Rushabh is currently Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, Customer Success & Operations at Automation Anywhere. At Automation Anywhere, these people perform repetitive manual tasks by making end to end business processes more efficient and productive. They have built the worlds most advanced digital workforce platform, which combines robotic process automation, which will go into great detail today, artificial intelligence and machine learning and analytics. With over 2000 partners, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services, and Salesforce, automation anywhere has operations in almost every country in the world.
Rushabh’s 19 years of experience includes:
He began his career as a Software Engineer in Siebel Systems. Right after his first job, Rushabh started this organization Automation Anywhere with other 3 of the founders. It’s been 16-17 years to Automation Anywhere is growing successfully.
At Automation Anywhere, they believe that people who have time to create, think, and discover build great companies. That's why they have dedicated the last decade to driving the adoption of robotic process automation technology in leading Financial Services, BPO, Healthcare, Technology, and Insurance companies—to name a few—across more than 90 countries. Their intelligent process robots transform the way businesses operate, delivering complex business and IT work across a range of processes including procure-to-pay, quote-to-cash, HR administration, claims processing, and thousands of other front and back office processes.
Transcripts: Part 2 - Interview of Rushabh Parmani, Co-Founder & Executive Vice President Automation Anywhere
Disclaimer to the Transcripts:
The transcript was generated using an Artificial Intelligence program and then scanned over; we would like to thank you in advance for understanding that there might be some inaccuracies. While reading, one might also notice that there are times were the sentences are not grammatically correct and due to changes in advertisements, the timestamps do not always align with the show. We are keeping the text as true to the interview as possible and hope that the transcript can be used for a reference in conjunction with the Podcast audio. Thank you and enjoy.
This is Silicon Valley Tech behind the scenes a podcast hosted by Shawn Flynn and Sunil S. Ranka. Here's where we talk to the real heroes, to find out how decisions are made, and how they're executed to create the thriving businesses of tomorrow.
Rushabh Parmani 0:19
Thousands of miles away, that gives you a tremendous sense of confidence. So that was the first aha moment in a very, very small environment, small company that we were back then. And then obviously, along the way, many aha moments came as we rolled out new products in our new geographies that we opened up the first million dollar deal, the $100,000 deal is the first real different products anytime you have the first sale of that first version obviously gives you that confidence, the first customer going on stage and speaking about you feel so good because till then, only you who have spoken right and when you have somebody else who has nothing to do with you come then talk and praise is about your product, your service your people that gives you so much satisfaction and the energy to go even more.
Shawn Flynn 1:06
We're going to continue where we left off last week. Now last week we talked about the journey from a company grown from four people to over 2300 in 16 years. We talked about not taking any money and being sustainable and profitable for 10 years with exceptional growth. We talked about having 1300 global partners and you know, how should one look at customer service now and in the future. But on this week's episode, we go even further and we talk about what's going to happen post-COVID with automation and how it's going to help companies. We talk about what happens when a management team makes an unpopular decision, but still knows they have to implement it. We talked about how businesses are going to adapt in the coming years with implementing new technologies, and much more. So let's start today's episode of Silicon Valley Tech.
Sunil Ranka 1:59
Somebody new and somebody listening to this podcast and they want to start on an RPA journey, what would be your advice?
Shawn Flynn 2:08
And before that are other for our listeners, some of them might not be familiar with some of the terms used RPA robotic process automation, you give us just a two-sentence definition of that for your answer.
Rushabh Parmani 2:20 Yes, that would be a good start. We are in a phase called RPA which is Robotic Process Automation, essentially, the software that does all the work that a human does in a repetitive fashion over and over again. And that's the business that we are in. We have millions of transactions processed on a daily basis, which don't require too much sort of intelligence but it is just moving of data across various applications. And that's where RPA comes in very handy. It's a very fast-growing market. It's a very attractive market because it's a classic supply-demand problem today. The demand from customers is huge supply from the vendors and partners are picking up but it's not close to what customers need. So there is a tremendous opportunity for people who want to grow the sales in the RPA space. We tie with a lot of universities where RPA is part of the curriculum, actually, that obviously gives a tremendous boost to the students who take that course and come out and graduate and either take an internship or a job, it gives them that edge for sure. If you are a student, or if you are searching the market for the job RPA developer, there are lots and lots of roles even in the RPA. Right, so one somebody was developing the bot somebody who is not doing the support on those bots, somebody who is designing a solution around the RPA somebody who can look at the opportunities and what are the best opportunities to automate. Right? I mean, that is a very rare skill as well. There are lots of opportunities in that if you are an individual person and we have lots of courses on our website. There's lots of material on the web just in general on RPA. Most courses are free, you can go learn, educate yourselves and improve your chances dramatically to enhance your career in RPA. And if you are a small consulting firm, and if you haven't ventured into the IP, I mean, obviously there are, you can partner with one of the vendors and offer your RPA expertise. And, again, as I said, customers are looking for this expertise. There's just not enough people in the market to provide this expertise. So there are lots of opportunities.
Sunil Ranka 4:29
Rushabh, this is great. If I'm a CIO-CXO. And who wants to take up the journey of automation within my organization? What are the different things I should be doing?
Rushabh Parmani 4:39
So first and foremost, being a CXO in an organization and thinking automation. That's the first big step that we encourage people to take. Because often automation comes with a lot of roadblocks, mainly in terms of people because it requires change. Automation is a synonym to change and all of us don't like change. To the fact that you are thinking automation, that is a very big step, because coming top-down will definitely help create that mindset across your organization. The first one of the things that we encourage the CXO's, to do a spread the awareness and make people less fear about automation, you know, help them embrace the automation, encourage them to build automation, deploy automation in any form in any capacity, because when they see it, working right in front of them, helping them moving and letting them do more value-added work. They themselves are the champions and evangelists who will take this to the next level, because as a CIO, all you can do is provide the infrastructure and the support but your entire organization and the people who are doing this automation are the ones who are going to take it further and you need them on their side. This is not one of those, you know, enterprise software type of deployment that you do it and then they're using it on a day to day basis. People can build automation every single day and come up with new ideas on how you can connect all these different systems come up with solution that you haven't even thought for come up with profit. There are ways where you can save costs. But there are also ways where you can make profits and generate revenues in automation ideas in, you know, generate revenues as well.
So from a CXO point of view, you know, enabling the organization and setting it up for the success is number one criteria. And then obviously, what you want to do, if you are truly thinking strategic, then you need to look at automation platforms that provide you a complete comprehensive solution from front office to back office to middle office to intelligent insights, all of that together. And something that is, you know, easy to adopt, because as it is you have enough applications that we all touch. If there is one more application then it's hard enough, it's not gonna fly. It has to be very frictionless. Very easy. Maybe even cloud-based web-based, those things make much more difference in today's world, especially in millennials, where you want to make things easy for them to adopting. So a combination of those things as a CXO for sure you should look into. And the other thing is, obviously to footprint, the footprint of the ecosystem that can help you support. Do you want to do this yourself? We want to do it with the RPA vendor? Do you want to do it as a combination of your own team RPA vendor and a partner together? Those are some of the questions that may not happen on the initial ground, but it will come and you need to be prepared to think through those questions as well because that will define that ecosystem is formed
correctly, will decide how far you go and what kind of impact do you see in your organization. So thinking through all the steps right from inception, to killing it and to transforming your organization together as a holistic view will definitely help define how successful your journey is going to be.
Shawn Flynn 8:02
So to implement this technology. I would gather that some people might be a little worried, a little scared that their jobs might be replaced. But at the same time, if they don't upgrade their systems upgrade how they do business, their companies themselves as a whole might become obsolete. How does one consider implement this technology and making maybe those hard decisions?
Rushabh Parmani 8:24
I think what we have learned last three months during this pandemic, is that the adoption and inclineness of large organization to move to cloud has accelerated significantly, something even we did not anticipate, we thought it will take a new course and some of these large enterprises including banks and healthcare companies, but those discussions happen to speak to a lot of these CXO's all the time from large organization and their appetite for cloud and incliness towards that is increasing dramatically. So in order to adopt the RPA in a very rapid manner, especially given that everybody is always working from home, things need to be simple. And whatever we as a vendor can do to make things frictionless for a customer will always. And this adoption of cloud is one of the things that we are seeing picking up big time in the market. Our latest product is cloud-native, that helps a lot. We call it A2019. So it's literally within minutes, you can just go and you know, start your automation journey, because it's all SAP-based cloud-based implementation. So that definitely will play a big role. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, as well, there is always this fear about job loss when it comes to automation. But I think that has gone away to certain extent over the last few years. In early days. It used to be the case but now people have realized that it's not about that I think what automation brings is the opportunity as an organization that you'd never had access to before, because you just never had that kind of bandwidth. So right now it's about unlocking those opportunities, and figuring out what is the right fit for your business. Because everybody in a way struggling during this tough times of code situation, you have to find the right opportunity with automation that can help you fight your competition in your space, you can find those revenue-generating opportunities in a very quick time that will tremendously give you a boost as an organized and we are actually seeing some of those things, especially in pharmaceutical business, where you can take the drug to the market, we went two months earlier, that has an impact, obviously on that organized a pro-business point of view, but on humanity, where we get access to those drugs much faster. So we have seen extreme cases of this implementation. And I think some of the things that we are doing, we feel very good about it as a Technology Roadmap, and I see that evolving, obviously more and more of AI you know, sort of being built into the product, product telling you what you should do, as opposed to you telling, that's going to be the sort of the theme for next several years. And we are already not innovating along those lines where you know, a lot of prescriptive sort of steps to the customer saying that these are the things you should be doing. And that will go a long way, in our view.
Shawn Flynn 11:23
Now, in this interview, we've talked about SoftBank, you've talked about robotic process automation, we've talked about growing a company from four people to you know, having 1300 global partners, and we've covered so much. What's one thing that we haven't talked about that you'd want our listeners to take away from this interview?
Rushabh Parmani 11:41
What I would highly encourage all the listeners is to think what automation can do to your life, your organization, your ecosystem that you are in, because we truly believe that an idea can come from anywhere. What that means is For example, we have this concept of Bot Store, we let anyone and everyone around the world, an individual developer to a large organization, to publish their bots on our bot store where millions of people can access it. Now, it can be a simple idea that can save you two hours, or it can be a groundbreaking idea that can help define a new way of doing work completely. So what I would encourage is think of ways where automation can truly impact life. So you have all the tools available to get yourself acquainted with the technology, the market space, its potential, etc. that thinking from an automation microscope and a lab is super important. And if you can do that, I think you will be very, very valuable player wherever you go. Whichever team you are part of as long as you can. We are in automation space obviously, I can talk very passionately about automation. And if you start thinking of looking at any process with an automation lens, it puts you in a different In category compared to the rest of your peers and that is one thing I would encourage all the listeners to do is don't get stuck into this tactical things or some things which is right in front of you but see what you can do to impact the organized and ecosystem you are by thinking automation. And if you keep thinking you will teach two of your colleagues your entire team your organization to think automation and that will have a far far better impact than just you know, creating certain skills in RPA. Because you know, that's very tactical that anybody will be doing any but this will truly change lives. In my opinion, and I've seen it with my own eyes right in front of a lot of my customers partners, a lot of my employees my own life, it because when you think through automation lens, you think differently, and that's one piece of advice from myself.
Shawn Flynn 13:49
And Rushabh, if anyone wants to learn more about you, your company, what you're working on, what's the best way to go about doing it
Rushabh Parmani 13:55
The best way to do go about doing it is you know, go to automationanywhere.com the first and foremost is we have Automation Anywhere University which is open to all, we have apeople community, which is again open to all the thousands of our users sharing their ideas, thoughts and issues and concerns and people responding and helping each other out. There is not a curriculum, lots of material on our website on our portal. So I think that's the best way to talk if you want to learn more.
Sunil Ranka 14:26
Rushabh as you rightly said, customers are the most important part of any journey you've been part of the customer success, in my opinion, one of the most important part of the organization's success
Rushabh Parmani 14:38
To being in this role leading the customer success organization for automation anywhere. I consider myself very fortunate because what that does is it gives me complete 360 degree view of the customer, why they want RPA to know how they go about choosing it, how they go about implementing initial successes and how they go about thinking bigger from that point of view, and what all of those mean to automation anywhere, because we have to do a lot of things to help them support and scale and grow in their journey as well. So connecting all those dots together, obviously gives me a tremendous, you know, view and a line of sight across many, many different intersections and lots of intelligence that comes from that exercise. That's a very fortunate position to be in, you are very close to the technology, you are very close to the partner, you're very close to the customer ecosystem and rest of our organization. And I think what we have seen in early days, people used to think you know, what, when RPA was not too mature in terms of its awareness and as a market, people used to take this crawl, walk run type of approach where you want to do something small. When you see that return, then only you go to the next step and next step, And so on, so forth. And now we have enough customer success stories out there in the market where people have been tremendous benefits, not just in terms of savings and dollars, but the kind of things they could never do before. And that has opened up opportunities for our customers in terms of growing big tool. And doing so only helps them because Think of it this way. If I take a crawl, walk run approach, and I have faced that out over the years, then my grand phase comes in the 30. I'm not forcing myself to do something different, something drastic in the first year. And nowadays, we are seeing a lot of our customers taking those bold decisions in early part of the RPA journey and they are paying off because there are always the early adopter's people who want to not go by the status quo and we only challenge situation that you are in and people who are aggressive who want to be ahead in the competition. And RPA is one of the biggest levers that you can use to get there. So that one thing we are seeing a clear difference in the market where people are going big on get go and using RPA at the front and center of strategy in the journey. And obviously from our point of view you you know, we learn every single implementation as we go along and we are there to help them across all fronts from Customer Success point of view. And we'll continue to do so.
Shawn Flynn 17:30
Fantastic and Rushabh from Sunil and myself. We want to thank you for your time today on Silicon Valley Tech.
Sunil Ranka 17:37
Thank you so much, Rushabh. It was a pleasure talking to you.
Rushabh Parmani 17:40
Thank you guys.
Outro 17:43
Thank you for listening to Silicon Valley Tech behind the scenes. To find out more contact the team or to be a guest on the show, visit our website at svtechpodcast.com. We look forward to hearing from you and remember to support the show by leaving a review to encourage us to keep creating great content like this.This is Silicon Valley Tech behind the scenes a podcast hosted by Shawn Flynn and Sunil S. Ranka. Here's where we talk to the real heroes, to find out how decisions are made, and how they're executed to create the thriving businesses of tomorrow.
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