what do you do when you've got an application that only works under human power it has no apis yet you still need to automate a process involving this software well we've got an answer for you on this episode of breakpoint welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host chuck demasi hello servicenow admins builders developers and of course all the curious individuals i say that with the utmost love and respect every time just for you welcome to or welcome back to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast in this episode i've got the pleasure of talking to prasad velamuri senior principal product manager how are you today prasad i'm doing great chuck i'm very pleased to be on this podcast and i'm pleased to have you right back at you buddy [Laughter] welcome to breakpoint and like always we like to give everybody a chance to give their quick origin stories how they got to be a superhero so please tell us a little bit about yourself yeah sure i have been at servicenow for over six months now i am part of the outbound product management team for rpa which comes under the creator workflow business and my background is in ai rpa cloud and enterprise networking across different functional roles in engineering and product management previously i managed the cognitive automation product line at automation anywhere and prior to that i had my own startup in the voice automation space you've been around the block a couple of times you you must be like 60 years old or something for being able to do all that you don't have to you don't have to reveal your age [Laughter] when you're not doing all that great ai and rpa work what do you enjoy doing in your free time i enjoy hiking along the beautiful trails in the san francisco bay area okay i did a little quick research before we started and i went out to all trails dot com and i discovered there's almost 90 trails just in that area alone that they've got documented pictures it looks like a beautiful place do you have any favorites yes i do i have one favorite hiking trail it's in fremont south fremont it's called mission peak hiking trail it's almost six miles long and the elevation gain is almost 2500 feet and also my recent hike at uh clouds rest near yosemite national park it's at 10 000 feet and i love it it's almost 13 miles 10 000 feet that's not a hike that's that's an expedition do you bring sherpas and alpacas up there to all your stuff no if you have if you have to celebrate some great achievement you should go on hike even in arizona i have a bucket list and i want to do a rimto rim hike in grand canyon it's almost 26 mile hike and the elevation gain is also more than 7000 feet yes it is i bet up there i i uh as much as i like standing at the rim and looking down i don't want to think about climbing back up let's let's ride the mule [Laughter] give us an introduction to what is rpa hub and why should our listeners our developers be interested in it rpa hub is our latest offering which is the command and control center to manage the software robots automation packages and the bot processes so in the san diego version that we released last week we have combined rpa hub and the integration hub into a new offering called automation engine and with this offering our servicenow developers can automate any process uh or connect the servicenow application uh to any third-party application and with these third-party applications especially when they are modern and if they have apis we are already able to utilize integration hub to automate the process but what happens when those applications are legacy they don't have the relevant apis or when we need to automate manual repetitive ui actions uh in that case we can use rpa and that rpa would mimic human actions on these different kinds of applications let me give you an example so take up a process where agents have to constantly you know copy paste data from one desktop application to another you know that civil sharing between different systems to manually copy data all of that so that whole process can be automated through rpa so that the human agents they can focus on higher order tasks that they truly aspire for so the bottom line is that the developers can create and deploy software robots to users desktops and let the robots handle all the repetitive grant work on their behalf this is pretty cool when i when i saw a demonstration of this and we even did a little bit of a boot camp back in november i it was really impressive because we had what was it excel and and of net application neither of which have direct apis they're both desktop applications and we were able to put information from excel into this.net application and okay that that was pretty cool but when you think about it there's there's no interfaces between those but yet you can connect them and and take row by row and put them into record by record went well that's pretty cool excel we've got some connectors that are built in some apis from the uh the rpa tools to actually interface with excel but that net application was done almost i got a pixel by pixel this is the area for this field and here's the submit button and uh it was that was impressive tell us about what it takes to build that what are the components of rpa hub yes so we have three main components firstly we have the rpa design studio this is uh one of industry's most intuitive low code ide to design rpa robots for a very large number of applications and these applications can range from windows applications web browsers all the way to legacy applications such as ibm mainframes and we have over 1300 actions and methods that can help you rapidly build rpa robots also known as digital workers that can mimic human actions such as using various you know ui elements on an application copying pasting text and also doing complex mouse actions and there are also some good cognitive actions that use native computer vision technology the second major component is the rpa hub that allows you to build administer and monitor all the rpa robots centrally from a servicenow instance you can automate very complex robotic workflows uh through flow designer because we have the rpa hub spoke in addition to the other 170 plus spokes and the third major component is rpr on time and this is the runtime that allows you to run an rpa robot on a on a windows virtual machine or or a bare metal server either in attended or unattended modes and all of these three components they work seamlessly uh on the servicenow platform uh and that delivers you a better together experience and this really helps you accelerate your hyper automation journey so we've got the designer where you build these things out which is kind of like flow designer you're building your bots then we've got rpa hub on the instance to do some of the administrative work and then the run time which is actually when you launch these bots from from the the instance right did i get that right yeah that's right okay so now the designer and the runtime if i heard right they're windows based right they currently you have to run those on a windows machine that's right that's right okay so tell me a little bit more about what you can do on the servicenow instance yeah so the servicenow instance hosts the rpa hub to help you build administer and monitor robots and what do i mean by that so when i say build what it means is you can build a bot process and this bot process essentially maps to a real business process that you're looking to automate and how do you build a bot process uh once you have built once you have designed the rpa automation package you would upload that to the rpa hub and using rpa hub you can configure that automation package you would also have a credential vault you don't want to hard code all your user names and passwords so you want those credentials to be used directly and store them securely you also configure the parameters and also the the scheduling and the triggering mechanisms so that is the concept of building the bot process and when i say administer what essentially it means is you can administer the robots by by configuring the machines on which the robots run as per the bot process and thirdly when i say monitor what i mean is you can monitor the robot activity because you have complete visibility into all the execution details and also you can get timely alerts and since you have a common database our cmdb on the now platform you would have complete end-to-end visibility of your automation and and applications and there are also other benefits uh which you don't really find in other rpa vendors it's that you can be really proactive because when the applications evolve you can make timely upgrades and keep the robot stable oh yeah because no one ever upgrades software in the middle of you know like month end or quarter end or year uh so i assume there has to be some sort of governance or control about your application suite and and the servicenow people who are administering these bots right is you wouldn't want somebody to just go hey we released version three and it's got five new fields and make sure they're filled in because they're mandatory you have to keep those bots up to date and and the instance is more than just a repo because at first i'm going okay so you you do these in designer and you upload them to the instance it's the scheduler it's the dashboard to make sure everything's running right uh are there any types of alerts should something go off the rails let's say somebody did upgrade their desktop application and now your your bot isn't running as harmoniously as it could yeah that's right uh you can get that alert and and make sure you immediately make the relevant changes to the robots because you don't want to uh wait till the robot breaks and then start making the changes you want to be proactive well that's the way my software often goes it breaks and then somebody has to tell you about it no it'd be nice to know ahead of time uh i also discovered that this is kind of a two-way integration between um you know the designer let's say and the instance so you've got you've got the ability to trigger flows on the instance from the robot that's running so when we get to this point let's fire flow designer and make it run a flow that we built and then in flow designer we've got a spoke that lets you trigger certain things on the robot or check the status so i mean it's kind of cool that that that we've got this communication going both ways yeah that's correct uh so once you design the automation using the rpa design studio uh you would push the package onto the rpa hub on the instance and on the rpa design studio you also have some actions and methods which are uh which are from the flow designer um and since we have the you know we have one platform with embedded rpa you have a lot of flexibility uh in terms of the bi-directional communication that you alluded to so for example in one scenario you can design the robot to invoke a flow or a soft flow in the flow designer so you have more than 170 spokes so you can invoke any of them from the automation package and in another scenario you can use flow designer to trigger the rpa robot and and how do you do that you can use the rpa robot spoke that is available on the floor designer and i'd also like to point out to our listeners that this is not our typical what i'm going to call a 1.0 release this uh if if those of you that remember back to kingston and flow designer when it first started or some of the other products that we've released we we like to release them early and then do an iterative approach working with the customers find out what's working what's not rather than wait three years and go here it's done and find out we're on the wrong direction so that's not a bad strategy to follow this is already a very mature product that we got through the acquisition of intellibot i mean you guys have worked on this for years right so the the the designer is well thought out and built it's very mature there's hundreds over a thousand of these components for connectors and templates and ocr there's a rules engine there's all kinds of stuff in there that's amazing yeah you got it right chuck the rpa design studio is a very matured product coming from intellibot that was acquired by servicenow early last year it was founded by engineers who have very deep understanding of rpa products so based on their deep expertise they have built this ground up and it's a very matured product and it's already being used by customers to automate a lot of mission critical workflows ranging from itsm to to financial services operations um and in my past roles chuck i have used other competing rpa products and and man i can really vouch for the simplicity and the intuitive design of our servicenow's rpa product the feature rich and and this whole intuitive tooling that we have on the rpa design studio it would make the learning curve very short i'm sure you would have picked it really fast in the prior boot camps and it will also reduce the time to to realize the value for any rpa initiative i have to imagine we're working with the training team to get some enablement material out there yes yep oh good good and i want to point out this is something that our customers have been asking for for quite a while it i've even heard it in analyst calls when gartner or forrester says and check the box that says rpa and i didn't really quite get it until i saw this in action went oh i get it now can you can you give us an example uh or some use cases of what customers have been using rpa hub for yeah so so rpa is industry agnostic so we can think of multiple use cases for business processes across different industry verticals in itsm for example we can use rpa to automate for example common incidents that involves legacy systems that don't have the relevant apis or any system that you know where apis don't exist at all so for example you may have some i.t incidents around system access requests uh password resets application monitoring and reporting so for all of these you can use rpa and you can also use rpa to automate specific troubleshooting sequences uh to to help reduce the empty tr of incidents because many of the i.t incidents there are some specific categories that have a really rule-based troubleshooting sequences uh coming to the employer workflows right employee workflows we can use rpa to automate uh many uh employee onboarding and off-boarding tasks because many of these tasks involve certain third-party applications legacy applications and even for customer workflows we we have similar use cases uh around you know on-boarding and also improving customer experience especially it involves dealing with customer data and some third-party applications um and like i mentioned before even in finance financial services operations there are a lot of workflows uh where uh we can use rpa to automate uh some workflow so for example you know loan processing uh accounts payables and receivables all of these involve some rule based processing um you know reporting bank reconciliation i mean there are a lot of such use cases and i'm sure as customers start playing with servicenow rpa i'm sure they'll see the value and they'll come up with a lot more use cases oh man where was this when i was a customer i i remember we'd get uh we when we onboarded servicenow and people were like yeah i can get users provisioned through the service catalog and then they check that box that said and they need as400 access oh man that just threw a manual process in our face you got to bring up the terminal application you got to fill out in the uh just it was like this this could have automated it you know where was this 15 years ago when i needed it so what suggestions do you have for someone who's just starting out with rpa hub yep so last week we released san diego so rpa hub is available now on the servicenow store and developers can install it on their subprod instances and they can get uh hands-on with the product at no charge uh but they would have to stay tuned for plans uh for our plans to getting it on the pdis or you've heard something about that's that what i started hearing too like when can we get rpa hub on our pdis like uh yeah yeah yeah yeah we know we know so stay tuned and remember you will need a windows machine to do the designer and the um the run time yes i'm sorry i wanted to say bots but that's where the bots run can you give us a hint i always love asking our product manager this give us a hint of what's on the road map ah sure chuck uh i assume we have added the safe harbor disclaimer oh yes i'll put in the there clackson collects and collects it safe harbor safe harbor safe harbor we're good we're good legal okay thank you yeah so so we are laser focused on delivering the best in class and a low code developer experience and and delivering that better together experience on the servicenow platform for a secured and compliant rp offering and as part of this we are enhancing our connectors so the good thing is we are going to come up with a brand new connector for microsoft edge browser okay in the next version and that will allow you to automate different kinds of actions that involve the edge browser secondly we are allowing uh integration with other servicenow products uh so for example we are making it very easy to work with uh the document intelligence product uh that is coming from the atg team and that will help automate many of the workflows that require uh processing scanned documents um and remember these documents these pdfs or images they can come at different levels of complexity sometimes they are structured sometimes semi-structured or even unstructured so you need some intelligence on top of ocr and this requires machine learning to understand those complex objects and their relationships in addition we are also going to support a third party credential vaults so if you are not comfortable storing the credentials on rpa hub you know you can use those third party vaults and then we are also enhancing the user experience that includes uh porting the rpa design studio onto the web because we want the citizen developers also to utilize the web-based design uh not many people would like to you know install rpa design studio so for them they can use the web-based studio and i'm really excited about all these enhancements because all of these are are really going to help any enterprise accelerate their hyper automation journey you mentioned things like the pdf and the ocr and i couldn't help think about a recent experience my wife had she's been doing taxes for well me and our two daughters and their husbands and her sister and her mom it's like she's turned into a regular tax attorney around here but she gets the job done and in one instance they asked to upload uh this is this commercial desktop software that everybody knows and loves i'm not going to mention the name but she uploaded a pdf and it was able to process the information out of there and i don't believe they have rpa hub because we just released it but that might be a use case for something like this as well rather than taking your input from one application to another it could be from a document into your application whatever it may be whether the destination a service now or another application that has no api this is a perfect use case for something like that i also want to point out that rpa hub is separately licensed so it's not part of the base platform it is like integration hub part of our automation engine you do need to talk to your account team for pricing information uh have you also thought about how you would handle the use cases where the there are uh applications that only run on the macintosh platform oh uh yeah right now we don't support macintosh or linux based applications um yeah so we would have those applications running on windows okay so is that on the roadmap yeah so we thought about it but right now we have not included them in the roadmap yet but based on the on the requirement and based on uh how many of those applications are part of servicenow based workflows we will make a decision to include that in the roadmap there you go customers if you need it we know who to talk to now so i would assume that would be just creating a runtime for linux and a runtime for mac os okay your team knows what to do i'm not here to just do your job oh thank you once again for joining us today prasad before we leave can you let the listener know how they can get in touch with you yeah sure i'm reachable on linkedin please search for prasad velamuri and as far as i know i'm the only one with this name in the san francisco bay area i will include a link to your linkedin profile in the show notes in the document that accompanies this so easy to find p-r-a-s-a-d last name is v-e-l-a-m-u-r-i did i get that right yes you got it right take a drink okay thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget to check out the other servicenow podcast you can find them at community.servicenow.com under the resources menu you can also subscribe to this podcast wherever you find all your other podcasts and get it automatically delivered to you i'm gonna try to say that one more time again thank you so much prasad for sharing with us today thanks for having me on this podcast chuck please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening all right this should be a fun discussion it's villa mori i i can repeat that part no that's i can't even get the question right now we'll just go with the question i had before tell me more about the servicenow instance i don't have a question in one of these that's okay you don't have an answer really how many trails are there oh my gosh there's a lot of trails i just realized i kept saying etc etc so many times i'm starting to solid yule brenner from the king and i