 The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome to day two of Forward 5 UiPath's customer conference. You're watching The Cube, my name is Dave Vellante, my co-host is David Nicholson. Yesterday, Dave, we heard about the extension into an enterprise platform. We heard about, from the two CEOs, a new go-to-market strategy. We heard from a lot of customers how they're implementing UiPath generally in automation specifically, scaling, hyper-automation, all the buzzwords in here. Todd Foley is the CDO and CISO of Ladonia Technologies and Devaka Saharya is the director of ERP and RPA at MongoDB. Folks, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for taking time out of your busy day and coming on. Thank you, Dave. Thank you so much. So let's start with the roles. So Devaka, ERP and RPA. It's like peanut butter and jelly or how are those things relate? What's your role? Absolutely. So I started at Mongo as an ERP manager. And as we were growing, the one thing that came out of the every year goals for the company, one big goal that came out was how we have to scale. There are so many barriers to scale. How can we become a billion dollar company? What do we need to do? And when we started drilling down into different areas, we figured it out that people do a lot of stuff manually. It's like comparing sheets, you know, copying data from one place to the other and so on and so forth. So one thing that we realized was we definitely need some kind of automation. At that time, we didn't know what automation but we did our own market research and here we are. Let's automate, sounds easy. All right, thank you. Todd, CDO, Chief Data or Chief Ditch and CISO? I'm assuming Chief Data. Chief Data. And the Chief Information Security Officer. Tell us about Lydonia and also your role. Sure, Lydonia, we started just over three years ago. We looked at the RPA market, we saw great opportunity but we also saw a challenge. We saw that a lot of people had deployed RPA but weren't getting the promised immediate ROI, rapid deployment that was out there and when we looked at it we saw that it really wasn't a technical challenge. Sometimes it was how technology was applied but there were a lot of things that people were doing in their process and how they were treating RPA often as if it were a traditional technology that slowed them down. So we built our practice, our company around the idea of being able to help people scale very quickly and drive that faster and we're finding now with the RPA being pretty ubiquitous that it's the one thing that's in the greatest demand among our clients. Okay, so you're the implementation partner for Mongo, is that right? We are. Okay, so relatively new, very new actually, but a specialist, why'd you choose Lydonia? So that's an interesting question. When we came last year to your back forward we were looking for the right kind of people who can put us on track. We had the technology, we had everything in place. We did the POC, everybody liked it, but we didn't know how to basically go in that direction. We were missing that direction and when we were doing our homework here we accidentally stumbled with Lydonia and I had follow-up conversations with Todd and they were just so tapered. I knew exactly what Todd was explaining me and we knew we are in safe hands. So where did you start? So the first thing that we did was a POC for the finance side of business and right after that POC we realized that how much time people were actually investing manually, like things that were done to three to four days was turning into a 30 minute process and that gave us the idea that we should start drilling down into different departments and try to find where there are areas where we can improve and we did all of that and then we met with Todd and Todd explained that how his reignite process works. So we took reignite as our first step and took it from there. We chose one department, we worked with them, we had about 10 processes highlighted. Thanks to Todd, he worked with them and he literally drilled and nailed it down that what we need to do. And as of today, all those 10 are automated. Wow, okay. Todd, does this interaction between Lydonia and MongoDB as a customer apply equally in the field when you're going out and talking to clients that might be running MongoDB? They might be customers of MongoDB. They may have financial applications that are back-ended with MongoDB. Is there a synergy there that you've been able to gain? I think there is. I think there's one thing that's kind of unique about RPA and that the traditional questions around integration and applicability aren't as important when you have a platform that can work with anything that people can use. I think also when we look at what we typically do with people, some of the things we see at Mongo are very common use cases across all of our clients. There's definitely the ability for us to take things we've done and have clients get leveraged out of them. At the same time, the platform itself makes it different than a traditional model where if somebody has worked in a particular area or built an automation for a particular application, there's some kind of utility to do it faster for another client. What we find is that that's not really the case and that oftentimes we'll compete with people who use different tool sets than UiPath who have that kind of value story around having done it before. We come in and we do it twice as fast as they could. So you're a veteran of complex integrations. Oh yeah. I know that from our paths of cross in the past. So you're saying that in this world of RPA that this tool set, like at UiPath as a platform, we've been talking a lot about the difference between being a tool set and being a platform. That this platform can sort of hover above things without that same layer of complexity or level of complexity that you've experienced in the past because that speaks to the idea that UiPath as a platform is going to work moving forward in a big way. Exactly, right? I think we've seen for years and years that regardless of the type of development environment you're using, a developer's value sometimes is based on what reusable libraries they've created, what they have to cut and paste from their old code to be able to do things faster. The challenge with that is it has to be maintained. When things change, they've got to update those libraries. It's a value prop that's very high touch. With UiPath, they've created the ultimate and reusability. The platform, especially since they acquired cloud elements and built all of those API integrations into their platform, the platform maintains the reusability and the libraries in such a way where their drag and drop from a development standpoint and you don't have to maintain them. It's the ultimate expression of reusability as a platform. Yeah, cloud elements, API automation, obviously a key pickup by UiPath. Divaka, what's the scale of your operation today? How many bots and where do you see it going? Yes, so we started with one bot. The last year we experimented a lot that, you know, we were just trying to make our footprint in the company, trying to understand that, you know, people understand what RPA is, what UiPath is. Initially we got a lot of pushback. We got a pushback from our security team as well, because they could not understand, you know, that what UiPath is and how secure it is. And we had to explain them that how we would host it over AWS, how we will work, how we will not save passwords, et cetera. When we did all of that and they got comfort, we started picking, you know, very small processes around to show, you know, people the capability of RPA and UiPath per se. When we did that, people started just coming with bigger processes and one specific team that I can think of came that we do, you know, fuzzy logic in Excel and we do it twice a week, but it takes a lot of time. We automated it, they run it daily, every single day, two times now. And the exponential growth that we saw just with that one automation was mind boggling. I couldn't believe that, you know, we were tracking our insights and we were like, oh my God, what happened? It just blew out of proportion. Okay, so then did you need more bots? Are you still running one bot or? No, now at the moment we have nine. Okay. And we are still looking to grow. Okay, so the initial friction, you said there was some, you know, concern. It was primarily security over there. Others people afraid they're going to lose their jobs. Was there any of that? There was no risk of losing the job. The major pushback was one was from security. The other one was from different system owners because a lot of people were not sure why we want UI access or why we want API access and why are we accessing their systems? What type of information we are trying to gather out of their systems? Are we writing into their system? Because a lot of people have issues when we start saying that we will write or overwrite data. So most of the processes that we are working around are either writing, comparing, reading and comparing. And if it is writing, we take special permission that this is what we are going to do. So what did you have to do to get through the security not hold? You had AWS SOC2 report. Did you have to show them the UI path pen test? Did you have to change any of your processes? What was that sort of punch list like? Everything. So we had to start from pen test. We had to explain that UI path is in the process of acquiring SOC. We also explained that how things are hosted on AWS. We had to bring our consultants in who explained that how on AWS this will be a very secured way of doing things. And when we did our first process which was actually for the auditors, which is interesting, what we did was we did segregation of duties, which I think is very important in every field and every sphere we work in. So for example, the write up that we were building for auditors, we made sure that it is approved by a physical or a human, and not everything is done by the bar. The biggest piece of the puzzle was writing, because it was taking a lot of time. People were going into different systems, gathering information, putting it on Excel, and then comparing and submitting it to PWC. When you say write, you mean any update to a system of record? Correct. Required some scrutiny. Some scrutiny, yes. Okay, initially by a human until there was comfort level and then it's like I had these bots know what they're doing. Correct, correct. Okay, and now you're Netsuite customer, correct? Yes, that's right. Now we were talking about Oracle is going to acquire OCR capabilities. Well that, we've been talking to Dave and I all week about, okay, well ServiceNow has RPA and Salesforce and SAP, et cetera. How will that affect your thinking about adopting UiPath? I don't think it should matter, because I think all these systems kind of coexist in a bigger ecosystem. And I also feel that all these systems have their own plus points and minus points. Not one system per se can do everything within a company. So it could be that, for example, Netsuite might be very strong for financials in the space we are in, but not extremely good around sales and marketing. So for that company chose Salesforce. So you have those smaller, smaller multiple systems that build into a bigger ecosystem, right? And I think the other piece of the puzzle is that UiPath helps bridge that gap between these systems. It could happen that certain things can get integrated, certain things cannot, because of the nature of business, the nature of work that the teams are trying to do. And I think UiPath is leveraging that gap and putting those strings together. As you scale, how will, and Todd, I presume you're going to assist in this process, but how will you decide what processes to prioritize and is that a process-driven decision? Is it data-led? Both, if so, what kind of data can you describe? How are you guys going to approach that? Yep, Todd, would you like to take that first before I start? Sure, yeah, maybe some best practice and then we can maybe get specific to Mongo. Absolutely. Our guidance is always that it should be a business decision, right? And it should be data-driven based on a business-defined metric around the business case for that particular automation. Our guidance to customers is don't automate it unless you know why you're automating it and what the value is. We see sometimes there are challenges with people being able to articulate the business case for an automation and it can almost always be resolved by having that business case be the first step in qualifying and identifying an automation candidate. And how does that apply to Mongo? Where are you thinking about scaling your opinion? It's interesting because initially we thought that we will explore one area in MongoDB and the other thing that we did was we did road shows. So because we had to create some awareness in the company that we have UiPath. There's something called bots, there's something called automation that we can do. So we created a presentation with small demos inside it and circulated it within the company, different departments, tried to explain what we can achieve. And based off of that, we came up with a laundry list of all the automations that different departments needed. And out of that, we started doing the business case, the value, trying to come up with complexity, effort. We did a full estimation matrix and based off of that, we came, okay, these are the top 20 that we should build first. And as soon as we built those top 20, we saw a skyrocket growth and... And you're looking for hard dollars, right? Yes, yes, absolutely. Devika, I think Mongo also is great at taking a data-driven approach to looking at their program. Do you want to share how you do that? Yes, absolutely. So one thing that we were very sure was we have to talk in terms of numbers because that's the only solid way to see growth. And what we did was, we got insights, we started doing full metrics in terms of dollar saved, hour saved. And we are trying to track how every process is impacting in the grand scheme of things like, say for example, for finance, are we shortening the closed cycle in any shape or form by doing these two or three automations that we are doing? And I'm happy to report that we have really shortened our closed cycle from where we started. Your quarter end or month end close. Correct. Yes. Daily? You're at the daily close yet? The John Chambers? Yeah, great. Drive everyone nuts. First I have to say, I can feel the audience sort of smiling as they see and they hear from MongoDB, Disruptor of Legacy Databases, being cautious in their internal approach to change as everyone else goes. Exactly. But Todd, just sort of double clicking on this idea of kind of stove pipes of capabilities in the RPA space. I mean OCR being added to NetSuite. Not sure if that's the greatest example, but the point is Lydonia will work with all of those technologies to synthesize something, is that correct? Or are you a UI path only? Both. So we exclusively use UI path with our customers. We don't use other RPA platforms and we don't because, not because we can, but because we don't believe that anything else is going to be as quick or as effective. Also, it's the only platform that is as broad and comprehensive as it needs to be to deliver outcomes to our customers. We have partnerships with other companies that have gaps where UI path isn't currently playing, but the number of companies and the number of gaps has shrunk down to almost nothing these days and we're well placed as UI path continues to grow their platform to take advantage of that and leverage that to deliver outcomes to customers. It was a great story of starting small, being careful and prudent from a security standpoint, especially as a public company. And then it sounds like there's virtually unlimited opportunity. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Great story. Thank you very much for sharing it. Thank you. All right, good luck. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante will be back from UI path forward five from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Right back.