>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida.
It's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite.
Brought to you by Cohesity.
>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of
Microsoft's Ignite here at the
Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
along with my co-host Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Param Kahlon.
He is the Chief Product Officer at UiPath
Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thank you so much for having me.
>> For coming back on theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
>> So I was just at UiPath with you in Vegas
a couple of weeks ago and the UiPath tag line
is a robot for every employee.
The Microsoft tag line is empowering every employee
to be a technologist and empowering citizen developers.
Does it strike you that the two missions are similar
in their way?
>> That's actually right.
I think we have so much in common there companies together
and we're working very closely together.
And not just our technology but also
in what we're trying to achieve,
which is to make people achieve more
and amplifying human achievement is a core mission
of our company and very excited that Microsoft shares
the same ambission.
>> Yeah, it really does connect with me so after this morning
talked about that sixty one percent of job openings
for developers are outside the text sector
and of course UiPath is really trying to help
business productivity over all with everything
you're doing.
>> Absolutely and productivity is where we focus
our technology primarily on.
In fact, a lot of our focus is around how do we actually
get people to do more with less time.
So they can have more time to do the things
that they can do with the career parts of their time,
as opposed to doing it in mundane parts.
So, yeah, productivity is really important to us
as a company.
That's what we think about everyday.
>> Could you bring us inside the relationship
with Microsoft and UiPath?
>> Yeah, so we're deeply partnered with Microsoft
since day one.
Most of our technology is building Microsoft's stack
and that means our databases all run on sequel server.
Our cloud service runs on Microsoft Azure.
So we are very deeply partnered.
We've helped Microsoft build a lot of AI services around
document extractions, a forms recognizer.
We're one of the first customers that we worked together
with Microsoft and Chevron on.
So we have a very deep partnership with Microsoft.
>> So let me ask you a question, actually as a customer
of Microsoft.
Why everything built on Microsoft from the dot net
through the infrastructure as a service?
Why did UiPath choose Microsoft?
>> I think it made a lot of sense.
Microsoft's focus on productivity, Microsoft focus on
enabling developers to do stuff quickly and it also helped
that a lot of the founders, myself included, came through
with Microsoft and had a lot of experience with Microsoft.
So I think part of that helped, as well.
>> Does it help or hurt when you are then
pitching your services that it is a much more Microsoft
focused company?
>> So I think we've grown over the years to actually have a
much broader ecosystem so we have more than
five hundred partners.
We work with Google, Google is a customer,
it's an investor.
It's also very deep partner.
A lot of our AI services are ruling with Google
over deep partners with Adouglas, as well.
So I think we're working with the way
our customer's are today but I think we still have a
very close relationship with Microsoft,
given where we started.
>> Yeah, I actually went to the UiPath forward
event last year and had not realized how deep that
connection was with Microsoft.
I see UiPath across all the clouds.
So, there's little mention of RPA this morning in the KINO,
the power automated solution coming out for Microsoft.
Of course, everyone seems to have an RPA out there.
All the big software houses out there.
Tell us what this means in the marketplace.
>> Yeah, so listen, RPA is a very fast growing market.
It is the fastest growing Enterprise category today
and when you grow so fast, it's good for the business
but also attracts attention.
I think getting somebody like Microsoft to sort of say
we're in it, as well, only helps to solidify the foundation,
solidify the category and brings a lot more credibility
to this category.
So I think we're excited to have
Microsoft here, as well.
>> As you were saying, your two companies
that are very much focused on work-place productivity,
employee collaboration and being able to be more
creative with the time that you have, how much
is that cultural alignment?
How much does that help your partnership?
>> I think it helps the partnership a lot, so when we
for example, meet with the office team, they think
deeply about helping people do more with less time.
We think about the same things, as well.
So, if you notice, some of the newer products that
we've launched are very deeply integrated into Office .
In fact, we do a lot of inspiration from products like
Excel, to be able to say business people that are able to do
some very sophisticated, complex models in Excel
should be able to do similar stuff with
their products, as well.
So we continue to work with Microsoft
in a cross-collaboration across the seams.
And I think, in general, our message we have a closer
relationship with Microsoft so when Microsoft brings us into
opportunities and it closes, it actually retires quota
for Microsoft sellers, as well.
So I think all of that alignment really helps.
>> We'd love to hear what joint customers, ya know,
what brings customer's to UiPath, at a show here.
What are some of the key drivers for their discussions
that you're having this week?
>> Yeah, so I mean we've got , ya know, through the years
we've got over five thousand customers that work with us.
Large enterprises, ya know, very large banks,
to companies like Chevron.
Chevron, in particular, is one of those customer's
that's a very deep customer of Microsoft but also
a very strong customer of ours.
And, in a specific use case, at Chevron was,
Chevron wanted to extract data from
their Oil Service Rig Reports and we're getting
more than a thousand Oil Rig Reports coming in everyday
with about three hundred pages per average per report
and somebody had to manually go in and physically
read those reports, put them into the SMP system so that
you could predict if there was a pre-maintenance repair
that was required.
Ya know, working together with Microsoft , we were able
to take a service that Microsoft was building an AI
called Forms Recognizer and take it to prebeta and alpha
with the customer so that Chevron is now able to have
all of those reports read by UiPath Robot and automatically
punch it into, ya know, the SMP preventative maintenance
application so that you can actually
shove the engineer inside before you notice something's
happened to the oil rig.
So I think that's a pretty cool scenario.
>> Another similarity between UiPath and Microsoft is this
customer obsession and this is something you talked
a lot about at UiPath foreward.
This spending time with customers, learning how they
would use RPA and then also thinking ahead of them in terms
of how they could use RPA.
How do you work with customers and Microsoft together in
partnership in terms of how do you find out exactly what
their needs are and the joint solution that you can provide?
>> That's a realy good question. Microsoft has been very
obsessed with driving customer Obsession and all parts of
the organization.
We culturally have a really deep
obsession about working closely with customers and I
think so if Microsoft has MTC meet the customer sessions
around the world and we work closely with Microsoft to
make sure that our technology can be showcased by
Microsoft people in those MTC sessions so that when
customers come in they're able to
not only Microsoft Technology, but also our technology
and if they're interested then our sales teams work
collaboratively together to make sure we can you know
have joint sessions and planning and working with customers.
>> I had a chat earlier this year with your
CMO Bobby Patrick talking about how AI and RPA go together.
You on the products so will AI be able to allow RPA to get
into more complex configuration, you know give us
where we are and you know what's new in that space.
>> Yeah, no absolutely, so like the first wave
of RPA was all about taking sort of structure processes.
You know reading data from Excel sheets,
reading data from API's
and be able to process it in different systems.
Now the humans don't always work with that.
Ten percent of what we do on a daily basis
are structured data [Mumbling].
Ninety percent of what we do is, reading spread sheets,
extracting information from papers,
responding to chat conversations.
All of that unstructured information can now be processed
by AI algorithms to be able to extract the intent
of that chat conversation to extract the data
that's in that unstructured document that we just received.
To be able to use computer vision to detect
what is on the computer screen so
that you're able to detect that control,
whether rendered the browser or it renders
in a you know windows started application of that,
so AI brings the possibility to automate
a lot more complex racesis within the organization.
You know mimicking sort of more human like behavior,
so the robots are not just doing numbers
and structured data,
but be able to process that structured information as well.
>> Will the AI help at all
trying to understand what can I automate?
>> Absolutely and that's the other piece of being able
to use process understanding capabilities,
so what we've done is,
we build capabilities that's able to follow
human activity logs and how people are using systems,
but also how the data basis are getting updated
by different applications and be able to mine
that information to understand how work is getting done
and the enterprise
and be able to understand what are the scenarios
and possibilities for automating more business processes
and that's also one of the key benefits of how AI
and process mining can be applied to the context of the RPA.
>> There's so many products announcements today
on the main stages and eighty seven page book
that we resent from the Microsoft com's team.
What is the most exiting things you've seen here today?
>> I think I'm really exited about some of the innovation
that Microsoft is doing the analytics stag.
To be able to report on the, you know the data warehouse,
but also big data together in one stack.
I think that's really powerful,
that is something that our customers
have been very interested in,
because robots process structure logs,
but also unstructured logs.
I'm also exited about some of the AI investments
that Microsoft is making.
I think, some of the AI capabilities
and are really coming to practical use,
I mean a lot of companies talked about AI for a long time.
We've applied AI practically in our technology,
but I think a lot more technology is now available
for us to be use in our products.
>> Okay, Param there's recent acquisition Process Gold
was the company, tell us a little bit about that
and what are the plans for that?
>> Absolutely, so Process Gold is a company
that's based around Germany and Eindhoven in Netherlands
and this is a company that was focused
on process understanding of profit mining,
so essentially what they had was that
connectors to different line of business applications
and be able to sit and study logs of how work
was getting done over a long periods of time,
so what happens is if you went to a line of business owner
and he asked them what is your process for precure
to pay look like order to cash look like.
Chances that they'll draw you a straight line
and say here is what the process says however when you look
at how work is getting done,
it's typically not a straight line
and depending on how many variations you're looking at,
you can get up to like you know fifteen or twenty
different variations of the same process being done,
so what Process Gold does is it identifies
what are the different ways in which
processes are getting done,
identify where the bottlenecks exist in the process,
right how long is the step one,
how long is the time between step two and step three,
right is that taking twenty five percent
of what the total time is
and is there a way to optimize that process by eliminating
that bottleneck and once you've optimized that process,
it also gives you the ability automate
that optimized process,
right you don't want to automate a process
that is sub optimal.
You want to go understand the process,
see how work is getting done.
Optimize the bottlenecks and eliminate the bottlenecks
optimize the process
and then go automate that in Process Gold,
it really helps a sort of cater to that need,
which is go automate,
you know the best possible way to optimize a process.
>> In terms of Microsoft's use of things like AI and ML
and we have not really talked a lot about ML here.
I mean it was mentioned on the main stage, but not a lot.
How, what do you think the future holds in terms
of Microsoft in the next five to ten years?
>> Yeah, I mean I think I see Microsoft investing
a lot in data and really being able to get
all kinds of data, because ML is useful only after it's able
to reason over tons of data
and Microsoft is in a rightfully investing
in the data repositery in stores,
so that it has the ability to store that data,
to process that data and once it's got the data
and the data assets over then
it's able to go career the algorithms
that can reason over data
and create that stuff and I think that's really exiting,
cause Microsoft has a lot of the horse power
to be able to not only store that data,
process that data efficiently
so it can be used in machine learning in AI.
>> Well Param thank you so much for coming on theCUBE,
it was a pleasure talking to you.
>> Thank you, pleasure to have me here, thank you very much.
>> I'm Rebecca knight for Stu Miniman stay tuned
for more of the CUBE's live coverage of Microsoft ignite.