Welcome to another episode of "Powered by Snowflake,"
where I interview technology leaders building applications and businesses on Snowflake.
Today, we'll be learning how UiPath has built an automation platform on top of Snowflake.
And with me is Param Kahlon, Chief Product Officer of UiPath.
Param, how are you today?
Very good, Daniel. Delighted to be here.
Thanks for having us on the show.
Absolutely. I'm excited to talk with you today.
So an automation platform is no small feat. Tell me more about what the company does,
your background, and some context around UiPath.
Absolutely. I have been at UiPath about 4 years now.
I've spent my career in enterprise software, building business applications at Microsoft prior to UiPath.
Spent 5 or 6 years at Microsoft building business applications for Dynamics 365,
and then spent time before that at SAP and Siebel, which is part of Oracle now.
You know, UiPath was founded in 2005 by engineers
that were building software for other engineers to consume,
and we kind of stumbled into the automation market
back when it was called RPA, somewhere in 2013- 2014 timeframe,
where it's technology that we created to help
people create automation to automate the mundane, the repetitive tasks
that were generally in the back office.
And from there, given the shift in demographics around the world,
and given the need for people to do more with less,
there has been a tremendous demand for the automation platform
that has accelerated our growth through the last four or five years.
In fact, analysts have called the automation category
the fastest growth enterprise business application category
for the last three years in a row.
We were very fortunate to get some private investors
as it was going through the growth curve,
and we raised more than a billion dollars for the company through private investors.
And last year we went IPO in the public market in the New York Stock Exchange.
So we're now listed as a public company under the symbol PATH.
That's incredible.
So tell me about some of the customers that you work with and the solution that you ve built?
Absolutely.
So what companies are trying to do with our software
is to be able to leverage existing assets that they have in existing technologies
and be able to automate processes leveraging those. Transform their processes digitally without
having to re-engineer systems from the ground up.
So we've got customers like SMBC Bank in Japan, for example,
that have automated more than 1,000 processes,
and they measure the value that our software delivers to their business.
They've now measured more than 500 million dollars of savings that we've generated
to their organization by saving hundreds and thousands of hours.
In fact, they write about us in their annual report.
So a lot of the automations that we create help people to create automations
so that they can go focus on the work at hand and creating value.
For example, somebody working in a contact center can focus on communicating with the customer
as opposed to trying to click and navigate through different systems to get work done.
So we've got customers like Pepsi that have used us in back office financial processes,
Customers like HP that use this across for an office and back office processes.
Our software is a generic automation platform that isn't specific
to an industry or a process.
It can be applied to create automations, whether they are in the
back office, doing stuff without any human intervention,
or they could be in the front office, like in a contact center
where the agent, the user, can focus on doing the work that humans are best at,
the creative, empathetic aspects of our nature,
and not have to focus on clicking different things on the screen
and navigating across different applications
To have built a platform that is so cross-industry and use case agnostic,
it has to be pretty agile in terms of how you built it.
Tell me why and how you decided to build this on top of Snowflake.
Absolutely.
So first of all, the platform that we've built can assume that we can work with any interface
that is available on the computer screen.
So we're able to tap and work with any application,
whether it's displayed in a browser or in a Windows application, on a virtual desktop interface.
Our robots help execute business processes across these interfaces or APIs
that exist across these applications.
Now, as the robots go complete these business processes,
they log everything they're creating,
because that is an added requirement for companies--
to be able to manage and control and report on how businesses
are completing different transactions.
And now, as those robots create those logs, we needed a system that's able
to not only understand what the robots are doing and be able to report on it,
but also provide both operational and business metrics
at a scale that was really large.
Because not only were our customers large and doing a lot of transactions through our system,
but as those robots were processing those transactions,
we wanted a system that was able to scale to the needs of our customers.
And that's why we decided the right platform for us
is a platform that can scale and grow as our needs
and our customers needs are growing.
And that's why we built that ability to ingest all of those robot logs and reports
and measure the impact of those automations using Snowflake.
So that's really cool to see.
I totally agree with you. Scale is critical to an operation like this.
Can you show me a high-level overview of how the data flows
through UiPath and through Snowflake in this case?
Can you show me a little bit about that?
Absolutely. I'd love to give you a quick demonstration of how that works.
I'm going to share my screen.
So first of all, just very quickly, the architecture of what we've created using Snowflake.
So as these robots are completing business processes,
they are ingesting a lot of information about the business process:
whether they were successful or not,
how often they were used, how many times did the robot run,
how long did it take for it to execute the process?
How much time do we save in executing that?
And all of those metrics--and the logs are really important.
So, scale was important, but what was also really important
the ability to process unstructured information
just like we process structured information.
So, for example, if a robot is executing a process in the back office,
it's capturing some information about that invoice
or the accounts payable processes.
And the same robot can now go ahead and turn around
and process some information from an employee onboarding process,
or a customer service request management process.
So the unstructured, semi-structured nature of information
that the robots are capturing across different process executions
was also important for us to make sure that we're able to understand.
So what we created in Snowflake is not only scale,
but also be able to process custom fields and unstructured information
and be able to analyze and report on them.
So we take all of the data from the robot logs that we are processing
and ingested into our data lake,
which is able to report both the outcomes that are focused on operational metrics,
like how many robots have got, how many processes they have executed,
what's the success rate, but also the ROI,
the business ROI metrics, as in how efficient are we
after putting this process in place? Have we reduced the cycle time for a certain process?
How many hours have we saved?
How does that account into the metrics in terms of dollar savings?
So if you go look at the demo of the product that I'd love to show you as well,
here, I have logged into our cloud platform.
That's where our automation services are.
And what we do is, in this log platform, we can, using Studio,
help build automations quickly.
We have Orchestrator that helps manage the deployment
of those automation that we build.
We've got Actions, where we can engage humans and robots together
to help orchestrate the end-to-end process.
So on the lefthand side, essentially, offer all the services
that are available to our customers from an end-to-end automation platform.
That's awesome.
I see Insights there.
I assume that's probably a key area that that Snowflake plays a role.
That's absolutely correct.
And Insights is powered by Snowflake.
So if you click on insights here, what we can do with Insights is
help manage and measure
the impact that automations are having on the business.
So we provide out of the box certain templates or dashboards
that our customers can use to start to measure different metrics that they care about.
And they can configure and customize these metrics.
So, for example, if we jump into some of the operational metrics,
like processes, cues, and robots--
and I'll jump into processes here to kind of see what
metrics around processes might look like.
So then processes metrics...you know, . we care about different metrics and processes,.
For example, how many processes we have run,
on average how long does a process take,
what's the success rate, are we successful or not?
And then other key metrics that might be important for us.
So one of the things that I care a lot about is, what's happening
with the processes that have failed jobs?
There are certain processes failing more often than others.
And what does that mean?
So I can click on this and quickly drill in on that process and get
a list of what are the types of errors people are seeing
with this process that is failing a lot.
So I can kind of hone in and get the details of that.
What's also nice about these dashboards and charts
is that I can drill in, but I can also take this data and I can export this data
into whatever format that I'm more comfortable consuming and using.
For example, I want to take these error messages and send them to my IT analyst
to go look at and find out why we're having these bills executions.
They can look at the data, and I can export it directly from here and be able to do that.
Another thing that our customers can deal with is they can set up alerts.
So for example, if they come in here and I want to get alerted any time my success rate falls
below a certain threshold, I can click on this alert icon here.
And I can say whenever the success rate is less than, let's say, 80,
I want to get an email, and I want to get that email every day at 5 a.m.
So I can set of those alerts very easily and get notified on things
without having to come to this dashboard and monitor this metric on a daily basis.
That's really powerful. See, one of the things that always comes to mind when
I see a dashboard like this is how-- you're ingesting a lot of data, right?.
That data is going into Snowflake.
How are you deciding, when to trigger and make new calculations in this dashboard?
That's absolutely correct.
So what we do is all of this data is streamed near real-time to this dashboard.
So one of the things, for example, we do is I'll go back into my Insights dashboard,
and we've got business metrics in here as well.
So for example, if we look at the business ROI dashboard.
and over here the metrics that we care about are relevant from a business perspective.
And we look at things, for example, the hours saved and the dollars saved,
and, for example, if I changes metric and say, I want to look at, let's say, the last 365 days,
How much time have you saved through automation and how much money have you saved?
You can kind of get those metrics.
Now you may ask, how do we actually set this up?
How do we know we've saved that much money?
It's all configurable,
So you can click on this here and configure the ROI data set.
Or here we decide for every process, what did it take for us
to manually complete that process in minutes or hours or whatever metric we set up.
What was the hourly cost to the person that was actually executing that metric?
What was the development cost for that?
What was the number of FTEs that was reduced, and what was the license cost for that.
So very quickly we can come in here and configure these dashboards however we want to do it.
And if I wanted to add, let's say, another cost metric
that influenced the overall cost of this, I can quickly come in here
and I can say whether this is, for example, a digital transformation is relevant or not,
because we may have a special cost associated to things
that we're doing for digital transformation.
And as easy as that, we've now created another metric that I can use
in my calculations to power the metrics that my dashboards are using.
So super flexible, and super easy to use these things.
That's awesome.
And I see here also that when you were just at the dashboard selections page,
those are different templates.
I assume with these templates, are you able to edit/modify to your liking?
If you have a specific use case or something like that, can you edit these dashboards?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a great question.
So, for example, just with one click, I can take this dashboard,
I can copy it right?
And this would create a copy of the dashboard that we've got now.
I've copied this dashboard.
I've copied it because I want to personalize it to my taste and my liking.
As soon as I come in here...okay, now it is completely editable.
If I can come in here and click a button and say, "Edit this dashboard,"
I can come in here and I can say, here's my dashboard.
I want to, for example, to take this chart out here and move it to the top.
Maybe I don't like the way the chart is arranged.
I can click on Edit mode and launch into the design of this dashboard.
I can change the visualization of the dashboard.
I can also change what fields are available,
what things that I want to look at.
So it's completely configurable.
For example, if I just want to change this from a horizontal column-based chart
to a bar-based chart, I can do this and I can save it.
And just like that, I've now saved my chart to look like this.
And it's very easy to move these metrics around
and do whatever I want to do with them.
Again, super easy, super configurable for me to do.
And this is what our customers love about our platform.
It is that it is not just a way to create automation and not
knowing what impact these are having on their business.
With Snowflake, we created the ability for our customers to say
without having to invest in any analytical tool
that they have to do themselves,
it is ingesting that information, that data, to give them the metrics
that give them the dashboards out of the box.
So that as soon as they start building automation and deploying them,
they're able to measure the impact that these are having on their business.
That's awesome.
One of the things that always comes up with these types of applications is,
especially when you're building on Snowflake,
is that scaling back that you mentioned earlier.
And one of the key aspects that Snowflake provides out of the box
is the ability to ingest all Marketplace data, right?
So to give even more kinds of relevant insights that, for example,
if you wanted to ingest weather data, you can get that actually for free on the Marketplace.
Are there ways that, or elements in the future, for UiPath
that you see leveraging Snowflake Data Marketplace?
Yeah. That's definitely, extremely one of the primary reasons
we chose an open platform like Snowflake.
As we look at the robots execute business processes,
and they have a lot of information that's relevant to what they're executing.
But the information is even more powerful when we're able to combine it
with other things that are happening in the ecosystem.
The robots are executing automated processes,
but there are a lot of processes that are happening that are automated by humans
as well other metrics and information that is available within the ecosystem
or outside the ecosystem about the process.
Let's say an EFP report makes certain information relevant and useful for that.
We can look at all of that information and we can ingest all of that,
and combine the power of robot logs with the information that's available
through the Marketplace connectors to really give more power
and more value to our customers.
That's awesome.
And so from here, what's next for UiPath,
say six months, one year down the road.
You know, we see the value of the platform evolving.
So when we started, we were focused on creating automations that were focused on UI automation.
And that's what a lot of our customers do today.
But our platform is evolving now.
One of the things that we've created is process mining,
where we can observe system logs of what human activities that they're using,
either in creating event logs or human activities on a desktop,
and created process mining and task mining products
that are mining how work is getting done in the enterprise.
We are bringing those logs, bringing logs from products like Automation Hub,
which is an idea management platform that says how we're generating ideas for automation.
So we're basically creating Snowflake as a central repository
of all the things that are happening around automation,
whether they're for extracting information from documents,
or they're for building low-code application experiences,
that our platform is evolving to.
Or whether they're for building task mining and process mining.
So we are bringing in all of this data together.
And with this, we're also adding a lot of machine learning capabilities on top of this data.
So our intent, at the end of the day, is for customers to
come to this place to truly understand what business processes do they have in the enterprise?
How are they executing these business processes today?
How have they evolved over time?
And how do they compare to the benchmarks in the industry?
So they can look at an order-to-cash process,
and they can say our order-to-cash lead time is so many days.
How can we reduce that lead time to be the best in the industry?
How far away are we from the benchmarks, and how much
have we progress towards that over the last 12 months or the last 18 months?
All of that is going to be powered through Snowflake and UiPath Insights.
That's going to be awesome.
I love that that you're able to get such business- relevant insights using a platform like that.
So for our viewers here, where should they go
if they want to learn more about you and UiPath?
Absolutely. So I would highly recommend you come to our website, UiPath.com/ insights.
You will get all the information about our products.
We have a very open ecosystem around the community.
We have more than a million members engaged in our community.
You can sign up for an instance of UiPath directly there and start to use it.
We definitely welcome all the feedback and any ideas you have for us for improving our products.
And for everybody watching here today, if you're interested in building your next application
or business on Snowflake, check out developers.snowflake. com.
Thanks.
Thank you very much, Daniel.
Bye.