>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We're joined by Param Kahlon, he is the Chief Product Officer at UiPath, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me here. >> So-- >> Big week! >> Yes. >> You've been busy! >> I have been busy. >> (Rebecca laughs) >> Thank you David. >> So this morning, you were up on the main stage, and you were sort of giving the audience a state of play of business today. And you were lamenting, saying, "Wasn't technology supposed to make our lives easier? "Wasn't it supposed to free us from the mundane, "and supposed to make us more efficient?" And yet, hasn't quite ended up that way. You had the quote, the famous quote, "We see computers everywhere "except in the productivity statistics," from Robert Solow, the Nobel winner. Can you refine that a little bit? And particularly within the context of the RPA market. >> Yeah, isn't it exciting? I mean, we really have so much technology that we live in today, yet we're busier, we're doing more mundane work than we've ever done before. We're more stressed than ever before. That just seems sort of paradoxical to me that, you know, all this stuff that was supposed to give us more time to do the things that we wanted to do, yet we keep doing the repetitive, robot type work that, you know, we thought technology will free us from. And I think that's fascinating that, you know, that's happening. And I think there's a few theories on why we think that's happening. I think it's happening because business has gotten a lot more complex. You know, companies are having to change business models on the fly. Digital transformation is effecting standard companies, regulated industries, in ways that they did not imagine, and companies don't know how to cope and manage all the technology well. And this where, I think, RPA is really, really useful, because it can help you change the processes, modernize the processes without having to go change, rip and replace those existing systems. You know, do the work that you were going to hire humans to do in moving data, moving processes from one system to another. Do that through robots. And that's what our robots can help free the humans, to be able to focus on the things that matter, the things that they care about, right? That's really what the beauty of the RPA is. >> So I wonder if you can help our audience, you know, understand UiPath a little bit better. You know, Daniel talks about, how is it that UiPath has ascended so quickly? And you appear to be achieving escape velocity. You kind of started out, you know, third, fourth, whatever it was, and now you're sort of number one in all these quadrants and waves. And so yesterday you talked about five pillars. And I want to unpack them a little bit. Open platform, rapid results, which I think is around ROI. Path to AI, scalability, and trust. So here's my question. Any one of your competitors could say the same thing. "Oh yes, we're open. "Oh, we get rapid ROI." So what makes UiPath different? >> I think actually not just saying those words, but making it happen, right? So anybody can say we've opened, we've done something, but do people actually have 400,000 community members that have actually using the platform on an active basis? Can you actually go to a website over the last two years and download the software and use it? How long does it take you to sign up for a cloud service that we have made available? What does it take for you to do that? I think all the things that we've invested in, in really enabling engagement with the community, right? Making it open, not just from a technology perspective, but from a people perspective as well, are the things that have differentiated ourselves. And those can be very generic terms, that you're right, other people can use as well, but I think we live those terms, right? We actually do everything in the product, from the business perspective, to make sure that openness is embraced. You know, when we look at building new capabilities, new products, we focus on, is it actually going to help our customers get quicker value, right? Is it going to help them reduce five clicks to be able to get that process done? And if so, then we should build this feature because it will make it easier, and engage more people in the audience, more people like the customer to be able to get work done. So we're super excited about bringing all those capabilities >> Okay, so the big part of that is the product. I mean if you have a great product, that always helps. It's not the sole condition, but it helps a lot. >> Param: Yeah. >> Many times we've seen leaders that don't have the best product, but I'm guessing you feel as though you have the best product. So architecturally, what is it about UiPath that's different, that differentiates you? >> Yeah, I think the core difference is, I'd say, fundamentally at a company level, is in our culture. This is a culture that's built around customers. This is a culture that's built around humility. This is a culture that's built around getting things done, and being fast about it, right? You saw a lot of product innovation that we did. If we told you a year ago, we're going to do all this, you would've laughed at our face, right? We're continue to do that pace, at the pace the market wants. And I think that is the fundamental difference in us, versus the rest of the companies out there. I'd also like to believe that we are, from a technology perspective, we have an edge, because we didn't start with the legacy of doing RPA many, many years ago. We have a much more modern stack. You alluded to the fact that we came in from behind, and we've taken to the number one place very quickly. I think part of that is the architecture decisions that we've made are more modern, are not vetted in a lot of legacy, that are helping us bring more rapid innovation to the market. That are helping us build more resilient technology, that's helping our customers achieve those outcomes, the goals that they want to be able to do, more easily on our platform. We have a number of our customers that actually did not start with us. They started with one of our competitors, and they said, "We started, we thought it was going to work, "it didn't. We came to UiPath and we saw that "it actually works." And that's a testament to the technology that we built, that's actually helping deliver the results that our customers expect it to. >> Rebecca: So, >> Dave: You know, >> Sorry Rebecca, go ahead. >> I was just going to say that, one of the other things you said this morning, was that bots allow you to focus on you, focus on the more creative aspects of your job, and you brought up some customers, PepsiCo and Nielsen, too. Can you describe sort of, how you're helping customers focus on themselves, these employees who are now, you're taking away the tedium, and that's great, and they're giddy about that. But how are they, then, channeling that energy into strategy, innovation, and the sort of more value added things? >> Param: Yeah, you know I'll give you a really quick example of a customer, that I worked with, it's a bank. And in this bank, it's a retail bank, and what used to happen before we deployed UiPath, was the banker had to go to like six different applications, and pull reports of the customer they were about to go meet, print them all out, review the data, and be able to suggest what the customer's unique needs might be, right? So for that half an hour appointment with the customer, it used to take that banker another half an hour to get ready for that appointment. After the deployed UiPath robots, UiPath's robots now go pull up the data for the customer, from those six different core banking systems, and be able to feed that to a machine learning system, to suggest what their unique needs might be. So they need five minutes to get ready for that appointment. They're more ready for that appointment, and they deliver a better outcome. People want to help other people, right? They don't want to go to systems, and print reports, and read them, and understand what it might be. They really want to be able to go meet with the customer, and help solve their problems, that help the customer, but also help the business goals for the bank. And that's what makes the people that are using our technology more happier, right? It makes them free enough to say that, instead of now spending half an hour printing stuff, I now have that extra 25 minutes, because I still need five minutes to get ready, I have the extra 25 minutes, to think about, what else can I do to further more creative aspects of my job? Or maybe I don't have to work as hard as I did in the past. >> I wonder if I could ask you about, I've been drawing parallels today with another company, ServiceNow, that I've been tracking for a long time. And they started out in this kind of narrow, change management, ITSM space >> Param: ITSM, yeah. >> And then expanded their TAM dramatically. And you shared with us, yesterday and today in the keynote, You've got RPA for devs and testers, you know StudioT, that targets 2% of the market. and then you've got the citizen developers, that's StudioX, that expands up to 10%. Business analysts, which is Explorer and Insights, that gets you to 25%. And then apps, where automation is the apps, that was a little fuzzy to me, so I want to dig into it a little bit, but that's 100% of the market. That's your, whatever it is, 20, 40, 50 billion dollar TAM. My question is this, I was going to the event last night, and I ran into some business analysts. So you're already working with those folks. So it seems like you're learning from folks that are sort of using a product, that was maybe developed for testers and devs, but they're using it today as business analysts, and you're improving that. Can you help us just understand your product strategy, just in terms of what you've announced, and how it dove tails into those segments that we just talked about? >> Absolutely, so you know, our product strategy isn't tied to like, what are we going to do to grow our TAM, and other stuff. Our marketing organizers can get super excited about that, Bobby is all over that, but really everything we've done in the product today, is about listening to customers. Understanding what their needs are, what do they want us to grow into, and what capabilities they want us to go build, right? So we've expanded the StudioX, not because we thought everybody should have StudioX, but we actually had customers that took our product, the Studio product, and said, "We want to roll this out "to every single user within the enterprise." Because they thought that every person has unique needs and they should be able to build a bot for themselves. Well they came back and told us, well we wanted to do that, but this isn't really quite ready for all of our accountants. This isn't quite ready for all of our business analysts. Can you actually make it simple? All of these people use Excel, can you make it look like Excel? So we took all of that feedback, and that's what we focused on, building StudioX. So we can make sure we meet the needs of the market. And every single pillar of the investment that we've done, has focused around making sure that we're able to meet those requirements around those. Automation is the application, now I'm going to go to that. And that also came from, you know, there's different kinds of, if you look at, take a product like Analytics, right? Or Reporting. Different people within the organization have different kinds of needs. There's people that are like, "Hey I want to create my own reports, "I want to slice and dice, I want to understand the strands, "and I'm going to use it this way." Then there's somebody who says, "Oh, I want to bring more data into that, "and I want to do data joins, "and I really am going, I'm a data junky, "I'm going to build a data model around it." And then there's users that are like, "I just want to use the report, I want somebody else to build them, I just want this report every Monday morning." Those are more executives, they're like, I just want to look at the data, let me tell you my report, and I'm just going to use it, I'm just an end user. And that's what we're trying to do, is from an automation perspective, there's people that have different types of needs. There's going to be people that are true developers, RPA developers that we've targeted with Studio, then there's people that are business analysts that are like, I can do some stuff with it, I'm not going to spend 8 hours a day every day working on it, I may spend two hours, once a week, building something that's relevant for me. And that's what StudioX is targeted to. But then there's a whole lot of other users, that are like, I don't want to build anything myself, but I want to use it, things that are relevant for me. These are people, maybe like contact center agents, that are taking orders from customers. So, let's say, in a typical Fortune 500 company, if you hired a person to take orders today, you'd have to go train the person in at least 10 different applications to be able to take orders, right? You'd have to show them how it works, when a customer calls, if it's a material order take it in this SOP system, if it's a this order that came through an acquired company, take it in that system. That takes a lot of time. What is the call center agent, the order taking person, doing? They're essentially capturing some very basic information from the customer, that are saying, I am this customer, I want this, this, and this product to be shipped at this address, and tell me when you can ship it, and what is the price for that? What we're trying to do with that application, is give that order agent a very simple interface, where they can punch in the three things simply, and get the results back that the customer cares about, without having to learn how to jump hoops across these 15 different applications to be able to enter that. Because robots can learn those applications, and take what you have put into that interface, and do the work of putting in, cascading that data, and extracting information from those systems. That is the concept behind, automation is the application. >> Sounds like a killer app. >> Yeah, it is. Yeah I like to say it that way as well. >> I want to ask you about cloud. Cause you guys announced the ability, and I did it, I went and downloaded, not downloaded but I signed up, it took seconds. I mean it was simple, and now I got to invite other people, and start, you know, digging in. But we saw this with CRM. Email, Service Management, HR, now even analytic databases, all got SaSified. >> Param: Right. >> I'm curious as to why, not really it took so long, why didn't you start with SaS? Is there something unique about RPA? Is it cause Daniel was a Microsoft guy, pre-Azure? And will this industry eventually go all SaS? Or will it be hybrid, or? >> Param: I think it's like any other workload in the enterprise, there's some customers that are going to want to remain on premise, because that's who they are, that's what they do. >> Governance, compliance, all those, security, right. >> Governance, compliance, you know, we're special. And then there's other customers that are like, you know, we're going where the rest of the world is going. We're going to let this data center work in a cloud, that we believe is secure, has the governance and compliance. So I think we're meeting customers where they are. We're going to continue to support on premise deployments. We will continue to support deployments for customers that want to deploy on private cloud infrastructure. And we'll keep deploying customers that want to use in SaS. Your question was why did it take so long for this to go to that? I think, my theory behind that, is that a lot of the automations that are happening, are touching systems that are only available on premise. Some of these are affecting systems that haven't moved to the cloud, So companies are saying, well I've got to put my robot on premise, because it's got to touch this application that's on premise. I might as well deploy the whole infrastructure on premise. And what we've done with the cloud service, is we've given you the options. You will definitely run their infrastructure in the cloud. That manages and governs the robots. And you can decide to run the robots on premise, or you can decide to run the robots in the cloud, as VMs and machines in any data center. >> So if I can put it in my words, the data lives on prem. >> Param: Yes. >> So you're bringing the automation to where the data lives, independent of the cloud, so that's really why. So the latency issues, we mentioned the other ones, compliance, governance, you know, security, etc. But there's going to be performance implications as well. If you've got a lot of data on-prem, you want to be on prem. >> Again, yeah, it just depends upon, if you've got a lot of data on-prem, and more importantly the business applications that you're using, let's say you're trying to automate a process in a mainframe application that hasn't moved through any cloud yet, that's sitting on a server in the on-premise environment. And the robot can only access it if it's deployed on a machine that sits within the same network, then you've got to put the robot in there, that can access it there as well. >> Dave: It makes sense, it's not a standalone application. It's automating other apps, and touching others, it's got dependencies all over the place. >> Exactly, it's sort of like the lowest common denominator. If every application your touching is the cloud, there's no reason you want to put the robot on premise. You would want to put the robot in the cloud as well. But the reality is that people have moved some applications to the cloud, but not every application to the cloud, that the business process is touching. >> Dave: Well a lot of ERP, a lot of financials, I would imagine the folks I talked to last night were insurance industry, so. >> Yeah, those industries have a lot of homegrown systems, built a long time ago. >> Rebecca: So there's been a lot of exciting product announcements at this conference, but I want you to talk about what's coming up ahead. What are some of the things that you're working on, that are most exciting to you, as these bots become smarter, more durable, and more able to take on complex tasks? What are we going to be talking about at next year's UiPath? >> Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question, and I think you'll hear talk next year about a few things. One is, we started a lot of initiative this year, and we're going to release the version one of many of our products this time. We're going to keep focusing on making sure we make them enterprise ready, we take the feedback across the customers, and make it ready for what they're able to do. I think another key initiative that we're focused on, is contact center. We see mass adoption of our technology in contact centers, and today what we do, is we give our customers the components that we will deploy in call centers, but we don't actually have a finished solution for call centers. Call centers have a lot of automation opportunities, we'll build a more finished solution for contact centers. The other stuff that you'll hear us do more next year, is the concept of applications. We have some ways to build applications today, but I think we're going to grow that ability to create applications, compose applications, very quickly, and you'll hear us do a lot more next year there. >> Rebecca: Well we'll look forward to hearing about it. >> Param: I really look forward to telling you next year about it. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on. >> Rebecca: Thank you so much, Param >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, that wraps up day one of UiPath Forward, come back tomorrow for more. >> [Electronic Music]