The 2^nd UiPath Developer Conference gave the impression that RPA has become mainstream. The conference opened with a welcome message from Raghu Subramanian, President and CEO, UiPath India, who said, “The fourth industrial revolution is evolving exponentially. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance. Today, we will discuss more on how India can leverage this disruption and take lead for the world.”

India is the global hub for RPA

India has been growing in importance in the UiPath scheme of things not only in terms of the domestic business but also in terms of ecosystem development efforts and presence of key functions such as global tech support, R&D and product engineering, and customer success functions.

Bobby Patrick, CMO, UiPath, said that there are 75,000 UiPath certification holders in India, which is 3x more than any other country. With the presence of global captives and BPM industry in the country, it makes India the global hub of RPA. He alluded to various recent strides made by UiPath in terms of mindshare and customer interest: rating of 4.5 based on 321 reviews in Gartner Peer Insights, ranked No.1 in G2 Crowd making it the Best RPA Solution of the Year, ranked No. 18 among Top 50 Products for Enterprise, ranked No. 26 in Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and No. 12 in Forbes Cloud 100.

RPA is Leading the GigaBot Economy

With RPA pervading all domains in the enterprise, Bobby Patrick also advanced the idea of enterprises having a robotics operations center (ROC) in the same way they have security operations centre and network operations center. His greater point was about the role of RPA in business transformation in a digital world wherein digital workers (software robots) would work alongside human workers. He calls it the GigaBot Economy with people and robots working together across borders and integrated with distributed ledgers.

RPA will be mainstream by 2020. Get automation-ready

According to Gartner, RPA will drive the adoption of the more buzz causing trends-AI & Blockchain. The next two years are going to see huge adoption of RPA to drive business transformation.

UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines said in his closing keynote. “Our vision is to drive enterprise wide RPA --which we have already implemented for a few global clients ---to the first 100 enterprise clients, generating on average 100,000 hours saving for each client.”

UiPath is focused on evolving an aggressive product roadmap to achieve enterprise-wide adoption. The highlights of key capabilities sought by enterprises are:

·      Make RPA on cloud simpler. Just plug in to the UiPath RPA cloud and automate.  Track & manage software robots anytime anywhere from the mobile

·      Move from atomic level process automation to automating the larger business processes under RPA and enabling digital transformation of the organizations.

·      Smart machine learning based data capture will improve accuracy and deliver smarter insights.

·      Capture business analytics. For example, go beyond capturing data like “10 bots ran 100 jobs last night” to how many invoices were processed, what was the added efficiency, etc.

·      Robots that learn skills to augment humans and working alongside them.

·      Delivering better customer experience

In keeping with these requirements, Param Kahlon, Chief Product Officer, UiPath outlined the key features of the UiPath platform roadmap in 2019 to include the following: Human Robot collaboration, Smart scheduling & Analytics, Self-service licensing, Smart capture, Robotic platform as a service, and Embedded intelligence.

Academic Alliance Program in India, Training 500,000 students by 2022

A day before the developer conference at the first global UiPath Academic Summit, UiPath rolled out its Academic Alliance program in India announcing partnerships with ICT Academy of Kerala, Bennett University, NTTF, and Trident Academy of Technology.

Globally, the UiPath Academic Alliance program envisions an inclusive workforce fluent in automation technologies and empowered to find engaging, creative, and strategic careers. UiPath Academic Alliance Program will function globally to serve more than one million students across 1000+ universities in the next three years.

The stated mission of the UiPath Academic Alliances program is to prepare the society for maximal employment. The program is designed to craft the premier global RPA knowledge ecosystem together by tapping into the potential of universities, mobilizing current professionals across the globe, embracing diversity, and educating youth.

Said Raghu Subramanian, President and CEO- India, UiPath, “The UiPath Academic Alliance Program is preparing our communities for in-demand automation jobs. To this end, we are training, certifying, and engaging a large target group, including: university students, educators, experienced professionals, traditionally underrepresented groups, and youth.”

Adds Alok Shrivastava, VP, Learning, UiPath, " We see there is a massive skills gap when it comes to RPA and this program will bridge that gap and foster greater industry-institute collaboration by enabling RPA skill-sets that in turn will lead to an uptick in terms of RPA developers."

Following are the MOU’s signed under the UiPath Academic Alliance’s program:

·      ICT Academy of Kerala and UiPath to jointly work on taking program benefits to 6-10k students and train 500+ educators in next 3 years’ time. ICT Academy will also run a dedicated training program to help students get internships or fulltime jobs with companies looking at hiring students with RPA skills.

·      Bennett University (NCR, India) is a research-driven University and promoted by Times Group (India’s largest media conglomerate ). As part of the engagement, students of Bennett would be able to take up - RPA Design & Development course from the coming semester and will also help us take the program to 50+ neighboring colleges.

·      Nettur Technical Training Foundation (NTTF India) and UiPath to work together to help youth skill up for RPA Ecosystem. NTTF will offer UiPath RPA course to students undergoing diploma programs and extend the benefit to alumni base.

·      Trident Academy of Technology, Bhubaneshwar to set up the first Automation Educator Academy to help scale  RPA adoption by Skilling Educators. 200+ educators to be ramped up in 2019