 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward America's 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 Kalon. He is the Chief Product Officer at UiPath. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me here. Big week. Yes. You've been busy. I have been busy. 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, it hasn't quite ended up that way. And you had the quote, the famous quote, we see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics from Robert LaSolo, the Nobel winner. Can you riff on 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 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 we thought technology would free us from. And I think that's fascinating that 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. Companies are having to change business models on the fly. Digital transformation is affecting 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 is 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 the existing systems. 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 they matter, the things that they care about. That's really what the beauty of the RPA is. So I wonder if we can help our audience, understand UiPath a little bit better. 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 third, fourth, whatever it was. And now you're sort of number one in all these quadrants and waves. 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 can say the same thing. Oh yes, we're open. Oh, we get rapid, all right. 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 of the things that we've invested in and 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 at 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. 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 UI path 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, right? 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 you told you a year ago we're going to do all this with a laugh to their face, right? We're going to continue to do that pace at the pace that 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 our PA many, many years ago. We have a much more modern stack. You said, you alluded to the fact that we came in from behind and we've taken sort of 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 the 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 did, we came to UiPath and we saw that it actually works. And that's a testament to the technology that we build that's actually helping deliver the results that our customers expect it to. 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, you brought up some customers, the 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? Yeah, you know, I'll give you a really good example of a customer that I work with, it's a bank. And you know, in this bank, it's a retail bank and what used to happen before we had deployed UiPath was the banker had to go to like six different applications and pulled reports of the customer they were about to go meet, friend 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. With after the deployed UiPath robots, UiPath 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. You know, 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 helps, you know, 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 freeze 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 and 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, and then expanded their TAM dramatically. And you shared with us yesterday and today in the keynote, you got RPA for devs and testers, you know, Studio T, that targets 2% of the market. And then you got the citizen developers, that's Studio X, that expands it 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, 30, 40, $50 billion 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 dovetails 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, you know, grow our TAM and other stuff. Our marketing organization gets super excited about that, Bobby's 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 are the capabilities they want us to go build, right? So we've expanded to StudioX, not because we thought, you know, everybody should have a 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, right? Because they thought that every person has unique needs and they should be able to build a box 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, you know, 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, right? So we took all of that feedback and that's what we focused on building StudioX so we can make sure they meet the needs of the market. And every single pillar of the investment that we've done is focused around making sure that we're able to meet those requirements around this stuff. Automation is the application. I want to go to that. And that also came from like, 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 junkie. I'm going to build a data model around it. And then there's users that are like, I just want to use the reports. I don't, I want somebody else to build them. I just want this report every Monday morning. Those are more executives that are like, I just want to look at the data. Let me tell you when I report it and I'm just going to use it. I'm just an end user. And that's what we're trying to do. It's like from an automation perspective, there's people that have different types of needs. There's going to be people that are true developers, RP 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 eight 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 Studio X 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 that 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 SAP system. If it's a disorder that came through and acquired a 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'm this customer. I want this, this and this products 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 at 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 and cascading that data and extracting information from those systems. That is the concept behind automation is the application. It 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. Did you guys announce the ability? And I did it. I went downloaded, not downloaded, but I signed up. It took seconds. It was simple. And now I got to invite other people and start digging in. But we saw this was CRM, email, service management, HR, now even analytic databases all got Sassified, right? I'm curious as to why, not really took so long. Why didn't you start with Sass? Is there something unique about RPA? Is it because Daniel was a Microsoft guy pre-Azure? I mean, and will this industry eventually go all Sass or will it be hybrid or? 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. We're special. And then there's other customers that are like, we're going with where the rest of the world is going. We're going to let the status 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 in private cloud infrastructure and will keep deploying the customers that want to use in Sass. 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 forgot 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 services have given you the options. You will definitely run the infrastructure in the cloud that manage 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 on machines and any data center. So if I can put it in my words, the data lives on-prem. Yes. You're bringing the automation to where the data lives, independent of the cloud. So that's really why. So the latency issues that we mentioned, the other ones, compliance, governance, security, et cetera, but there's got 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 to any cloud yet. It's sitting on a server in the on-premise environment and the robot can only access it if it's deployed in 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. It makes sense. It's not a standalone application. It's automating other apps and touching other, it's got dependencies all over the place. Exactly. So it's sort of like the lowest common denominator, if every application you're 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. A lot of ERP, a lot of financials. I would imagine the folks I talked to last night were insurance industries. Those industries have a lot of homegrown systems built a long time ago. So it'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 text? What are we going to be talking about in next year's UiPath? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. I think you'll hear us 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 Center, 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. So we have some ways to build applications today, but I think we're going to grow that application, ability to create applications, compose applications very quickly, and you'll hear us do a lot more next year there. But we'll look forward to hearing about it. I'm really looking forward to telling you next year about it. 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.