Ashish Nangla, the CTO of OpenBots, comes from an extensive IT and automation background and is a renowned subject matter expert in User Experience, AI, ML, RPA, and similar topics. Nangla believes that the RPA market was a natural fit for an open source model since, unlike other enterprise software, most commercial RPA software requires extensive implementation, maintenance, and support services on top of license costs. “OpenBots is our attempt to fulfill a promise,” said Nangla. “We want everyone to be able to create enterprise-grade simple to complex automations, very quickly, with little effort, and at very little cost. Our slogan ‘Open Source Automation for All’ explains our initiative very clearly. We want the democratization of automation and the widespread availability of the tools.”

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Ashish Nangla: [00:00:00] Now that we are willing to our cycles of sales and implementations. I am surprised that most of our clients are actually large companies, that they have billion dollar corporations with all their tools. And then I asked myself after these zoom calls about you're a billion dollar company, why are you talking to me? And then it looks like they also struggled with the same. The way calculations, when they open up the Excel sheet and they put in the license fee, the number of rules that qualify or come in agreements are very, very few. And they themselves are also looking at open source.

[00:00:45] Thank you for listening to Ivy podcast, where we feature weekly leadership conversations. With thought leaders and industry experts. Now here's your host Courtney Domingas

[00:01:06] [00:01:00] Cortney Dominguez: [00:01:06] Ashish. Welcome to the Ivy Podcast. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me today.

[00:01:11] Ashish Nangla: [00:01:11] Thank you so much for having me over.

[00:01:13] Cortney Dominguez: [00:01:13] Can you please tell everybody a little bit about your background and also about Open Boxing?

[00:01:17] Ashish Nangla: [00:01:17] Sure I am sheesh and I left. I am the CTO and co-founder for open boxing. Open Box is essentially an RPO open source RPA tool. It's now available in the market. We have launched in about November, early November. Myself, I've been in ID services, Nike consulting for a long, long time, about 45 years now. Did gigs for large insurance companies, financial services, banks, high level architecture in terms of creating solutions as well as did a lot of in the later years I started doing a lot of emerging tech, especially around EIS, RPA, IoT a whole bunch of new technologies that started breaking ground and look very promising. They're kind of starting to become mainstream now. RPA was definitely one of them. RPA was the early contender and looked like it had better ROI for most of the other results and more definite business cases and use cases for us when we started implementing RPA and earlier we did have to explain what RPA was and things, but at the end, RPA took off very well. It was understood by the business community better. And they started appreciating what RPA can do. And I thought this could become a business by itself and not just part of some services that, an independent thing altogether.

[00:02:53] Cortney Dominguez: [00:02:53] So you and I are passionate about RPA, and we deal with it every day. According to Gartner Global RPA revenue is projected to reach $1.8,-1,9 million this year in 2021. And that's an increase of almost 20% over 2020. And the growth rate is expected to continue by double digits into 2024, despite this, and despite you and I living and breathing this every day, there are still companies out there that are exploring this technology and haven't really leveraged it yet. So maybe can you describe RPA and also some of the benefits it can bring to an organization.

[00:03:32] Ashish Nangla: [00:03:32] Absolutely. I mean, RPA, when we describe RPA or another, when