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The release show brought to you by UIpath.
>> Hi everybody, Welcome back.
This is Dave Volante for the cube
and we've been covering the RPA market now
for quite some time.
UIPath just said 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
and talking about scaling you.
If you want to win an RPA, you got to scale.
You want to scale, you got to have cloud.
So Tarek Madkour 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 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 fit into all this?
>> 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 and 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 (mumbles).
>> Now, when you think about the cloud,
kind of of started with,
I guess it sort of started with salesforce back in 1999,
kind of of pre-cloud, but certainly,
so many functions and software areas have been cloudified.
You saw it with email.
Well, you saw it with ITSM, which was kind of a heavy lift.
You've certainly seen it with HR.
You seen it with data protection and backup.
Do you see RPA is kind of the next big wave
of cloudification?
>> Well, I absolutely think that cloud
is going to to be very big in RPA.
So from our perspective, when you start thinking about RPA,
you're already 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 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, investment
and go right ahead into what you really care about,
which is the automation.
So I think it's going to be big that 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 you hear a lot of narrative in the marketplace
about cloud, cloudnative.
You see some companies are dogmatic,
will never do on.
Had Frank Slootman on a while ago.
He said, we're not doing on-prem,
that's a halfway house.
You guys had 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?
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 clouded 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
that can take full combat capability of RPA.
On the other hand, there are people
who are still 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
and some industries that just are not ready
for the cloud at all.
And from our perspective, we wanted them to (mumbles) 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 a hybrid system, we got it.
We're just going to make it possible for you
and the deployment choices 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 UIpath
to make sure that if you are an on-prem customer
and you're starting to use some cloud,
that your experience the 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 say 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,
Hey, we're not going to the cloud now,
maybe with COVID that's changing somewhat.
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 they 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 UIpath are taking care of
with a 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 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
cause 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 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.
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
through the whole system.
And that's a really good for multiple reasons.
Azure provides some very good uptime
and reliability guarantees.
And in addition to that, they have servers around the world
that we can utilize so that we can expand.
So if our next frontier becomes, for example, in Australia,
New Zealand, we want to create a (mumbles) there,
being on top of Azure really allows us to go
and spin that off pretty quickly
and help customers that way.
>> So 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 edition.
Is there a community edition?
Is that community edition 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 you've got,
it's early days for you,
but I think that you have 200 enterprise customers,
but you've got two orders of magnitude greater than that
from the community edition.
Did I get that right?
>> That's correct, yes, absolutely.
So when you think about the UIpath automation,
cloud comes in two flavors.
We have the one for community, and that is the free version.
And it's, 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, be happy with it.
The community edition actually is a
fully functional product.
And it allows you to get two attended robots,
one unattended robot.
You get the option of connecting up the two studios
for designing automations to work with those.
So it allows you to, that's all your automation needs
is 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 edition
and you only use that for production.
That's fine, no problem.
That's all you need, go for it.
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 and 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 edition.
And the enterprise edition 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 for the community edition, obviously,
we keep the service up and we have very good response times.
But with enterprise, you actually get an uptime guarantee.
In addition to that, you get access to all our support.
So we have a dedicated support team that works 24 seven
around the clock in multiple regions.
And you get them guaranteed response times with an SLA.
On top of that, you get to be able to purchase
as many robots as you want, and the 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 at each site
that you can use for six days.
And from there, you can just go ahead and buy.
>> Well, now talk more about the uptime guarantee.
Is that basically Azures SLA sort of add a layer
on top of that.
What are we measuring there?
You could add some color.
>> Absolutely, yeah.
So our 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 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 a service experiences, any kind of downtime.
And we measure downtime in multiple ways.
So we do outside in testing, 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 download 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.
It's not the light on the server.
It's can i get to the customer.
Yeah, my service you're calling.
>> 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 you don't hit that SLA, well,
I get free credit, so how does that work?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
We have in our agreements provisions for penalties
on the UIpath side, if we don't hit that SLA
and similarly for support.
If you call support, you are guaranteed depending
on the severity of the issue and the type of contract,
we have two type of support.
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 (mumbles) for that.
Well, we treat this as a real enterprise service
that you would expect.
>> Yeah, Great.
I wonder if we could take some examples.
You've got a couple of hundred customers.
I think you mentioned Chipotle,
was up and running 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 started a private preview with 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.
Or 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
everyday as a guaranteed service
and getting the SLAs that we 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 with the launch
for the rest of the world.
>> Hey, even if it's anecdotal,
have you discerned an appreciable change
in people's attitude toward cloud as a result of COVID?
>> 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.
Then 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've asked a lot of things
and those discussions, anywhere between,
a few days to sometimes a few months.
Some customers would just (mumbles).
The volume of customers that's asking
about clouds 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, we can scale easily in the cloud.
And you mentioned the example of Chipotle.
And while that was an engagement that we had, obviously
before the COVID,
they are very impressed with what they were able to do.
They came in and (mumbles) and team,
had budgeted about two weeks to get started
and set up everything so that they can build
on top of that, their automations.
And they chose wisely through starting 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-prem.
>> Well, you (mumbles) all about automation,
and so is 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 to the cube
and explaining sort of your cloud angle,
really appreciate your time.
>> Thank you very much, Dave, its a pleasure to be here.
>> All right and thank you for watching everybody.
More coverage on the RPA market analysis.
Sort of digging into UIpath recent announcements.
This is Dave Vellante, for the cube.
Keep it right there,
will be right back right after the short break.