 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of UiPath Live, the release show. Brought to you by UiPath. Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we've been covering the RPA market now for quite some time. UiPath just had this huge announcement and we're going to update you on the space. As you know, we've been quantifying this with our partners at ETR. One of the areas that UiPath is obviously focused on is talking about scaling. If you want to win an RPA, you got to scale. You want to scale, you got to have a cloud. So, Tarek Madpur is here. He's the director of product management at UiPath. We're going to talk cloud. Tarek, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Dave. Good to see you as well. Yeah, so, you guys had this huge announcement. There were really four major kind of components, if you will, that you extended the core platform. You talked about more automation, more AI, smarter robots. The whole end to end, when you guys talk about what sometimes it's a little buzzwordy, but that hyper automation, it's got to be end to end. You've got to take a systems view and then you got to put the tools in the hands of regular people. If you want to have a robot for every person, it's got to be simple. You've got to democratize RPA. So, my question is, where does the cloud been into all this? You know, the cloud is the one that wraps it all up together. So, for us, it's very important to make it easy for people to start instantly. When you start to decide that you want to do an investment in RPA, you really want to get started very quickly. And the second thing is, you eventually want to grow that RPA investment and the cloud makes it super easy for you to scale that investment. So, cloud makes it easy for you to start instantly and scale in. You know, when you think about the cloud, you know, kind of started with, I guess I sort of started with Salesforce back in 1999, you know, kind of pre-cloud. But certainly, you know, so many functions and software areas have been, you know, cloudified. You saw it with email. You certainly, well, you saw it with ITSM, which was kind of a heavy lift. You certainly see it with HR. You've seen it with data protection and backup. You see, do you see RPA as kind of the next big wave of cloudification? Well, I absolutely think that cloud is going to be very big in RPA. So from our perspective, when you start thinking about RPA, you're really thinking about automation. You want your automations to light up and to save you money and to cut time for you. And that's the main thing that's going through your mind. What's going through your mind is not setting up infrastructure and, you know, configuring machines and installing software to make RPA possible. So the cloud makes it super easy for you to just cut down that IT infrastructure and go right ahead into what you really care about, which is the automations. So I think it's going to be big that, you know, we allow you to just go directly to automation. If I want RPA, start thinking about automations. Forget the infrastructure, leave that to us. So there's obviously, you hear a lot of narrative in the marketplace about cloud, cloud native. You see some companies are dogmatic. We'll never do on, had Frank Slupin on a while ago. He said, no, we're not doing on-prem. That's a halfway house. You guys have taken a different approach. You obviously started on-prem and now you're sort of moving to the cloud. What's your philosophy on that? You know, why wouldn't everybody do cloud? Makes sense. So for us, we're very pragmatic about it. We believe that customers are at different stages in their cloud adoption. Some people are extremely cloud friendly and have already put in place plans for making sure that everything is already on the cloud. There are companies that are cloud native that were born in the cloud, that if you go and ask them to install a piece of software on a local server, they will just laugh at you. So that's on one end of the spectrum. And you want to make sure that those people, it can take full capability of RPA. On the other hand, there are people who are still, you know, coming from on-prem servers, who are trying to move to the cloud, who have plans to move to the cloud, who would like to try some components in the cloud, but they still have some legacy systems that exist on-prem or a lot of systems that exist on-prem. And we want to make sure that those people are also able to take care of RPA. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are industries or some companies in some industries that just are not ready for the cloud at all. And from our perspective, we want to democratize RPA. We want RPA available for everyone. So it is our philosophy that we're going to give you a multitude of deployment options. If you want on-prem all the way, we got it. If you want cloud all the way, we got it. You want the hybrid system, we got it. We're just going to make it possible for you and the deployment choice is your choice. And the experience on-prem and cloud, it's substantially identical. Would you say it's completely identical? What's the delta? That is absolutely one of our goals. It is absolutely a goal for you, I have to make sure that if you are an on-prem customer and you are starting to use some cloud, that your experience is seamless between on-premises and in the cloud. If you are a cloud customer and you have some components that still exist on-prem and you want to use them, it's very important to us that you have that common experience between both. So our software is designed with a common experience at the core. And it's actually the same software that runs from a user experience perspective in the cloud and on-premises. Now, obviously a lot of the infrastructure is different and a lot of the security aspects are different, but the user experience itself is consistently the same and intentionally that way. So when people talk about cloud or not, they often cite several things. Clearly, latency is a factor. If your data lives on-prem, maybe you want to do things on-prem. There's local laws, data sovereignty. There's corporate edicts. Well, hey, we're not going to the cloud. Now, maybe with COVID, that's changing somewhat. But so what are you hearing from customers just in terms of the rationale on-prem versus cloud, hybrid, what are some of the decision points? Those are all good points, Dave. That's exactly the kind of stuff that we hear from our customers. So I think the main things that we hear in terms of cloud is about security. People, rightfully so, when you start talking about cloud, they start asking, can I really trust you as a vendor with my data? I'm giving you my sales data. I'm giving you my HR data. I mean, this is some confidential information. Can I really trust you with that data? So that's one thing we absolutely, AIFAP are taking care of with large focus on security and I can definitely dive deeper into that if you want. In addition to that, privacy and data sovereignty and where data lies is a big deal. So from our perspective, we host your data as an enterprise customer in three different locations. We host the man, we have servers in the United States. We have servers in Europe and we have servers in Japan. And as a customer, you get to choose where your data lies. And we keep it the way you tell us. So that kind of helps with data sovereignty because some countries, as you mentioned, or some companies, as you mentioned, really have strict rules about that. Also that helps with the latency aspects. So if you're a customer in Japan, you would really prefer to use our Japan data center as opposed to a, you know, a European center, for example. Do customers care like where your cloud infrastructure lives? Are they asking you about that? Do they probe you on that? I mean, specifically in terms of your cloud partner, like maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Absolutely. People definitely care about who we use and where the data is going to lie. And so from our perspective, for example, we're partnering with Microsoft and all our infrastructure is built on Microsoft Azure. And we use data centers from Microsoft Azure to host our stuff. And that's really good for multiple reasons. Azure provides some very good uptime and reliability guarantees. In addition to that, they have servers around the world that we can utilize so that we can expand. So for example, for our next frontier becomes, for example, in Australia and New Zealand, we want to create a region there. Being on top of Azure really allows us to go and spin that off pretty quickly and help customers that way. So, you know, one of the things about cloud is you can experiment very cheaply and you can fail fast and then iterate. So one of the things that struck me about your announcement was your community addition. I always look for, you know, is there a community addition? Is that community addition a free for life? Is it neutered? In other words, can I actually do anything with it? So I was happy to see that you guys had that. And I'm also happy to see, I mean, you've got, I think, you know, it's early days for your cloud. I think you said you had 200 enterprise customers, but you got two orders of magnitude greater than that from the community addition. Did I get that right? That's correct. Yes, absolutely. So when you think about the UIPath Automation Cloud, it comes with two flavors. We have a community, a one for community, and that is the free version. And as you said, it's not like a free trial or free limited time or something. It is just free as in free, free forever. We're going to keep it to you. If that's all you need, just use it. No questions asked. You know, be happy with it. The community addition actually is a fully functional product and it allows you to do, to get two attended robots. One unattended robot, you get the option of connecting to two studios for designing automations to work with those. So it allows you, if that's all your automation needs, it's like small automation needs, just go ahead and use it. If you're a small company or an individual or a small team, just use the community addition and you want to use that for production, just fine. No problem. You know, if that's all you need, go for it. Then the, and we have tens of thousands of community customers that are actively using the product. I'm not talking about the people that have ever signed up on left. Those are a lot more than that. But I'm talking about actually actively using the product. We've got tens of thousands of users that are using it every month. And built on that same infrastructure comes our enterprise addition. And the enterprise addition is basically the same infrastructure, but it adds a number of capabilities that are useful for a larger enterprise. Of course, the most important of which is an uptime guarantee. So, you know, for the community addition, obviously, we keep the service up and we have very good response times, but with the enterprise, you actually get an uptime guarantee. In addition to that, you get access to our support. We have a dedicated support team that works 24-7 around the clock in multiple regions and you get guaranteed response times with an SLA. On top of that, you get to be able to purchase as many robots as you want and, you know, list goes on and on. And it's very easy to go like you said from playing with community, working with community using that, doing a trial, it's instant as well. You just click a button and all of a sudden, now you have five robots of each type that you can use for 60 days. And from there, you can just go ahead and buy. Now, talk more about the uptime guarantee. Is that basically Azure's SLA? Sort of add a layer on top of that. And we, you know, what are we measuring there? You could add some color. Absolutely, yeah. So our uptime guarantee is built on top of Azure, obviously, but we provide our own uptime guarantee regardless of what happens in the underlying system. So from our perspective, we guarantee that the service is going to be up at a specific, you know, amount of time. So we measure the number of minutes every month that the service should actually be up. And we measure the number of minutes as the service experiences any kind of downtime. And we measure downtime in multiple ways. So we do outside in testing of, you know, if you're a customer, are you able to reach our service or not? We do incredible detailed monitoring and reporting on the life of our service itself from inside in. And we look at any minute, any of those services that we use underlying services are not responding to customers and we count those as down as well. So we guarantee that there's a specific number of minutes that the service will be down and that's it. And so if I understand it, you're really taking an application view. It's not the light on the server. It's the, it's, can I get to- You as a customer. Yeah. My service. From a customer perspective, are you able to reach our service and do what you're expected to do with it? That's what you as a customer really care about. And in turn, that's the right way for us to be measuring up time. And Tarek, if I don't, if you don't hit that SLA, well, I guess pre-credits or how does that work? Yeah, absolutely. We have in our agreements provisions for penalties on the UI path side, if we don't hit that SLA. And similarly for support, you know, if you call support, you are guaranteed depending on the severity of the issue and the type of contract, we have two types of support. I know how many minutes it takes us for somebody to be engaged with you on that issue. And we have very good numbers in hitting that SLA. And if we don't, there are also penalties on the UI path side for that. We treat this as a, you know, as a real enterprise service that you would expect. Yeah, great. I wonder if you could take some examples. You've got a couple of hundred customers. I think you mentioned Chip Hopeley was up and running, you know, very quickly. I think you had some other examples, but what can you share with us in terms of actual experience that your customers have seen? Absolutely, yeah. So we've taken a very measured and careful approach at actually launching our service. So even though our service literally just launched last week fully to the world, we have actually been enabling enterprise customers. We've been, we started a private preview with the four customers back in April of last year. And then we expanded that to a public preview for any customer to try our service as is no payment, but also no guarantees back in, I want to say June of last year. And then it took us all the way to December to feel comfortable that the services are the place where when we launch it, customers are going to get an excellent quality. And that's when we did a, what we call a limited availability where we started onboarding the enterprise customers step by step. We started with 10, we went to 50, we went to 100. And now we have a couple of hundred customers that are already signed up using the enterprise product every day as a guaranteed service and getting the SLAs that we've promised. So this was the time when we said, you know what? I think we've definitely been meeting our SLAs for five months running now. We feel very comfortable to launch it the rest of the world. Even if it's anecdotal, have you discerned an appreciable change in people's attitude toward cloud as a result of COVID? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's just the aspect of working from home and having a lot of people just not available either demand infrastructure or demand servers made a lot of people think about what is the best way to continue to run automation while they're at home. And obviously, there's nothing easier than granting access to someone in the cloud to access a service from home than if you were to grant them access to an on-prem service with VPNs and all of that stuff. And then if you want to provision new robots and new machines and you have to do that again on-premises, it's a lot more complicated. So a lot of customers are really starting to look at the cloud. So many of the conversations that we would have, obviously a customer would come in and they would ask us about the capabilities of our system, they would ask about security, they'd ask a lot of things. And those discussions anywhere between a few days to sometimes a few months, some customers are just iterated for those. The volume of customers that's asking about cloud is definitely increasing. Good for us, obviously the number of deals we're signing is also increasing. But most importantly, I think the number of customers that are benefiting from the value of starting instantly in the cloud to be scaled easily in the cloud. You mentioned the example of Chipotle and while that was an engagement that we had obviously before COVID, they were very impressed with what they were able to do. They came in and Colin and team had budgeted about two weeks to get started and set up everything so that they can build on top of that and their automations. And they chose wisely to start in the cloud. And as a result, they were done and all set up in one day. So it's definitely a huge difference between what you're able to get in the cloud versus what you would do on credit. Well, UI passed all about automation and so was the cloud. The superpowers of this decade, cloud, data, AI, you guys are at the heart of all of those. So Tarek, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and explaining sort of your cloud angle. I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much, Dave. It was a pleasure being here. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. More coverage on the RPA market analysis, sort of digging into UI pass recent announcements. This is Dave Vellante from CUBE. Keep it right there, right back, right at this short break.