Jigesh Saheba, the CTO, VP and Chief Architect and Mobile Strategist at ADP, was interviewed by theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at the Splunk.conf 2013 in Las Vegas.

Because many people don’t yet associate ADP as a technology company, or an apps company, Vellante invited his guest to talk more about ADP’s Innovation Lab.

“Innovation Lab was started a few years ago and our mission is to create relevant, consumable, cutting-edge technology solutions for our clients, so that they can manage their most important assets, the people,” Saheba explained.

The ADP offering today is a mobile one, but they have a number of other initiatives that intend to introduce new ideas and solutions in their products.

ADP is a major player in the human resource, the human capital management marketplace. They compete with the likes of Oracle, SAP, and WorkDay. Vellante asked his guest to elaborate on the HR piece and the software involved.

“We offer the broadest array of products in the area of HCM (Human Capital Management). Innovation is nothing new to ADP,” boasted Saheba.

On leveraging cloud, social tech

The Wall Street Journal recently featured ADP, and the article talked about the way ADP is leveraging LinkedIn for recruiting, so Vellante wanted to find out more details about the area of emphasis in that space. Saheba noted the major disruptors in the market for ADP – mobile, social, cloud-based computing and analytics.

“We’re embracing all these technologies and, looking at our products set, wonder how can we ingrain social within our products.” Saheba didn’t just want a bolt-on approach, but really meant incorporating the social aspects within their products. “Throughout our product line, the end-users have the capability and the ability to make informed decisions either through real-time analytics or leveraging the social medium to get the job done,” explained Saheba.

Picking on the extended history of the company, Vellante showed interest in the way the cloud and Saas changed their business. “We are not new to SaaS. We’ve been doing cloud for a long, long time,” Saheba said. “Being able to bring services quickly in a very cost-effective manner to the end user, with the minimum requirements/investments from our clients, consuming services from the cloud, makes perfect sense in the industry we are in.”

Using Splunk

“A couple of years ago when we rolled out our mobile solution application, we wanted to have complete visibility: a 360 degree view of how this product is functioning, how it’s being perceived in the marketplace and having that feedback loop so that we can improve products continuously by collecting real-time data and real information about the way our end users uses it,” explained Saheba.

“Splunk is a critical component of the success we had with this product. Using Splunk we were able to monitor end-to-end, to be able to understand the processes steps.”

At the Splunk conference 2013, Jigesh Saheba gave a talk about how ADP “uses big data to drive superior customer experience.”