(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas, "theCube" is on our fourth day of covering AWS re:Invent, live from the Venetian Expo Center. This week has been amazing. We've created a ton of content, as you know, 'cause you've been watching. But, there's been north of 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. We've had amazing conversations across the AWS ecosystem. Lisa Martin, Paul Gillan. Paul, what's your, kind of, take on day four of the conference? It's still highly packed. >> Oh, there's lots of people here. (laughs) >> Yep. Unusual for the final day of a conference. I think Werner Vogels, if I'm pronouncing it right kicked things off today when he talked about asymmetry and how the world is, you know, asymmetric. We build symmetric software, because it's convenient to do so, but asymmetric software actually scales and evolves much better. And I think that that was a conversation starter for a lot of what people are talking about here today, which is how the cloud changes the way we think about building software. >> Absolutely does. >> Our next guest, Holger Mueller, that's one of his key areas of focus. And Holger, welcome, thanks for joining us on the "theCube". >> Thanks for having me. >> What did you take away from the keynote this morning? >> Well, how do you feel on the final day of the marathon, right? We're like 23, 24 miles. Hit the ball yesterday, right? >> We are going strong Holger. And, of course, >> Yeah. >> you guys, we can either talk about business transformation with cloud or the World Cup. >> Or we can do both. >> The World Cup, hands down. World Cup. (Lisa laughs) Germany's out, I'm unbiased now. They just got eliminated. >> Spain is out now. >> What will the U.S. do against Netherlands tomorrow? >> They're going to win. What's your forecast? U.S. will win? >> They're going to win 2 to 1. >> What do you say, 2:1? >> I'm optimistic, but realistic. >> 3? >> I think Netherlands. >> Netherlands will win? >> 2 to nothing. >> Okay, I'll vote for the U.S.. >> Okay, okay >> 3:1 for the U.S.. >> Be optimistic. >> Root for the U.S.. >> Okay, I like that. >> Hope for the best wherever you work. >> Tomorrow you'll see how much soccer experts we are. >> If your prediction was right. (laughs) >> (laughs) Ja, ja. Or yours was right, right, so. Cool, no, but the event, I think the event is great to have 50,000 people. Biggest event of the year again, right? Not yet the 70,000 we had in 2019. But it's great to have the energy. I've never seen the show floor going all the way down like this, right? >> I haven't either. >> I've never seen that. I think it's a record. Often vendors get the space here and they have the keynote area, and the entertainment area, >> Yeah. >> and the food area, and then there's an exposition, right? This is packed. >> It's packed. >> Maybe it'll pay off. >> You don't see the big empty booths that you often see. >> Oh no. >> Exactly, exactly. You know, the white spaces and so on. >> No. >> Right. >> Which is a good thing. >> There's lots of energy, which is great. And today's, of course, the developer day, like you said before, right now Vogels' a rockstar in the developer community, right. Revered visionary on what has been built, right? And he's becoming a little professorial is my feeling, right. He had these moments before too, when it was justifying how AWS moved off the Oracle database about the importance of data warehouses and structures and why DynamoDB is better and so on. But, he had a large part of this too, and this coming right across the keynotes, right? Adam Selipsky talking about Antarctica, right? Scott against almonds and what went wrong. He didn't tell us, by the way, which often the tech winners forget. Scott banked on technology. He had motorized sleds, which failed after three miles. So, that's not the story to tell the technology. Let everything down. Everybody went back to ponies and horses and dogs. >> Maybe goes back to these asynchronous behavior. >> Yeah. >> The way of nature. >> And, yesterday, Swami talking about the bridges, right? The root bridges, right? >> Right. >> So, how could Werner pick up with his video at the beginning. >> Yeah. >> And then talk about space and other things? So I think it's important to educate about event-based architecture, right? And we see this massive transformation. Modern software has to be event based, right? Because, that's how things work and we didn't think like this before. I see this massive transformation in my other research area in other platforms about the HR space, where payrolls are being rebuilt completely. And payroll used to be one of the three peaks of ERP, right? You would size your ERP machine before the cloud to financial close, to run the payroll, and to do an MRP manufacturing run if you're manufacturing. God forbid you run those three at the same time. Your machine wouldn't be able to do that, right? So it was like start the engine, start the boosters, we are running payroll. And now the modern payroll designs like you see from ADP or from Ceridian, they're taking every payroll relevant event. You check in time wise, right? You go overtime, you take a day of vacation and right away they trigger and run the payroll, so it's up to date for you, up to date for you, which, in this economy, is super important, because we have more gig workers, we have more contractors, we have employees who are leaving suddenly, right? The great resignation, which is happening. So, from that perspective, it's the modern way of building software. So it's great to see Werner showing that. The dirty little secrets though is that is more efficient software for the cloud platform vendor too. Takes less resources, gets less committed things, so it's a much more scalable architecture. You can move the events, you can work asynchronously much better. And the biggest showcase, right? What's the biggest transactional showcase for an eventually consistent asynchronous transactional application? I know it's a mouthful, but we at Amazon, AWS, Amazon, right? You buy something on Amazon they tell you it's going to come tomorrow. >> Yep. >> They don't know it's going to come tomorrow by that time, because it's not transactionally consistent, right? We're just making every ERP vendor, who lives in transactional work, having nightmares of course, (Lisa laughs) but for them it's like, yes we have the delivery to promise, a promise to do that, right? But they come back to you and say, "Sorry, we couldn't make it, delivery didn't work and so on. It's going to be a new date. We are out of the product.", right? So these kind of event base asynchronous things are more and more what's going to scale around the world. It's going to be efficient for everybody, it's going to be better customer experience, better employee experience, ultimately better user experience, it's going to be better for the enterprise to build, but we have to learn to build it. So big announcement was to build our environment to build better eventful applications from today. >> Talk about... This is the first re:Invent... Well, actually, I'm sorry, it's the second re:Invent under Adam Selipsky. >> Right. Adam Selipsky, yep. >> But his first year. >> Right >> We're hearing a lot of momentum. What's your takeaway with what he delivered with the direction Amazon is going, their vision? >> Ja, I think compared to the Jassy times, right, we didn't see the hockey stick slide, right? With a number of innovations and releases. That was done in 2019 too, right? So I think it's a more pedestrian pace, which, ultimately, is good for everybody, because it means that when software vendors go slower, they do less width, but more depth. >> Yeah. >> And depth is what customers need. So Amazon's building more on the depth side, which is good news. I also think, and that's not official, right, but Adam Selipsky came from Tableau, right? >> Yeah. So he is a BI analytics guy. So it's no surprise we have three data lake offerings, right? Security data lake, we have a healthcare data lake and we have a supply chain data lake, right? Where all, again, the epigonos mentioned them I was like, "Oh, my god, Amazon's coming to supply chain.", but it's actually data lakes, which is an interesting part. But, I think it's not a surprise that someone who comes heavily out of the analytics BI world, it's off ringside, if I was pitching internally to him maybe I'd do something which he's is familiar with and I think that's what we see in the major announcement of his keynote on Tuesday. >> I mean, speaking of analytics, one of the big announcements early on was Amazon is trying to bridge the gap between Aurora. >> Yep. >> And Redshift. >> Right. >> And setting up for continuous pipelines, continuous integration. >> Right. >> Seems to be a trend that is common to all database players. I mean, Oracle is doing the same thing. SAP is doing the same thing. MariaDB. Do you see the distinction between transactional and analytical databases going away? >> It's coming together, right? Certainly coming together, from that perspective, but there's a fundamental different starting point, right? And with the big idea part, right? The universal database, which does everything for you in one system, whereas the suite of specialized databases, right? Oracle is in the classic Oracle database in the universal database camp. On the other side you have Amazon, which built a database. This is one of the first few Amazon re:Invents. It's my 10th where there was no new database announced. Right? >> No. >> So it was always add another one specially- >> I think they have enough. >> It's a great approach. They have enough, right? So it's a great approach to build something quick, which Amazon is all about. It's not so great when customers want to leverage things. And, ultimately, which I think with Selipsky, AWS is waking up to the enterprise saying, "I have all this different database and what is in them matters to me." >> Yeah. >> "So how can I get this better?" So no surprise between the two most popular database, Aurora and RDS. They're bring together the data with some out of the box parts. I think it's kind of, like, silly when Swami's saying, "Hey, no ETL.". (chuckles) Right? >> Yeah. >> There shouldn't be an ETL from the same vendor, right? There should be data pipes from that perspective anyway. So it looks like, on the overall value proposition database side, AWS is moving closer to the universal database on the Oracle side, right? Because, if you lift, of course, the universal database, under the hood, you see, well, there's different database there, different part there, you do something there, you have to configure stuff, which is also the case but it's one part of it, right, so. >> With that shift, talk about the value that's going to be in it for customers regardless of industry. >> Well, the value for customers is great, because when software vendors, or platform vendors, go in depth, you get more functionality, you get more maturity you get easier ways of setting up the whole things. You get ways of maintaining things. And you, ultimately, get lower TCO to build them, which is super important for enterprise. Because, here, this is the developer cloud, right? Developers love AWS. Developers are scarce, expensive. Might not be want to work for you, right? So developer velocity getting more done with same amount of developers, getting less done, less developers getting more done, is super crucial, super important. So this is all good news for enterprise banking on AWS and then providing them more efficiency, more automation, out of the box. >> Some of your customer conversations this week, talk to us about some of the feedback. What's the common denominator amongst customers right now? >> Customers are excited. First of all, like, first event, again in person, large, right? >> Yeah. >> People can travel, people meet each other, meet in person. They have a good handle around the complexity, which used to be a huge challenge in the past, because people say, "Do I do this?" I know so many CXOs saying, "Yeah, I want to build, say, something in IoT with AWS. The first reference built it like this, the next reference built it completely different. The third one built it completely different again. So now I'm doubting if my team has the skills to build things successfully, because will they be smart enough, like your teams, because there's no repetitiveness and that repetitiveness is going to be very important for AWS to come up with some higher packaging and version numbers.", right? But customers like that message. They like that things are working better together. They're not missing the big announcement, right? One of the traditional things of AWS would be, and they made it even proud, as a system, Jassy was saying, "If we look at the IT spend and we see something which is, like, high margin for us and not served well and we announced something there, right?" So Quick Start, Workspaces, where all liaisons where AWS went after traditional IT spend and had an offering. We haven't had this in 2019, we don't have them in 2020. Last year and didn't have it now. So something is changing on the AWS side. It's a little bit too early to figure out what, but they're not chewing off as many big things as they used in the past. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Did you get the sense that... Keith Townsend, from "The CTO Advisor", was on earlier. >> Yep. >> And he said he's been to many re:Invents, as you have, and he said that he got the sense that this is Amazon's chance to do a victory lap, as he called it. That this is a way for Amazon to reinforce the leadership cloud. >> Ja. >> And really, kind of, establish that nobody can come close to them, nobody can compete with them. >> You don't think that- >> I don't think that's at all... I mean, love Keith, he's a great guy, but I don't think that's the mindset at all, right? So, I mean, Jassy was always saying, "It's still the morning of the day in the cloud.", right? They're far away from being done. They're obsessed over being right. They do more work with the analysts. We think we got something right. And I like the passion, from that perspective. So I think Amazon's far from being complacent and the area, which is the biggest bit, right, the biggest. The only thing where Amazon truly has floundered, always floundered, is the AI space, right? So, 2018, Werner Vogels was doing more technical stuff that "Oh, this is all about linear regression.", right? And Amazon didn't start to put algorithms on silicon, right? And they have a three four trail and they didn't announce anything new here, behind Google who's been doing this for much, much longer than TPU platform, so. >> But they have now. >> They're keen aware. >> Yep. >> They now have three, or they own two of their own hardware platforms for AI. >> Right. >> They support the Intel platform. They seem to be catching up in that area. >> It's very hard to catch up on hardware, right? Because, there's release cycles, right? And just the volume that, just talking about the largest models that we have right now, to do with the language models, and Google is just doing a side note of saying, "Oh, we supported 50 less or 30 less, not little spoken languages, which I've never even heard of, because they're under banked and under supported and here's the language model, right? And I think it's all about little bit the organizational DNA of a company. I'm a strong believer in that. And, you have to remember AWS comes from the retail side, right? >> Yeah. >> Their roll out of data centers follows their retail strategy. Open secret, right? But, the same thing as the scale of the AI is very very different than if you take a look over at Google where it makes sense of the internet, right? The scale right away >> Right. >> is a solution, which is a good solution for some of the DNA of AWS. Also, Microsoft Azure is good. There has no chance to even get off the ship of that at Google, right? And these leaders with Google and it's not getting smaller, right? We didn't hear anything. I mean so much focused on data. Why do they focus so much on data? Because, data is the first step for AI. If AWS was doing a victory lap, data would've been done. They would own data, right? They would have a competitor to BigQuery Omni from the Google side to get data from the different clouds. There's crickets on that topic, right? So I think they know that they're catching up on the AI side, but it's really, really hard. It's not like in software where you can't acquire someone they could acquire in video. >> Not at Core Donovan. >> Might play a game, but that's not a good idea, right? So you can't, there's no shortcuts on the hardware side. As much as I'm a software guy and love software and don't like hardware, it's always a pain, right? There's no shortcuts there and there's nothing, which I think, has a new Artanium instance, of course, certainly, but they're not catching up. The distance is the same, yep. >> One of the things is funny, one of our guests, I think it was Tuesday, it was, it was right after Adam's keynote. >> Sure. >> Said that Adam Selipsky stood up on stage and talked about data for 52 minutes. >> Yeah. Right. >> It was timed, 52 minutes. >> Right. >> Huge emphasis on that. One of the things that Adam said to John Furrier when they were able to sit down >> Yeah >> a week or so ago at an event preview, was that CIOs and CEOs are not coming to Adam to talk about technology. They want to talk about transformation. They want to talk about business transformation. >> Sure, yes, yes. >> Talk to me in our last couple of minutes about what CEOs and CIOs are coming to you saying, "Holger, help us figure this out. We have to transform the business." >> Right. So we advise, I'm going quote our friends at Gartner, once the type A company. So we'll use technology aggressively, right? So take everything in the audience with a grain of salt, followers are the laggards, and so on. So for them, it's really the cusp of doing AI, right? Getting that data together. It has to be in the cloud. We live in the air of infinite computing. The cloud makes computing infinite, both from a storage, from a compute perspective, from an AI perspective, and then define new business models and create new best practices on top of that. Because, in the past, everything was fine out on premise, right? We talked about the (indistinct) size. Now in the cloud, it's just the business model to say, "Do I want to have a little more AI? Do I want a to run a little more? Will it give me the insight in the business?". So, that's the transformation that is happening, really. So, bringing your data together, this live conversation data, but not for bringing the data together. There's often the big win for the business for the first time to see the data. AWS is banking on that. The supply chain product, as an example. So many disparate systems, bring them them together. Big win for the business. But, the win for the business, ultimately, is when you change the paradigm from the user showing up to do something, to software doing stuff for us, right? >> Right. >> We have too much in this operator paradigm. If the user doesn't show up, doesn't find the click, doesn't find where to go, nothing happens. It can't be done in the 21st century, right? Software has to look over your shoulder. >> Good point. >> Understand one for you, autonomous self-driving systems. That's what CXOs, who're future looking, will be talked to come to AWS and all the other cloud vendors. >> Got it, last question for you. We're making a sizzle reel on Instagram. >> Yeah. >> If you had, like, a phrase, like, or a 30 second pitch that would describe re:Invent 2022 in the direction the company's going. What would that elevator pitch say? >> 30 second pitch? >> Yeah. >> All right, just timing. AWS is doing well. It's providing more depth, less breadth. Making things work together. It's catching up in some areas, has some interesting offerings, like the healthcare offering, the security data lake offering, which might change some things in the industry. It's staying the course and it's going strong. >> Ah, beautifully said, Holger. Thank you so much for joining Paul and me. >> Might have been too short. I don't know. (laughs) >> About 10 seconds left over. >> It was perfect, absolutely perfect. >> Thanks for having me. >> Perfect sizzle reel. >> Appreciate it. >> We appreciate your insights, what you're seeing this week, and the direction the company is going. We can't wait to see what happens in the next year. And, yeah. >> Thanks for having me. >> And of course, we've been on so many times. We know we're going to have you back. (laughs) >> Looking forward to it, thank you. >> All right, for Holger Mueller and Paul Gillan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCube", the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, brilliant cloud community, and welcome back to AWS re:Invent. We are here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how you doing? >> I'm doing well, thanks, yeah. >> Yeah, I feel like... >> I'm hanging in there. >> you've got a lot of pep in your step today for the fourth day. >> I think my voice is coming back, actually. >> (laughs) Look at you, resilient. >> I was almost lost yesterday, yeah. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> So, I actually, at a Hitachi event one time almost completely lost my voice. The production guys pulled me off. They said, "You're done." (Savannah laughing) They gave me the hook. >> You got booted? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, you actually (laughs) got the hook, wow. >> So, I have good memories of Hitachi. >> I was going to say (Dave laughing) interesting that you mentioned Hitachi. Our two guests this morning are from Hitachi. Sid and KP, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: How you guys doing? Looking great for day four. >> Great. Thank you. >> Great. >> Hanging in there. >> Thank you, Dave and Savannah. (Savannah laughing) >> Dave: Yeah, cool. >> Savannah: Yeah. (laughs) >> Yeah, it was actually a Pentaho thing, right? >> Oh, Pentaho? Yeah. >> Which kind of you guys into that software edge. It was right when you announced the name change to Hitachi Vantara, which is very cool. I had Brian Householder on. You remember Brian? >> Yeah, I know. >> He was explaining the vision, and yeah (indistinct). >> Yeah. Well, look at you a little Hitachi (indistinct). >> Yeah, I've been around a long time, yeah. >> Yeah, all right. (Dave laughing) >> Just a casual flex to start us off there, Dave. I love it. I love it. Sid, we've talked a lot on the show about delivering outcomes. It's a hot theme. Everyone wants to actually have tangible business outcomes from all of this. How are customers realizing value from the cloud? What does that mean? >> See, still 2007, 2008, it was either/or kind of architecture. Either I'm going to execute my use cases on cloud or I'm going to keep my use cases and outcomes through edge. But in the last four or five years and specifically we are in re:Invent, I would talk about AWS. Lot of the power of hyperscalers has been brought to edge. If you talk about the snowball family of AWS, if you talk about monitor on edge devices, if you talk about the entire server list being brought into Lambda coupled inside snowball, now the architecture premise, if I talk about logical shift is end. Now the customers are talking about executing the use cases between edge and cloud. So, there is a continuum rather than a binary bullion decision. So, if you are talking about optimizing a factory, earlier I'll do the analytics at cloud, and I'll do machine on edge. Now it is optimization of a factory outcome at scale across my entire manufacturing where edge, private cloud, AWS, hyperscalers, everything is a continuum. And the customer is not worried about where, which part of my data ops, network ops, server ops storage ops is being executed. >> Savannah: It's like (indistinct). >> The customer is enjoying the use cases. And the orchestration is abstracted through an industrial player like Hitachi working very collaboratively with AWS. So, that is how we are working on industrial use cases right now. >> You brought up manufacturing. I don't think there's been a hotter conversation around supply chain and manufacturing than there has been the last few years. I can imagine taking that guessing game out for customers is a huge deal for you guys. >> Big because if you look at the world today, right from a safety pin, to a cell phone jacket, to a cell phone, the entire supply chain is throttled. The supply chain is throttled because there are various choke points. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And each choke points is surrounded by different kind of supply and geopolitical issues. >> Savannah: 100%. >> Now, if we talk about the wheat crisis happening because of the Ukraine-Russia war, but the wheat crisis actually creates a multiple string of impacts which impact everything. Silicon, now we talk about silicon, but we then forget about nickel. Nickel is also controlled in one part of that geopolitical conflict. So, everything is getting conflagrated into a very big supply issue. So, if your factories are not performing beyond optimum, if they are not performing at real, I'm, we are talking about factory, hyperscale of the factory. The factory needs to perform at hyperscale to provide what the world needs today. So, we are in a very different kind of a scenario. Some of the economists call it earlier the recession was because of a demand constraint. The demand used to go down. Today's recession is because the supply is going down. The demand is there, but the supply is going down. And there is a different kind of recession in the world. The supply is what is getting throttled. >> And the demand is somewhat unpredictable too. People, you know, retailers, they've... >> Especially right now. >> kind of messed up their inventory. And so, the data is still siloed. And that's where, you know, you get to, okay, can I have the same experience across clouds, on-prem, out to the edge? Kind of bust those silos. >> Yep. >> You know, I dunno if it's, it's certainly not entirely a data problem. There's (laughs), like you say, geopolitical and social issues. >> Savannah: There's so much complexity. >> But there's a data problem too. >> Yes. >> Big. >> So, I wonder if you could talk about your sort of view of, point of view on that cross-cloud, hybrid, out to the edge, what I call super cloud? >> Absolutely. So, today, if you look at how enterprises are adopting cloud or how they're leveraging cloud, it's not just a hosting platform, right? It is the platform from where they can draw business capabilities. You heard in the re:Invent that Amazon is coming up with a supply chain service out of the box in the cloud. That's the kind of capabilities that business wants to draw from cloud today. So, the kind of multicloud or like hybrid cloud, public cloud, private cloud, those are the things which are kind of going to be behind the scenes. At the end of the day, the cloud needs to be able to support businesses by providing their services closer to their consumers. So, the challenges are going to be there in terms of like reliability, resilience, cost, security. Those are the ones that, you know, many of the enterprises are grappling with in terms of the challenges. And the way to solve that, the way how we approach our customers and work with them is to be able to bring resilience into the cloud, into the services which are running in cloud, and by driving automation, making autonomous in everything that you do, how you are monitoring your services, how we are making it available, how we are securing it, how we are making it very cost-effective as well. It cannot be manually executed; it has to be automated. So, automation is the key in terms of making the services leveraged from all of this cloud. >> That's your value add. >> Absolutely. >> And how do I consume that value add? Is it sort of embedded into infrastructure? Is it a service layer on top? >> Yeah, so everything that we do today in terms of like how these services have to be provided, how the services have to be consumed, there has to be a modern operating model, right? I think this is where Hitachi has come up with what we are calling as Hitachi Application Reliability Center and Services. That is focusing on modern operating, modern ways of like, you know, how you support these cloud workloads and driving this automation. So, whether we provide a hyper-converged infrastructure that is going to be at the edge location, or we are going to be able to take a customer through the journey of modernization or migrating onto cloud, the operating model that is going to be able to establish the foundation on cloud and then to be able to operate with the right levels of reliability, security, cost is the key. And that's the value added service that we provide. And then the way we do that is essentially by looking at three principles: one, to look at the service in totality. Gone are the days you look at infrastructure separately, applications separately, data and security separately, right? >> Savannah: No more silos. >> No more silos. You look at it as a workload, and you look at it as a service. And number two is to make sure that the DevOps that you bring and what you do at the table is totally integrated and it's end to end. It's not a product team developing a feature and then ops team trying to keep the lights on. It has to be a common backlog with the error budget that looks at you know, product releases, product functionalities, and even what ops needs to do to evolve the product as well. And then the third is to make sure that reliability and resiliency is inbuilt. Cloud offers native durability, native availability. But if your service doesn't take advantage of that, it's kind of going to still be not available. So, how do you kind of ingrain and embed all of these things as a value add that we provide? >> There's a lot of noise. We've got hybrid cloud. We've got multicloud. We've got a lot going on. It adds to the complexity. How do you help customers solve that complexity as they begin their transformation journey? I mean, I'm sure you're working with the biggest companies, making really massive change. How do you guide them through that process? >> So, it is to look at the outcome working backwards, like what AWS does, right? Like, you know, how do you look at the business outcome? What is the value that you're looking to drive? Again, it's not to be pinned through one particular cloud. I know there is lot of technology choices that you can make and lot of deployment models that you can choose from. But at the end of the day, having a common operating model which is kind of like modern, agile, and it is kind of like keeping the outcomes in the mind, that is what we do with our customers to be able to create that operating model, which completes the transformation, by the way. And cloud is just one part of the LEGO blocks which provides that overall scheme and then the view for driving that overall transformation. >> So, let's paint a picture. Let's say you've got this resilient foundation; you've kind of helped the customers build that out. How do they turn that into value for their customers? Do you have any examples that you can share? That'd be great. >> Yeah, I can start with what we're doing for one of the, you know, world's largest facility, infrastructure, power, cooling, security, monitoring company that has their products deployed in 2,000 locations across the globe. For them, and always on business means you are monitoring the temperature. You are monitoring the safety of people who are within the facility, right? A temperature shift of one to two degree can affect even the sustainability goals of NARC, our customer, but also their end consumers. So, how do you monitor these kind of like critical parameters? How do you have a platform? >> Savannah: Great example, yeah. >> How you have cloud resources that are going to be always on, that are going to be reliable, that are going to be cost-effective as well is what we are doing for one of our customers. Sid can talk about another example as well. >> Great. >> Yeah, go for it, Sid. >> So, there are examples: rail. We are working with a group in England; it's called West Coast Partnership. And they had a edge device which was increasing in size. Now, this edge device was becoming big because the parameters which go into the edge device were increasing because of regulation and because the rail is part of national security infrastructure. We have worked with West Coast Partnership and Hitachi Rail, which is a group company, to create a miniaturization of this edge device, because if the size of the edge device is increasing on the train, then the weight of the train increases, and the speed profile, velocity profile, everything goes down. So, we have miniaturized the edge device. Secondly, all the data profiles, signal control, traction control, traction motors, direction control, timetable compliance, everything has been kept uniform. And we have done analytics on cloud. So, what is the behavior of the driver? What is a big breaking parameter of the driver? If the timetable has being missed, is there an erratic behavior being demonstrated by the driver to just meet the timetable? And the timetable is a pretty important criteria in rail because if you miss one, then... So, what we have done is we have created an edge-to-cloud environment where the entire rail analytics is happening. Similarly, in another group company, Hitachi Energy, they had a problem that arguably one of the largest transformer manufacturer in the world. The transformer is a pretty common name now because you're seeing what is happening in Ukraine. Russia went after the transformers and substations before the start of the winter so that their district heating can be meddled with. Now, the transformer, it had a lead time of 17 weeks before COVID. So, if you put me an order of a three-phase transformer, I can deliver it to you in 17 weeks. After and during COVID, the entire lead time increased to 57 to 58 weeks. In cases of a complex transformer, it even went up to something like two years. >> Savannah: Ooh! >> Now, they wanted to increase the productivity of their existing plant because there is only that much sheet metal, that much copper for solenoid, that much microprocessor and silicon. So, they wanted to increase the output of their factory from 95 to 105, 10 more transformers every day, which is 500 and, which is 3,650 every- >> Savannah: Year. >> Year. Now, to do that, we went to a very complex machine; it's called a guard machine. And we increased the productivity of the guard machine by just analyzing all the throttles and all the wastages which are happening there. There are multiple case studies because, see, Hitachi is an industrial giant with 105 years of body of work. KP and I just represent the tip of the digital tip of the arrow. But what we are trying to do through HARC, through industry cloud, through partnership with AWS is basically containerizing and miniaturizing our entire body of work into a democratized environment, an industrial app store, if I may say, where people can come and take their industrial outcomes at ease without worrying about their computational and network orchestration between edge and cloud. That's what we are trying to do. >> I love that analogy of an industrial app cloud. Makes it feel easier in decreasing the complexity of all the different things that everyone's factoring into making their products, whatever they're making. So, we have a new challenge here on theCUBE at AWS re:Invent, where we are looking for your 30-second hot take, your Instagram reel, sound bite. What's the most important story or theme either for you as a team or coming out of the show? You can ponder it for a second. >> It might be different. See, for me, it is industrial security. Industrial OT security should be the theme of the Western world. Western world is on the crosshairs of multiple bad actors. And the industrial security is in the chemical plants, is in the industrial plants, is in the power grids, is in our postal networks and our rail networks. They need to be secured; otherwise, we are geopolitically very weak. Gone are the days when anyone is going to pick up a battle with America or Western world on a field. The battle is going to be pretty clandestine on an cyber world. And that is why industrial security is very important. >> Critical infrastructure and protecting it. >> Absolutely. >> Well said, Sid. KP, what's your hot take? >> My take is going to be a modern operating model, which is going to complete the transformation and to be able to tap into business services from cloud. So, a modern operating model through HARC, that is going to be my take. >> Fantastic. Well, can't wait to see what comes out of Hitachi next. Sid, KP... >> KP: Thank you. >> thank you so much for being here. >> Sid: Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> Dave: Thanks, guys. >> Savannah: This is I could talk to you all about supply chain all day long. And thank all of you for tuning in to our continuous live coverage here from AWS re:Invent in fantastic Sin City. I'm Savannah. Oh, excuse me. With Dave Vellante, I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (digital xylophone music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. The cube is live at the Venetian Expo Center for AWS Reinvent 2022. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people here joining myself, Lisa Martin at Dave Valante. David, it's great to see the energy of day one alone. People are back, they're ready to be back. They're ready to hear from AWS and what it's gonna announce to. >>Yeah, all through the pandemic. Of course, we've talked about digital transformation, but the conversation is evolving beyond that to business transformation now, deeper integration of the cloud to really transform fundamental business operations and And that's a new era. >>It is a new era. It's exciting. We've got a couple of guests that we're gonna unpack that with. Anan. Beji joins us, the President Digital Business Services at HCL Tech and Prar, SVP and Global head of AWS business unit. Also from HCL Tech. Guys, welcome. Thank >>You. Thank you, >>Thank you. >>Let's talk about some of the latest trends anon. We'll start with you. What are some of the latest trends in digitalization, especially as it relates to cloud adoption? What are you hearing out in the marketplace? >>Yeah, I think you said it right. The post pandemic, every industry, every enterprise and every industry realize that for resilience, for their ability to change and adapt change and their ability to increase, you know, velocity of change so that they can move fast and keep up the expectations of their consumers, their partners, their employees, they need to have composability at the core and resilience at the core. And so, digital transformation became all about the ability to change, an ability to pivot faster. Now, it's easier said than done, right? Larger enterprises, especially as you move into complex regulated industries, you know, oil and gas, manufacturing, life sciences, healthcare, utilities, these are industries that are not easy to change. They're not adaptable to change, and yet they had to really become more adaptable. And they saw cloud as an enabler to, to all of that, right? So they started looking at every area of their business, business processes that make up their value chains and really look at how can they increase the adaptability and the ability to change these value chains so that they can engage with their customers better, their partners, better their employees better, and also build some of the composability. >>And what might mean that is that just kind of like Lego blocks, they don't have to make changes that are sweeping and big that are difficult to make, but make them in parts so that they can make them again and again. So velocity of change becomes important. Clouds become an enabler to all of this. And so if I look at the last four years, every industry, whether regulated or not b2c, B2B to C, B2B is adopting cloud for digital acceleration. >>I'm curious to what you're seeing on the front lines, given the macro headwinds. You mentioned business resilience and during the pandemic, it was a lot of CIOs told us, wow, we were, we were kind of focused on disaster recovery, but our business wasn't resilient. We were really optimizing for efficiency. And then they started to okay, build in that business resilience. But now you got the economic headwinds. Yes. People are tapping their brakes a little bit. There's some uncertainty, a longer sales cycle, even the cloud's not immune. Yeah. Even though it's still growing at 30% plus per year. What are you guys seeing in the field with the AWS partnership? How are customers, you know, dealing with some of those more strategic transformation projects? Yeah, >>Yeah. So you know, first off, one thing that's changed and is different is every industry realizes that there is no choice. They don't have a choice to not be resilient. They don't have a choice to not be adaptable. The pandemic has taught them that the markets and the macros are increasingly changing supply chains. It's changing customer behavior for their own industries. It's changing their pricing and their cost models. And for all of that, they need to continue on their digital journeys. Now, what's different though is they wanna prioritize. They wanna prioritize and do more with less. They want to adapt faster, but also make sure that they don't, they don't just try to do everything together. And so there's a lot of focus on what do we prioritize? How do we leverage cloud to move faster, you know, and cheaper in terms of our change. >>And also to decide where do we consume and where do we compose? We'll talk a little bit more about that. There are certain things that you don't want to invent yourself. You can consume from cloud providers, whether it's business features, whether it is cloud capabilities. And so it's, there is a shift from adopting cloud just for cost takeout and just for resilience, but also for composability, which means let's consume what I can consume from the cloud and really build those features faster. So squeeze the go to market time, squeeze the time to market and squeeze the price to market, right? So that's the >>Change and really driving those business outcomes. As we talked about Absolut ard, talk to us about how hcl tech and AWS are working together. How are you enabling customers to achieve what an was talking about? >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, our partnership has started almost 10 years back, but over the last one year, we have created what we call as AWS dedicated business unit to look at end to end stock from an AWS perspective. So what we see in the market as a explained is more drive from clients for optimization, driving, app modernization, driving consolidation, looking at the cost, sustainability angles, looking at the IOT angle, manufacturing platforms, the industry adoption. All this is actually igniting the way the industry would look at AWS and as well as the partnership. So from an HCL tech and AWS partnership, we're actually accelerating most of these conversations by building bespoke accelerated industry solutions. So what I mean is, for example, there is an issue with a manufacturing plant and take Covid situation, people can't get into a a manufacturing plant. So how can AWS help put it in the cloud, accelerate those conversations. So we are building those industry specific solutions so that it can be everybody from a manufacturing sector can adopt and actually go to market. As well as you can access all this applications once it is in the cloud from anywhere, any device with a scalable options. That's where our partnership is actually igniting lot of cloud conversations and playing conversations in the market. So we see a lot of traction there. Lisa, on >>That, incredibly important during the last couple of years alone. >>Absolutely. I mean, last couple of years have been groundbreaking, right? Especially with the covid, for example, Amazon Connect, we use, we used Amazon Connect to roll out, you know, call center at the cloud, right? So you don't have to walk into an office, for example. People are working in the banking sector, especially in the trading platform. They were, they were not able to get there. So, but they need to make calls. How do you do the customer service? So Amazon Connect came right at the junction, so call center in the cloud and you can access, dial the number so the customer don't feel the pain of, you know, somebody not answering. It's accessible. That's where the partnership or the HCL tech partnership and AWS comes into play because we bring the scale, the skill set capability with the services of, you know, aws, Amazon, and that forms a concrete story for the client, right? That's one such example. And you know, many such examples are in the market that we are accelerating in the, in the discussions. >>And connect is a good example. Lisa, we were talking earlier about Amazon doubling down on the primitives, but also moving up up market as well, up chain up the value chain. And it needs partners like HCL to be able to go into various industries and apply that effectively. Absolutely. And that's where business transformation comes >>In. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think some of the aspects that we are looking at is, you know, while we do most of this cloud transformation initiatives from an tech perspective, what we are doing is we are encompassing them into a story, which we call it as cloud smart, right? So we are calling it as cloud smart, which is a go-to market offering from Atcl Tech, where the client doesn't have to look at each of these services from various vendors. So it's a one stop shop, right? From strategy consulting, look, implementation, underpinned by app modernization, consolidation, and the operational. So we do that as end to end service with our offerings, which is why helping us actually accelerate conversations on the crowd. What happen is the clients are also building these capabilities more and more often. You see a lot of new services are being added to aws, so not many clients are aware of it. So it is the responsibility of system integrator like us to make them aware and bring it into a shape where the client can consume in a low cost option, in an optimized way. That's where I think it's, it's, it's working out very well for us. With the partnership of, so >>You curate those services that you know will fit the customer's business. You, you know, the ingredients that you could put together, the, the dinner. >>Absolutely. You're preparing a dish, right? So you're preparing a dish, you know where the ingredients are. So the ingredients are supplied by aws. So you need to prepare a pasta dish, right? So you, you how spicy you want to make it howland, you want to make it, you know what source you want to use. How do you bring all those elements together? That's what, you know, tech has been focusing on. >>And you use the word curation, right? Curation is really industry process down, depending on your industry, every industry, every enterprise, there are things that are differentiating them. There's a business processes that differentiate you and there are business processes that don't necessarily differentiate you but are core to you. For example, if you're a retailer, you know, you're retailing, you're merchandising, how you price your products, how you market your products, your supply chains, those differentiate you. How you run your general ledger, your accounting, your payables. HR is core to your business but doesn't differentiate you. And the choices you make in the cloud for each of these areas are different. What differentiates you? You compose what doesn't differentiate you consume because you don't want to try and compose what >>Telco Exactly. Oh my gosh. >>Our biggest examples are in Telco, right? Right. Their omnichannel marketing, you know, how they connect with their consumers, how they do their billing systems, how they do their pricing systems. Those are their differentiations and things that don't they want to consume. And that's where cloud adoption needs to come with really a curation framework. We call it the Phoenix framework, which defines what differentiates you versus not. And based on that, what are the architectural choices you make at the applications layer, the integration layer, the data layer, and the infrastructure layer all from aws and how do you make those choices? >>Talk about a customer example anon that really articulates that value. >>Yeah, I'll give you an example that sort of, everybody can relate to a very large tools company that manufactures tools that we all use at home for, you know, remodeling our houses, building stuff, building furniture. Their business post pandemic dramatically shifted in every way possible. Nobody was going anymore to Home Depot and Lowe's to buy their tools, their online business surge by 200%. Their supply chains were changing because their manufacturers originally were in China and Malaysia. They were shifting a lot of that base to Taiwan and Germany and Latin America. Their pricing model was changing. Their last mile deliveries were changing cuz they were not used to delivering you and me last mile deliveries. So every aspect of their business was changing. They hadn't thought of their business in the same way, but guess what? That business was growing, but the needs were changing and they needed to rethink every value chain in their business. >>And so they had to adopt cloud. They leverage AWS at their core to rethink every part of their business. Rebuilding their supply chain applications, modernizing their warehouse management systems, modernizing their pricing systems, modernizing their sales and marketing platforms, every aspect you can think of and all of that within 24 months. Cuz otherwise they would lose market share, you know, in any given market. And all of this, while they were, you know, delivering their day to day business, they were manufacturing the goods and they were shipping products. So that was quite a lot to achieve in 24 months. And that's not just one example is across industries, examples like that that we have. That's >>One of the best business transformation examples I think I've heard. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. And so cloud does need to start with a business transformation objective. And that's what's happening to the cloud. It's changing away from an infrastructure consolidation discussion to business task. >>Because I know you guys have a theater session tomorrow on, on continuous modern, it was experiencing cloud transformation and continuous modernization. That's the theme. Pre-cloud. It was just a, you'd, you'd live, you'd rip and replace your infrastructure and it was a big application portfolio assessment and rationalization. It was just, it just became this years long, you know, like an SAP installation. Yes. How has cloud changed that and what's, tell us more about that session and that continuous modernization. Yeah, >>So, so we are doing a John session with a client on how HCL Tech helped the client in terms of transforming the landscape and adopting cloud much faster, you know, into the ecosystem. So what we are currently doing is, so it's a continuous process. So when we talk about cloud adoption transformation, it doesn't stop there. So it, it needs to keep evolving. So what we came up with a framework for the all such clients who are on the cloud transformation part need to look at which we call it a smart waste cloud, cloud smart. Where once it is in the clouds, smart waste to cloud for cloud and in the cloud. So what happens is, when it is to cloud, what do you do? What are the accelerators? What are the frameworks? Smart waste for clouds? How do you look at the governance of it? >>Okay? Consolidation activities of it, once it is in the cloud, how do we optimize, what do you look at? Security aspects, et cetera. So the client doesn't have to go to multiple ecosystem partners to look at it. So he is looking at one such service provider who can actually encompass and give all this onto the plate in a much more granular fashion with accelerated approach. So we build accelerated solutions frameworks, which helps the client to actually pick and choose in a much lower cost, I think. And it has to be a continuous modernization for the client. So why we are calling it as a continuous modernization is we are also also creating what we call cloud foundries and factories. What happens is the client can look at not only in a transformation journey, but also futuristic when there are new services are adapted, how this transformation and factories helping them in a lower cost option and driving that a acceleration story. So we are addressing it in multiple ways. One on the transformation front, one on the TCO front, one on the AX accelerated front, one on the operational front. So all this combined into one single framework, which is what is a continuous modernization of clouded option from xgl tech. >>When you apply this framework with customers, how do you deal with technical debt? Can you avoid technical debt? Can you hide technical debt? Or is it like debt and taxes? We're always gonna have technical debt because Amazon, you know, they'll talk about, they don't ever deprecate anything. Yeah. You know, are they gonna, are we gonna see Amazon take on tech? How do you avoid that? Or at least shield the customer for that technical debt. >>So every cio, right? Key ambitions are digital cloud, TCO optimization, sustainability. So we have a framework for that. So every CIO will look at, okay, I wanna spend, but I want to be optimized. My TCO should not go up. So that's where a system integrator like us comes. We have AOP story where, which does the complete financial analysis of your cloud adoption as to what estate and what technical client already has. How can we optimize that and how can we, how can we overlay on top of that our own services to make it much more optimized solution for the client? And there are several frameworks that we have defined for the CIO organizations where the CIO can actually look at some of these elements and adopt it internally within the system. You wanna pick it from there? >>Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's, it's a great question. First of all, there's a generational shift in the last three years where nobody's doing lift and shift of traditional applications or traditional data systems to the cloud. As you said, nobody's taking their technical debt to the cloud anymore. >>Business value's not there. >>There's no business value, right? The value is really being cloud native, which means you want to continuously modernize your value chains, which means your applications, your integration, your data to leverage the cloud and continuously modernize. Now you will still make priority decisions, right? Things that really differentiate you. You will modernize them through composition things that don't, you'll rather consume them, but in both factors, you're modernizing, I use the word surround and drown enterprises are surrounding their traditional, you know, environments and drowning them over a period of time. So over the next five years, you'll see more and more irrelevant legacy because the relevance is being built in the cloud, cloud for the future. That's the way I see it. >>Speaking of, take us out here, speaking of business value and on, we're almost outta time here. If there's a billboard on 1 0 1 in Palo Alto regarding HCL tech, what's the value prop? What does it say? >>It's a simple billboard. We say we are super charging our customers, our partners, our employees. We are super charging progress. And we believe that the strength that we bring from learnings of over 200,000 professionals that work at hcl working with over half of, you know, 500 of the, the largest Fortune thousands in the world is, is really bringing those learnings that we continuously look at every day that we live with, every day across all kind of regulations, all kind of industries, in adopting new technologies, in modernizing their business strategies and achieving their business transformation goals with the velocity they want. That's kind of the supercharging progress mantra, >>Super charging progress. Love it. Guys, thank you so much for joining. David, me on the program talking about, thank you for having a conversation. Our pleasure. What's going on with HCL Tech, aws, the value that you're delivering for customers. Thank you so much for your time. Thank >>You. Thank you. Thanks. Have a great time. >>Take care for our guests. I'm Lisa Martin, he's Dave Valante. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to Las Vegas. The Cube is here, live at the Venetian Expo Center for AWS Reinvent 2022. Amazing attendance. This is day one of our coverage. Lisa Martin here with Day Ante. David is great to see so many people back. We're gonna be talk, we've been having great conversations already. We have a wall to wall coverage for the next three and a half days. When we talk to companies, customers, every company has to be a data company. And one of the things I think we learned in the pandemic is that access to real time data and real time analytics, no longer a nice to have that is a differentiator and a competitive all >>About data. I mean, you know, I love the topic and it's, it's got so many dimensions and such texture, can't get enough of data. >>I know we have a great guest joining us. One of our alumni is back, Evan Kaplan, the CEO of Influx Data. Evan, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back to the Cube. >>Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. So here >>We are, day one. I was telling you before we went live, we're nice and fresh hosts. Talk to us about what's new at Influxed since the last time we saw you at Reinvent. >>That's great. So first of all, we should acknowledge what's going on here. This is pretty exciting. Yeah, that does really feel like, I know there was a show last year, but this feels like the first post Covid shows a lot of energy, a lot of attention despite a difficult economy. In terms of, you know, you guys were commenting in the lead into Big data. I think, you know, if we were to talk about Big Data five, six years ago, what would we be talking about? We'd been talking about Hadoop, we were talking about Cloudera, we were talking about Hortonworks, we were talking about Big Data Lakes, data stores. I think what's happened is, is this this interesting dynamic of, let's call it if you will, the, the secularization of data in which it breaks into different fields, different, almost a taxonomy. You've got this set of search data, you've got this observability data, you've got graph data, you've got document data and what you're seeing in the market and now you have time series data. >>And what you're seeing in the market is this incredible capability by developers as well and mostly open source dynamic driving this, this incredible capability of developers to assemble data platforms that aren't unicellular, that aren't just built on Hado or Oracle or Postgres or MySQL, but in fact represent different data types. So for us, what we care about his time series, we care about anything that happens in time, where time can be the primary measurement, which if you think about it, is a huge proportion of real data. Cuz when you think about what drives ai, you think about what happened, what happened, what happened, what happened, what's going to happen. That's the functional thing. But what happened is always defined by a period, a measurement, a time. And so what's new for us is we've developed this new open source engine called IOx. And so it's basically a refresh of the whole database, a kilo database that uses Apache Arrow, par K and data fusion and turns it into a super powerful real time analytics platform. It was already pretty real time before, but it's increasingly now and it adds SQL capability and infinite cardinality. And so it handles bigger data sets, but importantly, not just bigger but faster, faster data. So that's primarily what we're talking about to show. >>So how does that affect where you can play in the marketplace? Is it, I mean, how does it affect your total available market? Your great question. Your, your customer opportunities. >>I think it's, it's really an interesting market in that you've got all of these different approaches to database. Whether you take data warehouses from Snowflake or, or arguably data bricks also. And you take these individual database companies like Mongo Influx, Neo Forge, elastic, and people like that. I think the commonality you see across the volume is, is many of 'em, if not all of them, are based on some sort of open source dynamic. So I think that is an in an untractable trend that will continue for on. But in terms of the broader, the broader database market, our total expand, total available tam, lots of these things are coming together in interesting ways. And so the, the, the wave that will ride that we wanna ride, because it's all big data and it's all increasingly fast data and it's all machine learning and AI is really around that measurement issue. That instrumentation the idea that if you're gonna build any sophisticated system, it starts with instrumentation and the journey is defined by instrumentation. So we view ourselves as that instrumentation tooling for understanding complex systems. And how, >>I have to follow quick follow up. Why did you say arguably data bricks? I mean open source ethos? >>Well, I was saying arguably data bricks cuz Spark, I mean it's a great company and it's based on Spark, but there's quite a gap between Spark and what Data Bricks is today. And in some ways data bricks from the outside looking in looks a lot like Snowflake to me looks a lot like a really sophisticated data warehouse with a lot of post-processing capabilities >>And, and with an open source less >>Than a >>Core database. Yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, thank you for that >>Part that that was not arguably like they're, they're not a good company or >>No, no. They got great momentum and I'm just curious. Absolutely. You know, so, >>So talk a little bit about IOx and, and what it is enabling you guys to achieve from a competitive advantage perspective. The key differentiators give us that scoop. >>So if you think about, so our old storage engine was called tsm, also open sourced, right? And IOx is open sourced and the old storage engine was really built around this time series measurements, particularly metrics, lots of metrics and handling those at scale and making it super easy for developers to use. But, but our old data engine only supported either a custom graphical UI that you'd build yourself on top of it or a dashboarding tool like Grafana or Chronograph or things like that. With IOCs. Two or three interventions were important. One is we now support, we'll support things like Tableau, Microsoft, bi, and so you're taking that same data that was available for instrumentation and now you're using it for business intelligence also. So that became super important and it kind of answers your question about the expanded market expands the market. The second thing is, when you're dealing with time series data, you're dealing with this concept of cardinality, which is, and I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the idea that that it's a multiplication of measurements in a table. And so the more measurements you want over the more series you have, you have this really expanding exponential set that can choke a database off. And the way we've designed IIS to handle what we call infinite cardinality, where you don't even have to think about that design point of view. And then lastly, it's just query performance is dramatically better. And so it's pretty exciting. >>So the unlimited cardinality, basically you could identify relationships between data and different databases. Is that right? Between >>The same database but different measurements, different tables, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. So you can handle, so you could say, I wanna look at the way, the way the noise levels are performed in this room according to 400 different locations on 25 different days, over seven months of the year. And that each one is a measurement. Each one adds to cardinality. And you can say, I wanna search on Tuesdays in December, what the noise level is at 2:21 PM and you get a very quick response. That kind of instrumentation is critical to smarter systems. How are >>You able to process that data at at, in a performance level that doesn't bring the database to its knees? What's the secret sauce behind that? >>It's AUM database. It's built on Parque and Apache Arrow. But it's, but to say it's nice to say without a much longer conversation, it's an architecture that's really built for pulling that kind of data. If you know the data is time series and you're looking for a time measurement, you already have the ability to optimize pretty dramatically. >>So it's, it's that purpose built aspect of it. It's the >>Purpose built aspect. You couldn't take Postgres and do the same >>Thing. Right? Because a lot of vendors say, oh yeah, we have time series now. Yeah. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Right. >>And they >>Do. Yeah. But >>It's not, it's not, the founding of the company came because Paul Dicks was working on Wall Street building time series databases on H base, on MyQ, on other platforms and realize every time we do it, we have to rewrite the code. We build a bunch of application logic to handle all these. We're talking about, we have customers that are adding hundreds of millions to billions of points a second. So you're talking about an ingest level. You know, you think about all those data points, you're talking about ingest level that just doesn't, you know, it just databases aren't designed for that. Right? And so it's not just us, our competitors also build good time series databases. And so the category is really emergent. Yeah, >>Sure. Talk about a favorite customer story they think really articulates the value of what Influx is doing, especially with IOx. >>Yeah, sure. And I love this, I love this story because you know, Tesla may not be in favor because of the latest Elon Musker aids, but, but, but so we've had about a four year relationship with Tesla where they built their power wall technology around recording that, seeing your device, seeing the stuff, seeing the charging on your car. It's all captured in influx databases that are reporting from power walls and mega power packs all over the world. And they report to a central place at, at, at Tesla's headquarters and it reports out to your phone and so you can see it. And what's really cool about this to me is I've got two Tesla cars and I've got a Tesla solar roof tiles. So I watch this date all the time. So it's a great customer story. And actually if you go on our website, you can see I did an hour interview with the engineer that designed the system cuz the system is super impressive and I just think it's really cool. Plus it's, you know, it's all the good green stuff that we really appreciate supporting sustainability, right? Yeah. >>Right, right. Talk about from a, what's in it for me as a customer, what you guys have done, the change to IOCs, what, what are some of the key features of it and the key values in it for customers like Tesla, like other industry customers as well? >>Well, so it's relatively new. It just arrived in our cloud product. So Tesla's not using it today. We have a first set of customers starting to use it. We, the, it's in open source. So it's a very popular project in the open source world. But the key issues are, are really the stuff that we've kind of covered here, which is that a broad SQL environment. So accessing all those SQL developers, the same people who code against Snowflake's data warehouse or data bricks or Postgres, can now can code that data against influx, open up the BI market. It's the cardinality, it's the performance. It's really an architecture. It's the next gen. We've been doing this for six years, it's the next generation of everything. We've seen how you make time series be super performing. And that's only relevant because more and more things are becoming real time as we develop smarter and smarter systems. The journey is pretty clear. You instrument the system, you, you let it run, you watch for anomalies, you correct those anomalies, you re instrument the system. You do that 4 billion times, you have a self-driving car, you do that 55 times, you have a better podcast that is, that is handling its audio better, right? So everything is on that journey of getting smarter and smarter. So >>You guys, you guys the big committers to IOCs, right? Yes. And how, talk about how you support the, develop the surrounding developer community, how you get that flywheel effect going >>First. I mean it's actually actually a really kind of, let's call it, it's more art than science. Yeah. First of all, you you, you come up with an architecture that really resonates for developers. And Paul Ds our founder, really is a developer's developer. And so he started talking about this in the community about an architecture that uses Apache Arrow Parque, which is, you know, the standard now becoming for file formats that uses Apache Arrow for directing queries and things like that and uses data fusion and said what this thing needs is a Columbia database that sits behind all of this stuff and integrates it. And he started talking about it two years ago and then he started publishing in IOCs that commits in the, in GitHub commits. And slowly, but over time in Hacker News and other, and other people go, oh yeah, this is fundamentally right. >>It addresses the problems that people have with things like click cows or plain databases or Coast and they go, okay, this is the right architecture at the right time. Not different than original influx, not different than what Elastic hit on, not different than what Confluent with Kafka hit on and their time is you build an audience of people who are committed to understanding this kind of stuff and they become committers and they become the core. Yeah. And you build out from it. And so super. And so we chose to have an MIT open source license. Yeah. It's not some secondary license competitors can use it and, and competitors can use it against us. Yeah. >>One of the things I know that Influx data talks about is the time to awesome, which I love that, but what does that mean? What is the time to Awesome. Yeah. For developer, >>It comes from that original story where, where Paul would have to write six months of application logic and stuff to build a time series based applications. And so Paul's notion was, and this was based on the original Mongo, which was very successful because it was very easy to use relative to most databases. So Paul developed this commitment, this idea that I quickly joined on, which was, hey, it should be relatively quickly for a developer to build something of import to solve a problem, it should be able to happen very quickly. So it's got a schemaless background so you don't have to know the schema beforehand. It does some things that make it really easy to feel powerful as a developer quickly. And if you think about that journey, if you feel powerful with a tool quickly, then you'll go deeper and deeper and deeper and pretty soon you're taking that tool with you wherever you go, it becomes the tool of choice as you go to that next job or you go to that next application. And so that's a fundamental way we think about it. To be honest with you, we haven't always delivered perfectly on that. It's generally in our dna. So we do pretty well, but I always feel like we can do better. >>So if you were to put a bumper sticker on one of your Teslas about influx data, what would it >>Say? By the way, I'm not rich. It just happened to be that we have two Teslas and we have for a while, we just committed to that. The, the, so ask the question again. Sorry. >>Bumper sticker on influx data. What would it say? How, how would I >>Understand it be time to Awesome. It would be that that phrase his time to Awesome. Right. >>Love that. >>Yeah, I'd love it. >>Excellent time to. Awesome. Evan, thank you so much for joining David, the >>Program. It's really fun. Great thing >>On Evan. Great to, you're on. Haven't Well, great to have you back talking about what you guys are doing and helping organizations like Tesla and others really transform their businesses, which is all about business transformation these days. We appreciate your insights. >>That's great. Thank >>You for our guest and Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage. We'll be right back with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents UiPath Forward5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody, we're back in Las Vegas. We're live with Cube's coverage of Forward 5 2022. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson Ted Kumer this year is the Executive Vice President, product and engineering at UiPath. Brought on to do a lot of the integration and bring on new capabilities for the platform and we've seen that over the last several years. And he's joined by Dr. Edward Challis, who's the co-founder of the recent acquisition that UiPath made, company called Re:infer. We're going to learn about those guys. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Ted, good to see you again. Ed, welcome. >> Good to be here. >> First time. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here with you. >> Yeah, so we have seen, as I said, this platform expanding. I think you used the term business automation platform. It's kind of a new term you guys introduced at the conference. Where'd that come from? What is that? What are the characteristics that are salient to the platform? >> Well, I see the, the evolution of our platform in three chapters. You understand the first chapter, we call that the RPA chapter. And that's where we saw the power of UI automation applied to the old problems of how do I integrate apps? How do I automate processes? That was chapter one. You know, chapter two gets us to Forward3 in 2019, and the definition of this end-to-end automation platform you know, with the capabilities from discover to measure, and building out that core platform. And as the platform's progressed, what we've seen happen with our customers is the use of it goes from being very heavy in automating the repetitive and routine to being more balanced, to now where they're implementing new brought business process, new capability for their organization. So that's where the name, Business Automation Platform, came from. Reflecting now that it's got this central role, as a strategic tool, sitting between their application landscape, their processes, their people, helping that move forward at the rate that it needs to. >> And process mining and task mining, that was sort of the enabler of chapter two, is that right? >> Well, I'd say chapter two was, you know, first the robots got bigger in terms of what they could cover and do. API integration, long running workflows, AI and ML skills integrated document processing, citizen development in addition to professional development, engaging end users with things like user interfaces built with UiPath apps. And then the discovery. >> So, more robustness of the? Yeah, okay. >> Yeah. Just an expansion of the whole surface area which opened up a lot of things for our customers to do. That went much broader than where core RPA started. And so, and the other thing about this progression to the business automation platform is, you know, we see customers now talking more about outcomes. Early on they talk a lot about hours saved and that's great, but then what about the business outcomes it's enabling? The transformations in their business. And the other thing we're doing in the platform is thinking about, well, where can we land with solutions capabilities that more directly land on business, measurable business outcomes? And so we had started, for example, offering an email automation solution, big business problem for a lot of our customers last year. And we'd started encountering this company Re:infer as we were working with customers. And then, and we encountered Re:infer being used with our platform together. And we saw we can accelerate this. And what that is giving us now is a solution now that aligns with a very defined business outcome. And this way, you know, we can help you process communications and do it efficiently and provide better service for your customers. And that's beginning of another important progression for us in our platform. >> So that's a nice segue, Ed. Tell about Re:infer. Why did you start the company? >> Right, yeah, so my whole career has been in machine learning and AI and I finished my PhD around 2013, it was a very exciting time in AI. And me and my co-founders come from UCL, this university in London, and Deep Mind, this company which Google acquired a few years later, came from our same university. So very exciting time amongst the people that really knew about machine learning and AI. And everyone was thinking, you know, how do we, these are just really big breakthroughs. And you could just see there was going to be a whole bunch of subsequent breakthroughs and we thought NLP would be the next breakthrough. So we were really focused on machine reading problems. And, but we also knew as people that had like built machine learning production systems. 'Cause I'd also worked in industry that built that journey from having a hypothesis that machine learning can solve a problem to getting machine learning into production. That journey is of painful, painful journey and that, you know, you can see that you've got these advances, but getting into broad is just way too hard. >> So where do you fit in the platform? >> Yeah, so I think when you look in the enterprise just so many processes start with a message start with a no, start with a case ticket or, you know, some other kind of request from a colleague or a customer. And so it's super exciting to be able to, you know, take automation one step higher in that process chain. So, you could automatically read that request, interpret it, get all the structured data you need to drive that process forward. So it's about bringing automation into these human channels. >> So I want to give the audience a sense here. So we do a lot of events at the Venetian Conference Center, and it's usually very booth heavy, you know, brands and big giant booths. And here the booths are all very small. They're like kiosks, and they're all pretty much the same size. So it's not like one vendor trying to compete with the other. And there are all these elements, you know I feel like there's clouds and there's, you know, of course orange is the color here. And one of the spots is, it has this really kind of cool sitting area around customer stories. And I was in there last night reading about Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank was also up on stage. Deutsche Bank, you guys were talking about a Re:infer. So share with our audience what Deutsche Bank are doing with UiPath and Re:infer. >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, before we automate something, we often like to do what we call communications mining. Which is really understanding what all of these messages are about that might be hitting a part of the business. And at Deutsche Bank and in many, you know, like many large financial services businesses, huge volumes of messages coming in from the clients. We analyze those, interpret the high volume query types and then it's about automating against those to free up capacity. Which ultimately means you can provide faster, higher quality service because you've got more time to do it. And you're not dealing with all of those mundane tasks. So it's that whole journey of mining to automation of the coms that come into the corporate bank. >> So how do I invoke the service? So is it mother module or what's the customer onboarding experience like? >> So, I think the first thing that we do is we generate some understanding of actually the communications data they want to observe, right? And we call it mining, but you know, what we're trying to understand is like what are these communications about? What's the intent? What are they trying to accomplish? Tone can be interesting, like what's the sentiment of this customer? And once you understand that, you essentially then understand categories of conversations you're having and then you apply automations to that. And so then essentially those individual automations can be pointed to sets of emails for them to automate the processing of. And so what we've seen is customers go from things they're handling a hundred percent manual to now 95% of them are handled basically with completely automated processing. The other thing I think is super interesting here and why communications mining and automation are so powerful together is communications about your business can be very, very dynamic. So like, new conversations can emerge, something happens right in your business, you have an outage, whatever, and the automation platform, being a very rapid development platform, can help you adapt quickly to that in an automated way. Which is another reason why this is such a powerful thing to put the two things together. >> So, you can build that event into the automation very quickly you're saying? >> Speaker 1: Yeah. >> Speaker 2: That's totally right. >> Cool. >> So Ed, on the subject of natural language processing and machine learning versus machine teaching. If I text my wife and ask her would you like to go to an Italian restaurant tonight? And she replies, fine. Okay, how smart is your machine? And, of course, context usually literally denotes things within the text, and a short response like that's very difficult to do this. But how do you go through this process? Let's say you're implementing this for a given customer. And we were just talking about, you know, the specific customer requirements that they might have. What does that process look like? Do you have an auditor that goes through? And I mean do you get like 20% accuracy, and then you do a pass, and now you're at 80% accuracy, and you do a pass? What does that look? >> Yeah, so I mean, you know when I was talking about the pain of getting a machine learning model into production one of the principle drivers of that is this process of training the machine learning model. And so what we use is a technique called active learning which is effectively where the AI and ML model queries the user to say, teach me about this data point, teach me about this sentence. And that's a dynamic iterative process. And by doing it in that way you make that training process much, much faster. But critically that means that the user has, when you train the model the user defines how you want to encode that interpretation. So when you were training it you would say fine from my wife is not good, right? >> Sure, so it might be fine, do you have a better suggestion? >> Yeah, but that's actually a very serious point because one of the things we do is track the quality of service. Our customers use us to attract the quality of service they deliver to their clients. And in many industries people don't use flowery language, like, thank you so much, or you know, I'm upset with you, you know. What they might say is fine, and you know, the person that manages that client, that is not good, right? Or they might say I'd like to remind you that we've been late the last three times, you know. >> This is urgent. >> Yeah, you know, so it's important that the client, our client, the user of Re:infer, can encode what their notions of good and bad are. >> Sorry, quick follow up on that. Differences between British English and American English. In the U.K., if you're thinking about becoming an elected politician, you stand for office, right? Here in the U.S., you run for office. That's just the beginning of the vagaries and differences. >> Yeah, well, I've now got a lot more American colleagues and I realize my English phrasing often goes amiss. So I'm really aware of the problem. We have customers that have contact centers, some of them are in the U.K., some of them are in America, and they see big differences in the way that the customers get treated based on where the customer is based. So we've actually done analysis in Re:infer to look at how agents and customers interact and how you should route customers to the contact centers to be culturally matched. Because sometimes there can be a little bit of friction just for that cultural mapping. >> Ted, what's the what's the general philosophy when you make an acquisition like this and you bring in new features? Do you just wake up one day and all of a sudden there's this new capability? Is it a separate sort of for pay module? Does it depend? >> I think it depends. You know, in this case we were really led here by customers. We saw a very high value opportunity and the beginnings of a strategy and really being able to mine all forms of communication and drive automated processing of all forms of communication. And in this case we found a fantastic team and a fantastic piece of software that we can move very quickly to get in the hands of our customer's via UiPath. We're in private preview now, we're going to be GA in the cloud right after the first of the year and it's going to continue forward from there. But it's definitely not one size fits all. Every single one of 'em is different and it's important to approach 'em that way. >> Right, right. So some announcements, StudioWeb was one that I think you could. So I think it came out today. Can't remember what was today. I think we talked about it yesterday on the keynotes anyway. Why is that important? What is it all about? >> Well we talked, you know, at a very top level. I think every development platform thinks about two things for developers. They think, how do I make it more expressive so you can do other things, richer scenarios. And how do I make it simpler? 'Cause fast is always better, and lower learning curves is always better, and those sorts of things. So, Re:infer's a great example of look the runtime is becoming more and more expressive and now you can buy in communications state as part of your automation, which is super cool. And then, you know StudioWeb is about kind of that second point and Studios and Studio X are already low code visual, but they're desktop. And part of our strategy here is to elevate all of that experience into the web. Now we didn't elevate all of studio there, it's a subset. It is API integration and web based application automation, Which is a great foundation for a lot of apps. It's a complete reimagining of the studio user interface and most importantly it's our first cross-platform developer strategy. And so that's been another piece of our strategy, is to say to the customers we want to be everywhere you need us to be. We did cross-platform deployment with the automation suite. We got cross-platform robots with linear robots, serverless robots, Mac support and now we got a cross-platform devs story. So we're starting out with a subset of capabilities maybe oriented toward what you would associate with citizen scenarios. But you're going to see more roadmap, bringing more and more of that. But it's pretty exciting for us. We've been working on this thing for a couple years now and like this is a huge milestone for the team to get to this, this point. >> I think my first conversation on theCUBE with a customer was six years ago maybe at one of the earlier Forwards, I think Forward2. And the pattern that I saw was basically people taking existing processes and making them better, you know taking the mundane away. I remember asking customers, yeah, aren't you kind of paving the cow path? Aren't there sort of new things that you can do, new process? And they're like, yeah, that's sort of the next wave. So what are you seeing in terms of automating existing processes versus new processes? I would see Re:infer is going to open up a whole new vector of new processes. How should we think about that? >> Yeah, I think, you know, I mean in some ways RPA has this reputation because there's so much value that's been provided in the automating of the repetitive and routine. But I'd say in my whole time, I've been at the company now for two and a half years, I've seen lots of new novel stuff stood up. I mean just in Covid we saw the platform being used in PPP loan processing. We saw it in new clinical workflows for COVID testing. We see it and we've just seen more and more progression and it's been exciting that the conference, to see customers now talking about things they built with UiPath apps. So app experiences they've been delivering, you know. I talked about one in healthcare yesterday and basically how they've improved their patient intake processing and that sort of thing. And I think this is just the front end. I truly believe that we are seeing the convergence happen and it's happening already of categories we've talked about separately, iPass, BPM, low-code, RPA. It's happening and it's good for customers 'cause they want one thing to cover more stuff and you know, I think it just creates more opportunity for developers to do more things. >> Your background at Microsoft probably well prepared you for a company that you know, was born on-prem and then went all in on the cloud and had, you know, multiple code bases to deal with. UiPath has gone through a similar transformation and we talked to Daniel last night about this and you're now cloud first. So how is that going just in terms of managing multiple code bases? >> Well it's actually not multiple Code bases. >> Oh, it's the same one, Right, deployment models I should say. >> Is the first thing, Yeah, the deployment models. Another thing we did along the way was basically replatform at an infrastructure level. So we now can deploy into a Kubernetes Docker world, what you'd call the cloud native platform. And that allows us to have much more of a shared infrastructure layer as we look to deliver to the automation cloud. The same workload to the automation cloud that we now deliver in the automation suite for deployment on-prem or deploying a public cloud for a customer to manage. Interesting and enough, that's how Re:infer was built, which is it was built also in the cloud native platform. So it's going to be pretty easy. Well, pretty easy, there's some work to do, but it's going to be pretty easy for us to then bring that into the platform 'cause they're already working on that same platform and provide those same services both on premises and in the cloud without having your developers have to think too much about both. >> Okay, I got to ask you, so I could wrap my stack in a container and put it into AWS or Azure or Google and it'll run great. As well, I could tap some of the underlying primitives of those respective clouds, which are different and I could run them just fine. Or/and I could create an abstraction layer that could hide those underlying primitives and then take the best of each and create an automation cloud, my own cloud. Does that resonate? Is that what you're doing architecturally? Is that a roadmap, or? >> Certainly going forward, you know, in the automation cloud. The automation cloud, we announced a great partnership or a continued partnership with Microsoft. And just Azure and our platform. We obviously take advantage of anything we can to make that great and native capabilities. And I think you're going to see in the Automation Suite us doing more and more to be in a deployment model on Azure, be more and more optimized to using those infrastructure services. So if you deploy automation suite on-prem we'll use our embedded distro then when we deploy it say on Azure, we'll use some of their higher level managed services instead of our embedded distro. And that will just give customers a better optimized experience. >> Interesting to see how that'll develop. Last question is, you know what should we expect going forward? Can you show us a little leg on on the future? >> Well, we've talked about a number of directions. This idea of semantic automation is a place where you know, you're going to, I think, continue to see things, shoots, green shoots, come up in our platform. And you know, it's somewhat of an abstract idea but the idea that the platform is just going to become semantically smarter. You know, I had to serve Re:infer as a way, we're semantically smarter now about communications data and forms of communications data. We're getting semantically smarter about documents, screens you know, so developers aren't dealing with, like, this low level stuff. They can focus on business problem and get out of having to deal with all this lower level mechanism. That is one of many areas I'm excited about, but I think that's an area you're going to see a lot from us in the next coming years. >> All right guys, hey, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate you taking us through this. Awesome >> Yeah Always a pleasure. >> Platform extension. Ed. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Dave Nicholson, I will be back right after this short break from UiPath Forward5, Las Vegas. (upbeat music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sans Convention Center covering UI Path Forward five. This is the fourth time the Cube has covered forward, not counting the years during Covid, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson, coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show back here in Vegas. David talking about UI path. UI path is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO this company that was founded in 2005 and was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. Yeah. And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard and they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. >>And then all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and, and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but, but they've hit a billion dollars in arr. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously with the, with the downturn, but also some execution misuses. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward customer stories. And the other thing I'll, I'll, I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation software, robots, they're gonna take away jobs. The opposite has happened, the zero unemployment. Now basically we're heading into a recession, we're actually probably in a recession. And so how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain if, if, if, if inflation is five to 7% and you can get 20% from automation. Well, it's a good roi. But you sat in the keynotes, it was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second. Isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How, how cool can that possibly be? >>Well, it kinda was in the >>Beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but when you dig into it, to your, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that can automate it are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then frees individuals up frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So when you, when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization. Not, you know, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for, for everybody throughout the enterprise. >>Yeah. So let's take a, let's take folks through the, the keynote to, basically we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, you know, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at, at the Venetian, formerly the San Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are orange colors, kinda like pure storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice, it's very welcoming and very cool, but 300 3500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO, automation council and a pickleball court inside this hall, which pickleball is, you know, all the rage. So Bobby, Patrick and Mary Telo kicked it off. Bobby's the cmo, Mary's the head of branding, and Bobby raised four themes. It it, this is a tool that it's, this is RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. >>The second thing is, the big news here is the UI path business platform, something like that. They're calling, but they're talking about about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately when you're heading into a recession, you can, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that, Dave, is as they were saying before, if you're gonna, if if you're, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation may be a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah. >>There's no question, there's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved. We're in the, you know, we're, we're still in the age of cloud, but automation is gonna be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UI path's role be in that market? And, and, and when you hear, when you hear UI path talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm gonna be looking for in terms of the, the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for them. >>Well, they're betting the company on >>That, that's Rob Ensslin coming in. That's why he's part of the, the equation. But >>That platform play is they are betting the company. And, and the reason is, so the, the, the history here is in the early days of this sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UI path went out, they both raised a ton of money. UI Path rocketed out to the lead. They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the other legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, Big Stacks, UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market. And then started building or or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like cloud elements, which is API automation. More recently Reiner, We, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today and they've been putting that together to do not just rpa but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. >>And so Rob Ins insulin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go to market expertise as well as Shim Gupta who's, who's the cfo. So they, they, and they were kinda late with that. They sort of did all this post ipo. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision supervision that's necessary. Rob Sland, I thought was very cogent. He was assertive on stage, he was really clear, he was energetic. He talked about the phases, e r p, Internet cloud and the now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage better, faster, cheaper, pick two. He said, You don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. >>And then what I always, again, love about UiPath is they're no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody, and I think I would say the best of, of, of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on the cube all this week, talked about Changi airport from Singapore. They're adding 50 able to service 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or retail. And how you say that a hundred thousand employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially 12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the, of the UI path finance team is digital. And they've, they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenue's grown. What a 10 x? And really he talked about how to, for how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob ens insulin's keynote? >>First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Ensslin is a brand, and that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll, I'll say it again. It's critically important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're, you're, you're never gonna make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's, he's, he's the right person for the job and I, and I I I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are and the critical nature of automation question remains, will you I path to be able to benefit from that trend. >>So a couple things on that. So your point about sap, you know, is right on EY was up on stage. They, EY is a huge SAP customer and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, right? And they're going all in with UI path as a partner. Of course. I I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough, right? When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. >>Javier from Spain. Yeah. Yep. >>Talking about he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomer was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've gotta get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and got it to this market really providing individual automations and making it, you know, it's Microsoft, they're gonna make it really easy to add it really >>Cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, >>And then, and then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. Okay. So they're, they're, they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob ends and put up on the, the slide go big, I, I tweeted, took a page outta Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break? >>I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean this is, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting to stay forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise they will never get beyond where they are now. I I I, I do wanna mention too, to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, so, you know, these, these guys have reached a milestone, there's no question about that. But to get to that next level platform, platform, platform, and I know we'll be, we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple years. >>Yeah. And the key is obviously gonna be keep servicing the customers, you know, all the financial machinations and you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth down to roughly 20% when you, when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars though dollars are appreciated. So they're less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but, but we're gonna get into that over the next two days. Dave Ante and Dave, you're watching the Cubes coverage of UI path forward, five from Las Vegas. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to the Cube's Coverage of Forward five UI Path Customer event. This is the fourth forward that we've been at. We started in Miami, had some great events. It's all about the customer stories. Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Flow Yees here. She's the director of engineering and development at dsu and Kate Hall is to her right. And Kate is the director of Automation Solutions at dsu. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much. Thanks >>You to >>Be here. Tell us about dsu. You guys are huge company, but but give us the focus. >>Yeah, absolutely. Dentsu, it's one of the largest advertising networks out there. One of the largest in the world with over 66,000 employees and we're operating in a hundred plus countries. We're really proud to serve 95% of the Fortune 100 companies. Household names like Microsoft Factor and Gamble. If you seen the Super Bowls ads last year, Larry, Larry Davids ads for the crypto brand. That's a hilarious one for anyone who haven't seen it. So we're just really proud to be here and we really respect the creatives of our company. >>That was the best commercial, the Super Bowl by far. For sure. I, I said at the top of saying that Dave and I were talking UI pass, a cool company. You guys kinda look like cool people. You got cool jobs. Tell, tell us about your respective roles. What do you guys do? Yeah, >>Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation, so what I really do is to implement the automation operating model and connecting developers across five continents together, making sure that we're delivering and deploying automation projects up to our best standards setting by the operating model. So it's a really, really great job. And when we get to see all these brilliant minds across the world >>And, And Kate, what's your role? Yeah, >>And the Automation Solutions vertical that I head up, the focus is really on converting business requirements into technical designs for flows, developers to deliver. So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, prioritizing them according to the business businesses objectives and making sure that we route them to the right place. So is it, does it need to be an automation first? Do we need to optimize the process? Does this make sense for citizen developers or do we need to bring in the professional resources on flow's >>Team? So you're bilingual, you speak, you're like the translator, you speak geek and wall, right? Is that fair? Okay. So take me back to the, let's, let's do a little mini case study here. How did you guys get started? I'm always interested, was this a top down? Is, is is top down required to be successful? Cuz it does feel like you can have bottom up bottoms up with rpa, but, but how did you guys get started? What was the journey like? >>Yeah, we started back in 2017, very traditional top down approach. So we delivered a couple POCs working directly with UiPath. You know, going back those five years, delivered those really highly scalable top down solutions that drove hundreds of thousands of hours of ROI for the business. However, as people kind of began to embrace automation and they learned that this is something that they could, that could help them, it's not something that they should be afraid of to take away their jobs. You know, DSU is a young company with a lot of young, young creatives. They wanna make their lives better. So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases of, hey I, I need a bot to do this. I need a bot to do that i's gonna save me, you know, 10 hours a week. It's gonna save my team a hundred hours a month, et cetera, et cetera. All of these smaller use cases that were gonna be hugely impactful for the individuals, their teams, even in entire department, but didn't have that scalable ROI for us to put professional development resources against it. So starting in 2020 we really introduced the citizen development program to put the power into those people's hands so that they could create their own solutions. And that was really just a snowball effect to tackle it from the bottom up as well as the top down. >>So a lot of young people, Dave, they not not threatened by robots that racing it. So >>They've grown up with the technology, they know that they can order an Uber from their phone, right? Why am I, you know, sitting here at MITs typing data from Excel into a program that might be older than some of our youngest employees. >>Yeah. Now, now the way you described it, correct me if I'm wrong, the way you described it, it sounds like there's sort of a gating function though. You're not just putting these tools in the hands of people sitting, especially creatives who are there to create. You're not saying, Oh you want things automated, here are the tools. Go ahead. Automated. We'll we, for those of you who want to learn how to use the tools, we'll have you automate that there. Did I hear that right? You're, you're sort of making decisions about what things will be developed even by citizen developers. >>Let me, Do you wanna talk to them about governance? Yeah, absolutely. >>Yeah, so I think we started out with assistant development program, obviously the huge success, right? Last year we're also here at the Cubes. We're very happy to be back again. But I think a lot, a lot had changed and we've grown a lot since last year. One, I have the joy being a part of this team. And then the other thing is that we really expanded and implemented an automation operating model that I mentioned briefly just earlier. So what that enabled us to do is to unite developers from five continents together organically and we're now able to tap into their talent at a global scale. So we are really using this operating model to grow our automation practice in a scalable and also controlled manner. Okay. What I mean by that is that these developer originally were sitting in 18 plus markets, right? There's not much communication collaboration between them. >>And then we went in and bridged them together. What happened is that originally they were only delivering projects and use cases within their region and sometimes these use cases could be very, very much, you know, small scale and not really maximizing their talent. What we are now able to do is tap into a global automation pipeline. So we connecting these highly skilled people to the pipeline elsewhere, the use cases elsewhere that might not be within their regions because one of our focus, a lot of change I mentioned, right? One thing that will never change with our team, it's used automation to elevate people's potential. Now it's really a win-win situation cuz we are connecting the use cases from different pipelines. So the business is happy cuz we are delivering these high scalable solutions. We also utilizing these developers and they're happy because their skills are being maximized and then at the same time growing our automation program. So then that way the citizen development program so that the lower complexities projects are being delivered at a local level and we are able to innovate at a local level. >>I, I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. It's blowing my mind >>Here. It's a whole cycle. >>So let me start with how do you, you know, one of the, one of the concerns I had initially with RPA, cuz just you're talking about some very narrow use cases and your goal is to expand that to realize the potential of each individual, right? But early days I saw a lot of what I call paving the cow path, taking a process that was not a great process and then automating it, right? And that was limiting the potential. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and maybe which processes should be rethought, >>Right? Exactly. A lot of time when we do automation, right, we talk about innovations and all that stuff, but innovation doesn't happen with the same people sitting in the same room doing the same thing. So what we are doing now, able to connect all these people, different developers from different groups, we really bring the diversity together. That's diversity D diverse diversity in the mindset, diversity in the skill. So what are we really able to do and we see how we tackle this problem is to, and that's a problem for a lot of business out there is the short-termism. So there's something, what we do is that we take two approaches. One, before we, you know, for example, when we used to receive a use case, right? Maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into development and start coding and all that good stuff, which is great. >>But what we do with this automation framework, which we think it's a really great service for any company out there that want to grow and mature their automation practice, it's to take a step back, think about, okay, so the China market would be beneficial from this automation. Can we also look at the Philippine market? Can we also look at the Thailand market? Because we also know that they have similar processes and similar auto tools that they use. So we are really able to make our automation in a more meaningful way by scaling a project just beyond one market. Now it's impacting the entire region and benefiting people in the entire region. That is what we say, you know, putting automation for good and then that's what we talked about at dsu, Teaming without limits. And that's a, so >>By taking, we wanna make sure that we're really like taking a step back, connecting all of the dots, building the one thing the right way, the first time. Exactly. And what's really integral into being able to have that transparency, that visibility is that now we're all working on the same platform. So you know, Brian spoke to you last year about our migration into automation cloud, having everything that single pipeline in the cloud. Anybody at DSU can often join the automation community and get access to automation hub, see what's out there, submit their own ideas, use the launchpad to go and take training. Yeah. And get started on their own automation journey as a citizen developer and you know, see the different paths that are available to them from that one central space. >>So by taking us a breath, stepping back, pausing just a bit, the business impact at the tail end is much, much higher. Now you start in 2017 really before you UI path made it's big enterprise play, it acquired process gold, you know, cloud elements now most recently referenced some others. How much of what you guys are, are, are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort of robot installation? Yeah, >>I mean platforms power people and that's what we're here to do as the global automation team. Whether it's powering the citizen developers, the professional developers, anybody who's interacting with our automations at dsu, we wanna make sure that we're connecting the docs for them on a platform basis so that developers can develop and they don't need to develop those simple use cases that could be done by a citizen developer. You know, they're super smart technical people, they wanna do the cool shit with the new stuff. They wanna branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. That's, you know, the nature of human curiosity. Citizen developers, they're thrilled that we're making an investment to upscale them, to give them a new capability so that they can automate their own work. And they don't, they, they're the process experts. They don't need to spend a month talking to us when they could spend that time taking the training, learning how to create something themselves. >>How, how much sort of use case runway when you guys step back and look at your business, do you see a limit to the use cases? I mean where are you, if you had on a spectrum of, you know, maturity, how much more opportunity is there for DSU to automate? >>There's so much I think the, you feel >>Like it's limitless? >>No, I absolutely feel like it's limitless because there one thing, it's, there's the use cases and I think it's all about connecting the talent and making sure that something we do really, you know, making sure that we deliver these use cases, invest the time in our people so we make sure our professional developers part of our team spending 10 to 20% of the time to do learning and development because only limitless if our people are getting the latest and the greatest technology and we want to invest the time and we see this as an investment in the people making sure that we deliver the promise of putting people first. And the second thing, it's also investment in our company's growth. And that's a long term goal. And overcoming just focusing on things our short term. So that is something we really focus to do. And not only the use cases we are doing what we are doing as an operating model for automation. That is also something that we really value because then this is a kind of a playbook and a success model for many companies out there to grow their automation practice. So that's another angle that we are also focusing >>On. Well that, that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and, and I'm sitting here thinking they don't realize they're working themselves out of a job once they get everything automated, what are they gonna do? Right? But, but so, so it sounds like it's a never ending process, but because you guys are, are such a large global organization, it seems like you might have a luxury of being able to benchmark automations from one region and then benchmark them against other regions that aren't using that automation to be able to see very, very quickly not only realize ROI really quickly from the region where it's been implemented, but to be able to compare it to almost a control. Is that, is that part of your process? Yeah, >>Absolutely. Because we are such a global brand and with the automation, automation operating model, what we are able to do, not only focusing on the talent and the people, but also focusing on the infrastructure. So for example, right, maybe there's a first use case developing in Argentina and they have never done these automation before. And when they go to their security team and asking for an Okta bypass service account and the security team Argentina, like we never heard of automation, we don't know what UiPath is, why would I give you a service account for good reason, right? They're doing their job right. But what we able to do with automation model, it's to establish trust between the developers and the security team. So now we have a set up standing infrastructure that we are ready to go whenever an automation's ready to deploy and we're able to get the set up standing infrastructure because we have the governance to make sure the quality would delivered and making sure anything that we deployed, automation that we deploy are developed and governed by the best practice. So that's how we able to kind of get this automation expand globally in a very control and scalable manner because the people that we have build a relationship with. What are >>The governors to how fast you can adopt? Is it just expertise or bandwidth of that expertise or what's the bottleneck? >>Yeah, >>If >>You wanna talk more about, >>So in terms of the pipeline, we really wanna make sure that we are taking that step back and instead of just going, let's develop, develop, develop, here are the requirements like get started and go, we've prove the value of automation at Densu. We wanna make sure we are taking that step back and observing the pipeline. And it's, it's up to us to work with the business to really establish their priorities and the priorities. It's a, it's a big global organization. There might be different priorities in APAC than there are in EM for a good reason. APAC may not be adopted on the same, you know, e r P system for example. So they might have those smaller scale ROI use cases, but that's where we wanna work with them to identify, you know, maybe this is a legitimate need, the ROI is not there, let's upscale some citizen developers so that they can start, you know, working for themselves and get those results faster for those simpler use cases. >>Does, does the funding come from the line of business or IT or a combination? I mean there are obviously budget constraints are very concerned about the macro and the recession. You guys have some global brands, you know, as, as things ebb and flow in the economy, you're competing with other budgets. But where are the budgets coming from inside of dsu? Is it the business, is it the tech >>Group? Yeah, we really consider our automation group is the cause of doing business because we are here connecting people with bridging people together and really elevating. And the reason why we structure it that way, it's people, we do automation at dsu not to reduce head count, not to, you know, not, not just those matrix number that we measure, but really it's to giving time back to the people, giving time back to our business. So then that way they can focus on their wellbeing and that way they can focus on the work-life balance, right? So that's what we say. We are forced for good and by using automation for good as one really great example. So I think because of this agenda and because DSU do prioritize people, you know, so that's why we're getting the funding, we're getting the budget and we are seeing as a cause of doing business. So then we can get these time back using innovation to make people more fulfilling and applying automation in meaningful ways. >>Kate and Flo, congratulations. Your energy is palpable and really great success, wonderful story. Really appreciate you sharing. Thank you so >>Much for having us today. >>You're very welcome. All keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're live from UI path forward at five from Las Vegas. We're in the Venetian Consent Convention Center. Will be right back, right for the short break.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody you're watching theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson this morning. Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system. (Dave laughing) >> Thought it was something fake. >> But it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile and Naga Chakravarthy is the Chief Digital Officer at iOpex. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> Next, so John, (commentator booming) so okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that S0 let's just give him a second here. >> (Commentator) Three different tracks >> I think it's pretty loud. Probably coming through. Usually we don't get that. >> It's live. >> But, it is live. So John, we, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title's, Director of product and technology. Obviously you're here 'cause you have an affinity to automation. But talk about your role and how automation fits into it. >> Sure. Well, I'm the director of product and technology and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So I'm here to learn about, from these experts and all these leaders within the UiPath and from our vendors as well. >> Okay. Now tell us about iOpex. So kind of an interesting name. Where'd that come from? I think cloud. When I think opex, but, get rid of my cap. Where's the name come from and what do you guys do? >> Actually we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the whole team comes from a service background and then I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, you know the dependency on people was also increasing. And we thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, you know, I would say iOpex is currently at 3.0 and if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me from operation excellence that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. >> So the market just went right, right to you guys you were ahead of the game. And then, wow, now, >> I have to brag that we fortunately named it Opex, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. >> Got it. >> So, so John, where did, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did, was it the, was it the, the merger? Take us through that. >> Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOpex. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. Proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-mobile enterprise. Not having any experience within automation as we had discussed before usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners iOpex being main critical partner in that evolution. And so iOpex came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green is that, you know, we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shoutouts here. Giao Duong, John Lowe and our CIO Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOpex, UiPath to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, I'll wait. >> Wait. No, it's okay. So you went, you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program, where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOpex to get that in place. And once we have that in place I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program. That's incredible. And we're a large company and we'll, I mean we're just starting so it's going to be fun. >> So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroot effort and then the COE comes later? How do you typically recommend approaching it? >> I think the fact that we started very small there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we are solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation, right? And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process, entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So, which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to have, when you have to have evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified let's say if you have to go to different departments it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments' problem statements and how when you, when you navigate it you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit. And when it comes to benefit, right? You need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem. So somebody internally within T-Mobile we were able to use very nice, you know John's team, you know, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation. And slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggyback and scale it bigger. >> So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyper scale cloud providers or automation platforms from UiPath, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else there are organizations like iOpex and you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, >> Yeah. >> How does that business model from an iOpex perspective work do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it a, is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of, okay now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, in the, from a business perspective, iOpex wants to do as much as it can a value for T-mobile because that's what, that's the business they're in. But, so tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, So I'll say real fast that, yeah iOpex is actually part of the T-mobile team. They are embedded. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> We work with them daily. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> Right. They had the expertise they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure there. >> Absolutely. Let me add one more point to it. See if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile I would say it's a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you there was a natural way to get embedded, you know as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So, which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. >> Vellante: I got a lot of questions. >> John: Yeah. >> John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. >> Yes. >> What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding, >> Yep. >> And maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I, if you could, Cause a lot of people ask me well how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative line of business? >> So those executives were from the IT team. >> Vellante: Okay. For sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and you know a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have, you know, Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. >> How do you choose, I got so many questions I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? >> I think it's a combination, right? One fundamentally guiding principle that we always look at is let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that gets executed in the systems of record, in the form of workflow. And there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath, you will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere. But you also have to look at why is this clutter happening, and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together. And that's when you'll start deciding, hey this is repetitive in nature, this is going to scale, this is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard and that scorecard naturally drives the, you know decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? >> So I was going to ask you how you visualize it. You visualize it through, I guess, understanding of the organization, anecdotal comments, research digging, peeling the onion, and then you do some kind of scorecard like approach and say, okay these are the high, high opportunity areas. Okay. So combination. Got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before, big organizations that I know they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio the applications have dependencies on each other. And then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications. Any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? >> So we actually have a change management team and we make sure that before we go forward with anything it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with iOpex, with our development teams on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? >> Yeah. So when it comes to change management, right? Well, John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is the proactive thing that we end up doing is right when a bot goes live, there is a life support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamentally core principle for that entire support to work good is you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails. Right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record the data format, is it changing or the bot logic is failed? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons. And that kind of compliments the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay fair enough, this systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way the change becomes a smoother process. >> And how quickly can you diagnose that? Is it hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? >> So, >> Vellante: Depends. >> It's a very subjective question. Right. If we know the pattern early then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, you know, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you know, you need to basically look at how the business is going to going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. >> So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. >> Please. >> As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that in general? What differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? >> I think, it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with Orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in process mining, task capture, made it up chain, a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skillset? So a platform will try to look at what is that, you know I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise? I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture. And that's the kind of platform that, you know anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. >> So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? You know, is there an all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? >> John: Yeah, so we are enterprise license. >> You are? Okay. >> So, and iOpex helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, you know, and and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of 'em. It's a large company. So I'm, '23 is going to be huge for us. >> Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. Good luck in the future. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> All right. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson UiPath FORWARD5. The bots are running around Dave. We're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at FORWARD. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.

The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi, everybody went back live at the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center. Dave Ante with David Nicholson. UI. Paths forward five. This is the fourth forward conference that the Cube has done. So we've seen the ascendancy of UI path, the growth customers. UiPath is one of the first companies to actually come back Post Covid. Last year, 2021 at the Bellagio. They took a chance and it actually worked out great at a couple thousand people there. Lots of customers. We're here with Lauren Joyce, who's the global automation lead at Whirlpool. She's joined by Regener Facade rp, who is the global automation lead at Accenture. Good to see you again. Lauren. Welcome to the Cube first timer. Very much, >>Yes, thank >>You. So you're relatively new to automation, but you, as we were talking, you're a process with talk about the center of excellence that you're building out. What's the importance of that to Whirlpool? >>Absolutely. So we are first looking at automation from our finance organization and they were coming to us with, Hey, here are 12 things we wanna automate. And really what we are finding is that not all of these things were suitable for automation. So we've started on the COE journey of, well, how do we make sure that we're getting the most ROI for our business? Starting with discovery, making sure that what we're automating it makes sense, it's the right process versus just an upgrade or, or retooling set. So for us, especially being a global company, making sure that we had that governance in place, that mindset and what should be automated and when really made sense and helped us on our journey pursuing. >>And, and, and I presume that's where Accenture comes in. I mean, rp, you got deep industry expertise, you've got automation expertise. What role do you play in that prioritization exercise? >>So the, the way we approach any automation implementation is similar to what we did here in our pool. First step is, you know, I call it as knowing where you are in the automation journey. Like what always is, if you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you. So baselining the current automation maturity and the current journey where they are. And once you do that, you identify you are not star and prioritization and the goals that are required and then you build a plan. And exactly how we approach in establishing a center of excellence that drives the automation with rigor, knowing where you are and where you want to get to, >>What's the team look like in a, in a, who's on the bus, You know, who's who's, who's in in the circle if you will. How do you com you know, build, you've written about this, it's like a sports team. You put it together, you need be a quarterback, you need a lineman, you need, you know, wide receivers who's on the center of excellence team. >>So the way you always build the center of excellence is making sure that your business partners and the senior leadership team is committed to the entire automation journey. That's the key ingredient for success. Then you build, one of the critical aspect is the talent, the quarterback, you said the talent. In today's world, automation talent is just not about knowing, you know, RPA techniques or you know, process optimization, but it is an end to end technology stack starting from cloud to data to analytics and entire platform capabilities of automation that combined and coupled with change management and how do you drive an enterprise chain management is very, very critical in terms of implementing automation. >>Absolutely. Lauren, I'm curious, did, did Accenture bring UI path to Whirlpool or did you bring, or did you bring Accenture in and UI path in together? How, how did that interaction? >>Yes. So we brought Accenture in and they really helped us along with that journey and they brought UI path to us. Our European business was actually using Blue Prism and that's when we said no, we wanna standardize specifically on UI path and make sure from a global standpoint we're using the same tooling. And that really helped that as we were building our team, we leaned on their expertise and then even we're retooling people within our corporation of, hey, we took our SAP lead, our GCP lead to be our technical architect and and people that could help speak the language and translate from process and explain that doesn't have to be a large project and explain what automation is to help drive return investment for sure. >>Now you're early in, but have you seen results, you know so far? Can you talk about that, quantify it in any way or? >>Absolutely. So we started our journey December of 2020. We've automated about 60 or so bots, but really everything that we've done is based on hours saved. So we're at about 60,000 hours automated and with some of our biggest, like our big box stores and our KitchenAid small appliances, we've even had hard dollar savings that we had a bot that went live about in 60 days. We had a $3 million return and take took out 3000 hours of human interaction. That was great for us. >>So the world's kind of a mess right now. You got supply chain issues, you got inflation, you got a recession, you got the United States. Anyway, you got the Fed trying to figure out, oh there's sling shoting, you know, some people are, you know, really hurting stock market is starting to show that there's a lot of confusion out there. The world is changed quite a bit obviously the last few years. How do you guys see it? What role has, I wonder if both of you could answer, what role has automation played in helping like, for instance, Whirlpool with maybe supply chain problems or maybe bigger forecasting and, and what are you seeing across organizations? But Lauren if you could start. >>Absolutely. So for us being able to show improvement in a six to eight week development cycle and instead of saying here's a heavy dollar investment or a new tooling that you gotta get people resources up to speed on, we can take where we are today, automate save hours where we're getting our employee engagement scores of I'm overworked, I have too much on my plate, how can you help me? And automation is there to support and that's really helped our business one take unnecessary work off their plate and show very quick value add to the business without having to have huge dollar investments in our, I'm you trying to save money. >>Are people, what are you seeing in terms of, so some of the problems that people I see as sign out here said, oh, in inflation at five to 7% go after productivity and make it in 20% gains. I mean, what are you seeing in the field? >>More than ever, More than ever, automation is more relevant now given the current economy environment that we are operating. Because automation always free up or optimizers the capacity that every enterprise has. Optimizing capacity is very important so that you can take your talented employees and the talented resources to do more strategic transformation program, which helps to sustain and stay and scale in your business. So I see that automation playing a significant role to impact business imperative. >>What are some of the common misconceptions? I mean we talk a lot about people's fear of automation. You know, I don't think that's necessarily a misconception. I think a lot of times people are fearful about automating though. Maybe they, they shouldn't be. We had Dentsu on today, DS like, you know, this giant global branding firm and they get a lot of young kids, they're like, No, bring it on. I don't want to do all this mundane stuff. But you know, a lot of folks are are are concerned, but, so that maybe is one misconception. Are there others, Lauren, that you found that you can share? >>I think we were lucky that we didn't necessarily have that fear of being replaced by automation. I think our change management plan really helped drive that. We included some fun things of any time a bot went live you got almost like a birth certificate of here's the process we save for you, here's how it's grown over six, six months, 12 months, 18 months. But I'm not sure if we had any other major gaps like that or or pitfalls >>Or, or p anything that, >>So my philosophy is automation is human plus machine combination. You can't run just, you know, people can't think that, you know, if my task get automated, I lose the, I lose my my jobs. That's not how it works because you, you do need human expertise, competency skills to kind of argument what you do with automation. And most important thing when you do this change is that most of the enterprises do not believe, do not understand that you have to get even process, right? You don't want to, you know, have an inefficient process and put automation on the top of it. Then you just made your inefficiency run more faster. So you need to kind of make sure that you address inefficiency, optimize your process, then infuse automation, then have human plus machine capability to strengthen your automation. >>Is it really that easy? Sounds easy, right? It, >>So from an, from an Accenture perspective, if you're, if you're looking at the market as a whole or looking at industry verticals, what's the difference between an organization that is leveraging automation and an organization that is not leveraging organ leveraging automation? Is there, is there sort of a range of percentage of efficiency that you can put on that? What does it mean for their bottom line? >>Essent, you must have data on this. Yeah, I mean what, >>Yeah, >>Today, today's world in the technology world, every organization understands the importance of automation that's given. That's a table stake. Now, where an organization is in the journey differs some of the enterprises maybe at the beginning of the maturity spectrum. In my book I talk about automation maturity framework wherein there are the initial stages of automation. Some of them are intelligent automation at the end of the spectrum where they're using data cloud and AI to drive the automation journey. But in every enterprise, the key success of automation depends upon whether you do automation and enterprisewide not in a silo in the organization, but if you do enterprise wide apply across, you get a lot more benefits, lot more efficiency to drive. >>Does does automation being more strategic or key? Does it, does it in a way make investments in automation more, more scrutinized or more circumspect? I, I would, I would use the term discretionary. We heard Bobby Patrick today say this is not discretionary, it's strategic to me. If it's strategic it might be a mandate but it's might be something I can kick down the road. What are you seeing there in the field just in terms of overall demand and sentiment? >>Automation today, as I said, is a table stake. When it becomes an integrated DNA of enterprise, it is always, you know, whether you want to call one pillar of strategy, key DNA of your strategic roadmap you are in investments have to be directly proportional to what you want to accomplish as your business KPIs to thrive and deliver your business with. Otherwise, if you do it as like a one off thing, you know you won't get the benefit. Yeah. >>Or from your standpoint, where do you want to take the automation initiative inside a whirlpool? How are you thinking about scaling it? What have you learned that you can apply to driving scale? >>So we put some strict governance in place who weren't just automating everything under the sun cuz >>Wild west >>Yeah, I can't support that. Right? So we made sure that everything had at least less than a one year invest return on investment and 500 hours worth of automation for us to even consider it as part of our coe. So because of that, we do have some automations that would make sense, but that's why we're looking at a citizen development program or low code, no code. What other types of options are there to make sure that it does become a part of our culture and dna that you can automate those even small parts of your workflow to, to make your day better. >>When, when you're looking at those workflows, do you, are you, are you literally looking over someone's shoulder with a stopwatch and measuring, Measuring how time >>And motion studies? No >>Question. Yeah. I mean is it time and motion studies? I mean, is that sort of the entry level data that that you use or is it more, or is it more automated than that? >>I would say it's a little more automated than that, but we do sit down and we ask our business process, show me what this process looks like to you. And then from that we can take some task mining and look at, okay, how long did it take you to do this? How often are you doing it? And then based on how long the automation would take, see how many hours are saved and how many people are doing that same task on a monthly, daily, weekly basis. >>Great. All right guys, thanks so much for coming in the cube and sharing your story. A whirlpool and always love to have Accenture on. You guys got such a massive observation space, global depth of industry. So thank you very much both. Thank you. Thank you. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante will be back right to the short break, you watching the cubes coverage of UI path forward. Five live from Las Vegas.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward. Five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five from Las Vegas. We're inside. The formerly was The Sands, now it's the Venetian Convention Center. Dave Nicholson. David, Deb. I've never seen it set up like this before. UI Path's. Very cool company. So of course the setup has to be cool, not like tons of concrete. James Furlong is here, the Vice President of Supply Chain Management and projects at Puma. And Derek Weimer is the CEO of Robo, who's an implementation partner, expert at Intelligent Automation. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. Great to have you on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>So what's happening at Puma these days? I love your sneakers, but you guys probably do more than that, but let's tell us about, give us the update on Puma. >>Yeah, absolutely. Puma's one of the world's leading sports, sports brands. So we encompass all things sports. We do footwear, we do apparel, we do accessories. Cobra, Puma golf is underneath our umbrella as well. So we get the added benefit of having that category as well. And yeah, trade, trade all over the world and it's an exciting, exciting brand to be with. >>And di Robo Atlanta based really specialists in intelligent automation. That's pretty much all you do, is that right? >>Yeah, we are a pure play intelligence automation professional services firm. That's all we do. We're the world's largest firm that focuses only on automation headquarter in Germany, but with a large presence here in Americas. >>So we hear from a lot of customers. We've heard from like with the journey it started, you know, mid last decade, Puma James is just getting started. We April you mentioned. So take us through that. What was the catalyst as you're exiting the, the pandemic, the isolation economy we call it? Yeah. What was the catalyst tell, take us through the sort of business case for automation. >>Sure, absolutely. So Puma, our mission is forever faster. It's, it's our mantra and something we live and breathe. So naturally we have an intense focus on innovation and, and automation. So with that mindset, the way this all kicked off is that I had the opportunity to go into some of our distribution facility and I was unbelievably impressed with the automation that I saw there. So how automation augmented the employee workforce. And it was just very impressive to see that some of our state of the art technology and automation at the same time. Then I went back to the office with that excitement and that passion and I saw that we had the opportunity to take that to our employee base as well. We sort of lacked that same intense focus on how do we take automation and technology like I saw at the distribution facilities and bring it to our employees because picture a large workforce of talented, dedicated employees and they just couldn't keep up with the explosive growth who's seen explosive growth over the last couple of years and they just couldn't keep up with it. So I said that that's it. We need to, to take that same passion and innovation and enter in hyper hyper automation. So we went to the leadership team and no surprise they were all in. We went with them with the idea of bringing hyper automation, starting with RPA to, to our office employees. And they were in, they support innovation and they said, Great, what do you need? Really? Go for it. >>The first question wasn't how much, >>Actually the first question I will say that the funny part is, is they said, Well I like this, it sounds too good to be true. And because it, it really does. If you're new to it like we were and I'm pitching all the benefits that RPA could bring, it does sound too good to me. True. So they said, All right, you know, we trust you and, and go for it. What do you need? Resources, just let us know. So sure enough, I had a proof of concept, I had an idea, but now what? I didn't know where to go from there. So that's where we did some intensive research into software suppliers, but also implementation partners because now we knew what we wanted to do. We had excitement, we had leadership buy-in now, now what do I do? So this is when we entered our partnership to figure out, okay, help Puma on this journey. >>How'd you guys find each other? You know, >>Just intensive research and spoke with a lot of people here. Is there a lot of great organizations? But at the end of the day, they really supported everything that Houma stood for, what we're looking to do and had a lot of trust in the beginning and Dirk and his team and how he could help us on this journey. Yeah. >>Now James, your, your job title system for supply chain management. It is, but I understand that you have had a variety of roles within the organization. Now if we're talking about another domain, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Yeah. There's always this concept of domain expertise. Yeah. And how when you're trying to automate things in that realm, domain expertise is critical. Yeah. You have domain expertise outside of your job title. Yeah. So has that helped you with this journey looking at automation, being able to, being able to have insight into those other organizations? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we were pitching it to the leadership team in the beginning, that enabled me to look at each one sitting at the table and saying, alright, and on the sales, on a commercial side, I was a head of sales for one of the trade channels. I could speak directly to him in the benefits it could have with not with tribal knowledge and with an expertise. So it wasn't something that, it was just, oh, that's supply chain. I could sit, you know, with the, our CFO and talk to him about the, the benefits for his group merchandising and legal so on. I was really able to kind of speak to each one of them and how it would support, because I had that knowledge from being blessed of 15 years experience at, at Puma. So yeah, I was able to take all of that and figure out how do I make sure not just supply chain benefits from rpa, but how does the whole organization benefit from not only RPA but the hyper automation strategy. >>So what's an engagement look like? You start, I presume you, you gotta do some type of assessment and, and you know, of some upfront planning work. Yeah. What does that look like? How, what's the starting point? Take us through that >>Journey. Yeah, so exactly. So the, the key when you're trying to get value from Intel automation is finding the right opportunities, right? And you can automate a lot of things, but which are the things that are gonna drive the most value and, and the value that actually matters to the company, right? So where are you trying to get to from a strategic level, your objectives and how do you actually use automation to help you get to there? So the first thing is, what are the opportunities gonna help you do that? And then once you identify, what we recommend is start with something that's gonna be, you know, accessible, small, You're gonna get a quick win. Cuz then the important thing is once you get that out there, you build the momentum and excitement in the organization that then leads to more and more. And then you build a proper pipeline and you and you get that the, the engagement. >>So what was that discovery like? Was it you fly up there and do a, a chalk talk? Or did you already know James, like where you wanted to focus? >>Yeah, I knew I had a solid proof of concept with the disruptions in supply chain we couldn't keep up with, with all the changes and supply. So right away I knew that I have a very substantial impact on the organization and it would be a solid proof of concept. It was something that not only would supply chain steal, but our customers would feel that we would be servicing them better. Our sales team, the commercial team, marketing impacted everybody. But at the same time it was tangible. I saw two people that just physically couldn't get their, their work done despite how talented and hardworking they were. So I, I was in on that proof of concept and then I just took that idea with some strong advice from Dirk and and his team on, okay, well how do I take that? But then also use that to evangelize through the organization. What are some pitfalls to avoid? Because as a proof of concept, they just told me it's too good to be true. I believe in it. So it was so important to me that it >>Was successful. >>It get your neck out. Oh, I sure was. Which is a little scary, but I had confidence that we would >>Do it. But your poc you had to have a systems view. Yes. Right? Cuz you were trying to, I think you, I'm inferring that you had two people working really hard, but they couldn't get their job done. Yeah, for sure. They were just sitting on their hands. Right. Waiting. Okay. So you kind of knew where the bottlenecks were. Yes. And that's what you attacked and or you helped James and her the team think through that or, >>Yeah, exactly. So, so a couple points you were asking about her domain model of knowledge earlier, and I think that's really key to the puma's success with it, is that they've come at it from a business point of view, what matters to the business. And at the point, you know, supply chain challenges, how do we use automation to address that? And then, you know, and then it's gonna, it's actually gonna, you know, pick opportunities that are gonna matter to the business. Yeah, >>Yeah. At the same time, we, we knew this could be a scary thing, right? If it's not done right, you know, automation definitely can, can take a, a wrong path. So what we relied on them for is tell us how to make this successful. We wanted structure, we wanted oversight, we wanted to balance that with speed and really, you know, developing our pipeline, but at the same time, tell us how to do this right? How do we set up a center, our first ever center of excellence? They help us set that up. Our steerco, our process definition documents are like, they really helped us add that structure to how to make this successful, sustainable and make sure that we were standing things up the right way versus launching into a strong proof, proof of concept. But then it's not gonna be scalable if we didn't really take their strong advice on how to make this something, you know, that had the right oversight, the right investment. So that was, that was key as >>Well for us. So when you looked at the POC and James was saying there were potential pitfalls, what were those pitfalls? Like what did you tell Puma, Hey, watch out for this, watch out for that. What was sort of the best advice there? >>Yeah, so I think one is understanding complexity, right? So a lot of opportunities sound good, but you want to make sure that it's, it's feasible with the right tool set. And also that you're not bit off too much in the beginning is really important. And so some of that is that bringing that expertise to say, Okay, yeah, look, that does something, a good process. You're gonna get value out. It's not gonna be overly complicated. It's a good place to start. And then also, I guess the thing too to mention is it's more than just a technology project. And that's the thing that we also really focus on is it's actually as much about the change management, it's much about, you know, what is the right story, the business case around it, the technology actually in a way is the easy part and it's all the stuff around it that really makes the POC effective, >>Obviously the process. Yeah. Been the people I presume getting to adopt, >>Right? And I think, again, with our, our brand mantra forever faster, we, we get that support that the buy-in from the top is is there from, from the beginning. So that's a benefit that some companies don't, they don't have, right? They have a little resistance maybe from the top. We're trying to get everyone's buy in it. And we had that. So we had, you know, the buy-in the engagement, we were ready to go. So now we just needed someone to kind of help us. >>One more if I may. Yeah, yeah. Gabe, six months in. Yes. That's the business impact that, can >>You tell you? That was tremendous. Yeah. >>Really already six months. Wow. >>Yeah, >>Absolutely. Cfo, CFO's dream. Yeah. >>And again, and, and we had a CFO change mid, mid project. So the new CFO comes in, not new to Puma, the same thing. Super, super smart guy. And I had to sit and again pitch, you know, pitch what it is and the support that I needed by way of investment. And he saw the results and he was all in, you know, what do you need, what's next? And instantly was challenging his departments, Why don't he got competitive, right? We're a competitive bunch, so why don't you know, you should have more in the pipeline. And he was, he was bought in. So there was that fear of a new CFO coming in and how do you show value? Because some of it is, it's very easy to show right away, You know, we were able to refocus those two full-time employees on, on higher value chain activity and you know, they're doing a tremendous job and they're, you know, they have the, the bot and the automation supporting them. So he saw that right away. And we can show him that. But he also understands, as does the whole leadership team, the concept of downstream impacts that you can't necessarily, you know, touch and, and put on paper. So he sees some, but then he also recognizes all the other upstream and downstream impacts that it's had and he's all in and supports whatever, whatever we need. >>Yeah. New CFOs like George Seaford taking over for bill walls. >>Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We >>Have, we have to keep showing results and it has to be sustainable. So that's, again, we'll rely on our partnership to say, okay, this is the beginning, you know, what's next? Keep us, you know, honest on oversight and, and any pitfalls that we should avoid because he's excited. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we sustain those results and, and show what's next. Now they all gotta taste to the apple and they're very eager to see what's next in, in, in this hyper automation journey. >>Well, Dirk, you've partnered on this journey, this specific journey with, with, with Puma. But from your perspective in the broader marketplace, what would be the perfect low hanging fruit opportunity that you would like to have somebody call you and say, Hey, we've got, we've got this perspective engagement with a client. What would be the, what would be the like, Oh yeah, that's easy, that's huge roi really quickly, What does that look like? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's a few areas, right? You know, one task automation RPA is a, is a really good entry point, right? Because it's, it's, it's not overly complex. It doesn't involve a lot of complicated technologies. And I'd say the, the usual starting areas, you know, you, you finance back office, you know, shared service, invoice processing, you know, payables is a very good opportunity area. HR is also an area I would look at, you know, in new, new employee onboarding process or you know, payroll, et cetera. And then supply chain is actually becoming more and more, more common, right? So those would be I guess, top three areas I would mention. And >>Then, and then kind of follow onto that, what's the tip of this sphere? What's the sort of emerging market Yeah. >>For >>This kind of technology? >>I think there's two things. One, it's taking a holistic into end view and leveraging multiple, you know, technology, you know, beyond just rpa, right? You know, intelligent document processing, iml, you know, bringing all this to bear to actually do a true digital transformation. That's, that's number one. And then I'd say the second is going from focusing on cost and efficiency to actually getting into the front office and how do you, how do you actually increase revenue? How do you increase margin? How do you actually, you know, help with that, that top line growth. I think that's really, and that's where you're leveraging technologies, you know, like the, the AI as an example to really help you understand how do you optimize. >>So James, that's, that becomes then an enterprise wide initiative. Yeah. That's, that's, is that your vision? Maybe maybe lay that out for >>Us a bit. Yeah, ab absolutely. The, the vision is now that we've seen what, what it can do, how do we take it from being managed by just, you know, supply chain and this proof of concept cuz I manage projects, but now it's bigger than just a supply chain project. And how do we sort of evangelize that through the whole organization And you know, they mentioned on main stage this, the creation of new jobs and, and roles and how a, a company might set out their strategic directive now is, is changing and evolving. So you know that that's our idea now and that what we'll need support next is how should we structure now for success. And so that it's across the whole enterprise. But that's, that's the vision for >>Sure. What worries you do, you worried about it like taking off and getting outta control and not being governed and so you have to be a little bit careful there. >>Yeah, for sure. That was really important to us. And we actually got to leverage a lot of heavy lifting that Puma Global had done at the same time that we were coming up and, and thinking of the idea of rpa. They were having the same thoughts and they did a lot of heavy lifting again, about not only the software providers but also what does the structure look like, the oversight, a center of excellence globally. So we were able to really leverage a lot of best practices and SOPs that they had set out and we were able to kind of leverage those, bring those to Puma North America so that we didn't face that fear cuz that would be a limiting factor for us. So because we were so disciplined and we could leverage the work that they had done, that fear wasn't, wasn't there. Now we have to stay, you know, on top of it. And as people get excited, how do you kind of mirror the excitement and with it at the same time that the oversight and not getting, you know, too, too big, too fast. So that's the balance that we'll, we'll work through now. It's a good problem to have. >>Well, exactly. It is super exciting. Great story. Congratulations on, on the success and good luck. Thank you. Yeah, you very much for coming to the, Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson Andante right back, the cube live from Las Vegas UI path forward. Five.

The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back at forward five UI Paths, Big customer event. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center, Dave Ante and David Nicholson. Javier Castanos is here. He's the Robot Factory director. How's that for a title for Orange ESP Spania. And he's joined by Niva Pillow, who is Senior Director of Telecommunications Industry at UiPath. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks for coming on, Javier. Just off the keynote, it was really amazing to see what you were doing with your dashboard, how much you've operationalized automation, you really far down the journey. But I wanna start with your title. I've never seen this before. Robot Factory director, that's unique. What is that all about? >>Yeah, the Robot Factory is our brand to create the RPA journey to involve all the company in this amazing story regarding automation, because for us, automation is only a piece of the digital transformation and the culture transformation for the employees. >>Your robot factory obviously builds robots. Yeah. For employees and employees build them as well. >>Yeah, both. We have two different ways to, to build robots. We have a citizen developer program with more than 500 and employees certified in UiPath technology, and they build a small robot for the daily task for avoid repetitive task, very board. And in the other hand we have the robot factory team automating the business. The core business processes very complex in the telco industry, you know, and both teams working together, the community of employees, the best ambassadors for to find new opportunities and for discovery for robots and the robot factory are automating real complex processes to impacting our customer satisfaction. >>So if a, if a, if a citizen developer develops a robot, does the factory then have to audit it and make sure it's governed? Or do you add a, maybe I'm not such a good developer. Do you make it better? How does that collaboration work? >>The good thing is with you at Pat, you don't need to be a tech guy. You, you can be a finance guy and every morning you need a report, create an Excel, create a graph, put in a power point and send to your box. And you can create by your own a robot doing that task and going to the bending to take a coffee in, in the meantime that the robot is working. And as soon as you discover in your domain a complex tax, you can call us and say, Hey guys, I need your job because we need to ize this process. You need traceability. And we have a big savings below the desk. It's not only my health, it's the area work. >>Now, Navage, you specialize in the telecommunications industry. Now of course, the telcos are going through a massive transformation. It's almost, I call it revenge. The, the telcos now they're coming back with 5g. It's gonna be a great new future. But what kind of patterns are you seeing in the industry for automation? >>Sure. Look, as you said, telecoms going through quite a transformational era. There's this huge demand for connectivity around the whole world, and that presents opportunities and some challenges. But the key areas of focus right now is really helping the telecom achieve their strategic goals. And they include the customer experience at the most significant point, and thereafter driving a few more efficiencies and improving the employee experience. But organizations like Orange, you know, they start with the customer experience. These are large areas, but they tend to be the patterns where we are really helping telecoms transform and deliver better outcomes. >>Javi, I'm I'm curious about the concept of the citizen developer. Now you said that they don't have to have a deep technical background and they may come from finance or other places, but how do you, how do you recruit these people? What's in it for them? I, I can understand automating a process that is repetitive, mundane, something they don't want to do. But is there ever a concern that they might be automating themselves out of a job? >>Yeah, the, the people use Dex Excel and 30 years ago, Dex Excel does not assist and change our work. Your iPad technology is more or less the same. It's changing the way that you are working with your desktop every morning. You can create for your daily task a robot by yourself and executing your corporate desktop. And then you can save this time or use to improve your satisfaction as employee. Because sometimes in, in, in this kind of companies, we have a telecommunications engineering with a lot of talent making repetitive task. And with this technology, you can use your talent only to improve the processes. So we train these people in Miami, the training is very easy. A robot enter on the web searching, Google make different search regarding prices on, on device creates an Excel and only in a few hours that kind of people that we have in all companies that very easy excel some macros and these kind of things is the people prepared to jump to the next step to the robotization. So in all areas, in all departments, there are people prepared. In our company, 500 people. >>I, I'd like to get into a little mini case study if we could, and understand orange esp Spania is way deep. You should see this dashboard that Javier showed. I mean it's amazing, I think you said 7 million euro business benefit so far to date. But you can slice it and dice it and look at a lot of different angles. But where did you get started? Did you get started? Was it a bottoms up? In other words, an individual started to automate on their desktop. Was it a top down? The, the, the CEO said this is, we're gonna automate. How did it, I mean I'm sure you get this question a lot nivo, but where did it start at Orange? >>Yeah. Our story is very linked with the finance department because the citizen developer are saving internal hours and transforming the employee satisfaction and improving the talent and the reskilling of the people. But in the other hand, from the efficiency point of view, if you look for, for the finance approach, what happened, we, we take one profit and now domain perhaps 80% of the process. And next month the invoice reduce because your external cost disappear because the robot is making the task is improving the satisfaction of the customers. Because sometimes we have a, a human back office or another kind of task. And the compliance, the, the SLAs, the, the, the delay on time with all the people disappear with the robots because the robots are working at night. We can and repeating the job, 1, 1 1. And every tracking of that task are controlled by finance. Because if you save in a transaction three minutes, when you multiply for a thousand, a thousand, thousand tasks, you save on real time, you can see how much money you are saving and making the the things better. Not only a question of money is a question of money, but a attempt below that the customer is, is taking better experience for us. >>Robots don't sleep Nova. >>I never, >>So you started in finance and how much have you gone permeated other parts of the organization? What other parts of the organization are adopting RPA and automation? Where are you on that journey? >>More or less? Our eight, nine hundred and fifty three FTS equivalent robots working okay's like a contact center. It's robots navigating through the user interface applications, making transactions for our customers. So when you put in the middle of your customer relation, you can transform all because if a human agent is making a very complex process for, because telco is a complex market and very fast, perhaps the robot can help the human agent saving time and taking advantage of that part of, of the operations. And at the end, the operation is short and the customer satisfaction is better. And we measure the MPAs, the net, the net promoter score. And when you combine human agents with robots, the satisfaction improve because the transaction is made on real time very fast and doesn't fail. >>Is this a common story nivas that you're seeing in Telco in terms of the, the starting points? Does it tend to be bottoms up? Does it more top down? What are you seeing in >>Look, it actually varies by telecom. You know, Orange started their journey with us four years ago. So companies that have started while they tend to start in finance or IT or, or hr, but the customer experience I think is the ultimate area where many telecoms focus and what Harvey Edge just shared is it doesn't matter if a customer's calling you through a contact center or reaching you through a chatbot. They want their issue resolved at the first point. And what the robots do is they integrate information from multiple sources and provide that data to the agent so you can actually resolve the issue. And that is the beautiful example of humans and robots working together. Because if you know what the data's telling you, if it's a billing issue and a customer's been been billed because they have gone overseas and used international roaming and they weren't aware that the contract had that as a leader or a person in a contact center, you can make the right decision quite often. It takes a long time to find the data, but in this way you can actually address the issue real time, first point of resolution. And we're seeing up to 60% increase in first time resolutions across telecoms, irrespective of whether it's a chat bot or a contact center or a service desk. >>That's key. I mean, that's as a, that's consumer, that's what you just want to get off the phone or you want to get off the chat notice. So I have to ask you, what would you say is your secret to success? >>The secret is to be transparent with the organization, serve the savings and put on the table. We put on the table to the finance guys every month, all the robots that we put in production the month before and it's finance will declare officially the savings for each robot. As soon as you reach this, the credibility appear because it's not the robot factory team telling Aren, saving a lot of money of the company. No, no. It's the finance guys that trust on you. And as soon as you ask more money to buy more license or to improve the processes on whatever finance say, okay, these guys, as soon as we invest money in robots, we obtain twice or three times more by savings and they are improving not only for the quantity point of view, the quality is improving too. Because when you, a brief example, when you have a wifi problem connection and you call to our contact center, there is an ecosystem for more than 25 robots working from the beginning of your call, testing your line and making decisions. If we are going to send you a new router or you have a connectivity problem or, and the robot decide of, we are going to send to you a new install at your home and then the human manage you and take the conversation. But all the decisions are made by robots. So it's very powerful from the point of view of customer satisfaction. >>So what I'm hearing is you started four years ago. Yeah. And it, it, the ROI for your first instantiation was very fast, I presume inside of 12 months or what was the, how fast did you get a return with >>In the first three months we developed 25 robots and we saved more than 1 million to the company in three >>Months. In three months. Okay. So it was self-funding. >>Yeah. >>Right. You took that million dollars and you said, Okay, let's double down on that. Let's do it again. Do it again. Do it >>Again. It's only a question of resources and budget and only companies wants to create robots, but sometimes big companies only put on that one people to people. From the beginning of our story, we put 13 people and a budget. So if you have resources, the things happen be because the process are very accomplished. Sometimes you start one process. Sometimes our block, and we started at the beginning, a lot of process and imagine in telco we developed 900 processes, but every day we have a new opportunity for discovery. So I, I think the scalability is, is, is a challenge, but it's very, is possible if you put people and money >>And we, we focused on, we talk a lot in, in, in the broader IT world about the edge. And so I sort of think of these citizen developers as living at the edge. Part of your robot factory is at the core of the enterprise also. Is that, is that correct? Yes. >>Yes. >>Now what, what is, what has that looked like in terms of ROI cycles and development cycles? What kinds of projects do you work on at the core that are, that are different than what citizen soldiers are doing at the edge? >>Yeah. When, when we need to apply a discount or change your taif or switch on your bonus or your voicemail, that kind of transactions with impacting customers are made by the robot factory with robots made by the robot factory team. With a big traceability. With a big security because okay, with, with human awake the robot, we need to, to make a traceability because we have thousand of agents in the contact center working with robots and we have a lot of security disability and these kind of things. But in the other hand, internally we have a lot of task and a lot of processes for the citizen developers. There are very important tasks for the employee, perhaps not impacting in, in final customers, but we combine both. Because if you only work in one way, the citizen developer are making a lot of savings in terms of internal hours, but it's not real money. But in the other hand, you have the robot factory business processes impacting the money, combining both, you obtain the most powerful tool because the ambassadors, the, the, the employees are discovering you new opportunities. >>Last question, Javier, Why did you choose UiPath? What were the determining factors four years ago? >>Yeah, we, we were researching a lot in the market, but UiPath is pretty easy. You don't need to be an IT guy. People from, from customer care, people from finance in every areas. We have a lot of people learning this, this technology because it's easy, intuitive and very nice from the point of view of look and field. >>This a common story. This is really, we've reported on this a lot. This is how you UiPath really was able to get its foothold in the marketplace because of the simplicity. If you look at the legacy tools and even some of the modern tools, they were a lot more complicated. Now of course, UiPath is expanding its platform. So thank you very much. Don't welcome. Thank, thanks for coming. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. All right, you, you're gonna hear a lot of customer stories cuz that's what UI path brings in the cube. Proof is in the pudding. We right back at forward five from Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's coverage here. Monaco took a trip all the way out here to cover the Monaco crypto summit. I'm John feer, host of the cube, a lot of action happening presented by digital bits and this ecosystem that's coming together, building on top of digital bits and other blockchains to bring value at the application. These new app, super apps are emerging. Almost every category's gonna be decentralized. This is our opinion and the world believes it. And they're here as well. We've got Oscar ballet CEO co-founder of Agora verse ago is a shopping metaverse coming out soon. We'll get the dates, Oscar. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>We were just talking before you came on camera. You're a young gun, young entrepreneur. You're a gamer. Yeah, a little bit too old to miss the eSports windows. You said, you know, like 25. It's great until that's you missed the window. I wish I was 25 gaming the pandemic with remote work, big tailwind acceleration around the idea of this new digital VI virtual hybrid world. We're living in where people want to have experiences that are similar to physical and virtual. You're doing something really cool around shopping. Yeah. Take a explain. What's going on when the, I know it's not out yet. It's in preview. Yeah. Take a minute to explain. >>Absolutely. So a goers really is a way to create those online storefront environments, virtual environments that are really much inspired by video games in their usage and kind of how the experience goes forward. We want to recreate the brand's theme, aesthetic storytelling or the NFT project as well. All of that created in a virtual setting, which is way more interesting than looking at a traditional webpage. And also you can do some crazy stuff that you can't do in real life, in a real life store, you know, with some crazy effects and lighting and stuff. So it's, it's a whole new frontier that we are trying to cover. And we believe that there is a real use case for shopping centric S experiences and to actually make the S a bit more than a buzzword than that. It is at the moment. >>Okay. So a Agora is the shopping. Metaverse a Agora verse is the company name and product name. You're on the Solona blockchain. Got my notes here, but I gotta ask you, I mean, people are trying to do this right now. We see a lot of high end clients like Microsoft showroom, showroom vibes. Yeah. Not so much. E-commerce per se, but more like the big, I mean it's low hanging fruit. Yeah. How do you guys compare to some other apps out there? Other metaverses? >>I think compared to the bigger companies, we are way more flexible and we can act way more quickly than they can. They still have a lot of ground to cover. And a lot of convincing to do with their communities of users metaverse is not really the most popular topic at the moment. It's still very much kind of looked at as a trend, as something that is just passing and they have to deal with this community interaction that is not really favorable for them. There are other questions about the metaverse that are not being talked about as often, but the ecological costs, for example, of running a metaverse like Facebook envisions it, of running those virtual headsets, running those environments. It's very costy on, on, on the ecological side of things and it's not as often mentioned. And I think that's actually their biggest challenge. >>Can you get an example for folks that don't are in the weeds on that? What's the what's what do you mean by that? The cost of build the headsets? Is it the >>Servers? It's more of the servers, really? You need to run a lot of servers, which is really costly on the environment and environmental questions are at the center of public debates. Anyways, and companies have to play that game as well. So they will have to find kind of this balance between, well, building this cool metaverse, but doing it in an ecological friendly manner as well. I think that's their toughest challenge. >>And what's your solution just using the blockchain? Well, an answer to that, cause some people say, Hey, that's not that's, that's not. So eco-friendly either, >>That's part of it. And it's also part of why we're choosing an ecosystem such as Lana as a starter. It's not limited to only Salana, but Salala is, is known as a blockchain. That is very much ecological. Inclined transactions are less polluting. And definitely this problem is, is tackled in the fact that we are offering this product on a case by case scenario brands come to us, we build this environment and we run something that is proper to them. So the scale of it is also way less important that what Facebook is trying to build. >>Yeah. They're trying to build the all encompassing. Yeah. All singing old dancing, as we say system, and then they're not getting a lot of luck. They just got slammed dunked this week on the news, I saw the, you know, FTC moved against them on the acquisition of the exercise app. >>It's it's a tough, it's a tough battle for them. Let's say they >>Still have, they got a headwind. I wouldn't say tailwind. They broke democracy. So they gotta pay for it. Right. Exactly. I always say definitely revenge going on there. I'm not a big fan of what they did. The FTC. I think that's bad move. They shouldn't block acquisitions, but they do buy, they don't really build much. That's well documented. Facebook really hasn't built anything except for Facebook. That's right. Mean what's the one thing Facebook has done besides Facebook. >>I mean, >>It's everything they've tried is failed except for Facebook. Yeah. >>So we'll see what's going on with the Methodist side. >>Well, so successful, not really one trick bony. Yeah. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp, you know, and not really successful. >>That's true. They do have the, the means though, to maybe become successful with something. So >>You're walking out there, John just said, Facebook's not successful. I meant they don't. They have a one product company. They use their money to buy everything. Yeah. And that's some people don't like that, but anyway, the startups like to get bought out. Yeah. Okay. So let's get back to the metaverse it's coming out is the business model to build for others. Are you gonna have a system for users? What's what's the approach? How do you, how are we view viewing this? What's the, the business you're going after? >>So we are very much a B2B type of service where we can create custom kind of tailor made virtual environments for brands, where we dedicate our team to building those environments, which has been what we have been at the start to really kickstart the initiative. But we're also developing the tool that will allow antibody to develop their own shop themselves, using what we give them to do something kind of like the Sims for those that know, building their environment and building their shop, which will they, they, they will then be to put online and for anybody of their user base customers to have a look at. So it's, it's kind of, yeah, the tailor made experience, but also the more broader experience where we want to create this tool, develop this tool, make it accessible to the public with a subscription based model where any individual that has an idea and maybe a product that is interesting for the metaverse be able to create this virtual storefront and upload it directly. >>How long does it take to build an environment? Let's say I was, I wanna do a cube. Yeah. I go to a lot of venues all around the world. Yeah. MOSCON and San Francisco, the San convention center in Las Vegas, we're here in Monaco. How do I replicate these environments? Do I call you up and say, Hey, I need some artists. Do you guys render it? What's the take us through the process. >>Yeah. It's, it's basically a case by case scenario at the moment, very much. We're working with our partners that find brands that are interested in getting into the metaverse and we then design the shops. Well, it depends on the brands. Some have a really clear idea of what they want. Some are a bit more open to it and they're like, well, we have this and this, can you build something? >>I mean, I mean, I can see the apple store saying, Hey, you know, they're pretty standard apple stores. You got cases of iWatches. Yeah. I mean that's easily to, replicateable probably good ROI for them. >>Exactly. It's it's is that what you're thinking? Their team. Exactly. Yeah. It depends. And we, we want to add a layer of something cuz just replicating the store simply. Yeah. It's it's maybe not as interesting, you know, it just, oh, okay. I'm in the store. It's white, everywhere. It's apple. Right. It's like, oh I'm in at the dentist, but we want to add some video game elements to the, to those experiences. But very subtle ones, ones that won't make you feel, oh, I'm playing one of these games, you know? It's yeah. Very supple. >>You can, you can jump into immersive experience as defined by the brand. Yeah. I mean the brand will control the values. So you're say apple and you're at the iWatch table. Yeah. You could have a digital assistant pop in there with an avatar. Exactly. You can jump down a rabbit hole and say, Hey, I want this iWatch. I'm a bike mountain biker. For example, I could get experience of mountain biking with my watch on I fall off, ambulance sticks me up. I mean, all these things that they advertise is what goes >>On. Yeah. And we can recreate these experiences and what they're advertising and into a more immersive experience is what we're trying to our, our goal is to create experiences. We know that, you know, why does someone is someone spend so much at Disneyland? It's like triple the price of whatever, because you know, it's Mickey mouse around you. It's, that's the experience that comes around. And often the experience is more important than the product. Sometimes >>It's hard. It's really hard to get that first class citizen experience with the event or venue physical. Yeah. Which is a big challenge. I know the metaverse are gonna try to solve this. So I gotta ask you what's your vision on solving that? Okay. Cause that's the holy grail. That's what we're talking about here. Yeah. I got a physical event or place. I wanna replicate it in the metaverse but create that just as good first party citizen like experience. >>Yeah. I mean that's the whole event event type of business side of the metaverse is also a huge one. It's one that we are choosing to tackle after the e-commerce one. But it's definitely something that has been asked a lot by the brands where like we want to create, like, we want to release this store for an event that is in real life, but we want to make it accessible to the largest number. That's why we saw with Fortnite as well. All those events, the fashion week in the central land. And >>Sand's a Cub in the Fortnite too. >>There you go. And so the, the event aspect is super important and we want those meta shops to be places where a brand can organize an event. Let's say they want to make the entrance paid. They can do an NFD for that if they want. And then they have to, the user has to connect the NFD to access the event with an idea. Right. But that's definitely possible. And that's how we leverage blockchain as well with those companies and say, you know, you're not familiar with >>This method. You're badging, you know, you're the gaming where we were talking earlier. Yeah. Badging and credentials and access methods. A tech concept can be easily forwarded to NFTs. Yeah, >>Exactly. Exactly. And brands are interested in that. >>Sure. Of course. Yeah. By being the NFT. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I gotta ask you the origination story. Take me through the, the, how this all started. Yeah. Was it a seat of an idea you and your friends get together? Yeah. It was an it scratch. And when you're really into this, what's the origination story and where you're at now. >>So we started off in January really with a, quite a, a different idea. It was called the loft business club. It's an NFT collection on the Salina blockchain. And the whole idea beyond it is that NFT holders would have access to their virtual apartments that we called the lofts. It got very popular. We got a really big following at the start. It was really the trend back in January, February. And we managed to, to sell out successfully the whole collection of 5,000 NFTs. And yeah, we started as a group of friends, really like-minded friends from my hometown in, in, met in France who are today, the co-founders and the associates with different backgrounds. Leo has the marketing side of things. A club has the 3d designing. We had all our different skills coming into it. Obviously my English was quite helpful as well cause French people in English it's, it's not often the best French English. Yeah. And I was, the COO has been doing amazing on the kind of the serious stuff. You know, the taxis lawyers >>Operational to all of trains running on time. >>Exactly >>Sure. People get their jobs done. >>Yeah, exactly. So >>It's well too long of a lunch cuz you know, French would take what, two hour lunches. Yeah. You >>Have to enjoy it. Yeah. >>Coffee and stuff. That's wine, you know about creative, >>But yeah, it's, it's a friend stuff that started as a, as a passion project and got so quick. And today I'm here talking to you in this setting. It's like, >>You're pretty excited. >>I mean it's super excited. It's such a we're you know, we feel like we're building something that's new and our developer team, we're now a team of 15 in total with developers based in Paris, mostly. And everybody is, is feeling like, you know, they're contributing to something new and that's, what's exciting about it. You know, it's something that's not really done or it's trying to be done, but nobody really knows the way >>It's pioneering days. But the, but the pandemic has shifted the culture faster because people like certainly the gen Zs are like, I don't wanna reuse that old stuff. Yeah. And, but they still want to go to like games or events or go to stores. Yeah. But once to go to a store, I mean, I go to apple store all the time where I live in Palo Alto, California. And it's like, yeah, I love that store. And I know it by heart. I don't, I don't have to go there. Yeah. Walking into the genius bar virtually I get the same job done. Yeah, >>Exactly. That's that's what we want to do. And the other pandemic is just it's it's been all about improving, you know, people's condition, life conditions at home, I think. And that's what kind of boosted the whole metaverse conversation and Facebook really grabbing onto it as well. It's just that people were stuck at home and for gamers, that's fine. We used to be stuck at home playing video games all day. Yeah. We survived the pandemic fine. But for other people it was a bit more of a new >>Experience. Well, Oscar, one of the cool things is that you said like mind you and your founding team, always the secret to success. But now you see a lot of old guys like me and gals coming in too, your smart people are like-minded they get it. Especially ones that have seen the ways before, when you have this kind of change, it's a cultural shift and technology shift and business model shift at the same time. Yeah. And to me there's gonna be chaos, but at the end of the day, >>I mean there's fun and >>Chaos. That's opportunity. There's a fun and fun and opportunity. >>It's fun and chaos, you know, and yeah. Likeminded people and the team has really been the driving factor with our company. We are all very much excited about what we're doing and it's been driving us forward. >>Well, keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the cube and sharing, sharing a story with us in the world. We really appreciate we'll keep in touch with you guys. Do love what you do. Oscar ballet here inside the cube Argo verse eCommerce shop. The beginning of this wave is happening. The convergence of physical virtual is a hybrid mode. It's a steady state. It is not gonna go away. It's only gonna get bigger, more cooler, more relevant than ever before. Cube covering it like a blanket here in Monaco, crypto summit. I'm John furrier. We'll be right back after this short break.