>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. I path everyone. Welcome back. This is Dave Vellante for the human. We've been covering the r P a market now for quite some time. Yeah, I pastor said this huge announcement. Then we're gonna update you on the space. As you know, we've been quantifying this with our partners at ET are one of the areas that you I path is obviously focused on talking about scaling. If you wanna win in r p. A. You got a scale you want to scale. You gotta have cloud, though. Eric Metaphor is here. He's the director of product management. That you either path, We're gonna talk Cloud. Tara. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Didn't get to see you as well. >>Yes. So you know, you guys have this huge announcement. Um, there are really four major components, if you will. That you extended the core platform. You talked about more automation? More ai smarter robots. The whole end to end. When you guys talk about the what? Sometimes it gets a little buzz, wordy, but that hyper automation, it's got to be end end. You've got to take a systems view, and then you got to put the tools in the hands of regular people. If you want to have a robot for every person, it's got to be simple. You've got to democratize uh, R p A. So my question is, where does the cloud fit into all this? >>You know, the cloud is the one that wraps it all up together. So for us, it's very important to make it easy for people to start instantly. You when you when you start to decide that you want to do in investment in r P A. And you really want to get started very quickly. And the second thing is, you eventually want to grow that are being investment, and the cloud makes it super easy for you to scale out of it. So Cloud makes it easy for you to start instantly and scaling. >>You think about the cloud you know, kind of started with. I guess it's sort of started with Salesforce back in 1999 kind of pre cloud. But certainly, you know so many functions and software areas have been cloud ified. You saw it with the email. You certainly where you start with I t s m. Which was kind of a heavy lift. You certainly see it with With HR. You seen it with data protection and backup. You see, do you see r p A. Is kind of the next big wave of cloud ification. >>Well, I absolutely think that cloud is gonna be very big in our be a. So from our perspective, when you start thinking about are you really thinking about automation? You want your automation is the light up and to save you money and to cut time for you and the investment thing that's going to remind what's going through your mind is not setting up infrastructure and, you know, configuring machines and selling software to make our p possible that the cloud makes it super easy for you to just cut down that I t infrastructure investment and go right ahead into what you really care about, which is the automation. So I think it's gonna be big that we allow you to just go directly to automation. I want RB start thinking about automation for good infrastructure lead that blood. >>So there's obviously you hear a lot of narrative in the marketplace about Cloud Cloud native. You see some companies or dogmatic will never do on had Frank's loop in a little while ago. So we're not doing our friend. That's Ah, that's a halfway house. You guys have taken a different approach, obviously started on Prem and now you're moving to the cloud. What? What's your philosophy on that? You know, Why wouldn't everybody do Cloud >>makes sense. So for us, we're very pragmatic about We believe that customers are different stages in their cloud adoption. Some people are extremely cloud friendly and have already put in place at plans for making sure that everything is already in the cloud. There are companies that are cloud native. They were born in the cloud that if you go a nascent install a piece of software in the local server, they would just laugh at you. So that's on one end of the spectrum and you want to make sure that those people can take full capability of our. On the other hand, there are people who are still, you know, coming from on Prem servers who are trying to move to the cloud to have plans to move to the cloud who would like to try some components in the CLI. But they still have some legacy systems that exist on Prem or a lot of systems that exist, and we want to make sure that those people are also able to take care of our key. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are industries or some companies and some industries that just are not ready for the cloud at all. And from our perspective, we want to democratize our key. We want our P available for everyone. So it is our philosophy that we're going to give you a multitude of the women options. If you want on Prem all the way, we got it. If you want cloud all the way we got, you want the hybrid assistant, We got it. We're just going to make it possible for you. And the deployment choice is your choice >>and the experience on Prem and Cloud. It's substantially identical. Would you say it's completely identical? What? What's the Delta? >>That is absolutely one of our goals. It is absolutely a gore for Google for you. I have to make sure that if you are an on Prem customer and you are starting to use some cloud, that your experiences seamless between on premises and in the cloud if you are a cloud customer and you have some components that still exist on Prem, if you want to use them, is very important for us that you have that common experience between both. So our software is designed with a common experience of the core, and it's actually the same software that runs from a user experience perspective in the cloud and on premises. Now, obviously, a lot of the infrastructure is different than a lot of the security aspects are different. But the user experience itself is, you know, consistently the same and intentionally that way. >>So when people talk about cloud or not, this is often site, you know, several things. Clearly, Layton sees a factor. If your data lives on, you know, on Prem, maybe you want to do things on Prem. There's local laws, data sovereignty. Uh, there's there's corporate edicts. Okay, we're not going to the cloud now. Maybe with Covad, that's that's changing somewhat, but so what are you hearing from customers just in terms of the rationale on Prem versus Cloud Hybrid. What are some of the decision points? >>Those are all good points, Dave. That's exactly the kind of stuff that we hear from our customers. So I think the main things that we hear in terms of cloud is about security people rightfully. So. When you start talking about cloud that they start asking, Can I really trust you as a vendor? With my data, I'm giving you my sales data. I'm giving you my HR data. I mean, this is some confidential information. Can I really trust you with that data? So that's one thing we absolutely, I start taking care off with large focus on security, and I can definitely dive deeper into that if you want. In addition to that, privacy and data sovereignty and where data lives is a big deal. So from our perspective, we host your data as an enterprise customer in three different locations. We host demand. We have servers in the United States. We have servers in Europe. We have servers in Japan, and as a customer you get to choose where data lives and we keep it the way you thoughts s so that kind of helps with data sovereignty because some countries, as you mentioned or some cos there's mentioned really have strict rules about that. Also, that helps with the legacy aspect. So if you're a customer in Japan, you would really prefer to use our Japan Data Center as opposed to a You know, your it's simple. >>The customers care, like where your cloud infrastructure lives. Are they asking you about that? They did they? Did they probe you on that? I mean specifically in terms of your cloud partner, like maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Absolutely. People definitely care about who we use and where the data is going to lie. And so from our perspective, for example, we're partnered with Microsoft and all our infrastructures. They don't Microsoft Azure, and, uh, we use data centers from Microsoft Azure through the whole start stuff, and that's a really good for multiple reads as it provides some very good uptime and reliability guarantees. In addition to that, they have service around the world that we can utilize so that we can expect, for example, for a next frontier becomes for example, in Australia, New Zealand. Then we want to create a reason they're being on top of Azure really allows us to go and spend that off pretty quickly and help customers that way. >>So we don't want things about Cloud is you can you can experiment very cheaply and you can fail fast and then iterating. So one of the things that struck me about your announcement was your community edition. I always look for, you know, Is there a community edition? Is that in addition, free for life? Is it neutered? In other words, can I actually do anything with it? Um, so I was happy to see that you guys had that. And also happy to see I mean, you've got I think it's early days for you, but I think that you have 200 enterprise customers, two orders of magnitude greater than that from the community edition. Did I get that right? >>That's great. Yes, absolutely. So when you think about the automation, cloud comes into play. But we have a community, the one for community, and that is the free version. And it's as you said, it's not like a pretrial or three limited time or something. It was just free as in free, free forever. We're gonna keep it to you. That's all you need. Just use it. No questions asked. You know, be happy with it. And the community edition actually is, is a fully functional product, and it allows you to do to get to attended robots one unattended robot and you get the option of connecting up the studio to two studios for designing animations. Work with those s so it's it's it allows it. That's all your automation needs, like small automation needs. Just go ahead and use it. If you're a small company or an individual or a small team, just use the community edition and you want to use that production. That's fine. No problem. That's all you need to go for it, then the and we have tens of thousands of community customers that are actively using the product. I'm not talking about the people that have ever signed up on left. Those are a lot more than that, but I'm talking about actually actively using the product. We've got tens of thousands of users as they're using it every month and built on that same infrastructure comes our Enterprise Edition, and the Enterprise edition is a basically the same infrastructure. But it adds a number of capabilities that are useful for a larger enterprise, of course, the most important of which is an uptime guarantee. So, you know, with the community edition, obviously we keep the service. Often we have very good response times, but with enterprise, you actually get enough time guarantee. In addition to that, you get access to our sport. They have a dedicated support team that works 24 7 around the clock and multiple reasons, and you get guaranteed response times with the mass away. On top of that, you get to be able to purchase is many robots as you want, and the list goes on and on and on. And it's very easy to go. Like you said, from playing with community, working with community, using that doing a trial, it's instinct as well. You just click a button, and all of a sudden, now you have five robots that each night that you can use for 60 days, and from there you can just go ahead and buy. >>We'll talk more about the uptime guarantee is that basically Azure s l A. So the data layer on top of that, you know, what are we measuring there? You could add some color. >>Absolutely. A startup and guarantee is built on top of azure, obviously. But we provide our own uptime guarantee regardless of what happens in the underlying system. Eso From our perspective, we guarantee that the service is going to be out at a specific amount of time. So we measure the number of minutes every month that the service should actually be up. And we measure the number of ministers service experiences, any kind of downtime. And we measure down. I'm in multiple ways. So we do outside in testing. Or, you know, if you're a customer, are you able to reach our service or not that we do incredible detail the monitoring and reporting on the life off our service itself from inside and And we look at any minute, any of those the services that we use underlying services are not responding to customers, and we count those down as well. So and we guarantee that there's a specific number of minutes that the service will be down, and that's >>it. And So if I understand it, you're really taking an application. You It's not the light on the server. It's It's the it's Can I get to you as a customer? Yeah. My state, my service, your >>perspective. Are you able to reach our service and do what you're expected to do with it? That's what you as a customer, really care about and in turn, that's the right way for us to be measuring up. >>And if I don't? If you don't hit, that s L. A. What? I get re credit. So how does that >>work? Absolutely, we have in our agreements and provision for penalties on the outside, we don't hit that escalate. And similarly for support. You know, if you call support, you're guaranteed depending on the severity of the issue on the back of contract that sport. Uh, you know how many minutes it takes us for somebody to be engaged with you on that issue? And we have very good numbers and hitting. That s L. A. And if we don't? They're also penalties on the outside for that. I think this is a real enterprise services you'd expect. >>Yeah, Great. I want to get to take some examples. You've got a couple 100 customers I think you mentioned should hopefully was up and running very quickly. I think you had some other examples, but but what can you share with us in terms of actual experience that your customers have seen? >>Absolutely. So we were thinking a very measured and careful approach, actually launching our service. So even though our service literally just launched last week fully to the world, we have actually been enabling enterprise customers we've been. We started a private preview with four customers and back in April of last year. And then we extended that to a public preview for any customer to try our service, as is no payment but also no guarantees. Back in the day, I want to say June of last year and then it took us all the way to December to feel comfortable that the services of the place where when we launch it, customers are going to get an excellent quality. And that's when we did a what we call a limited availability where we started on boarding enterprise customers step by step. We started with 10. We went to 50. We went to 100 now we have a couple 100 customers that already signed up, using the enterprise product every day as a guaranteed service and getting that Sele's that we've promised. So this was the time when we said, You know what? I think we've definitely been meeting our SL A's for five months running. Now we feel very comfortable lunch the rest, >>even if it's anecdotal. Have you discerned appreciable change in people's attitude toward cloud as a result of over? >>Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's just the aspect of working from home and having a lot of people just not available either demand infrastructure or demand servers made. A lot of people think about what is the best way to continue to run on information while they're at it. And obviously there's nothing easier than granting access to someone in the cloud to access a service from home. Then, if you were to bring them access to an on premise service with BP and all that stuff, and then if you want the provisioning new robots and machines and you have to do that again on premises, you know it's it's it's a lot more complicated. So a lot of customers are really starting to look at the cloud so many of the conversations that we would have, obviously we come in and they would ask us about the capabilities of our system. They would ask about security that ask a lot of things and those discussions, you know, anywhere between, you know, a few days to sometimes a few months. You know, some customers is just a great for those. The volume of customers that's asking about cloud is definitely increasing good for us. Obviously the number of deals were signed exalts increasing. But most importantly, I think that the number of customers that are benefiting from the value of starting instantly like cloud scale easily in the cloud. And you mentioned the example of Chipotle. And while that was engagement that we had obviously for the core of it, you know, they were very impressed with what they were able to do with The came in and falling and team had budgeted about two weeks to get started and set up everything so that they can build on top of that in their automation. And they, they chose wisely, do start in the cloud and As a result, they were done and all set up in one day. So it is definitely a huge difference between what you're able to get in the cloud person. So what you're doing? >>Well, you have passed all about automation. And and so is the cloud. The superpowers of this decade Cloud data A You guys were, you know, at the heart of all those Eric. Thanks so much for coming on the cube in explaining sort of your cloud angle. Really Appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Alright? And thank you for watching everybody. More coverage on the r p. A market analysis digging into your past recent announcement stable people want to have right back right after this short break. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah