, why do I need service now? What do you guys do? We talked to John Donohoe about you guys are a platform of platforms, but explain that please. Sure, absolutely. Maybe I'll go back to the Google Maps metaphor. The way I think about this is, you know, in my mind, Workday, you can think about them as a highway system, but you have to drive on them. Yes, it's got signage and you need to know what exits to take, right? So to me, Workday has a good user interface, if you will. But a lot of times what employees are looking for is where do I go? Where do I begin? What's the policy? What's the process? And so that's where the Google Maps equivalent comes in. And these two go hand in hand and they are extremely complementary and you just cannot imagine going out there without a Maps application these days. And in fact, where I feel that things are truly transformed is this is not just when I don't know the way to get somewhere. You're using this for every trip now. When I go home every day after work, I'm using Google Maps. Whether I know it or not, it turns on and it tells me, oh, you're headed home. It's going to take you 35 minutes to get home. And I didn't ask it anything. But I'm using Google Maps every day for a route that is well-traveled because I know that if there's a traffic backup, it's going to let me know. Police ahead. Right? Or whatever. Yeah. And so I think that's where we are different from systems that are extremely important for either managing or core data, core business processes, talent management, workforce management. I mean, there are systems that do that. They do that very effectively. But we are really trying to provide that guidance, especially when what you're trying to get done involves multiple departments and a number of times multiple systems, even within HR. Okay. Go ahead. When you're thinking about, when you're talking to customers, what are they telling you about their biggest pain points? And then what is your, if you have any sort of overarching advice for these HR practitioners, what is it? Oh, it's a good question. So we engage with customers typically three different ways. They're all related. But typically our engagement starts off either because we're talking to someone that runs shared services. And what they're trying to do is bring order to how employees are interacting with HR. And typically they will go through some sort of an organizational change. They'll set up a shared services organization, which basically means that becomes a single entry point for employees to go to. And in that case, really the pain point is too many unstructured interactions and they may have no technology or they may have technology that is inadequate and we bring a method to that madness. If you will, we help them structure those interactions and help them provide the right type of support to these employees. The other way we engage with customers is they're going through a full blown HR transformation. And they've decided that technology is going to be a big piece of their transformation. And as they are looking to move everything to the cloud, for example, we start to talk about how the interaction aspect of employees still needs to be managed and you cannot ignore that. You cannot just move your systems to the cloud and then just hope that employees will figure this out themselves, right? Because again, it's not about the user interface. It's about the entire end-to-end experience. So that's the other pain point that we help solve for them. In the context of a cloud-based application or a set of applications, how do you make sure that they know what they need to do? And then the third piece is it's usually a CHR-type conversation where they are really starting to make this association between happy customers means happy employees. And so they have several strategic initiatives then that are at C-suite level, trying to figure out what does that really mean and they're trying to drive great employee experiences. And so they're working top-down. As part of that, they may end up with a shared services set up to manage that. They may end up with moving systems to the cloud, but it's a different angle. And they are really thinking about that the holistic end-to-end experience for that employee and what they're going to feel, how does that impact employment brand? So kind of higher-order benefits that they're trying to accomplish. But ultimately, we make the HR department much more effective and efficient and we make it very, very easy for the employee. Well, that's what we end up doing. You guys completed some research with Chief Human Resource Officers. Yeah, the CHRO point of view study. 500, I think. Yeah, absolutely. You studied, tell us about the study, the findings, what you learned. Yeah, yeah. So this was a study that was done recently, 500 CHROs and HR leaders that we studied. I think the number one thing that popped out for me was that these CHROs are thinking of their role as not someone that is managing talent management processes and people data and things like that. That's obviously very important and that's been the focus. But as those disciplines mature, the technologies that manage that mature, what's happening is they're focusing towards how to create these great experiences, how to leverage digital technologies and create what we call consumerized experiences, especially during these moments that matter. So when they're thinking about their employee population, they're looking at, where do these breakdowns happen? This is where things are likely to snap, quite literally, but employees can get angry, frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed out, this is very intrinsic, it's from the gut. And so that's where your employment brand starts to take a dip. And that ends up on Glassdoor that will end up with this employee speaking with a friend and that starts to directly impact employment brand. So they're starting to focus on these moments that matter. And then I think what they're trying to do is also develop digital proficiency. One of the things that came out of the study is how can CHROs be the change agent when it comes to digital transformation so that this just doesn't have to come from IT, doesn't have to come from a different line of business. HR can manage and guide their own destiny. Obviously, IT is going to be involved, but how can HR be more and more in the driver's seat, become more digitally proficient? And we see that in our customer base. We've got a number of customers where HR deployed service now first and really set the bar for the other departments to follow. But ultimately, we absolutely believe that every department should be on the same platform because that's where you get the economies of scope, if you will, in terms of the solutions to these problems. What can you tell us about your business? How are you guys doing? It's a couple years now since you launched this product. How's it going? Well, it couldn't be better. As John mentioned in our earnings call last quarter, it was last month, actually, we had $6 million plus ACV deals just for HR, right? And that's just in one quarter. So that starts to show you how the business is really picking up. We have hundreds of customers now using us for HR. 80% of them are of our customer base is live. In fact, we had a customer in my keynote. They did a global rollout and they took 14 weeks to complete that global rollout. So the time to value is extremely fast and that's one of the things that really makes it a solution that our buyers are attracted to. But the business is doing very well. A lot of interest from organizations that are all sizes, really. You look at 1,000-person organizations. We are selling to hundreds of 1,000-person organizations. We're selling globally in all geographies. We are selling to all verticals. And it's just great to see the business take off. Great. Well, Deepak, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much and love being here and thank you for having me. Awesome seeing you. Can't wait to see you again next year. Likewise. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more just after this.