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Keynote Analysis | UiPath Forward5


 

>>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.

Published Date : Sep 29 2022

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The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, And that's the thing you always Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of you know, all the rage. a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform But They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, He said, you know, the old adage better, And how you say that a hundred thousand employees important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. So, so, you know, you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth

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Kate Hall Slade, dentsu & Flo Ye, dentsu | UiPath Forward5


 

>>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.

Published Date : Sep 29 2022

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by And Kate is the director You guys are huge company, but but give us the focus. we really respect the creatives of our company. What do you guys do? Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation, So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, up with rpa, but, but how did you guys get started? So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases So a lot of young people, Dave, they not not threatened by robots that racing it. Why am I, you know, sitting here at MITs typing data from Excel into to use the tools, we'll have you automate that there. Let me, Do you wanna talk to them about governance? So we are really using So we connecting these highly skilled people to I, I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and Maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into So we are really able to So you know, of what you guys are, are, are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort They wanna branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. And not only the use cases we are doing what On. Well that, that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and, and the security team Argentina, like we never heard of automation, we don't know what UiPath So in terms of the pipeline, we really wanna make sure that we are taking that step back You guys have some global brands, you know, as, as things ebb and flow in the So then we can get these time back using innovation to Thank you so We're in the Venetian Consent Convention Center.

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Marshall Sied, Ashling Partners & Dave Espinoza, Cushman & Wakefield | UiPath Forward5 2022


 

>> theCUBE Presents UiPath FORWARD 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> We're back in Las Vegas live. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of FORWARD 5 UiPath's customer event. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson. Our third Dave Espinoza is here, Director of Transformation at Cushman & Wakefield. And Marshall Sied is also here. He's the co-founder of Ashling Partners. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> We know Cushman & Wakefield, huge real estate firm. We'll come back to that, wanted to dig into some of the industry trends. But Marshall, what is Ashling Partners all about? >> Great question, Dave. So Ashling Partners was founded with modern automation and continuous improvement in mind. So a lot of us used to implement large ERP systems, accounting transaction systems. We viewed RPA and broader intelligent automation as kind of the wave of the future. So everything we do has continuous process improvement and automation in mind together. So we don't want to decouple, we want bring those together in an agile way. >> It's interesting, Rob Enslin this morning on the stage was talking about the waves of industry tech that used ERP was where he started and you know, et cetera, internet and now automation. He's sort of drawing that analogy. It's interesting that you're seeing the same pattern. >> David: Were were you fist bumping in the back of the room? >> Marshall: Absolutely. >> Well, I mean there's a lot of opportunity there. A lot of money to be made on both ends. Dave, talk about your firm. What's going on in the industry specifically? You joined sort of as we're exiting the isolation economy. Right? So what's happening in the industry now? I mean, real estate has been up and down and, you know, wild ride, you know, with COVID. What are the big trends in the industry that are informing your automation strategy. >> And actually I joined probably like right in the middle of the isolation economy. So it was a really interesting time to like to, I'm sure for most people also onboarding into groups. But coming on Cushman, you know, Cushman itself is an organization that formed predominantly through acquisition and through merger, right? So three large companies came together. And so a lot of the times the sort of headaches and the opportunities that we find are probably no different than other legacy organizations have when they're merging three companies together, right? So lots of disparate process, lots of paper, lots of process that isn't really very standardized. And so really it's a lot about us trying to make sure that we're continuing to double down on really that continuous process improvement but also bringing technology, lots of different types of technologies to bear to solve different problems throughout the organization. >> Well is the pandemic a catalyst for the automation initiative? Or actually you guys started before that I think, Marshall started about 2018. But was it like a rocket booster during the pandemic or was it more sort of steady state? >> I think it was actually a little bit of both Dave. 'Cause the reality is there was already top down executive support at Cushman pre-pandemic. So Cushman was already moving on this in a big way and they had executive sponsorship across the C-suite. Pandemic came, never a good time for a pandemic, but it came at a decent time for Cushman because they were prepared. They had the foundation of governance, everything you need in a large enterprise to run a program. They had that in place so they were able to kind of just put kerosene on the fire when the pandemic hit with certain automation candidates. >> Because I often said that pre-pandemic, you know, digital transformation was kind of this buzzword. A lot of firms were sort of giving it lip service. But it sounds like Cushman actually had started down the digital transformation path and then obviously everybody was accelerated. If you weren't digital business, you were out of business. But but how tightly aligned, 'cause we heard this in the keynotes today, I'd like to test it. How tightly aligned is automation and digital transformation at Cushman. >> They're pretty synonymous really for us, right? So like it is really about bringing different types of technologies, whether it's like NLP. The other really interesting thing that we were talking about the keynote, right? There's just so much that is going into the UiPath platform that is enabling us and enabling the things that we want to do across the organization, right? So like natural language processing, document understanding, you know, cloud based items. Like there's just so much that we can leverage and it's really about that continuous process improvement. It's trying to make sure that we're aligning ourselves to the strategy that the organization is absolutely pushing, but making sure that we're doing it in smart ways, right? And that we're empowering our employees as we do it, right? So it's not just very top down from a COE, it's also very bottoms up, very citizen-led throughout the organization. >> So I think of this as a strategic initiative that happens over time. But how does Ashling, and Marshall, how do you engage with Cushman? Do you engage on a project by project basis? Do you have sort of a long term strategic arc that you're working to? >> Absolutely. >> How does that work? >> No, that's a great question. So we started project based, so we were a part of the co-establishment of the intelligent automation COE. So very outcome driven, top down approach as Dave mentioned. But we also had a wider aperture than just RPA. It was broader end to end automation experiences that was project based. We had so much kind of quantifiable evidence at that point that we wanted to go bigger with the program. Over time we matured into more of an agile DevOps methodology with the Cushman team. And Dave should certainly speak about the size of the Cushman team and how that's evolved over time, but- >> Because the two of you are in a partnership in terms of proving out the ROI of what you're doing. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Right? >> Marshall: Every day, every day. We all have numbers we got to hit, right? And that's just the reality of it. But in order to do that, you know, agile DevOps approach where you're, you know, releasing every two weeks into production, you need a dedicated team that has like a longer term roadmap that is coinciding with the Cushman objective. So that's what we have in place today, something we call build as a service and mROC. So kind of think of that as as plan, build, and then run. We're infused. You have to be infused with your clients if you're going to run an agile DevOps program. >> Is automation more self-funding? Marshall, I want to draw on your experience with ERP. Is automation more self-funding than other technology initiatives? And if so, why or if not, why not? >> It is, and it's a double edged sword actually. We talk about this all the time at Ashling. We've never worked in an enterprise technology space where there's more accountability to value delivered because it's so quantifiable and measurable. So every time a transaction runs you can measure- >> Dave: How are we doing? >> Exactly, I mean the ERP days, nobody questioned. They just, they thought we just have to move to S/4HANA, we just have to move to Oracle. >> We'll let you know in a couple years. >> That's it, yeah. >> I mean the stuff that we just saw earlier from Javier Castellanos, right, from Orange. It is very much like each transaction has a value associated to it. Each part of that transaction has a value associated to it. We're constantly monitoring the numbers of looking at our performance, right? There's very real value associated to maintaining business as usual for the 50 plus automations that we have in production, right? So like the business is really counting on us to maintain and to make sure that we're continuing to perform. But also that we're continuing to work with them to find additional value and additional opportunities, right? To make sure that we are saving money and finding dollars- >> But it's dropping hard dollars to the bottom line, right, that are quantifiable to your point. But what's the governor, what's the barrier to your ability to absorb whether it's new automation? Is it just expertise, talent, or you bandwidth? Is it the prioritization exercise and thinking intelligently about, you know not- >> Dave: All of that. >> So how do you, I guess you guys work together, but take us through that a little bit. >> I mean, we're constantly refining our approach. So we were just talking about our DevOps approach. You know, we started with I think maybe five or six different teams based on specific service lines. We modulated that recently to go to two teams, right? One specific to build and one specific to enhance. So we're constantly looking for and building new automations throughout the organization. And then also looking for incremental value to enhance the automations that we've got out there, right? So making them better, faster, making them more resilient so resolving technical debt, doing a lot of different things to make sure that we're as stable as we possibly can be. But it's not only that, it's really like making sure like we're just as pinched by everybody else in terms of like the great resignation and looking for talent. I think everybody here is basically looking for the exact same talent. And so it's really making sure that we have interesting work, we're doing interesting work, we're making people feel valued, and we're bringing value throughout the business. >> So I remember Bobby Patrick called me when he joined UiPath. He goes, "You're not going to believe what I'm doing now. You got to get on this train." And so I started looking to it and we actually downloaded, you know, the package and started playing with it. And we tried to do it with the competitors, we, you know, we couldn't. It was like call for pricing kind of thing. We're like, well that's interesting. But what we saw was my perspective, this bottoms up adoption. And I know there was top down as well. But then, I remember I was in the meeting when they announced the sort of process gold acquisition and then started, I said, "Okay, they're going for platform now." And then Microsoft came into the market like, okay, they got to differentiate there. Now you're seeing everybody, all the software companies think they should own every dollar that's ever spent on software. So SAP's doing it and ServiceNow. And so Marshall, from your perspective, how has this platform evolved? And then Dave, to the extent you can talk about it, how is that platform adoption taking shape within the organization? I mean, platforms are much more complicated than products and they require integration. How is UiPath doing there? >> I think they're doing fantastic in that category. If you think about, and it's been a natural evolution. They're not fighting inertia, they're following challenges of their clients, right? So RPA obviously came onto the scene hot, everybody understands the business rule driven automation value. Easy to, you know, make a quantifiable, tangible evidence with RPA. But exceptions happen in a business and upstream processes break that, you know, cause challenges with downstream automations. So what do you do? You have to go upstream. You have to have more automations, you have to have process discovery, process mining with process gold. You need to have the ability to have a better user experience interface, which we've definitely incorporated into Cushman when we didn't get adoption with certain automations that we like. You build low-code apps. People want that consumerization of technology in the enterprise and that allows them to adopt more of the automation which triggers the robots and then you report analytics on it. So that expansion's been pretty natural with UiPath and I think the next acquisition they just made with Re:infer's really interesting, 'cause now you're going even more upstream with communication mining, turning that into structure data that you potentially could automate or analyze so it's been natural. It's truly the only platform that we've encountered that can do all of this at this point. >> So a couple things there. You know, one is the nuance of adoptions, not just the function of the potential savings or, you know, revenue production or productivity. It's, you know, the experience because you got to have a great UI. And then what are you going to do with Re:infer? I don't know if you guys are adopting Re:infer but what do you see as the potential. Marshall and Dave, if you guys have visibility on it? >> I know we've talked about it Dave so I mean the potential's huge. I think it's going to be more of a question of change management for each organization just to feel comfortable with that. But I mean, think about all of the communication and the semi and unstructured data in an organization that comes, you know, via Slacks, Teams, emails. It's huge and it's significant if you can figure out the right identifiers that you want to trigger for your business. And then figure out is that something downstream we can automate or can we just analyze and make our business more effective, more efficient, or provide a better experience. So I think it's huge. We don't know how big this is yet, but we know that it's something that, I mean, think about Cushman, get brokers all day long that are communicating with clients and third parties. So it could be extremely significant. >> Sounds like a potential to eliminate email hell, but. >> Marshall: Heard those promises before. >> Maybe that's like the paperless office eventually. >> Well in our organizations, like 50, 40 to 50,000 people, you know, globally, right? And there are definitely service lines within our organization where probably it doesn't make sense for us to leverage UiPath and provide them the, you know, studio and low code, no code automation tools. But a lot of this NLP stuff and a lot of the content mining and the communication mining stuff, really has the ability for us to be able to sort of pinpoint opportunities at levels that we couldn't possibly do it before. So it was really very exciting to see the stuff that we were in there. I think when you start your organization, a lot of times you're a hammer looking for a nail, right? And you need to quickly move away from that. And so I think a lot of the stuff that UiPath is introducing, a lot of the stuff that they're bringing into their platform, really helps us to be moving away from that sort of orientation. >> Well when you think of this in terms of CI/CD, you know, people maybe have a better understanding of sort of the life cycles and, you know, the iteration calendar. Can you give us an example of something that went from an idea, something like, "Hey, I think we might be able to automate this process" through "Okay, yeah, let's do it." You try it, at some point there's sort of quality testing involved to make sure that it's achieving that we want to do. Can you give us an example of a process that you've gone through? And then how long do those things usually take? Are we talking weeks, months? What are we talking about from idea to establishing that, "Yeah, this is something we want to keep in place." >> Dave: We always want to make it faster. So we're especially always trying to find ways, especially upfront parts of the process. So a lot of the analysis, requirements gathering, you know, stuff that's not actual building. We want to make sure that we're shrinking that as much as possible, that we're also being comprehensive so that we're not building something that doesn't meet someone's needs, right? Or that just completely misses the mark. But I mean, invoice processing is a good example. We do that internally. Obviously, we have corporate accounting. We also do that on behalf of clients. And so a lot of times, you know, we're bringing some of the internal processes, we're using the technologies for document understanding, optical character reading, and machine learning. And we're doing that on behalf of clients, but we're also doing that internally. So to be able to use some of those processes and automations, sort of client facing plus internally, are big changes. Big changes for us. But I think the other thing too is like, we're always trying to make it faster and better. I think that's one of those also processes where we put something in place and we're constantly looking to enhance it, make it better based on the process that's out here. >> And you're applying automation to that upfront piece, the planning phase? Is that right? Or? >> Yeah, yeah, so a lot of it is about sort of the work that we do on behalf of clients. And there are teams who are specifically tasked to accounts. And so we're looking to find ways to make it easier for those accounts to get their bills paid, to get visibility into, you know, accounts payable, accounts receivable, their full end to end accounts lifecycle. And so yeah, we're doing that directly on behalf of clients and then we're doing that internally. >> How about the why UiPath question. Marshall, I think I heard you say that you're pretty much exclusively UiPath as your automation partner. Why? Why not play the field? Why UiPath? >> So I think it started in like 2017, 2018 for Ashling. We did an analysis of kind of an outside in of what, at that point was the big three of RPA, the vision and the roadmap and the open platform architecture of UiPath and just the self-awareness that, "Hey, we need to operate with other technologies in order for our clients to get the most value from automation." That was really the main reason, outside of the fact that we like working with UiPath, but it was just that complete vision of a platform as opposed to a tool. We felt like everybody else was more of a pointed tool and then UiPath had this platform approach and it was going to be necessary to go end to end like we all are trying to achieve. >> And UiPath continues to deepen that, right? They continues to support us with tons of new technology- >> How so? Can you be specific? >> I mean, when we're talking about document understanding, I mean, we're trying to leverage that for manual handwritten time sheets. We're also using it for, you know, Chronos integration, right? So like there's a lot of stuff that we're using it for and we can go to a single shop, right? To be able to do it, a single platform from a scalability and a supportability perspective, it's also a big game changer for us, right? As you start, you want to be able to scale, but you can't spend a ton of money supporting, you know, a hundred different platforms. You really got to invest and be smart about it. And UiPath for us was a really smart play. >> Are you budget limited relative, you're competing with other initiatives within the organization? Where's the funding come from? Is it from the business? Is it from IT? Is it a combination? >> It had been centrally funded and we are now moving into a different model. So we are constantly looking at, you know, the justification of value, speed to value, and proving it out to our business partners from all service lines and within all different functions of the organization. So we're at an interesting inflection point, but I think we also have a really good background that we're building on. >> I've been saying it all day, I've said it for years, at the UiPath events that they are awesome about putting customers on theCUBE and we love to hear from the customer stories because we get to sort of map what we hear in the keynotes and then test it, right, in the real world. And I also really love the fact that Marshall, UiPath always brings implementation partners so we can get the expertise and you have a wider observation space. So guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and thanks for sharing your stories and good luck in the future. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it guys. >> Very welcome. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante live from Las Vegas UiPath FORWARD 5. We'll be right back right after this short break.

Published Date : Sep 29 2022

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by UiPath. He's the co-founder of Ashling Partners. of the industry trends. as kind of the wave of the future. on the stage was talking about A lot of money to be made on both ends. and the opportunities that we for the automation initiative? 'Cause the reality is there was already that pre-pandemic, you know, and it's really about that that you're working to? of the intelligent automation COE. in terms of proving out the But in order to do that, you know, And if so, why or if not, why not? the time at Ashling. Exactly, I mean the ERP and to make sure that we're that are quantifiable to your point. you guys work together, that we have interesting work, And so I started looking to and that allows them to of the potential savings that comes, you know, via to eliminate email hell, but. Maybe that's like the and a lot of the content mining of sort of the life cycles So a lot of the analysis, to get visibility into, you know, How about the why UiPath question. outside of the fact that we and we can go to a single shop, right? So we are constantly looking at, you know, and good luck in the future. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante live

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Thomas Stocker, UiPath & Neeraj Mathur, VMware | UiPath FORWARD5


 

>> TheCUBE presents UI Path Forward Five brought to you by UI Path. >> Welcome back to UI Path Forward Five. You're watching The Cubes, Walter Wall coverage. This is day one, Dave Vellante, with my co-host Dave Nicholson. We're taking RPA to intelligence automation. We're going from point tools to platforms. Neeraj Mathur is here. He's the director of Intelligent Automation at VMware. Yes, VMware. We're not going to talk about vSphere or Aria, or maybe we are, (Neeraj chuckles) but he's joined by Thomas Stocker who's a principal product manager at UI Path. And we're going to talk about testing automation, automating the testing process. It's a new sort of big vector in the whole RPA automation space. Gentleman, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Neeraj: Thank you very much. >> Thomas: Thank you. >> So Neeraj, as we were saying, Dave and I, you know, really like VMware was half our lives for a long time but we're going to flip it a little bit. >> Neeraj: Absolutely. >> And talk about sort of some of the inside baseball. Talk about your role and how you're applying automation at VMware. >> Absolutely. So, so as part of us really running the intelligent automation program at VMware, we have a quite matured COE for last, you know four to five years, we've been doing this automation across the enterprise. So what we have really done is, you know over 45 different business functions where we really automated quite a lot different processes and tasks on that. So as part of my role, I'm really responsible for making sure that we are, you know, bringing in the best practices, making sure that we are ready to scale across the enterprise but at the same time, how, you know, quickly we are able to deliver the value of this automation to our businesses as well. >> Thomas, as a product manager, you know the product, and the market inside and out, you know the competition, you know the pricing, you know how customers are using it, you know all the features. What's your area of - main area of focus? >> The main area of the UiPathT suite... >> For your role, I mean? >> For my role is the RPA testing. So meaning testing RPA workflows themselves. And the reason is RPA has matured over the last few years. We see that, and it has adopted a lot of best practices from the software development area. So what we see is RPA now becomes business critical. It's part of the main core business processes in corporation and testing it just makes sense. You have to continuously monitor and continuously test your automation to make sure it does not break in production. >> Okay. And you have a specific product for this? Is it a feature or it's a module? >> So RPA testing or the UiPath T Suite, as the name suggests it's a suite of products. It's actually part of the existing platform. So we use Orchestrator, which is the distribution engine. We use Studio, which is our idea to create automation. And on top of that, we build a new component, which is called the UiPath Test Manager. And this is a kind of analytics and management platform where you have an oversight on what happened, what went wrong, and what is the reason for automation to **bring. >> Okay. And so Neeraj, you're testing your robot code? >> Neeraj: Correct. >> Right. And you're looking for what? Governance, security, quality, efficiency, what are the things you're looking for? >> It's actually all of all of those but our main goal to really start this was two-front, right? So we were really looking at how do we, you know, deliver at a speed with the quality which we can really maintain and sustain for a longer period, right? So to improve our quality of delivery at a speed of delivery, which we can do it. So the way we look at testing automation is not just as an independent entity. We look at this as a pipeline of a continuous improvement for us, right? So how it is called industry as a CICD pipeline. So testing automation is one of the key component of that. But the way we were able to deliver on the speed is to really have that end to end automation done for us to also from developers to production and using that pipeline and our testing is one piece of that. And the way we were able to also improve on the quality of our delivery is to really have automated way of doing the code reviews, automated way of doing the testing using this platform as well. and then, you know, how you go through end to end for that purpose. >> Thomas, when I hear testing robots, (Thomas chuckles) I don't care if it's code or actual robots, it's terrifying. >> It's terrify, yeah. >> It's terrifying. Okay, great. You, you have some test suite that says look, Yeah, we've looked at >> The, why is that terrifying? >> What's, It's terrifying because if you have to let it interact with actual live systems in some way. Yeah. The only way to know if it's going to break something is either you let it loose or you have some sort of sandbox where, I mean, what do you do? Are you taking clones of environments and running actual tests against them? I mean, think it's >> Like testing disaster recovery in the old days. Imagine. >> So we are actually not running any testing in the production live environment, right? The way we build this actually to do a testing in the separate test environment on that as well by using very specific test data from business, which you know, we call that as a golden copy of that test data because we want to use that data for months and years to come. Okay. Right? Yeah. So not touching any production environmental Facebook. >> Yeah. All right. Cause you, you can imagine >> Absolutely >> It's like, oh yeah we've created a robotic changes baby diapers let's go ahead and test it on these babies. [Collective Laughter] Yeah >> I don't think so. No, no, But, but what's the, does it does it matter if there's a delta between the test data and the, the, the production data? How, how big is that delta? How do you manage that? >> It does matter. And that's where actually that whole, you know, angle of how much you can, can in real, in real life can test right? So there are cases where you would have, even in our cases where, you know, the production data might be slightly different than the test data itself. So the whole effort goes into making sure that the test data, which we are preparing here, is as close to the products and data itself, right? It may not be a hundred percent close but that's the sort of you know, boundary or risk you may have to take. >> Okay. So you're snapshotting, that moving it over, a little V motion? >> Neeraj: Yeah. >> Okay. So do you do this for citizen developers as well? Or is you guys pretty much center of excellence writing all the bots? >> No, right now we are doing only for the unattended, the COE driven bots only at this point of time, >> What are you, what are your thoughts on the future? Because I can see I can see some really sloppy citizen coders. >> Yeah. Yeah. So as part of our governance, which we are trying to build for our citizen developers as well, there there is a really similar consideration for that as well. But for us, we have really not gone that far to build that sort of automation right >> Now, narrowly, just if we talk about testing what's the business impact been on the testing? And I'm interested in overall, but the overall platform but specifically for the testing, when did that when did you start implementing that and, and what what has been the business benefit? >> So the benefit is really on the on the speed of the delivery, which means that we are able to actually deliver more projects and more automation as well. So since we adopted that, we have seen our you know, improvement, our speed is around 15%, right? So, so, you know, 15% better speed than previously. What we have also seen is, is that our success rate of our transactions in production environment has gone to 96% success rate, which is, again there is a direct implication on business, on, on that point of view that, you know, there's no more manual exception or manual interaction is required for those failure scenarios. >> So 15% better speed at what? At, at implementing the bots? At actually writing code? Or... >> End to end, Yes. So from building the code to test that code able to approve that and then deploy that into the production environment after testing it this is really has improved by 15%. >> Okay. And, and what, what what business processes outside of sort of testing have you sort of attacked with the platform? Can you talk to that? >> The business processes outside of testing? >> Dave: Yeah. You mean the one which we are not testing ourself? >> Yeah, no. So just the UI path platform, is it exclusively for, for testing? >> This testing is exclusively for the UI path bots which we have built, right? So we have some 400 plus automations of UI bots. So it's meant exclusively >> But are you using UI path in any other ways? >> No, not at this time. >> Okay, okay. Interesting. So you started with testing? >> No, we started by building the bots. So we already had roughly 400 bots in production. When we came with the testing automation, that's when we started looking at it. >> Dave: Okay. And then now building that whole testing-- >> Dave: What are those other bots doing? Let me ask it that way. >> Oh, there's quite a lot. I mean, we have many bots. >> Dave: Paint a picture if you want. Yeah. In, in finance, in auto management, HR, legal, IT, there's a lot of automations which are there. As I'm saying, there's more than 400 automations out there. Yeah. So so it's across the, you know, enterprise on that. >> Thomas. So, and you know, both of you have a have a view on this, but Thomas's views probably wider across other, other instances. What are the most common things that are revealed in tests that indicate something needs to be fixed? Yeah, so think of, think of a test, a test failure, an error. What are the, what are the most common things that happen? >> So when we started with building our product we conducted a, a survey among our customers. And without a surprise the main reason why automation breaks is change. >> David: Sure. >> And the problem here is RPA is a controlled process a controlled workflow but it runs in an uncontrollable environment. So typically RPA is developed by a C.O.E. Those are business and automation experts, but they operate in an environment that's driven by new patches new application changes ruled out by IT. And that's the main challenge here. You cannot control that. And so far, if you, if you do not proactively test what happens is you catch an issue in production when it already breaks, right? That's reactive, that's leads to maintenance to un-claim maintenance actually. And that was the goal right from the start from the taste suite to support our customers here and go over to proactive maintenance meaning testing before and finding those issues before the heat production. >> Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I'm, I'm still not clear on, so you just gave a perfect example, changes in the environment. >> Yeah. >> So those changes are happening in the production environment. >> Thomas: Yeah. The robot that was happily doing its automation stuff before? >> Thomas: Yeah. Everyone was happy with it. Change happens. Robot breaks. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> Okay. You're saying you test before changes are implemented? To see if those changes will break the robot? >> Thomas: Yeah. >> Okay. How do you, how do you expose those changes that are in the, in a, that are going to be in a production environment to the robot? You must have a, Is is that part of the test environment? Does that mean that you have to have what fully running instances of like an ERP system? >> Thomas: Yeah. You know, a clone of an environment. How do you, how do you test that without having the live robot against the production environment? >> I think there's no big difference to standard software testing. Okay. The interesting thing is, the change actually happens earlier. You are affected on production side with it but the change happens on it side or on DevOps side. So you typically will test in a test environment that's similar to your production environment or probably in it in a pre-product environment. And the test itself is simply running your workflow that you want to test, but mark away any dependencies you don't want to invoke. You don't want to send a, a letter to a customer in a test environment, right? And then you verify that the result is what you actually expect, right? And as soon as this is not the case, you will be notified you will have a result, the fail result, and you can act before it breaks. So you can fix it, redeploy to production and you should be good now. >> But the, the main emphasis at VMware is testing your bots, correct? >> Neeraj: Testing your bots. Yes. Can I apply this to testing other software code? >> Yeah, yeah. You, you can, you can technically actually and Thomas can speak better than me on that to any software for that matter, but we have really not explored that aspect of it. >> David: You guys have pretty good coders, good engineers at VMware, but no, seriously Thomas what's that market looking like? Is that taking off? Are you, are you are you applying this capability or customers applying it for just more broadly testing software? >> Absolutely. So our goal was we want to test RPA and the application it relies on so that includes RPA testing as well as application testing. The main difference is typical functional application testing is a black box testing. So you don't know the inner implementation of of that application. And it works out pretty well. The big, the big opportunity that we have is not isolated Not isolated testing, isolated RPA but we talk about convergence of automation. So what we offer our customers is one automation platform. You create one, you create automation, not redundantly in different departments, but you create once probably for testing and then you reuse it for RPA. So that suddenly helps your, your test engineers to to move from a pure cost center to a value center. >> How, how unique is this capability in the industry relative to your competition and and what capabilities do you have that, that or, or or differentiators from the folks that we all know you're competing with? >> So the big advantage is the power of the entire platform that we have with UiPath. So we didn't start from scratch. We have that great automation layer. We have that great distribution layer. We have all that AI capabilities that so far were used for RPA. We can reuse them, repurpose them for testing. And that really differentiates us from the competition. >> Thomas, I I, I detect a hint of an accent. Is it, is it, is it German or >> It's actually Austrian. >> Austrian. Well, >> You know. Don't compare us with Germans. >> I understand. High German. Is that the proper, is that what's spoken in Austria? >> Yes, it is. >> So, so >> Point being? >> Point being exactly as I drift off point being generally German is considered to be a very very precise language with very specific words. It's very easy to be confused about between the difference the difference between two things automation testing and automating testing. >> Thomas: Yes. >> Because in this case, what you are testing are automations. >> Thomas: Yes. >> That's what you're talking about. >> Thomas: Yes. >> You're not talking about the automation of testing. Correct? >> Well, we talk about >> And that's got to be confusing when you go to translate that into >> Dave: But isn't it both? >> 50 other languages? >> Dave: It's both. >> Is it both? >> Thomas: It actually is both. >> Okay. >> And there's something we are exploring right now which is even, even the next step, the next layer which is autonomous testing. So, so far you had an expert an automation expert creating the automation once and it would be rerun over and over again. What we are now exploring is together with university to autonomously test, meaning a bot explores your application on the test and finds issues completely autonomously. >> Dave: So autonomous testing of automation? >> It's getting more and more complicated. >> It's more clear, it's getting clearer by the minute. >> Sorry for that. >> All right Neeraj, last question is: Where do you want to take this? What's your vision for, for VMware in the context of automation? >> Sure. So, so I think the first and the foremost thing for us is to really make it more mainstream for for our automation developer Excel, right? What I mean by that is, is to really, so so there is a shift now how we engage with our business users and SMEs. And I said previously they used to actually test it manually. Now the conversation changes that, hey can you tell us what test cases you want what you want us to test in an automated measure? Can you give us the test data for that so that we can keep on testing in a continuous manner for the months and years to come down? Right? The other part of the test it changes is that, hey it used to take eight weeks for us to build but now it's going to take nine weeks because we're going to spend an extra week just to automate that as well. But it's going to help you in the long run and that's the conversation. So to really make it as much more mainstream and then say that out of all these kinds of automation and bots which we are building, So we are not looking to have a test automation for every single bot which we are building. So we need to have a way to choose where their value is. Is it the quarter end processing one? Is it the most business critical one, or is it the one where we are expecting of frequent changes, right? That's where the value of the testing is. So really bring that as a part of our whole process and then, you know >> We're still fine too. That great. Guys, thanks so much. This has been really interesting conversation. I've been waiting to talk to a real life customer about testing and automation testing. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for everything. >> All right. Thank you for watching, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and I will be back right after this short break. This is day one of theCUBE coverage of UI Path Forward Five. Be right back after this short break.

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Andy Thurai, Constellation Research & Daniel Newman, Futurum Research | UiPath Forward5 2022


 

The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>I Ready, Dave Ante with David Nicholson. We're back at UI Path forward. Five. We're getting ready for the big guns to come in, the two co CEOs, but we have a really special analyst panel now. We're excited to have Daniel Newman here. He's the Principal analyst at Future and Research. And Andy Dai, who's the Vice president and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for making some time to come on the queue. >>Glad to be here. Always >>Good. So, >>Andy, you're deep into ai. You and I have been talking about having you come to our maor office. I'm, I'm really excited that we're able to meet here. What have you seen at the show so far? What are your big takeaways? You know, day one and a half? >>Yeah, well, so first of all, I'm d AI because my last name has AI and I >>Already talk about, >>So, but, but all jokes aside, there are a lot of good things I heard from the conference, right? I mean, one is the last two years because of the pandemic, the growth has been phenomenal for, for a lot of those robotic automation intelligent automation companies, right? So because the low hanging through position making processes have been already taken care of where they going to find the next growth spot, right? That was the question I was looking answers to. And they have some inverse, one good acquisition. They had intelligent document processing, but more importantly they're trying to move from detrimental rules based RPA automation into AI based, more probabilistic subjective decision making areas. That's a huge market, tons of money involved in it, but it's going to be a harder problem to solve. Love to see the execut. >>Well, it's also a big pivot for the, for the company. It started out as sort of a a point product and now is moving to, to platform. But to end of the macro is not in UI pass favor. It's not really in any, you know, tech company's favor, but especially, you know, a company that's going into a transition transitioning to go to market cetera. What are you seeing, what's your take on the macro? I mean, I know you follow the financial markets very closely. There's a lot of negative sentiment right now. Are you as negative as the sentiment? >>Well, the, the broad sentiment comes with some pretty good historical data, right? We've had probably one of the worst market years in multiple decades. And of course we're coming into a situation where all the, the factors are really not in our favor. You've got in interest rates climbing, you've got wildly high inflation, you've had a, you know, helicopters dumping money on the economy for a period of time. And we're, we're gonna get into this great reset is what I keep talking about. But, you know, I had the opportunity to talk to Bill McDermott recently on one of my shows and Bill's CEO of ServiceNow, in case anybody there doesn't know, but >>Former, >>Yeah, really well spoken guy. But you know, him and I kind of went back and forth and we came up with this kind of concept that we were gonna have to tech our way out of what's about to come. You can almost be certain recession is gonna come. But for companies like UiPath, I actually think there's a tremendous opportunity because the bottom line is companies are gonna be looking at their bottom line. A year ago it was all about growth a deal, like the Adobe Figma deal would've been, been lauded, people would've been excited. Now everybody's looking at going, how are they paying that price? Everybody's discounting the future growth. They're looking at the situation, say, what's gonna happen next? Well, bottom line is now they're looking at that. How profitable are we? Are you making money? Are you growing that bottom line? Are you creating earnings? We're >>Gonna come in >>Era, we're gonna come into an era where companies are gonna say, you know what? People are expensive. The inflationary cost of hiring is expensive. You know, what's less expensive? Investing in the cloud, investing in ai, investing in workflow and automation and things that actually enable businesses to expand, keep costs somewhat contained fixed costs, and scale their businesses and get themselves in a good position for when the economy turns to return to >>Grow. So since prior to the pandemic cloud containers, m l and RPA slash automation have been the big four that from a spending data standpoint have been above the line above all kind of the rest in terms of spending momentum up until last quarter, AI and RPA slash automation declined. So my question is, are those two areas discretionary or more discretionary than other technology investments you heard? >>Well, I, I think we're in a, a period where companies are, I won't say they've stopped spending, but you listened to Mark Benioff, you talked about the elongated sales cycle, right? I think companies right now are being very reflective and they're doing a lot of introspection. They're looking at their business and saying, We hired a lot of people. We hired really fast. Do we need to cut? Do we need to freeze? We've made investments in technology, are we getting a return on 'em? We all know that the analytics, whether it's you know, digital adoption platforms or just analytics in the business, say, What is all this money we've been spending doing for us and how productive are we? But I will tell you universally, the companies are looking at workflow automations that enable things. Whether that's onboarding customers, whether that's delivering experiences, whether that's, you know, full, you know, price to quote technologies, automate, automate, automate. By doing that, they're gonna bring down the cost, they're gonna control themselves as best as possible in a tough macro. And then when they come out of it, these processes are gonna be beneficiary in a, in a growth environment even more so, >>Andy UiPath rocketed to a leadership position, largely due to the, the product and the simplicity of the product relative to the competition. And then as you well know, they expanded into, you know, platform. So how do you see the competitive environment? A UI path is again focusing on that platform play Automation Anywhere couldn't get to public market. They had turnover at the go to market level. Chris Riley joined a lot of, lot of hope left Microsoft joined into the fray, obviously is having an impact that you're certainly seeing spending momentum around Microsoft. Then SAP service Now Salesforce, every software company the planet thinks they should get every dollar spent on software. You know, they, they see UI pass momentum and they say, Hey, we can, we can take some of that off the table. How do you see the competitive environment right now? >>So first of all, in in my mind, UI path is slightly better because of a couple of reasons. One, as you said, it's ease of use. >>They're able to customize it variable to what they want. So that's a real easy development advantage. And then the, when you develop the bots and equal, it takes on an average anywhere between two to maybe six weeks, generally speaking, in some industries regulated government might take more so that it's faster, quicker, easier than others in a sense. So people love using that. The second advantage of what they have in my mind is that not only they are available as a managed SA solution on, on cloud, on Azure Cloud, but also they have this version that you can install, maintain, manage any way you want, whether it's a public cloud or, or your own data center and so on so forth. That's not available with almost, not all of them have it, Few have it, but not all of the competitors have it. So they have an advantage there as well. Where it could become useful would be one of the areas that they haven't even expanded is the government. >>Government is the what, >>Sorry? The government. Yeah, related solutions, right? Defense, government, all of those areas when you go, which haven't even started for various reasons. For example, they're worried about laying off people, worried about cost, worried about automating things. There's a lot of hurdles to overcome. But once you overcome that, if you want to go there, nobody's going to use, or most of them will be very of using something on the cloud. So they have a solution for version variation of that. So they are set up to come to that next level. I mean, I don't know if you guys were at the keynote, the CEO talked about how their plans to go from 1 billion to 5 billion in ar. So they're set up to capture the market. But again, as you said, every big software company saw their momentum, they want to get into it, they want to compete with them. So >>Well, to get to 5 billion, they've gotta accelerate growth. I mean, if you do 20% cer over the next, you know, through the end of the decade, they don't quite get there. So they're gonna have to, you know, they lowered their forecast out of the high 20 or mid twenties to 18%. They're gonna have to accelerate that. And we've seen that before. We see it in cloud where cloud, you know, accelerates growth even though you got the lower large numbers. Go ahead Dave. >>Yeah, so Daniel, then how do we, how do we think of this market? How do we measure the TAM for total addressable market for automation? I mean, you know, what's that? What's that metric that shows how unautomated are we, how inefficient are we? Is there a, is there a 5% efficiency that can be gained? Is there a 40% efficiency that can be gained? Because if you're talking about, you know, how much much of the market can UI path capture, first of all, how big is the market? And then is UI path poised to take advantage of that compared to the actual purveyors of the software that people are interacting with? I'm interacting with an E R p, an ER P system that has built into it the ability to automate processes. Then why do I need 'EM UI path? So first, how do you evaluate TAM? Second, how do you evaluate whether UI Path is gonna have a chance in this market where RPAs built into the applications that we actually use? Yeah, >>I think that TAM is evolving, and I don't have it in front of me right now, but what I'll tell you about the TAM is there's sort of the legacy RPA tam and then there's what I would sort of evolve to call the IPA and workflow automation tam that is being addressed by many of these software companies that you asked in the competitive equation. In the, in the, in the question, what we're seeing is a world where companies are gonna say, if we can automate it, we will automate it. That's, it's actually non-negotiable. Now, the process in the ability to a arrive at automation at scale has long been a battle front within the nor every organization. We've been able to automate things for a long time. Why has it more been done? It's the same thing with analytics. There's been numerous studies in analytics that have basically shown companies that have been able to embrace, adopt, and implement analytics, have significantly better performances, better performances on revenue growth, better performances and operational cost management, better performances with customer experience. >>Guess what? Not everybody, every company can get to this. Now there's a couple of things behind this and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to close my answer out cause I'm getting a little long winded here. But the first thing is automation is a cultural challenge in most organizations. We've done endless research on companies digitally transforming and automating their business. And what we've found is largely the technology are somewhat comparable. Meaning, you know, I, I've heard what he is saying about some of the advantages of partnership with Microsoft, very compelling. But you know what, all these companies that have automation offerings, whether it's you know, through a Salesforce, Microsoft, whether it's a specialized rpa like an Automation Anywhere or a UI path, their solutions can be deployed and successful. The company's ability to take the investment, implement it successfully and get buy in across the organization tends to always be the hurdle. An old CIO stat, 50% of IT projects fail. That stat is still almost accurate today. It's not 50% of technology is bad, but those failures are because the culture doesn't get behind it. And automation's a tricky one because there's a lot of people that feel on the outside rather than the inside of an automation transformation. >>So, Andy, so how do you think about the, to Dave's question, the SAPs the service nows trying to, you know, at least take some red crumbs off the table. They, they're gonna, they're gonna create these automation stove pipes, but in Automation Anywhere or, or UI path is a horizontal play, are they not? And so how do you think about that progression? Well, so >>First of all, all of this other companies, when they, they, whether it's a build, acquire, what have you, these guys already have what, five, seven years on them. So it's gonna be difficult for them to catch up with the Center of Excellence knowledge on the use cases, what they got to catch up with them. That's gonna be a lot of catch up. Just to give you an idea, Microsoft Power Automate has been there for a while, right? They're supposedly doing well as well, but they still choose to partner with the UiPath as well to get them to the next level. So there's going to be competition coming from all areas, but it's, it's about, you know, highlights. >>So, so who is the competition? Is it Microsoft chipping away an individual productivity? Is it a service now? Who's got a platform play? Is it themselves just being able to execute >>All plus also, but I think the, the most, I wouldn't say competition, but it's more people are not aware of what areas need to be automated, right? For example, one of the things I was talking about with a couple of customers is, so they have a automation hub where you can put the, the process and and task that need to be automated and then you prioritize and start working on it. And, and almost all of them that I speak to, they keep saying that most of the process and task identification that they need to do for automation, it's manual right now. So, which means it's limited, you have to go and execute it. When people find out and tell you that's what need to be fixed, you try to go and fix that. But imagine if there is a way, I mean the have solutions they're showcasing now if it becomes popular, if you're able to identify tasks that are very inefficient or or process that's very inefficient, automatically score them up saying that, you know what, this is what is going to be ROI and you execute on it. That's going to be huge. So >>I think ts right, there's no shortage of, of a market. I would, I would agree with you Rob Sland this morning talked about the progression. He sort of compared it to e R P of the early days. I sort of have a love hate with E R P cuz of the complexity of the implementation and the, and the cost. However, first of all, a couple points and I love to get your thoughts for you. If you went back, I know 25 years, you, you wouldn't have been able to pick SAP out of a lineup and say that's gonna be the leader in E R P and they ended up, you know, doing really, really well. But the more interesting angle is if you could have figured out the customers that were implementing e r p in, in a really high quality fashion, those are the companies that really did well. You buy their stocks, they really took off cuz they were killing their other industry competitors. So, fast forward to automation. Will automation live up to its hype and your opinion, will it be as transformative and will the, the practitioners of automation see the same type of uplift in their markets, in their market caps, in their competitiveness as did sort of the early adopters and the excellent adopters of brp? What are your thoughts? Well, >>I think it's an interesting comparison. Maybe answer it slightly different way. I think the future is that automation is a non-negotiable in every enterprise organization. I think if you're a large organization, we have absolutely filled our, our organizations with waste too much overhead, too much expense, too much technical debt and automation is an answer. This is the way we want to interact, right? We want a chat bot that actually gives us good answers that can answer on a Tuesday at 11:00 PM at night when we want to know if the right dog food, you know, and I'm saying that, you know, that's what we want. That's the outcome we want. And businesses have to be driven by the outcome. Here's what I'm not sure about, Dave, is we have an era where over the last three to five years, a lot of products have become companies and a lot of 'EM products became companies ended up in public markets. >>And so the RPA space is one of those areas that got this explosive amount of growth. And you look at it and there's two ways. Is this horizontally a business rpa or is this going to be something that's gonna be a target of those Microsofts and those SAPs and say, Look, we need hyper automation to be deeply integrated at the E R P crm, hcm SCM level. We're gonna build by this or we're gonna build this. And you're already hearing it in the partnerships, but this is how I think the story ends. I I think either the companies like UiPath get much bigger, they get much more rounded in their, in their offerings. Or you're gonna have a large company like a Microsoft come in and say, you know what? Buy it rather >>Than build can they can, they can, can this company, maybe not so much here, but can a company like Automation Anywhere stay acquisition? Well, >>I use the, I use the Service now as an, as a parallel because they're a company that I thought would always end up inside of a bigger company and now you're like, I think they're too big. I think they've they've dropped >>That, that chart. Yeah, they're acquisition proof. I would agree. But these guys aren't yet Nora's automation. They work for >>A while and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes getting bit bought is good, but what I mean is it's gonna be core and these big companies know it cuz they're all talking >>About, but as independent analysts, we want to see independent companies. >>I wanna see the right thing. >>It just makes it fun. >>The right thing >>Customers. Yeah, but you know, okay, Oracle buy more customers, more >>Customers. >>I'm kidding. Yeah, I guess it's the right thing. It just makes it more fun when you have really good independent competitors that >>We >>Absolutely so, and, and spend way more on r and d than these big companies who spend a lot more on stock buyback. But I know you gotta go. Thanks so much for spending some time, making time for Cube Andy. Great to see you. Good to see as well. All right, we are wrapping up day one, Dave Blan and Dave Nicholson live. You can hear the action behind us, forward in five on the Cube, right back.

Published Date : Sep 29 2022

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by UI guns to come in, the two co CEOs, but we have a really special analyst panel now. Glad to be here. You and I have been talking about having you come to our I mean, one is the last two years because of It's not really in any, you know, tech company's favor, but especially, you know, you know, I had the opportunity to talk to Bill McDermott recently on one of my shows and But you know, him and I kind of went back and forth and we came up with this Era, we're gonna come into an era where companies are gonna say, you know what? or more discretionary than other technology investments you heard? But I will tell you universally, And then as you well know, they expanded into, you know, platform. One, as you said, it's ease of use. And then the, when you develop the bots and equal, it takes on an average anywhere between Defense, government, all of those areas when you go, So they're gonna have to, you know, they lowered their forecast out I mean, you know, I think that TAM is evolving, and I don't have it in front of me right now, but what I'll tell you about the TAM is there's investment, implement it successfully and get buy in across the organization tends to always be the hurdle. trying to, you know, at least take some red crumbs off the table. Just to give you an idea, Microsoft Power Automate has of the process and task identification that they need to do for automation, it's manual right now. a lineup and say that's gonna be the leader in E R P and they ended up, you know, doing really, you know, and I'm saying that, you know, that's what we want. And you look at it and there's two ways. I think they've they've dropped I would agree. Sometimes getting bit bought is good, but what I mean is it's gonna be core and Yeah, but you know, okay, Oracle buy more customers, more It just makes it more fun when you have really good independent But I know you gotta go.

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Sameer Bohra, Deloitte & Cheryln Chin, UiPath | UiPath Forward 5


 

>> Presenter: theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5, 2022. This is theCUBE's 4th UiPath FORWARD. They're mining automation gold here at the conference and in the customer base and we're creating Cube Gold, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. Cheryln Chin is here. She's the vice president of Global Alliances at UIPATH. Sameer Bohra, who's the director of Information Technology at Deloitte. Good to see you guys. >> Great. >> Thank you. >> Now normally we would be talking about, how Deloitte's out, doing its thing with its customers, but this is actually a case study on Deloitte's use of automation and UiPath, so that's cool. You not only partner with the GSIs you actually sell to them as well. Okay. What's that all about? What's your relationship like? Why don't you start there? >> Absolutely. So we're thrilled to be here. Thanks for having us. And really appreciate Sameer being here with us. Deloitte was an early adopter of UiPath not just as a partner, driving innovations and investing in getting skilled and building the capability. They were the first to become the US and certified partner network investing in thousands and thousands of skilling up their consultants and resources to help us address our customer needs together. But it's not just about being a great partner it's being a customer with what they've done and built their own business around UiPath and the automations. We've got an amazing story to tell you about today that we'd love to share. >> All right, Sameer, let's hear it. What's the story? What was the catalyst to bring in automation, UiPath? Where are you applying it? Where'd you start? >> Fantastic, well first of all, thanks for having me here. >> You're welcome. >> I'll start this journey with the predictions that we were making at some point. So, Deloitte, as a company, we are in the business of predicting the technology trends. We have been tracking automation as a trend for quite some time, and we have been following how this industries going to come along. And we then started placing our bets not just on the technology, but on the vendor as well in this case. Right around 2017, 18 is when we started kind of implementing automation with UiPath for our internal purposes. And as it happens, different constituents in our member firms started doing it at the same time without kind of consulting with each other. But the surprising thing is that we all ended up with the same results. We all ended up with UiPath. We all ended up using the same technology set and it was good that we all made the same choice because we would then all get along with it together. So we started our journey kind of disintegrated in a way and then we came along quickly all together. We then have COEs in each of our member firms, or at least the big member firms. And around January last year is when we signed an enterprise license agreement with UiPath that really brought some of our mature COEs together. And now we are kind of utilizing the product quite well. We are exploring the benefits of that ELA brings to us. So that has been our journey so far. Just in terms of some numbers, we are more than 400 millionaires saved for our member firm. We have hundreds of processes that we have automated. I'm kind of losing count of that already. And we have a good 70, 80 member team members across our three mature COEs that are constantly automating day in and day out. So there's a lot in terms of the history and there's a lot that we are looking forward to. >> Can you paint a picture of sort of where you're applying these automations in your business and maybe double click on that a little bit? >> Absolutely. So when we started our journey, there were some candidates right off the bat there were some of our enabling areas where we were looking at for instance, finance our talent which we also called as HR. Those were some of our preliminary areas that we started doing automations for. But another surprising thing is that our first automation use cases were actually contingent solutions that we built to help some of the other big deployments that were happening in the firm. And in absence of any good solution, we said, "Let's bring in RP and let's bridge the gap." And that basically opened the door for us to use automation at a bigger scale. So it's enabling area, talent, finance, business operations. Those are the prominent areas, marketing, chief culture, those are the areas that we are applying it. And then our services on the other hand are using automation as well because we need our services people to be armed with the valuable time to be able to invest on our clients rather than, being stuck in repetitive mundane tasks. So we are pretty much applying it all over the board now. >> So as director of IT at Deloitte, I'm curious about how this process works for you. You've heard the term drinking one's own champagne. >> Yeah. >> When you are looking... >> 'or jog fooding, but okay. >> I was trying to be polite, right? One throat to choke one bat to pat, back to pat. Are you immediately and at all times under a microscope when you're deploying something internally because someone else in Deloitte is thinking, "Okay, let's see how this works for us. Because if it works well, if we gain expertise, we can turn this into a line of business to help our clients." Is that something that starts day one? Or do people come to you six months into a project and say, "Hey, I hear you have something going on. That's cool." What's that look like? >> Very interesting question. The way I would like to describe it is we have a symbiotic relationship between our internal COE and our client facing teams that are out in the market selling automation along with UiPath. And the way that symbiotic relationship work for us is when we are doing anything interesting in terms of an automation use case, and we have many that I can talk about, we do have this constant connect with our client facing folks where we tell them about the use case. We tell them about the problem that we are solving and the way in which we are solving that problem. And in many cases, it generates interest. And then we get into conversations where we see, okay is it an asset that we can build out of it? Or is it simply a client use case that we could burn and implement and apply somewhere? So that's one side of the symbolic relationship. The other side is what our client service folks are seeing in the market. So when they see it, they come to us and they tell us, "Look, we see such and such client doing this and we did it for them. We should think about doing this in Deloitte and for ourselves." And then we say, "Fantastic, let's do it." So it's both ways. >> Dave: Both ways. And the fact that it is both ways. There is not that sense of pressure or you know that I'm under a microscope. It's all one big family. >> How do you measure success? >> It's a pretty interesting question again, success is subjective, right? When it comes to automation the typical metrics that people use to define and describe success is how many hours you have saved or how many hours, at least the way we use it how many hours you have reinvested, right? So we started with that as our measure and for some time that was really our measure of success. But lately we are seeing a change in that we are now shifting more over to other matrix like cost avoidance. So for instance, your firm is growing at a certain pace. Do all your enabling areas need to grow at that pace? Maybe not. Maybe we can avoid that cost and maybe we bring in more automation to support that. So cost avoidance is kind of emerging as a bigger matrix for us now, especially given that all low hanging automation fruits have been plucked. That's a big one we are looking at. I think the other matrix which is a bit difficult to measure directly is the employee satisfaction. There's somewhere I read that if you want happy clients you need to have happy employees first, right? And one way of making your employees happy is to give them the task that they really value that they really like to do. Now, again, being a professional services firm are ours are people's, our is our currency, right? So we want to give them as much of their valuable time back so they can invest it in their client facing activities as opposed to, you know doing mundane and ones. So those are some of the matrix and measures we are looking at. >> So I'd like to dig into that a little bit. If I could Sameer. So, aren't hours saved sort of related to cost avoidance? Is that an input to the cost avoidance calculation, if you will? >> So yeah, so yes and no. And the reason I say that is because yes, if you do the math, yes, it makes sense, >> 'not that it's direct. I understand it's not a direct relationship but it's somewhere related. Is it not? >> It is related in the sense that our saved is an immediate measure of automation, right? So if me as a practitioner, if I can hand over a task to the bar, which can take off five hours out of my week, that's an hour saved right away. But cost avoidance is more like, "Hey, I have these 10 engagements that are coming up. Do I need to amp up to meet boost end engagement or I simply amp up my automation, right?" So that's more around the cost avoidance piece. >> Okay. So there's an algorithm there. >> Yeah. >> Which makes sense. Do you find, so in other words, when you save hours at some point it's going to translate it to headcount avoidance. Okay, are you finding that when you run a project if you can automate that project, that the proportion of savings is greater on that automation of the project than it is for those sort of hours saved? I'm just sort of curious as to what the balance looks like. Is it like overwhelmingly speeding up the project? Is the real benefit there? I'm just kind of curious. >> There's absolutely a benefit there. With automation, you can obviously speed up your projects, you can do more with the staff and the team that you have. So that's definitely something that helps us a lot both internally and I believe on the client facing side as well. >> Okay. And just put my CFO hat on. Let's, so are those internal resources or are there sort of out of pocket expenses? In other words, it's the hard dollars that I don't spend or is it resources that I can deploy on another project or both? Or both. >> For the most part it's the resources right? >> So it's okay. >> Yeah, it's the resources that you can now have them do more value work with more clients as opposed to have them do many task at one place. >> Okay, I'm going to just keep going. So that's a productivity measure in my mind anyway, so I just like to keep peeling the onion on the metrics. So I would at some point, so the two things the cost avoidance and the employee satisfaction I would ultimately as the CFO want to see that show up in terms of productivity increases and decreases in turnover. And you probably don't have enough experience yet to measure that. But ultimately, isn't that where you want to go? >> I think that's essentially where it's going and I think that's the way it'll probably go for pretty much everyone who is in this journey of automation at your CFO will eventually want to look at, okay what after this investment, where is it leading us? So that's definitely the direction we are also heading. >> Yeah and so productivity revenue per employee, is that a good starting point? Maybe you get more sophisticated than that, but... >> Yeah, that's probably a good starting point. >> UiPath revenue employees about 250,000, which is pretty average for software companies. Now, maybe it's because they're investing more, but at some point I'd like to see that tick to 350,000 anyway. >> Yeah. >> I Digress. >> And we are on that journey where we are essentially looking to arm everyone with a bot right? There's a philosophy and UiPath around a bot for everyone. We are pretty close to getting to that stage where everybody should be able to leverage the technology. We shouldn't be limited to a certain business unit or certain pockets within a business unit. >> I want a bot. I do, I want a bot, I'm getting a bot. >> I wish I have a bot. >> I would, yeah, I want to a bot and I want to give that bot a very clever name. That's like you're thinking of naming bots. So are your activities evaluated in completely independently as sort of your own P and L or do you get credit for some of that symbiotic relationship that's developed? Because I can imagine a situation where you deploy something intelligent automation and you get a yield that translates into a practice for your firm that brings in a bunch of revenue with a bunch of satisfied customers. Do you get credit for that? Or is it like, no, no, no, no. I wouldn't >> I would love to get credit for that. But again, it's all in the family. It's all one big family. At this time we are simply focused on bringing the right use cases forward for our client facing folks and the other way around. So we haven't got into that stage as left. >> But you need to deliver standalone value. You're evaluated that way. >> And this COE. That's what we are evaluated upon. The matrix that I talked about earlier around cost avoidance, number of our saved employee satisfaction. Those are some of area that we are being rated upon. And that's across all our COEs. >> Oh, surely congratulations on landing Deloitte as a customer and of course a partner. And I'm sure there's big things in the future. We'll give you the last word, bring it home. >> You know, the takeaway here is we are leveraging partners like this who are going way beyond just automating processes for the sake of process and our save the using this to build their business make their consultants more productive and really driving profitability for the business. So really the automation flywheel going beyond that's really trying to fuel digital transformation by taking this, they make it go faster, more profitable, more agile, and they become an amazing customer and an amazing good market partner. >> Yeah, you guys take this pretty seriously behind us there's this, I don't know what you call it but this clouds floating above it. If you walk through there, there's some really inspiring commentary. And so I encourage you to do that if you're here at the show. All right, thanks guys, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. All keep it right there Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson will be back at FORWARD5 UiPath customer event from Las Vegas. We're live right back. (soft music)

Published Date : Sep 30 2022

SUMMARY :

brought to you by UiPath. and in the customer base Now normally we would be talking about, and building the capability. What's the story? Fantastic, well first of is that we all ended up And that basically opened the door for us So as director of IT at Deloitte, Or do people come to you is it an asset that we And the fact that it is both ways. in that we are now shifting more So I'd like to dig And the reason I say that is because yes, 'not that it's direct. It is related in the So there's an algorithm there. that the proportion of savings and the team that you have. dollars that I don't spend resources that you can now that where you want to go? So that's definitely the is that a good starting point? Yeah, that's probably that tick to 350,000 anyway. And we are on that journey I want a bot. and you get a yield that translates and the other way around. But you need to Those are some of area that We'll give you the last and our save the using this And so I encourage you to do that Vellante and Dave Nicholson

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