 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is live with UiPath at Forward 4 at the Bellagio, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're going to be talking about UiPath integration suite. We have a couple of guests joining us here. Mark Genie is here. The GM of UiPath, formerly the co-founder and CEO of Cloud Elements. And Peter Villaroy also joins us, Director of Global IT Automation Practice at UiPath. Guys, welcome to the program. Thanks, Lisa. Good to be here. So Mark, let's go ahead and start with you. The Cloud Elements acquisition was done in about the last six months. Talk to us about why you chose to be acquired by UiPath and where things are today. Some big announcements yesterday. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, if you go back six months ago, we had been in conversations with UiPath for quite a while. And as we were looking at our opportunities as an API integration platform, so Cloud Elements just to step back a little bit, was a leader in helping companies take APIs, integrate applications together and bed that into their apps. And UiPath approached us about the combination of what's happening in the automation world. And these have been, as Maureen Fleming from IDC mentioned this morning, integration and RPA have been in separate swim lanes. And what we saw and what UiPath approached us with was the ability to combine these together and really be the first company to take and take UI automation and seamlessly connect it together with API automation or API integration. Peter, what's been some of the feedback? We know you guys are more than 9,000 customers strong. Now we've had a whole bunch of them on yesterday and today. What's been the feedback so far on the Cloud Elements acquisition? So there's a huge amount of interest. We've had very positive feedback on that. Lisa, the combination of UI driven automation and API native integrations is key, especially to the IT leadership that I work with. Some of whom have traditionally compartmentalized UiPaths platform in the UI space and legitimately think about their own internal processes as having very little to do with a user interface. And so combining UI driven automation together with API integrations really helps to pick them up where they are and show them the power of that kind of a hyper automation platform that can deliver value in a number of spaces in IT. Do you guys ever see the movie Blind Side? All right, you know what I'm talking about with Joe Thysman gets hit on the Blind Side and then his career is over and that's when people realized, oh my gosh, the left tackle for a right handed quarterback is so important and it's some subsequent drafts when somebody would pick a left tackle like a good left, all the rest went. And that's what's happening in the automation business today. You guys took the lead, you set the trend, people said, well, this is actually going to be a huge market and then now we're seeing all this M&A occur. And a lot of it from these big software companies who believe every dollar of software should go to them saying, hey, we can actually profit from this within our own vertical stack. So what do you make of all the M&A that's going on? In particular, there was one recently where a private equity firm was mashing together of a long time RPA vendor with a long time integration firm. So it looks like you guys are on the right side of history in that regard, your thoughts. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, if you think about automation, right, you've got to obviously help people do their jobs better, but if you're going to automate a process in a department, you need to connect the applications that they use, that those people use, otherwise you can't accomplish it. And where APIs fit in as automation and UI automation has become more and more mission critical and has become bigger and bigger part of enterprise IT wants to get involved. And so enterprise IT gets involved and what's their stack? It's API based. Their technology stack is how you connect back is through API. So more and more companies are seeing what UI paths is that if you're going to automate every process and every department for every person, you need to connect to every application that they're using. And that's why this is now becoming, right? Three companies now just recently have done these types of acquisitions of bringing an integration platform in and then combining them together or trying to combine them together. Peter, all APIs are not created equally as we know. Some are sort of half baked. A lot of them, many of them don't have decent documentation. So there's sort of a spectrum there. How do you think about prioritizing? How do you think about the landscape? Do you just kind of ignore the stuff that's not well documented and then eventually that'll take care of itself? Or how should we think about that? There have always been layers of integration, right? Especially working with the IT organization. So you've got our native integrations to make it easier to drag and drop activities. And then you've got the APIs that we can consume with various activities. That area has really grown through the acquisition of cloud elements. And then you've got that third layer where when all else fails, you go onto the user interface and interact with the application like a human does. And what you see is that our interaction with cloud elements really enables a great enhancement of that lower base level, which is mildly interesting to the lines of business, very important to IT. Yeah, for sure. So the reason I asked that question is I was talking to one of your customers, it was big SAP customer. He said, I love you, iPad. The problem I have is I got so many custom mods and such this, you know, poorly documented and I can't, I want to put automation in there, but I can't. So to those parts of the tech stack become like the mainframe of, you know what I mean? And just sort of they live there and they just keep doing their thing. But there's so much innovation that pops up around it. How do you see that? Well, that's part of the agility that comes with a platform like UI paths is that you can interact with the, you know, very clean, swagger documented RESTful APIs and you can interact with SAP on their proprietary ages old APIs. Those are things that we've traditionally done decently well. But again, through this acquisition, we could do that on a grander scale with bi-directional triggering and all the goodness that comes with it. You can solve that problem today that your customer, and this is a couple of years ago, you can solve that problem with cloud elements. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. The ability to integrate to these enterprise platforms like SAP, you need multiple tools to do the job, right? So UI automation is great, but if you've customized the UI significantly or other things like that, then the API can be a great structure for it. And other cases where that API provides a resiliency and a scale to it that opens up new processes as well to those corporate systems, right? So the balance of being able to bring these two worlds together is where you can unlock more opportunities. Because you got east-west automation, that's your group ahead. Now you're going north-south with cloud elements is sort of deeper, right? Yeah, and bottom line from the VP of IT's point of view, the more that can be done from a machine to machine communication, the better, right? So sure. Mark, what's the opportunity for the existing cloud elements customers to take advantage of here? Yeah, no, absolutely. We've continued to support, brought our customers over with us. Part of our customer base has actually been a significant number of software customers. Companies, SAP's one of them. DocuSign, Gainsight, you know, so household names in the world of a software as well as large financial services institutions like US Bank and Capital One and American Express, all of them had that common need where they wanted to have an API-centric approach to being able to connect to customers and partners and leverage our platform to do that. So we will continue to support that and extend that, but we see opportunities where again, we couldn't automate everything for our customers just through APIs. And, you know, for example, one of the major financial services institutions we're working with wants to take and provide a robot for their customers and commercial payments to be able to automatically kick off an API. And so that seamless integration where we can combine that automation with robots leveraging and kicking off APIs automatically takes us further into automating those processes for those customers. So you guys, six months, right? Talk about how that integration, maybe API integration company, it better gone smoothly, but what was that like? You guys are getting a knack of M&A. Talk about that, what'd you learn? Maybe what you would do differently to even accelerate further, how'd it go? That's the best answer from you having been on the acquisition side, yeah. Well, how well it went is six months later, which I think is really unheard of in the technology world. We're introducing our combined offering UiPath integration service that essentially takes what Cloud Elements built and beds it right into Automation Cloud Studio and the UiPath product suite. And it's been a global effort, right? So we had the UiPath team was based in Hyderabad, Denver and Dallas. And then we've got UiPath engineers working with that Cloud Elements team that are in Bucharest, Bellevue and Bangalore. And with the miracles of Zoom and that type of thing, never meeting anyone in person, we were able to integrate the product together and launch it here today. Six months is a fast turnaround timeframe. How much of that was accelerated by the fact, by the fact of the global situation that we're in? Yeah, well, in some respects that helped, right? Because we didn't have to waste time traveling and we could hop on Zoom calls instantly. We spent a lot of time even over Zoom making sure there was a cultural fit. UiPath has a, not only the humble, bold and type of values, but it's a very collaborative environment and very open and collaborative environment as Brent can attest to. And that collaboration I think and that spirit of collaboration really helped us feel welcome and move quickly to pull this together. And also the necessity is the mother of innovation, right? And UiPath traditionally being popular in the CFOs organization, we're becoming the CIO's best friend and the timing was right to introduce this kind of capability to combine with what we traditionally do well and really move into there picking up, like I said, the customer where they are and leading them into that fully end-to-end automation capability. And this was integral. So it wasn't time to kick the tires, but to get moving. Am I right there's a governance play here as well because IT is kind of generally responsible for governance. If you make it easier for them to whatever governance systems they're using, governance, privacy, security, that now you can just connect, they don't have to rip and replace. Is there an angle there? Sure, yeah. So nothing's more important in IT than control and governments and change management. And half of the conversations we're having out there on the floor are around that, right? Ensuring that all of the good governance is in place. And we have a lot of the integrations and frameworks necessary to help that through your DevOps pipeline and doing proper CI CD and test automation. And introducing that integration layer in addition to what we already have just helps all of that to move more smoothly and bring more value to our customers. Mark, talk to me about some of the feedback from customers that you mentioned, DocuSign, SAP. Probably I imagined joint customers with UiPath. Now you're working together. What's in it for them? Yeah, no, the feedback has been tremendous, right? So API automation's not new to UiPath, but customers have been asking for more capability. So one of them is in that governance area that we were just talking about, right? The ability to create connections centrally, enable them, disable them, right? You got mission critical corporate applications. You want to be able to make sure that those applications are being controlled and monitored, right? So that was one aspect, and by bringing this as a cloud-based service, we can accomplish that. The other area is this eventing capability, the ability to kick off workflows and processes based on changes to corporate applications. A new employee's added in workday. I want to kick off a process to onboard that new employee. And that trigger and eventing service has been really well received. And then, yeah, so that, I'd say, with the ability to also create new connections more simply was the third big factor. We created a standardized authentication service so no matter where you are in the UiPath product line, you get a consistent way to create a new connection, whether it's a personal connection by a business user to Google Docs or Microsoft Office, or your COE or IT creating a connection to an important corporate system. How about the partner? I know you guys had partner day here leading into Forward Four. They must be stoked about this. It gives you a lever to even add new partners. What was those conversations like? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. The partners are excited about those same features, but they're also excited about something in our roadmap, which we expect to be previewing early next year, and that's a connector builder. So the ability for partners to, more quickly than ever, create their own connectors that'll work just like first-party connectors that we UiPath build and add them into catalogs, share them in the marketplace. So there's new revenue opportunities, new opportunities for partners to create reusable assets that they can leverage, and yeah, so lots of things, lots of work to continue to do, right? It's only been six months, and that's going to be a big initiative going forward. So integration service, as you mentioned, announced at this conference. We know that that's first step obviously accomplished as we also talked about very quickly in a six month time period, but what does the future hold for API automation and integration service? Yeah, so one of the key areas is just continue to expose the integration service more broadly in the UiPath product portfolio. Now that we have this service, more UiPath products will be able to leverage it, right? We're starting off with Studio and Orchestrator, but we can all use and share that common capability. The other is to make access to complex business systems easier. So you think about it, right? To get a purchase order from NetSuite, might take five or six API calls to do. Well, a citizen developer doesn't know what those five or six things you have to do. So we'll be creating these business activities that are just get me open purchase orders that'll work seamlessly in the studio product, and behind the scenes, we'll chain together those five, six API calls to make that a simple process, right? So taking the integration service and making it even more powerful tool for that citizen developer, that non-technical user as well. So that's development work you're going to do. That's work we're going to do as well as enable partners to do as well. We're just going to do it. So it's a key part of our roadmap over time. Because, yeah, I mean the partner piece is key because when NetSuite changes, how it does that, you're creating that abstraction layer. So, but that's value add for the partners. Absolutely, and they have that domain expertise, right? They can create assets, leveraging the UI path, automation capabilities, but also bring their knowledge about SAP or Workday and those Oracle EBS and those core business systems, and then combine that together into assets that enhance integration service that they build and can share with their customers and share with our marketplace. Right, because the Workday developers are going to know about that well ahead of time, know it's coming. And they know better than we do, right? That's their business. That's what they know really well. Nice value add opportunity. Kita, one of the things that UI path has been known for is being very, and I've said this on the program the last two days, is being a good use case for land and expand. You guys have 70% of revenue that comes from existing customers. Talk to me about the Cloud Elements acquisition as a facilitator of it, because you kind of mentioned, you know, we used to be really in bed with the CFOs, now we're going to CIOs, and we've heard from a number of your customers where they started in finance and it's now enterprise-wide. How is this going to help facilitate that even more? Yeah, it really helps it. You know, I'm touching on what Mark just mentioned about the citizen developer, right? Just as one of many examples, the empowerment of end users to automate things for themselves is critical to that land and expand successes that we've been seeing. And where from an IT standpoint, the frustration with the citizen developer is, you know, maybe what they're building isn't so top-notch, right? It works for themselves, but we can't replicate that. But making it easy to make API integration part of what they do in StudioX is so key to enhancing also the reusability of what's coming out of there so that the COEs can replicate that across teams or globally within their organization. And that's part of land and expand because you may find something that's valuable in one line of business, replicates easily into another line of business if the tool set is in place. Pretty powerful model, Lisa. It is. Guys, thanks so much for joining us today, talking about the Cloud Elements acquisition, what you're doing with integration service, what's to come, the opportunities in it for both sides and your partners. We appreciate your time. Great, thanks you guys. Thank you very much. Appreciate it, thank you. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio UI Path Forward 4. Stick around, we'll be right back.