>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman. This is our one day coverage of UiPath. UiPath Forward Americas. UiPath does these events all over the world. They've reached about 14,000 customers to date and about 1,500 here, Stu. A great show, a lot of energy. We're watching the ascendancy of robotic process automation, the simplification of software robots. Courtney Dominiguez is here, she's the Vice President of World Fuel Services and she's joined by Ashim Gupta who's the UiPath's Chief Customer Success Officer. Welcome folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> So, Courtney, let's start with you. World Fuel Services: what's that all about? >> So we're a logistics company, an energy logistics company. We're actually based here in Miami, Florida so it was a short commute over to the Fountain Blue for the day. >> Lucky you. >> Yes, exactly. So, yeah, we do fuel globally, all over the world. So we do for aviation, marine, and land. We also focus on renewable energy and we're really developing over in Europe as well. >> So, interesting, a lot of interesting drivers and dynamics in your business, fast moving, a lot of change, sometimes hard to predict. >> Yes. >> In terms of your role, talk about your role and what some of the key business drivers are that force you to be on top of your game. >> Yeah, so, I'm in charge of shared services and automation for the company so it's really my role to help us operate more efficiently and do things smarter. You know everybody's being challenged to do more with less and as you grow the business, your transaction accounts grow as well so we're really in charge of transforming and providing solutions. UiPath is a component, a big component, of what we're going to be rolling out and helping to really do transformation. >> So, Ashim, Courtney saying, do more with less, that's got to be music to your ears. Your job is to make, Courtney, her company, successful. So, talk about your role and how you actually make your success. >> Sure, so, one, I was a former customer. So you look at Daniel Dines' strategy and UiPath's strategy and it's bringing people in who really have a passion for the industry and have that experience to go and try and operationalize a lot of our mission. As a former customer, I know a lot of times you get sold software and you don't get a lot of the tools or you got to go buy another set of tools to make the first set of tools work. So customer success is about giving technical talent and really great experts and put them in the hands of our best customers to answer the questions that are out there as they embark on their RPA journey. That can go from anything from infrastructure, technical hurdles that they may face to how to really think about RPA, how to eventualize it within their areas. And by doing that, we get people to up that adoption curve, they start seeing the benefits of RPA and it becomes a no-brainer, both for the company to invest in and employees to understand the value that RPA brings. >> So, Courtney, was RPA kind of a no-brainer for you? Was it a, "What is this technology?" How did you go about sort of bringing RPA into your organization? >> Yeah, I think all of the above. So, it seems very intuitive. You know, you want to do things smarter and do things more efficiently but that makes people nervous too so there's a lot of people that say, "I like what I do" "and if you do it smarter and more efficient," "do you still need me?" And I also think that, from the top, it's easy to say robots, and that sounds really cool but really putting it into the water supply is a different story. So, one of the things that we did, we hosted a RPA awareness day, partnered with UiPath. They came in and worked with us on that. And then after that we hosted a bot-a-thon. So, we went out and we had our whole enterprise download the community version of UiPath and just had them start experimenting and coming up with their own ideas and honestly, it was a great crowd-sourcing engine for us. And we just came up with an instant pipeline of ideas and people really caught on and bought into it at that point. So it was fantastic. >> Courtney, I want you to expand a little bit on that. In my career, I've always said, "I know next quarter," "next year, I'm going to have more to do." When I managed a group in operations it was, "You need to figure out what you can get rid of," "you know, what you can," I mean automated a decade ago was quite different than what you do today but I like what you said about how you engaged everybody and got them to, kind of, get over that fear of the unknown. How long's the process going to take? Did you have senior management involvement in the planning? >> Yeah honestly, this was a great, ground roots kind of a way of getting it out and it didn't take long at all. I mean we've only been on this journey a couple of months quite honestly and it's caught on like wildfire and we're really excited about it. So you know, I think it's great that we were able to partner some of our great, younger talent with some of our more, people who've been doing it for a long time. And we partnered together, we partnered them together and then they came up with their own ideas. It's easy for me to, Monday morning, quarterback, and stand on the other side and say, "Oh, you should do this or do that" but the people that are doing it everyday are the ones who have the best ideas. They know what they don't want to do. They know what they want to spend their time working on. So they're the best ones to figure out how to make that other stuff that's not quite as fun go away. So, yeah, it's been fantastic. >> So, Ashim, if I could ask, how do you help your customers figure out what the right metric is? What is success for them? You've been on the customer side, you've been talking to users, it's often like, "Oh, I think I'm going to be able" "to save money but maybe it's growing revenue." There's a lot of pieces there. >> I mean, a lot of it starts with listening because I don't think there's one right answer. You know, a lot of software companies come in and say, "It is just about cost", or, "It is just about X". We think about it very differently. Some of our customers think about it in terms of cost equality, getting accurate data, getting things done 100% accurate and getting data quality up. Some of them, it is a productivity game, right? It's important to get that cost down. We have customers in Japan who are using it to augment their workforce because they need more workers than the market can supply and RPA gets it. So I would say the first is listening to our customers. The second piece of it is, then, there are some standard things across our customer base that we're all learning together. You know, one of our customers started looking at the time, the run time of a bot. Or how long, how much infrastructure does it consume? So we're able to get best practices across to be able to figure out what are the right metrics that suits our customers' needs. >> Courtney, I'm trying to understand if it was a top-down initiative or a bottoms-up or both? >> It's both, yeah I think it's really both. So I think it's that top level setting the direction and saying, "This is what we want to do." One of the things we have at World Fuel is, a lot of people have the mantra, and Dan said this this morning as well, is, "We don't want to touch the keyboard." Right? We want to be no-touch. We want things to come through seamlessly. So that's getting great data quality at the beginning with customer onboarding and then getting it all the way through and out the door because, at the end of the day, we need to get the invoices out and the money back in, right? And I need accurate data to do that and do things efficiently. So, I think it's from the top saying, "We want to be no-touch", and then it's up to my team to help provide solutions and work with the businesses and figure out how to make that happen. >> So it sounds like you had this ideation initiative and did you just pick one or two or did you say, "Okay, guys, go?" Where did you start, what did you have to do to really prove out the value? >> We did, we definitely picked one or two. It went with quick wins but when you go with quick wins and you say, "This is what we did in a really short" "amount of time with minimal effort," "think of the art of the possible, think of what we can do?" And now our focus is not on quick wins. Our focus is on, "How do we transform our business? "How do we take this tool and really apply it" "and transform the way we work?" So I think it's important to have those quick wins initially and just kind of set the stage because that gets everybody thinking, "Wow, this can be really big." >> What kind of person was required to build the robots? Somebody who's fairly technical or was it a business person, was it a team, two people team? >> I have the best team ever and I really think we got a lot of them internally. Really, citizen, kind of data, scientist people. Not anybody that was necessarily trained in it. Now we're getting more and more data scientists added to the team. So we're getting more developer-type skills. We also have BAs, so we've got some people who are great at looking at process and how can we make things more efficient? It's a combination but I do really think that some of our best resources have just been people that are really eager to learn. I mean, UiPath does an amazing job of putting the certification and the academy, and so many online tools it's free. I mean, it's so easy to work with them and really pick it up. You know you don't need a lot of training and that's one of the reasons we selected UiPath you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out. And they really make it all so readily available. >> A lot of the customers we talked to today on theCUBE have gone through a business case, some rigorous, some sort of back-of-napkin, What kind of business case and justification did you go through? >> So we started small with the bots. So we said, "Lets prove it out with a small number of bots" "and if we can do that, then we can scale". And we were just chatting earlier that now we really want to look at it and say, "Over the next three", "six, 12 months, how can we really scale this" "and what do we think that looks like?" Again, start small and then, now okay now we know what's out there and we know what we can get so let's go big and we're ready to do that now. >> So did you go through a rigorous, sort of, quantification of the business value or was it more like, "Hey, it's low risk. Let's try it, see what we get." >> Yeah, yeah, it's low risk, let's just do it. >> I mean what was the result, what was the business event? >> Honestly, it's been fantastic. I mean the results back that we've had have been savings of 100,000s of dollars with minimal, again, minimal effort and minimal, really unsure of what we were going to get out of it. So, it's phenomenal. >> And the denominator, and I say denominator I'm talking about benefit divided by cost-- >> Yeah. >> Sounds like the denominator was pretty low. >> Pretty low, yeah. >> One of the best ways to get our eyes, lower the denominator. I always talk to my kids about this when it comes to college cost so you know what I mean, (laughing) And really, with the community version, getting that out there and free and just having people start playing around with it? I mean, that right there keeps your cost pretty low because they're funneling and putting ideas in the pipeline and then when it comes time to develop it and make it production ready, that's where our effort is involved but to just get that into the pipeline with a little bit of effort and a little bit of cost is a no-brainer. >> So it's clear, your strategy as a company is to lower the barriers to entry for your clients, train them, free training, get them hooked, and then let the rest of it soar. >> Yeah, I mean, one is we share that, our CEO talked about that today, we share that joy that automation brings to a lot of people's work. That's what drives them. So for us, it's not about nickel and diming people every step of the way, it is arming them with what they need to fulfill the mission for what we sold them automation or RPA for. And that's a huge part of it so it goes beyond just the academy, just the training, you know, it's the intimacy that we want to keep with our customers. So we're growing very fast in our number of employees. So, even though, I think we're getting close to 2,000 customers, our goal is to get to 2,000 employees here very quickly. And our CEO really stresses customer first in that equation so we learn and we do little pivot points along the way. An example could be internal marketing, helping people drive awareness. You know, the bot-a-thon that Courtney had for her team, we want to be able to sponsor those things. You know, be partners in getting that name of RPA out there. So it's everything they need to try to get up that curve. >> Courtney, your enthusiasm is palpable, as much of the feedback that we've had from customers, but if you had to do it over again, would you change anything, would you go faster? Would you have done anything differently if you'd had a mulligan? >> One of the concerns is that I feel like we've got a lot of momentum and I want to keep it going. So I want to, like Ashim, we need to scale our team as well so that we're able to handle that pipeline of work coming in and that we don't stall out because I really see a lot of enthusiasm for what we're developing and we want to be able to keep up with that. I love moving fast, I wish we could move faster, I push my team to say, "How much faster can we go?", because there's commitments as well at the board level saying, you know, "What are you guys doing and how are you transforming?" But I wouldn't do anything over so far. So far it's been fantastic. >> You know It strikes me that when you put in a robot, and automate a process, you're saving for an individual, and arm or a leg, you know, Lots of arms and legs. How have you thought about virtualizing those arms and legs into a team that can really drive this to your last point, through the organization, to keep that momentum going? >> Yeah, that's what we're looking in now, right? We want to look at that digital roadmap and say, not arms and legs, but we actually want to look at real resources and that doesn't necessarily mean a resource reduction, it just means being able to scale and do things more efficiently and hopefully, redeploy those resources to do stuff that requires a brain, right? >> Ashim, I'm curious. Do you have some tools to help customers as to how they scale and grow and keep the momentum going? It reminds me of a rocket going on, you've got those booster levels, and you want to reach escape velocity but then probably, keep accelerating. >> Yeah, so you'll start seeing our platform expanding this. At this conference, and Daniel must have talked about it, we launched UiPath Go. Getting openness and collaboration within organizations and across organizations, that's really what our Go platform will enable people to do. Sharing automations, learning best practices, being able to connect with different companies, different partners at a fast pace, that's so important because there's not a cookie cutter approach to this, we need collective knowledge to ramp up the speed and then, slowly by slowly, the features that we're starting to do: sharable libraries within the platform, you're going to see other process discovery type automations come out or tools that we're starting to roll out to our customers. And then we have events. Yesterday, Courtney was a part of our customer advisory counsel. It is incredible, when you put customers like Courtney in a room, who are so passionate and are incredible, sharing what's working and what's not and everybody leaves saying, "Okay, these are the two things that I'm either" "going to look out for or that I'm going" "to do differently to make sure the journey happens ahead." Those are just a few. >> Courtney, Daniel was on earlier today and we were asking him to give some advice to these young people, you know, he's kind of inspirational. He talked about this morning in his keynote about people laughed him out of their office and so forth. And one of the things he said is, "I didn't think big enough," "I started to think bigger, you got to think bigger." So as you put on your think-big hat, where do you think this could go? >> So I really see UiPath and RPA collaborating, right? I mean, we were investing in a lot of smart tools and I want to see how all of those tools can work together. I don't want it to be just UiPath or just another tool, or workflow tool. I want to see how they can all, because to me, that's where the value really comes in. I mean if you're leveraging best-of-breed options and best-of-breed tools and then we can say, "How do all of these work together?" That's transformational. So, really, at the end of next year, what I want my team and what I want my leaders to say is, "Wow. They have really transformed the way that we work" "and the way that we do business." To me, that's a win. If Ashim can make me successful in that, I'll be a happy camper. >> Awesome, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. We're seeing some of these trends that we talked about: the productivity gap, we have more jobs than we have employees to fill those jobs. The productivity line's not moving. RPA and the ascendancy of RPAs promises to change that and we'll be covering that ongoing. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward Americas. Stu Miniman And Dave Vellante. We will be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPathForward Americas. We're talking about robotic process automation. We're seeing the ascendancy of a new marketplace. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Let's see, let's get into it. So Param Kahlon is here. He's the UiPath's Chief Product Officer. Welcome, so we're going to get into some of the product stuff. We haven't really dug down deep today, so that's great. >> Thank you. >> Jairo Quiros is here. He's the Vice President of Global Shared Services, an RPA COE, center of excellence, leader at Equifax. Welcome, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Jairo, let's start with you. Tell us about your role. I love the title. (Jairo laughs) You got automation in your title. Do people embrace you when they see you coming or run? >> No, no, no. Actually, that's very interesting. I've been with the company for 20 years now, so I'm responsible to lead Global Shared Services all across from business operations, financing, accounting, you name it, IT security, right? So, coming along with automation has been quite a journey for us. First of all, we love the product so thank you, Param for everything you guys do at the service, as well. But truly, automation, what it means to us is pushing our workforce to do stuff that is of more valued added to our customers, removing the but out of the human which is critical to us, so no fear of buts anymore. And it's been two years. >> The product's at the tip of the iceberg, I'm hearing. There's a whole lot of other stuff beneath it, culture, obviously process, mindset. >> Jairo: Yeah, correct. >> We will get into some of that. But Param, tell us about your role as Chief Product Officer. You make it all happen. (Param laughs) >> I'm responsible for making sure we can listen to what our customers want, what the market wants, translate that into requirements, and deliver that in the form of products. That's all I do, it's very simple. >> You're a translator. >> We translate it, transform it into requirements that can be given to the product team, their development team that can go write software for it. >> Kind of like that AI layer in UiPath that translates all this data into something that's actionable, right? >> Param: Absolutely. >> Jairo, you were saying you liked the product before. I mean, our personal experience is we could actually download it and play with it, and we're not ultra technical, some of our guys are. What do you like about the product? >> Well, I think many things. I mean, first of all, I think it's very easy to use, right? So, it's built for execution, right? For instance, in our case, we're having a lot of junior engineers coming on board. So we go out to colleges and recruit people that are passionate about process. So what UiPath offer us is a way for them to entry our operation and actually perform tasks and do, and realize results pretty easily. So then, they can see the work being done and appreciate it. >> So who are the users in your organization? Is it a spectrum? You got the sort of RPA developers and then you got business users, as well? Describe that. >> Well, it's a combination, right? So we built the COE over the past couple years. It's inclusive of not only configurators, but also analysts and people that can understand the business. So when you look at through the process, start thinking about how do you design for automation? So this tool allows a very comprehensive very easy to use and we see they make progress release after release, so it's very exciting. >> Alright, Param, why don't you walk us through the announcements that you made? What's new to the platform? Some enhancement to the community. >> Yeah, so we've done some really key announcements in this event today. The first one that we're very excited about is UiPath Go, which is our marketplace that enables broad innovation across our entire ecosystem of customers and partners. We can create on a platform or we can put it in a marketplace and then everybody else can easily access the innovation that's available there. We also released 2018.3 which is the third release we've done this year, but probably the most comprehensive release that we've done 'til date in the history of Enterprise Automation. So we're very excited about launching that release today, as well. And third, we've announced a $20 million fund that will fund our partners that will co-innovate together with us in bringing out new RPA capabilities, new machine learning and AI capabilities into the marketplace. Those are three key announcements. >> What are the-- >> I'm just-- Sorry, but from my understanding, you run on a quarterly cadence for the release of the primary product, correct? >> We're in a quarterly cadence, yes. >> What are the critical aspects of the new release? >> So, there's a few things we've done in the main release. One of the first things we've done is we've allowed for re-usability of the software. So if you're using a lot of components, if you've built a way to automate a certain process, it could be as simple as, here's how I log into a application, a financial application. The rest of the people in my organization don't have to go reinvent that thing themselves. They can reuse the component, the way I've built it, so they can be reused to process every single aspect of the customer, as well. We've made it very easy for our customers to upgrade to new versions of the software, as we're releasing very rapidly, we want to make sure that the upgrades are easy, but the upgrades are also seamless as in they don't affect any of the existing processes that are running in production. So we support version management and package management so we make it easier for people to manage that. There's some other capabilities that we've done. We've supported internationalization of the platform, so now customers in Japan can use our product in Japanese, customers can use it in Spanish, they can use it in Deutsche, German, so we've allowed that in this release, as well. Another cool thing we've done is allowing humans to provide input to what the robots need to do by putting a form that they can use to provide input to them, so it can provide a better symbiosis of humans working together with robots to achieve more processes and more automation in the ecosystems. There's a lot of stuff, this is some of the highlights. >> So what do you think? I mean, what of those, what of that compendium is of interest to you? >> I think, you know, I've been a member for a year now, from, of their customer advisory board, so they truly listen to what we need to say, right? Because the robotic aspect of it is critical, but there's so many other aspects, such as the analytics. So, understanding the business outcome, right? What's the bot producing? Not necessarily the bot that's up and running, but really, what's the impact to the business? I think that's part of the feedback that we've been given in UiPath, they're really working hard on that. The other aspect which is important also is how do you move forward from simple RPA to more complex automations? So, the human in the loop approach to things is important. We call that those small black boxes, you know people with 20 years of experience, they understand how to make decisions but those aren't documented, right? So, now we're giving the opportunity for that human to become part of the process, right? So that is very powerful to us. >> So one of the aspects we've been looking at, the marketplace seems interesting. I'm wondering if you've had a chance to look at that, are there things that you would consider using, and anything that you might even consider contributing in the future? >> I think so. I think this is a whole movement, it's a community today, so no matter where you are, developers, they love it. My guys are telling me, "When is this out?" Because, you know, they have I mean, they're so much hungry to get stuff done and to share what they can do, it makes a difference not only for our company, but for the world, right? So it means something. >> That's interesting. Your company's been around for a long time. You're not worried about, I mean, this open mindset is really intriguing to us, you're not worried about putting your IP in there? Or do you feel like, this open community, we're going to get back as much as we give? >> No, of course. Of course, there are controls in place, and of course, there'll be a protocol in place, but you know, at the end, you're making a difference in the world. So if someone wants to, for instance, have a mortgage because they're wanting to buy a house, you want to make it easy, right? At the end, that's the end goal. You know, for EquiFax and for all the institutions that are in the same sector. >> So from a product standpoint, we just have Craig LeClair on, he couldn't directly call out UiPath. It's not cool, right? I mean, he has to be independent. But, look, he wrote the report, UiPath went from third on the list to first on the list, out of I don't know, 10, 15 vendors. It's like the Gardiner magic quadrants, all these rating systems, right? We don't do 'em, but we read them because they're good, and they're informative. He said in there that last year's features have become this year's table stakes. And some of the things that are differentiating companies, and obviously UiPath won so I presume you have the differentiation ears. Analytics and governance. Those are two big areas, I see the heads nodding. Maybe you guys could each talk about that, Jairo let's start with you, why are those things important? You address the analytics, you kind of address governance, as well, but maybe you can summarize. >> I mean, we address governance as the get-go, and it's an evolution. So for instance, you know, really, truly when we're looking into RPA, it's not only so much about a tactical approach to a specific problem, but it's really turned into a strategy, right? So if you want to scale, you need to have the proper controls in place. So, these guys have done an amazing job integrating with tools such as Cyberart, for instance which is reall important for many companies. They're trying to secure their systems and make sure that the bots are operating on their very secure environment. >> So you guys not only you were in the place position, now you're in the lead. Now the pressure's really on. It's like the Red Sox, Stu. (laughs) So, how'd you get there? What is that enables that? Architecture? Mindset? Culture? You know, give us the insights there. >> Yeah, first of all, let's say we're super excited about being in the first place. I think it's really good, it's a really good testament to the hard work the team is putting in there, so we're super excited about that. We believe that our success and the product roadmap depends upon hearing a lot from customers and making sure that we're responding to their customers. So I think that's what we have done for the most part is ensuring that if there are things that our customers need, if there are things that our customers think our platform and technology is moving toward, we're actually doing the kinds of things that'll actually take us there. So a lot of the innovation that we've done on the platform has come from a direct result of engagement and working with customers and bringing their success into there. Specifically, the governance and analytics, those are very important aspects of what we're doing on a product. Most of our customers are very large corporations like Equifax, other corporations. They will not use our technology if we couldn't support the level of governance and compliance that they need from the ability to run those processes, especially when they're running autonomously without having a human look over what's happening. So that was a core part of what we've invested in. Analytics is also something that we've invested but we'll continue to make more investments there. We're now hearing from Equifax and other customers that people don't want to just get analytics that is responding to what the robots are doing but they want to understand what sort of business impact the robots are having on the corporation. So we want to build an analytics platform that is ingesting not just the robot workloads but bringing in information about line of business systems, as well, to be able to give the reports and perspectives that somebody can look at that and say the robots have done so much for me. Not just in terms of number of hours, but in terms of the business outcomes that I've achieved through the work the robots are executing. >> Jairo, I want to ask you about innovation at Equifax. We've observed many times in theCUBE that innovation in the tech industry used to march at the cadence of Moore's Law. Oh, new chip's out! We've got to do, we can now put better, faster data warehouse. You know, more storage, whatever it was. The innovation model is changing dramatically. And we've observed that it's a combination now, it seems, of data plus AI plus cloud, for scale. So, what do you think about that sort of innovation sandwich? Do you buy into it? How are you guys applying innovation in your business? >> I mean, I'll tell you I got a similar question the other day, you know. It's about, you know, I live in Costa Rica, right? So we surf all the time, right? So it's about riding, you know, the wave, right? So it's not about riding it, right? If you don't ride it, then you're going to drop, right? And then you're going to fall behind. >> Dave: You're going to be driftwood. >> So, yeah, innovation is there, you know. It's that demand for all companies. For us, innovating not only about how do we approach customers and consumers and we put them first in everything we do, but in how we operate internally. Creating a culture that drives automation, right? So giving time for people to think about stuff, you know, that makes a difference, right? I think that's how I can summarize innovation as of this moment. >> So, Stu had a question. >> So, if I understand this right now, we can blame the robots if our credit score isn't good enough now, right? (laughs) >> What do you think? Blame the robots, right? >> Blame the robots, always. >> Blame the innocent, as we say. Well, guys, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Param: Thank you. >> Param and Jairo, it was great to have you, appreciate it. >> Thank you again. >> Alright, keep it right there. Stu and I will be back with our next guest from UiPath Forward Americas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to events, we extract the signal from the noise. The signal here is all about automation, robotic process automation, software robots, we're seeing the ascendancy of that market space. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPath's Forward conference, big user conference, UiPath Forward Americas, about 1500 people here, Stu. They have conferences all over the world, I think I heard 14,000 people in the last year have attended such shows. They're intimate, there are a lot of partners here, they're loud, they're a lot of good energy. Ana Cinca is here, she's the Vice President of Enabling Technologies, and she's joined by old friend Tom Clancy, who's the Senior Vice President of UiPath Learning, both folks from UiPath, welcome. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Ana, let's start with you. VP of Enabling Technologies. What does that mean, what's that role? >> Well, my role in the organization is to generate a set of non-core products and programs that are creating an ecosystem that is actually contributing actively into accelerating the adoption of the core platform. And that would be through learning, through generating new products like the UiPath Go!, the Marketplace, or constantly engaging the community of users and so on. >> Okay, so you started the training program, correct? >> Ana: Yeah. >> How did that get started? What was your kind of mission, how'd you do it? >> Well it started from a very simple need. Back then, about two years ago, we were, a bunch of my team members were a bunch of RPA developers, who were losing their time only delivering training, so, two years ago about 500 trainings, five days per week, per year. That were a lot of training, so we said, we need to automate this, we need to do something about it. And the only thing that could come into our mind was to, we got inspired by the Udemy, by Coursera, by all the right courses out there, like platforms out there, which were very democratic in sharing the knowledge. So we said, how about we actually create a set of online courses that are really, really good, RPA focused, UiPath focused, courses, and put it out there? That's how it all started, we just wanted to get rid of these repetitive trainings, ultimately. >> Alright, so you had to do it for yourselves and then. >> Ana: Absolutely, yeah. >> So Stu, we heard today from Daniel, he kind of did the moon shot. He said we are going to train a million people in three years, right? >> Well, Tom, it seems like you've got a challenge in front of you to really scale this business. We've talked with you for years, back in your EMC days, your not just storage but new architectures, this convergent approach to the silos, and then cloud architects, really training kind of next generation of the work force in IT, give us a little bit, what's the same, what's different between what you did back at EMC and what you're doing now here with RPA? >> So the biggest difference between EMC and UiPath is EMC had a technology that a lot of people thought was kind of commodity, right? So, the excitement wasn't there when you started going outside of your partners and customers, right? This technology, there is passion about this throughout the entire globe. This is the next big wave, and so, if you're going to scale a program like this, you have to have a bunch of different factors on your side. What Ana just talked about is the academy, you have to bring value somehow, and that starts with having the right courses. If you don't have the courses built up, then you're starting from zero, right, from scratch. But, the other thing that's even more important, is the passion from the CEO. You know, when I first met with Daniel, it was actually sort of an interview, he was, he talked about, you know, employee training, partner training, customer training, but his passion and forty-five minutes of the hour was talking about educating the planet, right? And so he started with universities, which that was kind of a no brainer. And then he went to Youth in Action, under-represented groups, and so forth. The other factor that's really important is having the right team, so, at UiPath, the team is the company, everybody wants to do this. If you're the leader in India, Japan, China, the US, they're all coming to us saying "We need this program." Not just universities but all the way down to the youths. And then, you need a good academic alliance team. So the team that we're building is going to leverage academy, but we are bringing in some of those EMC academic alliance people, we're bringing in a person from Salesforce.com that was running a big piece of it, starts today. We're bringing in a VMware person, a Cisco person, so we're getting all the best. Those are the best programs in the industry. >> Tom, there's one underlying thing, that I saw, a similarity, is back when you talked about convergence or cloud, there was an underlying fear of "Oh my gosh, I'm not going to have the skills, I'm going to be out of a job." Automation's always been that thing "Oh wait, if I automate it, what's that mean for me?" How do you address that? >> Well, first of all, there's a report all that says by 2030, 1.5 billion jobs will be impacted. It doesn't say negative, it just says impacted. So, everybody is going to have to understand that this is coming, and how does it impact me? We're going to put together, as part of this, we'll have an upscaling rescaling, so everybody, it doesn't matter who you are, will be able to leverage the academy, and we'll be tweaking the academy courses, so if it's upscaling rescaling, they will take the courses in a different way, in a different format, than the university students, than the Youth in Action, so we'll target those different audiences, and the other, one other thing is marketing is hugely important, because you can't rely on the training group to get the word out. So, Bobby Patrick and his team, are working hand-in-hand with us to drive the awareness across the globe. >> So Ana, when we first heard about RPA and UiPath, we read the Forrester report, and said "Okay, there's a few leaders out there, let's "play with it, let's go download the software "and see how hard it is to do." Turned out, we could only get our hands on UiPath software, it was very easy to get our hands on the software, it was very open. Some of the other guys were like, "Why do you want to use it?" Forget it. But then we built some automations, and it was kind of, you know, it took a little, there was a little bit of a learning curve, but it was not a developer who did it, so it was relatively low code, or even no code. So, when you started this program and as you scale it, who are you targeting? Is it the hardcore developer, is it the, you know, RPA developer, is it the citizen developer, both? And how do you adjust the training correspondingly? >> Yeah, so, first of all, the way we set up the trainings, were, we wanted to make sure that, exactly like we did with the core platform, that was the first RPA software that had a trial version that was available for everyone, right? We had to do the same thing in learning and we're an academy, so what we said were we're launching courses which are free of charge, online, for everyone to use. But, moreover than that, what we wanted to do, is to, have courses that take someone from a very basic foundation level, of basic programming, and actually guide him or her through a learning curve that will get them to an expert level. So, the way we built the courses, are in such a matter that it is very easy to be followed by anyone, actually. And now, that's the reason why, now we're having not only courses for the RPA developers, the techie guys, or solution architects, or infrastructure engineers, but, moreover than that, we're tackling into the space of non-technical people who are equally very important in the RPA journey. Like business analysts, the RPA project managers, and so on. So we're trying to cover all the personas that are critical in an RPA COE set up. >> So it's interesting, Tom, hearing you say you're recruiting people from Cisco, Vmware, some EMC folks, a lot of the traditional, some would say legacy, enterprise companies, who are constantly in the process of reskilling, so I would think that these folks would be very receptive to that. Now you think about Vmware admin, Cisco certified engineers, Microsoft certifications, they sort of led to full employment for at least some period of time. Do you think RPA skills are going to be similar, in that they are going to be in such demand, if young people start to get trained in RPA they're going to essentially have full employment for life, or do you think it's more fleeting that that? You're thoughts? >> So I've been here for three months now, so I guess that makes me a veteran at UiPath, but robotics is going to be in everybody's job. So one of the things that it took me a while to kind of grasp when I was talking to Daniel the first time, the first meeting I mentioned, is he said that there will be at least one robot on every desktop moving forward. This is going to be, you know, when you had the flip phone before, well actually, when people went from the big cell phones and people were saying everybody's going to have a cell phone, you know, everybody looked like "That's kind of crazy," but then, next thing you know, you have a computer on your phone, and everybody has at least one phone. This is going to be the same way with robots. It's going to be ubiquitous across the entire industry. So, people will grow up understanding what robots are. That's why we're going after the youth, so they understand robots right from the get go. And then, it will integrated into everybody's job across the globe, so it's not fleeting at all, it's actually the complete opposite. >> How do you guys measure success? Obviously, you got to get to a million in three years, that's a lot of training. How else do you measure success? What kind of parameters do you set? Tests you take, how do you measure it? >> Want to take that one up for scaling? >> So, one of the things we did, well Ana, one of the things that Ana did before I got here, was they built certification. Certification is going to continue to get more and more important for us. You know, so, think Microsoft, Cisco, certification, and so forth, and so, we believe we will have the industry standard certification program, period. But one of the things we did, was we built our own certification platform, high stakes certification. So what that does is, we do not have to charge, or charge much, any of the people going through our courses and certification. So, today, because we had to go through a third party, we're charging 850 dollars per test. This quarter, through the end of the year, it's going to be zero, just to bring more people in. And then, going forward, it would be significantly lower than 150. What we want to do, and what we will do, is democratize learning and certification for robots. >> I think this is huge, go on you want to add something? >> Yeah, I really want to add one more thing, because what we're doing together, is actually, through the way we're approaching community, and through the spaces that we have already built so far like the academy, the forum, we're bringing now the UiPath Go! in October, the end of October, the project space, all holistically wrapped up in a new version of the community. What we're trying to get out there is an RPA developer getting trained on the academy, being certified, but then practicing within the UiPath universe. Ultimately, where we want to get to, is to measure success also through the number of community users, of end-users, who are not only certified, but we will be able to see what is their activity status, like reputation, and recognition, within the community itself. And, hence, ultimately, reaching up to a stage, where we will be able to pinpoint to a true UiPath expert elite of people throughout the world. >> I love that it's a community driven measurement. >> Everything goes into building up a holistic and global community. >> Very open-- >> If I could just say one thing on community if you just look at the education and the different audiences, you know, let's say, you know, people that do robotics and they get certified, all the way down to youth, we will have a community, where all these different organizations are talking to each other, and to professionals. So, you might have a ten year old in Bangladesh, that is on the community asking questions, and you might have an engineer in Romania at UiPath answering those questions because they're part of the community. Or, it could be a customer or partner, you know, in Philadelphia, but they're all part of the community, we're bringing all these people together. So, things like STEM, Women in Coding, one person came up to me last night, he was so excited, he said "I represent a lot of the black community when "it comes to education and I really want to get my teams "across the country involved in this." >> Phenomenal, now, the no cost training is available roughly when? >> Yeah, right now. >> It's today? >> Well no cost training has been available-- >> Since the beginning. >> That was a decision that Ana made 18 months ago. If somebody, if a customer wants to have a seminar, or something like that, we have third-party training companies that will go in, and they'll charge, but if you go online to the academy, 100 percent free. And the certification for the next quarter is going to be 100 percent free. >> That's unbelievable, because, you know, I got three kids in college and one of them is he's doing Python, he's doing R, he's doing Tableau and he's texting me, "Hey, these Tableau courses "are really expensive, can you pay for it?" And I'm like well, what's the ROI? And I'm sayin' learn about RPA, because it's going to change the world, you know, visualizations important and all that stuff's important, but that's, I think, a huge investment that you guys are making, and then also, helps me understand how you guys plan on staying ahead. So congratulations on getting this started, Tom, you basically came out of retirement, you know, quasi-retirement so it had to be pretty alluring. Extremely successful career at EMC, so great to have you back in the game. >> Thanks, it's great to be here. >> Thanks so much, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. >> Okay, thank you. >> Right there, everybody, you're watching theCUBE, live, from the Fontainebleau in Miami. We'll be right back, right after this short break, you're watching UiPathForward Americas, we'll be right back.