 The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Las Vegas. Everybody watching the Cube's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. This morning, Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system in here, but it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the Director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile in Naga Chakravarti. He's the Chief Digital Officer at I-OPEX. Guys, welcome. Thanks for having us. Next. So, John. So, okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that. So, let's just give him a second here. Three different transitions. I think it's pretty loud probably coming through. Usually we don't get that, but it is live. So, John, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title is Director of Product and Technology. Obviously, you're here because you have an affinity to automation, but talk about your role and how automation fits into it. Sure. Well, I'm the Director of Product and Technology, and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration, and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So, I'm here to learn about from these experts and all these leaders within the UI path and from our vendors as well. Okay, Naga, tell us about iOPEX. It's kind of an interesting name. Where did that come from? I think cloud when I think OPEX, but get rid of my cat bag. Where's the name come from? And what do you guys do? Actually, we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the core team, comes from a service background. And I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, the dependency on people was also increasing. We thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, I would say iOPEX is currently at 3.0. And if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me, from operation excellence, that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. So the market just went right to you guys. You were ahead of the game and then, wow, now it's a real chill. I have the time that we fortunately named it OPEX, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. Yeah, I got it. So John, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did it, was it the merger? Take us through that. Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOPEX. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. The proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-Mobile Enterprise. Not having any experience within automation, as we had discussed before, usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners. iOPEX being the main critical partner in that evolution. And so, iOPEX came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green, is that we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shout-outs here. Yao Duong, John Loh and our CIO, Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOPEX, UiPath, to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, oh wait. No, it's okay. So you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel. Absolutely, absolutely. So our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOPEX to get that in place. And once we have that in place, I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program, that's incredible. And we're a large company. And we'll, I mean, we're just starting. So it's going to be fun. So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroots effort? And then the COE comes later. How do you typically recommend approaching it? I think the fact that we started very small, there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we're solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation. And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified. Let's say, if you have to go to different departments, it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments problem statements. And when you navigate it, you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit? And when it comes to benefit, you need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem? So somebody internally within T-Mobile, we were able to use very nice. John's team, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation and slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggy piggyback and scale it bigger. So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyperscale cloud providers or automation platforms from UI path, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else, there are organizations like IOPX. And you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint, but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, how does that business model from an IOPX perspective work? Do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of okay, now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, from a business perspective, IOPX wants to do as much as it can of value for T-Mobile because that's the business they're in. So tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, so I'll say real fast that IOPX is actually part of the T-Mobile team. They are embedded. We work with them daily. They had the expertise, they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure. They're there. Absolutely, let me add one more point to it. See, if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile, I would say it is a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you, there was a natural way to get embedded as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say, I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and the openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. I got a lot of questions. John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding and maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I could, a lot of people ask me, well, how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative, line of business? So those executives were from the IT team, for sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. How do you choose? I got so many questions, I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? I think it's a combination, right? One fundamental guiding principle that we always look at it is, let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe, you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that get executed in the systems of record in the form of workflow, and there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath. You will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere, but you also have to look at why is this clutter happening and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together, and that's when you'll start deciding, hey, this is repetitive in nature. This is going to scale. This is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard, and that scorecard naturally drives the decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me, or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? So I was going to ask you how you visualize it. You visualize it through, I guess, understanding of the organization, anecdotal comments, research, digging peel in the onion, and then you do some kind of scorecard-like approach and say, okay, these are the high opportunity areas. Okay, so combination, got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before. Big organizations that I know, they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio, the applications have dependencies on each other, and then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications, any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? So we actually have a change management team. And we make sure that before we go forward with anything, it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with IOPX, with our development teams, on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? Yeah, so when it comes to change management, right? While John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is a proactive thing that we end up doing this, right? When a bot goes live. There is a live support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamental core principle for that entire support to work good is, you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails, right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record, the data format, is it changing? Or the bot logic is failing? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that, we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons and that kind of complements the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey, there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay, fair enough. The systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way, the change becomes a smoother process. And how quickly can you diagnose that, is it? Hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? So it depends on the complex question, right? If we know the pattern early, then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you need to basically look at how the business is going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Please. As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future, UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that? In general, what differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? I think it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform, you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving, it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in. Process mining, task capture, made it a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey, I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skill set? So a platform will try to look at what is that I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise. I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture and that's the kind of platform that anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? Is there at all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? Yeah, so we are enterprise license. You are, okay. And IOPX helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs, right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of them. It's a large company. So I'm 23 is going to be huge for us. Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. And good luck in the future. Yeah, thank you. All right. Okay, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson, UiPath Forward Five. The bots are running around. Dave, we're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at Forward. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.