 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPath Forward 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 Kallan 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. Iro Kudos 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. Iro, let's start with you. Tell us about your role. I love the title, 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, finance and accounting, you name it, IT security. 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 value add to our customers. Removing the butt out of the human, which is critical to us, right? So, no fear of bots anymore. But it's been two years. The product's the tip of the iceberg I'm hearing. There's a whole lot of other stuff beneath it, culture, obviously process, mindset. Yeah, correct, correct. We'll get into some of that. Correct. But Param, tell us about your role as Chief Product Officer. You make it all happen, right? 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. I'm a translator, transform it into requirements that can be given to the product team, the development team that can go write software for it. Kind of like that AI layer in UI path that translates all this data into something that's actionable, right? You were saying you liked the product before. I mean, our personal experiences, we could actually download it and play with it. And we were like, 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, you know, execution, right? So for instance, in our case, we're having a lot of junior engineers coming on board, right? So we go out to colleges and recruit people that are passionate about process. So what UI path offer us is a way for them to entry our operation and actually perform tasks and do, and you realize results pretty easily, you know? So that they can see the work being done and appreciate it. So who are the users in your organization? Are they, is it a spectrum? You got the sort of RPA developers and then you got business users as well, describe that. Well, you know, it's a combination, right? So we've built that COE over the past couple of years and it's inclusive of not only configurators, but also analysts and people that can understand the business, right? So when you look at through the process, you know, start thinking about how do you design for automation, right? So this tool allows a very comprehensive, you know, GUI, very easy to use and we see, you know, they make progress, you know, release after release. So it's very exciting. All right, Parm, why do you walk us through the announcements that you made, what's new to the platform, some enhancements 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 UiPathGo, which is a marketplace that enables broad innovation across our entire ecosystem of customers and partners. We can, you know, create on a platform, but 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 until 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. So those are three key announcements. Sorry, but 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 reusability of the software. So if you're using a lot of components, if you 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 it can be reused across 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 make it easier for people to manage that. There's some other capabilities have done. We've supported internationalization of the platform. So now customers in Japan can use their product in Japanese. Customers can use it in Spanish, they can use it in Deutsch, German. So we've allowed that in this release as well. Another core 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 then, so it can provide a better symbiosis of humans working together with robots to achieve more processes and more automation in the ecosystem. So there's a lot of stuff, this is some of the highlights. I mean, what of those, what of that compendium is of interest to you? And what- Well, you know, I think, you know, I've been a member for a year now from all 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 are so many other aspects, such as the analytics. It's understanding the business outcome, right? What's the bot producing? Not necessarily the bot is 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, you know, how do you move forward from, you know, simple RPA to more complex automations? So the human in the loop approach to things is important, right? We call that those small block boxes, you know, people with 20 years of experience, they'll 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, right? So no matter where you are, right? Developers, they love it, right? My guys, they're telling me, when is this out? Right, because, you know, they have, I mean, so much hungry, you know, to get, you know, stuffed on and to share what they can do, right? It makes a difference not only for our company, but for the world, right? So it makes a difference. That's interesting. Your company's been around for a long time. You're not worried about, I mean, it's 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? Of course, there are controls in place and of course there'll be a protocol in place. But you know, at the end, you know, you're making a difference, you know, in the world, right? So someone wants to, for instance, you know, have a mortgage because they're, you know, wanting to buy a house, right? You want to make it easy, right? At the end, that's the end goal, you know, for every facet and for all your institutions are in the same sector. So from a product standpoint, which is that Craig LeClaire 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. A lot of, I don't know, 10, 15 vendors. It's like the Gartner Magic Quadrants, all these rating systems, right? We don't do them, but we read them because they're good and they're informative. He said in there that last year's features kind of 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 here is analytics and governance. Those are two big areas. I see the heads nodding. Maybe you guys could each talk about that. I wrote, let's start with you. Why are those things important? You addressed analytics. You kind of addressed governance as well, but maybe you could summarize. I mean, we addressed governance as the get-go, as evolution, right? So for us, really truly, when we're looking into RPAs, not only so much about a tactical approach to a specific problem, but it's really turning 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 integrated with tools such as cyber art, for instance, which is really important for many companies, where they're trying to secure their systems and make sure that the bots are operating under a 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, too. So how'd you get there? What is it that enables that architecture, mindset, culture, 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 that the teams are putting in there. So we're super excited about that. We believe that our success in the product roadmap depends upon hearing a lot from customers and making sure that we're responding to their customers. 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 that our platform and technology is moving toward, we're actually doing the kind of things that actually take us there. So a lot of the innovation that we've done in the platform has come from a direct result of engagement and working with customers and bringing their success into there. Specifically with governance and analytics, those are very important aspects of what we're doing in the 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 so 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. Hi, Ron, I want to ask you about innovation at Equifax. We've observed many times on theCUBE that innovation in the tech industry used to march at the cadence of Moore's law. Oh, new chips out, we got to do. We can now put a better, faster data warehouse, 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 serve all the time, right? So it's about riding the, 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. You're going to be driftwood. So the innovation is there, you know, it's a 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, right? 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 for us at 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? 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. Thank you. Thanks for doing this. It was great to have you, appreciate it. Thank you again. All right, keep it right there. Stu and I will be back with our next guest from UI Path Forward, America, as you watch in theCUBE.