 from the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPaths. Forward 4, big customer event. You know, this company has always bucked the trend and they're doing it again. They're having a live event, physical event. There are customers here, partners, technologists. I'm here with Lisa Martin, my co-host for the show. And we're going to talk about testing. It's a new market for UiPath. Anybody who knows anything about testing, it's kind of this mundane, repetitive process, ripe for automation. Gaird Vyshar is here, the senior vice president of testing products at UiPath. And Matt Holista, who's the product marketing lead at UiPath. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, yeah. All right, Gaird, explain to us how you guys think about testing, both from an internal perspective and how you're going to market. Yeah, well, testing has been around for a long time. 25 years or so. When I came to UiPath, the first thing I looked at was like how do our customers test RPA? And it's quite interesting. We did a survey actually with 1500 people and 27% said that they wouldn't test at all. And I thought that's really interesting. RPA is a business critical software that runs in your production environment and you probably have to test. So we came up with this idea that we create the test suite. We're using proven technology from UiPath and we built this offering and brought this into market for RPA testing and for application testing. So we do both. And of course, we use it internally as well. I mean, that would be, eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne, I guess. So we do that as well. Yeah, well, think about it. If you automate, if there's an ROI to automate a process there's got to be an ROI to verify that it's going to work before it goes into production too. And so it's amazing that a lot of companies are not doing this and they're doing it manually today. So, but parts of testing have been automated, haven't they? With regression testing. So can you guys take us through kind of the before and after and how you're approaching it versus the traditional way? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like I said, testing is not new, right? But still, when you look at the customers they're not automating more than I would say 30, 40% of the manual tests. So still a lot is done manually, which I think, and we talked about this, right? Manual testing is the original RPA. It's a tedious, repetitive task that you should not do manually, right? And so what we're trying to bring in is now we're talking about this new role. It's called the digital tester. The digital tester is an empowered, we could call a manual tester who's able to build automation. And we believe that this will truly increase the automation even in the existing testing market. And it's going to be, I don't want to use the word game changer, but it's going to change the way testing is done. Yeah, and we're applying all the capabilities of UiPath and delivering those to testers, just like we would for HR team or a finance and accounting team, but testing that even has, they understand this more. They've been doing this for 20 years. They understand automation. We're going to give them things like process mining so they can figure out what tests they need to run from production data. We're going to give them task mining so they can make more human-like tests, test exactly like I used to be a tester and I ran a test team. And what I used to do is I have to go out to a warehouse and I would have to go watch people as they entered orders to make sure I was testing it the right way. So they would like click, we usually thought they were clicking things, but they were using hotkeys. That's just an example of what they were doing. But now we can do task mining to get that remotely, pull that data in and do tests and make more realistic tests. There's so much potential there. I think you were saying that only 27% are actually doing testing, so there's so much opportunity. I'm curious, where are your conversations within the customer organization? We know that automation is a board-level investor topic. Where are those discussions with the testing folks, the RPA folks, helping them come together? Well, that's interesting the question. We typically on the RPA side, we talk to the COEs, the people that are professionally developing those RPAs, but very easily we get introduced to the test side of the house and then usually there's a joint meeting where the test people are there, the RPA people are there, and that's why we are talking about this is going to converge somehow, right? They are in different departments today, but if you think about it, five years down the road, maybe 10 years, they might be an automation discipline for the entire enterprise. So if that answered your question about it. Yes, and it's going to require a cultural shift. Yeah, and we have a customer coming, presenting this afternoon Chipotle, and they're going to be talking about how they, both of the teams are using it, test teams and the RPA teams, and they've built a reusable component library that, so when the RPA team built their automations, they put them in a reusable library, and the test team is able to create their tests much faster, reusing about 70% of the components. And so when you think of automation, they're thinking about automating the application, not automating a process or a test, so that people can use those like Lego blocks and build it if they're doing, so they can even IT automation if they wanted to start doing IT automation, they could pull those components out and use those. Well, I think this is game-changing as quality, because so often, because in this day and age of Agile, it's like move fast and break things. A lot of things break, and we heard this morning in the keynotes how you guys are pushing code like a couple times a week, I mean it's just a constant, and then you do two big releases, okay, I get it for the on-prem, but when you're pushing code that fast, you don't have time to test everything. There's a lot of stuff that's unknown, and so to the extent that you can compress all those check boxes, now I can focus on the really important things that sometimes are architectural. How do you expect applying RPA to testing is going to affect quality, or maybe you got some examples Chipotle you just mentioned? Well, first of all, I mean when you say we're pushing code like bi-weekly or so, right, we're talking about continuous development, that's what it's called, right? It's Agile, you have sprint cycles, you continue to bring new code, new code, new code, and you test all the increments with it. So it's not that you're building up a huge backlog for the testing. On the RPA side, what I see is that there will be a transformation about the process, how they develop RPA. At the moment it's still done very much, I would say in a waterfallish way, would you agree? Yeah, big bang waterfall. Yeah, it will transition. We already have partners that apply Agile methodologies to their actually RPA development. And that's going to change that. Okay, so it's not, it's quality for those that aren't in testing, obviously, but for the waterfall guys, it's compressing the time to value. Oh yeah. That's going to be the big key. That's really where it's going to go. I mean what he said is Chipotle was able to reuse 70% of the automation components, right? That's huge, I mean you have to think about it. 70% can be reused from testing to RPA and vice versa. That's a huge acceleration also on the RPA side. You can automate more processes faster if you have components that you can trust. So you were a tester. Yeah. So you were a cost center. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And that's the budget. So could you think RPA and automation can flip that mindset? Yeah, totally. And that's one of the things we want to do is we want to turn testing from a cost center to a value center, give testers a new career pass even, because really testers before, all you could do is you could be a more technical, maybe become a developer, or you could be a manager, but you couldn't really become like an automation architect or a senior automation person and now we're giving them a whole different career path to go down. So it's really exciting. Talk more about that, Matt, because I know when I came out of college, I had a job offer and I wanted to be a developer, a programmer we called them back then. And the only job I could get was as a tester. And I was like, oh, this is miserable. I'm not doing this. But there's a growth path there. They were like, hey, do this for two or three years, maybe five years. I was like, forget it. I'm going into sales and marketing. But so what's the growth path today for the tester? And how do you see this changing? So you want to go, you want to take that one? No, you take it. Okay, I'll take it. You were there. So really, yeah, I mean, I did it. So really it's, I mean, we're going to be giving these guys, the testing market has been kind of not innovating for years and years and years. And so we're going to be giving these guys some new tools to make them more powerful and make even the, because testing is kind of a practice that is, like you said, you didn't like testing. I didn't like testing either, actually. I hated testing so I automated it, right? So that was the first thing I did. And so I think we're going to give these guys some new tools, some ways to grow their career, and some ways to be even better testers. But like we talked about process mining and test mining, like maybe they're testing the wrong things. Maybe they're not testing, you know, maybe, you know, they're, because there's kind of this test everything mentality, where we need to test everything in the whole release instead of like focusing in on what changed. And so I think we'll be able to help them really focus on the testing and the quality to make it more efficient as well. How are, oh, go ahead. So to defend the testers, right? Testers are very skilled people. Yes. Okay. They know their business, what to test and how to test in a way that nobody else knows that. That's something we sometimes underestimate. They're not developers, so they don't write code and they don't build automations typically. But if we can equip them with tools that they can build automation, you have the brain and the muscle together. You know what I mean? Like you don't have to delegate the automation to some whatever team that is maybe outsourced even. You can do it in-house. And I think to some extent, that was also the story of Chipotle, right? They were insourcing again because they're building their own automation. And it saved them time because they have to do all these handoffs to the external third party to do the testing for them. And so they pulled that all in, made things much more streamlined and efficient. How is, that seems like a big cultural shift within any type of organization in any industry we're using Chipotle as an example here. How does UIPath help facilitate that cultural shift? Cause that's big and we're talking about really reducing or speeding time to value. Right, right. And it's a lot of the agile methodologies so it's kind of like we're going back in time. And we're teaching these people, the RPA community, all the things that we learned from software development. And so we're going to be applying that to this. And so all those agile mindset, the agile values, those are the things that are going to help them kind of come together. And that's one of the things that Chipotle talked about is one of the things is they had a kind of an agile mindset, a can-do attitude that pulled them together. I think one thing that will really help with changing the culture is empowering the people. If you give them the tools that they can do, they will do and that will change the culture. I don't think it can come from top down. It needs to come from within and from the people. And that's what we see also with RPA by the way, is adopted on department level and they build automations and then at some point it becomes maybe an enterprise-wide initiative. But somebody in HR had this idea and started. The other thing too is Matt, you mentioned this, you go to a third party. So years ago in the early 2000s we had a software company, we would use a company called Agilon. They were assigned, I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're basically, we're a job shop. And we would throw our code over, they were very waterfall, throw the code over the fence. It was a black box and it was very asynchronous and it would come back weeks later and they'd say, I fixed this, fixed this. But we didn't have the analytics, we didn't have, there was no transparency. Had we had that, we would have maybe come up with new ideas or a way to improve it because we knew the product way better. And so if you can bring that in-house, now you've got much better visibility. So what analytics, are analytics a piece of this? Is that something that- Yeah, they are. So I mean, I'll give you an example, SAP systems, right? When you have SAP systems, customers apply transports like five or 10 a day. Every transport can change the system in a way that you might break the automation. We have the possibility to actually not only understand what's going on in the system with process mining, but we also have the possibility to do change impact mining. And change impact mining tells me with every transport I apply, what has changed. And we can pinpoint the test cases that you need to run. So instead of running 1,000 test cases every time, we pinpoint 50 of them and you know exactly what has changed. But that's the big change. Yeah, that's the key, right? Because a lot of times you don't know what you don't know and you're saying the machine is basically saying, focus on these areas that are going to give you the biggest, that's kind of Amdahl's law, isn't it? Focus on the areas that are going to get the most return. Yeah. This is a new business for UiPath. You guys are targeting, this is a market segment. Can you tell us more about that? Well, we joined about two years ago. It takes some time to build something, right? There was a lot of proven technology there and then we launched, I think it was in July last year, which was more like a private launch. We didn't make much noise around it and it's gaining a lot of traction. So it's several hundred customers have already jumped on their test bandwagon, if you can call this way. And yeah, this year we are pushing full speed into the testing market as well because we see the benefits that customers get when they use both. Like the story from Chipotle, there's other customers like Cisco and more. When you hear their stories, what they were able to achieve, I mean, that's a no brainer, I think, for any customer who wants to improve the automation. Yeah, and also we're taking production grade automation and giving it to the testers and we're giving them this advanced AI so they can automate things they weren't able to automate before like Citrix, virtualized machines, point of sale systems like Chipotle or any other business would have. They can automate all those things now that they couldn't do before. On a self-service. As well as everything else. And then they can also, the testing tools, they talked about fragmentation this morning. That's another problem is there's a tool for mobile, there's a tool for this, there's a tool for API. Of course, yeah. And you have all these tools, you have to learn all these languages. We're going to give them one that they can learn and use and apply to all their technologies. And it's easy to use. Yeah. That's kind of been the mantra of UiPath for a very long time, easy to use, making our P8 simple. We've got 8,000 plus customers. You mentioned a few of them. We're going to have some of them on the program this week. How do you expect, Gerd, question for you. That stat that you mentioned from that survey in the very beginning of our conversation, how do you expect that needle to move in the next year? Because we're seeing so much acceleration because of the pandemic. That's a really good question because the questions that we had in the beginning after we had the first hundred, right? The values didn't change that much. So we have now 1500 and you would assume that is pretty stable from the data. It didn't change that much. So we're still at 27% that are not testing. And that's what we see as our mission. We want to change that. No customer that has more than, I don't know, five processes in production should not like not test. That's crazy and we can help. And that's our mission. So but the data is not changing. That's the interesting part. And I know we're out of time, but how do you price this? Is it a subscription? Is it a usage-based model? How do you do it market? It's fully included in the UiPass tool suite. So it means it's on the cloud and on-prem. The pricing is the same. We are using... It's there. It is, yeah. It's the same components. Like we're using studio for automation. We're using orchestrator. We're using robots. We have cloud test manager, on-prem test manager. It's just a part of the... So it's a value add that you're putting into the platform. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, there are components at a price, yes. But I mean, it's part of the platform, how it is delivered. Yeah, but it's a module. So I pay for that module and you turn it on and I can use it. So it's a subscription. It is. So it could be an annual turnaround. If I want multi-year turnaround, I can do that. Exactly, great. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. I'm sure it was good luck with this. Thank you. Great innovations. Okay, keep it right there. Dave Vellante for Lisa Martin. We'll be back with our coverage of UiPath Forward 4 from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.