okay here we go hi everybody this is dave vellante and you're watching thecube's coverage of the cube on cloud our own virtual event where we're trying to understand the future of cloud where we've come from and where we're going and we're bringing in visionaries to really have that that detailed conversation daniel dines is here he's the ceo of automation specialist uipath daniel thanks for coming on and sharing your insights here thank you so much for inviting me dave appreciate it that's always a pleasure to get together with with folks that have started companies with a seed of a vision and have exploded into you know great success and and but i want to go back to the the founding days of uipath 2005. it was pre-cloud there's certainly pre-cloud as we know it today aws came out in 2006 and then we we saw the clouds ascendancy but but your original founding premise there was no cloud you know it wasn't like a startup that could just spin up stuff in the cloud but you've seen that evolution so when you first started to see cloud evolve what did you think did you think oh well we'll see what happens or did you did you know at the time that this was going to be as big as it actually has become what were your thoughts back then well i honestly i i thought that we are kind of ancient and maybe it's stupid to not to private into the new trends in technology like cloud mobile social but i we kept you know working on this computer vision technology that uh 15 years ago was not really hot but with the evolution of self-driving cars and the latest development in ai we we've been able to capture our investments in a domain that was not hot but suddenly you know became the word of the greatest minds in i.t and we definitely we we specialize our computer vision to a narrow use case but still it's the it's the key of what we've done in uh in the end the robots are powered by computer vision technology this kind of a robot emulate how human user work so obviously we use vision a lot in our day by day work and having the best technology that allows our robots to interact with the computer screen more like a human user is quintessential in uh in making our business reliable and easy to use so we were lucky but i always felt that maybe i should change it and we we were feeling i i remember you know many discussions with my you know initial developers because we like what we were doing but we felt a bit left outside by the world but we got lucky in the end so so i have a premise here and that when you go back to the early days of cloud what they got right was they were attacking the the human labor problem and they automated it was storage it was it was networking it was compute but really the automation that they brought to it and the quality that that drove and the flexibility uh was you know a game changer of course we we know that now and you know many of us at the time were very excited about cloud i'm not sure we predicted the impact that it had but my premise is that there's a parallel in your business with the automation that you're driving into the business we've talked to people for instance some of your customers have said you know i can't do six sigma i can't afford to do six sigma before things like rpa for business process i do that for mission critical things but now i can apply six sigma thinking across my entire business that drives quality it takes cost out of my business so what do you think about that premise that there's a parallel between the early days of cloud taking human labor out of the equation and driving quality and flexibility cost saving speed and revenue etc and what you're doing on the business side it is clearly a parallel i can tell that the cloud was built by looking at it automation use cases first of all because this is what software engineers understand the most software engineers let's be you know honest they don't understand the business work they they don't understand all how the real work is performed in a big enterprise and they don't care sometimes when in my own discussions with our cfo he is surprised that i don't know all the use cases in the world yes of course i don't know exactly how an insurance company work all the processes in healthcare all the banking processes i have intellectual curiosity how they work but what interests me the most is our computer vision technology that works uniformly well across different that was the same from the cloud so initially they built in the they built the cloud to help them when what they know the best and now for we were put in the face of having great technology this computer vision technology but without having a great use case in the iit world that we understood and when we when i'm speaking about our early days like 12 13 14 i believe this technology has a lot less applicability in the real world because again we were thinking of some sorts of small it automation gigs that were not possible just doing the apis but when i discovered the messy world of business processes and how important is to emulate people when you think automation that was the big aha moment so i believe that we can do for business processes what the cloud has done for i.t processes and we are really patient now about these business processes and helping people to eliminate all the repetitive work that is there delegate this work to robots and have the people that are required to do this work do do better a smaller number of tasks every day everyone has one as on her or him played today like let's say 10 20 different activities some of them can be completely delegated to rock to robots and they are the low value type of activities while they can focus on the high value activities like interaction with people creativity decision making and this type of human-like things that we as humans really love i love that uh you shared that story but you you thought it was a very narrow sort of set of use cases when you first started and then you know that's that's just an awesome founders you know realization i i love it when we've often said in the cube that you know for decades we've marched to the the tune of moore's law that was the innovation engine no longer is the case it's a combination of of data applied machine intelligence and cloud for scale and i guess the computer vision piece is how you ingest the data uh you you've you've made some investments in in ai and there's many more to come the industry in general and the cloud is is sort of the piece of that equation that we see for scale so i wonder how you see those pieces fitting to your business and how important is the cloud for your scale at last uh at last ui path forward there was a lot of talk amongst our customers about scaling is the cloud critical for that scale yeah i believe so and we are thinking of cloud in two distinct ways number one we are offering and manage automation service in our own cloud using uh where we host everything by ourselves including our orchestrator and then next we have the plans to include our the robots that execute the automation and people simply can connect to our cloud build an automation and just schedule it to run without any maintenance and they will have have access to great analytics everything integrated so this is a major focus to us and the way we launching ga this cloud offering in april this year and i can tell you that until now 20 percent of our customers already are in a shape or another in this type of offering not 20 dollar amount but 20 of our customers and it's clear that at this point this has more applicability into the long tail a smaller customers than in the on our biggest customers but the second distinct type of cloud offering that we focus on is to have best-in-class support in best-in-class multi-cloud support for the cloud of choice of our customers for instance if you go in if you go in aws gcp azure and you buy a subscription there you we we are building specialized editions where with one click you will be able to install our technology in those clouds and you will be able to to scale up and down your robots you can connect your robots to our many services were within your tenant but basically the end goal is to lessen a lot the administration the maintenance footprint of your installation either on our own cloud even on your cloud of choice i'm a strong believer that we will see an accelerated transition from the completely on prem workloads into these two source cloud workloads i want to ask you as a as a technologist if you see so you mentioned that you're going to take your products and you support multiple clouds it'll run on any cloud and a lot of companies are talking about that you know for their respective whether it's a database or you know whatever storage device etc do you see the the day where you'll actually start you're collaborating across clouds where the user uh maybe maybe the user today doesn't know but but maybe a developer does know which cloud it's running on but do you see any value in actual you know connecting across clouds where the data in one cloud is relevant for the data another cloud is i know there are latency issues is is that you know technically feasible and is it will it drive business value what do you think about that cross-cloud connection i believe it is already happening there is a mesh between between various services and who knows in which cloud they are offered already i feel the latency is less and less of a problem as much as the biggest cloud provider have have a very distributed geographically present so as long as i can play in aws in east coast on azure in east coast it's not such a big latency issue and frankly in the past our customers at least are telling us they seen how it is to be completely locked into one technology and people would like to have optionality it's not necessarily that i will use three clouds but i would like to use a vendor that gives me optionality even the and this is what we are trying to offer do you when you think about the future of work i mean as i said before the cloud 1.0 is infrastructure storage networking compute and it seems like 2.0 we're bringing in more ai new workloads uh we're seeing you know analytics and and machine intelligence applied to the data and then you know distributed at scale self-serve to the business how do you see the future of work specifically as it relates to automation affecting that uh and you know what role does cloud play there what's your vision so as the workloads will move to cloud it's absolutely critical that the processes will move to cloud so there is no way back and i i think that uh moving into moving from opera and software into cloud will make even easier to automate this type of workloads into the cloud it's gonna be less maintenance you will deal less with legacy applications that require some special care it's kind of a bit more easier to automate modern only web-based type of application so that's uh we will see an acceleration on the on the moving to cloud but again there will be different sorts of cloud from a completely managed automation service from us to managing yourself the automation in your cloud tenant but not on-prem i'm not a big believer that we will ex unless very few critical sectors i don't think that we will see on-prem workloads in the past five years i mean i agree in the business the business case for on-prem just gets you know less and less i mean it'll there's certain applications for sure my last question is when thinking about from a software developer standpoint you obviously you're going to want to run in aws and gcp and azure uh perhaps alibaba do you look at other clouds whether they're regional clouds of course you've got your own cloud maybe oracle ibm how do you think about those do you just sort of evaluate them on a case-by-case basis you let customers you know tell you where where you need to be yeah we we we focus on the on the three big clouds today but we are building on the top of kubernetes most of our we we have a big shift into building kubernetes microservices and my guess is that all modern clouds will offer fantastic support for kubernetes so what what it takes when you create an edition for another cloud is to is to have the underlying services like if we plan to use snowflake for instance in our analytics offering you better have snowflake in another cloud otherwise probably the the analytics will will have to be delayed or use less of one part technology so it's not only about what we are building but it's also you know the vast availability of other set of technologies that we try to use when you choose a technology now first of all we are looking we need to choose something that is multi-cloud versus dedicated from one cloud vendor that's that's our first priority this is why i've mentioned snowflake and then when you when we move into a cloud we are limited by the offerings that are there but i my belief is in the in the main clouds probably in the us i don't know on other regions what's going to happen but in the main clouds in the us and i believe that they will in the end they will catch up in terms of offering and convincing other other vendors to to have kind of similar offering on their own i don't know if besides the big three we will see someone and that is able to compete could be too much fragmented maybe they will be dedicated clouds for certain services but for general cloud i think three is more than enough yeah and so you know in the early days of cloud people talked about dial tone and essentially that's what's becoming it's the it's the value that's running on top of the cloud from software companies like uipath and others that is really driving sort of the cloud 2.0 the next generation daniel dines thanks so much for sharing your your vision uh and participating in the cube on cloud really appreciate it my pleasure dave thank you so much for inviting you're welcome always great to talk to you and thank you for watching everybody keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest ready for this short break this is dave vellante for the cube

hi everybody we're back this is Dave vellante from Wikibon Oregon here with Jeff Frick this is silicon angles the cube the cube we go into events like this we're at knowledge service now is user conference we try to extract the signal from the noise would bring you we love sports analogies here we like to bring you the best athletes tech athletes week all them so Carolyn Hollingsworth is here she's I know Carolyn you're a fan of a football but we're going to call you a tech athlete so Karen's with Lennox internationals he's an IT practitioner there Carla thanks a lot for taking some time and coming on the cube so tell us a little bit about Lennox about the organization and what's your role there Lennox is a global manufacturer of furnace and air conditioning equipment were based in Dallas Texas and we have sales of about five billion dollars a year and i'm the senior manager of service operations ok so this conferences amazed this first knowledge conference I've been to I presume you've been to others or is this year first oh this is actually my fourth kind of okay so you were here an inning so they had a few before that I'd be close but so it's it's evolved over the years I told oh yes it seems like year-over-year it doubles yeah so it's gotten bigger and more diverse or in terms of just the content or is it still sort of focused on you know leveraging the platform and now it's got more diverse I mean they've added you know discovery and their this new orchestration which is run book that's new this year they're always adding new modules so and then to now they're really pushing platform that's the custom applications you can build outside of IT so do you they tell us it's really easy to write applications can you write applications on the platform oh yes really okay you a programmer by trader I programmed in a past life okay really don't program today but I can't go in and build screens within service now and do reporting it's very easy so I was a program of past life too and not a very good one which is why I know hosting the cube but I have an idea for an app so I'm dying to get my hands on the platform so I can play around with what they just came out with a brand new app that they say that anybody can sit down and write application app creator right yeah so I will test that anybody claims oh they said we have a hackathon going on I believe tomorrow yeah we actually come in that earlier today you're in there filming at that phone is underway there they're working till midnight I made sure that they had pizza and caffeine and I think they're gonna have a little bonus Vegas entertainment visiting at some point in time so tell us more about how you're using service i'm really interested in the sort of before and after described life before service now came in you know what was that like and how did it change and we'll get into the implementation a little bit well before service now we did have an application for the help desk to take tickets but that's about all we did nothing else within IT really had a system like service now after we brought service now and you know we it's a complete package they keep you know they say erp for IT well it truly is you can do ticketing we're doing change change management discovery of all of our assets we've built our own applications for access management even departments outside of IT are coming to us now and saying hey we see what you've done with service now we have something we think that maybe we could use it for so we've built applications for HR we're building an application for our R&D department to track the various incidents and changes that goes on with the large test cells for HVAC equipment marketing we have some small retailers that has pieces and parts for our HVAC equipment around the United States we've built an app for them to bring in new equipment and it has to go through a workflow and be approved by like a district manager pricing changes sales programs I'll have to be approved well we build an app for them that runs on service now also so prior to service now you had the collection of sperm and I've seen the spreadsheets and it's an asset spreadsheet and the spreadsheets on top of spreadsheets and that's that what that describes your environment oh yes definitely and somebody owns the spreadsheet this is totally right yeah this is before you know google doc so I chose I got it you take it you take it so you had all this sort of conversion simultaneous versions going on convictions or email email was always a big way to pass around test the various people can you take care of this can you do that now you may be very well may have had project management systems right actually we had a homegrown project management so a lot of customers right there yeah homegrown or Microsoft projects or you know whatever 37signals I mean there's there are many out there so how did ServiceNow sort of change things in other words what can you do now that you couldn't do then we have one system where everything is so there's no you know before someone would say this is the way it is and another one might be tracking the same assets or the licenses and we had 22 answers now we have one system that is the record their goal we called our golden record so everything is in service now it's connected to each other if you know if you think of erp for manufacturing is you know everything is connected to each other right so you see each other you used to have to add one plus the other divide by two and say okay that's a truth so parents can you talk a little bit about mobile I'm Mobile's impacting your business we keep hearing about we keep hearing about I think of the Linux guy out in the truck checking in on the HVAC outside the house and the commercial actually they are actually building computer controls into our units now they've announced a couple of them but it's going to be able to call home when it has a problem and it's just starting but I mean they're actually taking this mobile idea to our products and arses we're doing some plc's where our sales force is getting iPads and they're going to be doing some apps within Salesforce calm and talk about that one but it's okay you got to manage a lot of different idea I so many puzzles of that we're starting to delve into mobile we're looking at possibly replacing all of our laptops with either notebooks or tablets so we have a lot of PLC's going on right now just trying to put a strategy together as to what our mobile is going to be but it's coming towards us all different ways were there challenges in terms of would be so you bring in service now you get the single system that we call to the gold golden record record were there challenges in getting rid of stuff we have to keep army called GRS getting rid of stuff getting rid of for instance legacy systems that had sort of embedded themselves into the organization and how did that go how did that all come about well let me tell you first how ServiceNow got into our organization we had this older system and we had it for 10 years and I mean it was meeting our needs we thought I mean we didn't really have any problems with it we weren't looking for a new system and yeah I remember this is five years ago we I got an email out of the blue for with a little embedded commercial for her demo for service now and it was I mean just sort of like mind boggling what they were saying they could do and how it was all packaged in one package and basically I you know I want that just for that just for that day and what we'll use cases they that they outline that grabbed you so effectively it's just that everything you know is there erp system for IT everything was there is connected we had the system we had all we had was ticketing if you wanted problem you had to buy another module if you want to change it by another module everything you wanted was more money this was one package one subscription price and you know you got it all and but it took me a year to convince my peers and our vp that we should be looking at this now why did it take so long what was the kind of friction what was the discussion like well it's like well why didn't we you know the use case why did why do you need a new tool you know this'n seems to be you know taking stock broke right wife is it and Lennox is a very conservative company and and we have in the past run a lot of old software as probably a lot of companies do if there's not a real need there you know they don't go out and look at in retrospect it was broke right in your hair to what you're doing now so how did it affect your business I mean did you get more competitive are you able to you know track better people or you out cost how we we posed it after you know I got some doubles going and everybody in the you know interested in looking at this we convinced our vp that we should go global with this because before Lennox was very structured that each locality because her global had their own IT systems and their own IT support groups so while they reported in dotted line into dallas the headquarters everybody sort of did their own thing so we came up with this program will we were going to do standard global processes with 80 and so that's where we started and then we were going to use service now as the tool of choice so we started down that path and it didn't make a big difference to the business because now most of our IT processes are the same across the globe and you know we're asking everybody to do things the same way go to service now and just work that way so you stuck with it for a year and a half I mean you don't seem like the type of person who's gonna start pounding the table and intimidating people that doesn't seem to be your style so so I bet you but at the same time you you kept at it so it was you know a year and a half before you were able to convince people so how did you go about that sell process I'm really well rhian give advice to the other position Hunter wonder you're watching the shutter say Carolyn help me my senior guys to make us make the sleep in here today thirty percent of it yeah well I till was really becoming big at the time and there was a lot of news going on about I chill and you know we do listen to you know gardener and Forester and people like that so I told was getting big and I think you know it just came at the right time with our vp to say well you know maybe this is something we should look into and you know we got all the senior management together and basically he said you know everybody's got to put their thumbs on the table that we're doing the or we're not going to do it and everybody came to the table said yes it sounds like a good thing to do so what are you most proud of the accomplishments that you've made both professionally and personally as it relates to this initiative I think that our support and operations department or groups are working the most efficiently that the most efficient that they can and I think that you know we're responding to our customers needs a lot faster we're not hearing all the complaints that we heard before that you know hey this has been broke when you're going to fix it you know we're even trying to become more proactive we've brought in some monitoring tools that we didn't have before to help us along those lines so just to be more customer-centric and you know sort of instead of saying no to the customer say okay we can do it now so all this I mean you're using the lines of indoor so all the stuff we hear about from going no to now that's not just to you that's not just marketing you're actually living that is that fair statement yes I mean like I said we started putting up our own applications and now we have all these customers who wouldn't normally come to support and ask that though they have an application built they go to our project side of the house but they're coming to us you know we're working with safety and HR and R&D and you know I could double or triple my staff just to keep up with the request we're getting from outside of our teeth and you're able to do that so the businesses and helping you fund that yes it's got to feel great it's so easy to make an application I mean the other ERP system we use is SI p and you know to get a system up in sa peas big dollars 6 8 9 10 12 months and we literally built the application for our retail stores in two weeks so I mean I've been around IT a long time and I've just seen the finger pointing and what do you spending our money on it sounds like you're you've flipped or in the process of sort of flipping that tality is that is my overstating that er no I think that's that's gotta feel great I mean good congratulations hi Carol doesn't thanks very much for coming on the cube and sharing your story the story of Lennox your personal story and really congratulations on all the great progress oh thank you there's a pleasure all right keep it right to everybody will be back our next guest is marina Levinson who's the founder former at netapp CIO we've had a couple of