Welcome to more of our special coverage of the UiPath customer conference, taking place this week in Las Vegas. Following the initial installment — our coverage of the company’s product, partnership, and customer successes — two of our analysts with a focus on automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and Cloud Wars Horizon companies got together to talk about the latest from the automation and robotic process automation (RPA) supplier.
The discussion brings together Acceleration Economy founding analyst and VP Aaron Back and Cloud Wars Horizon host Tom Smith, who has covered UiPath extensively in the last several months.
Highlights
00:55 — For context, Tom recaps a number of the announcements and development from the conference, including:
- New products: browser-based automation development tools to simplify app-building; enhanced discovery functionality that includes comparisons of ROI estimates and actual outcomes; and an automation suite with high availability/disaster recovery (DR) support for companies that host their own automation systems
- Alliances: UiPath expanded its relationship with Microsoft to bring more automation to Microsoft Office and the overall Microsoft ecosystem (including Azure)
- Customer wins
02:08 — Aaron says what really struck him about the product was the DR option for companies hosting their own automations; he noted if a company has its electricity go out or needs to switch over to an alternate power source, it needs redundancy and fail-safe capability because automation apps might be relying on inbound data other systems or customers and can’t afford to have that interrupted. They also can’t afford the productivity hit of having employees offline.
05:11 — While many new customers are going to the cloud, there’s an installed base of on-premises automation customers, and Aaron notes that many customers operate in a hybrid cloud mode spanning public and private clouds, so these DR capabilities are critical for them.
05:30 — Regarding the Microsoft partnership, Aaron says it continues a trend of major software firms (notably Oracle as well) partnering with Microsoft and aligning themselves with Azure. “It really shows the breadth Microsoft is trying to offer where a customer can bring their own solution versus having to be beholden to the Microsoft stack,” he says.
05:45 — Tom highlights a couple of impressive customer successes: Telecom provider Orange Spain said it saved more than 100,000 hours leveraging bots, and that bots are doing the work of 953 full-time-equivalent employees.
06:30 — Aaron: “That’s crazy. That’s almost mind-blowing if you think about it in terms of savings, efficiencies.”
07:30 — EY, the accounting and consulting giant, said it has 125,000 robot users. Tom and Aaron agree that is likely the biggest bot deployment there is — or at least that they’ve encountered. Aaron: “That’s a phenomenal achievement in my mind.”
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