Intro

Michael: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is episode 60 with guest, Antti Karjalainen, a co-founder and CEO of RoboCorp.

RoboCorp is a vendor in the RPA or Robotic Process Automation software market. It’s a type of software that allows businesses to automate repetitive and routine tasks typically done by humans through the use of software bots or robots. These tasks can include things like data entry or customer service interactions. If you’ve ever gone to a website and a chatbot pops up – that might be powered by RPA.

As you can imagine this software market is growing rapidly as more businesses are looking to automate their processes and improve efficiency. RoboCorp is a newer business than I thought at first, given how thoroughly they’ve established a leadership position in this very competitive market. Antti has a lot of great insights, so without further ado, let’s cut to the interview. Antti, welcome to the Underdogs podcast.

Antti: Thank you, Mike.

Origin

Michael: So, no founder interview is complete unless we hear the origin story. I take it as a young undergraduate student, you probably didn’t predict your career in RPA. So, how did you get into the industry and how did RoboCorp get its activation energy?

Antti: Yeah. I mean, that’s a long path obviously when we talk about these kind of founding stories. It all started with me just by doing software engineering work after graduating. And I ran a small consulting company around software engineering. And with that, we used to do a lot of Q&A test automation with a project called Robot Framework. It is a python-based keyword-driven test automation framework. I got into that community while using it. It is based out of – well, the project came out of Nokia, so that’s why the Finnish roots.

I got into the community, started doing things around the open-source project, hosting events, stuff like that, and then, I bumped into RPA, which is starting to emerge and take off around 2016 and 2017. And I thought immediately that that has a lot of commonalities with the test automation. In test automation, you obviously drive a system to validate it, and in RPA, you drive a system to perform a business process. So, I thought that maybe Robot Framework could become the leading open-source community for RPA and started on that path eventually after my first company got acquired.

So, a few years later, I’m looking at the market and there’s this big competition emerged, raised a bunch of money, started growing really rapidly, and RPA was the fastest growing segment and Enterprise software for like three years in consecutive.

So, I thought that somebody needs to build an open-source solution for that, and I didn’t see any other person having the right connections to do it, so I decided to start on that path myself and that sort of lead into RoboCorp. I felt that I had to do it in a way.

Product

Michael:  What are the products that RoboCorp sells?

Antti: We sell one product, which is the Control Room. That’s the proprietary component in the stack. That’s the orchestration platform as we call it in RPA. That’s how you deploy the bots, manage them, govern them and manage user rights and so forth. So, it’s really a central piece in how RPA works and how the bots actually get to execute work.

And then, we have a bunch of other components in the stack. You know, namely the code open-source stack, which allows you to build a bot and run it. And then, obviously all the automation libraries that enable you to connect to various applications, from browsers to mainframes, to ERP systems. And then, we have the developer tooling on top of that which creates a good developer experience. So, anything really outside of the core control room platform is open source with us.

Low Code Strategy

Michael: One way that RoboCorp has been innovative I think is through the use of Low Code. And why do you think that Low Code is so critical in your market?

Antti: In RPA, you deal with different sorts of developer personas. Some are very technical, come from a developer background, others might come from a accounting background for instance. So, when RPA got popular, it was marketed as something that anyone can really use to build these bots. But then, as it got adopted into the Enterprise, it sort of went into more complex use cases, more mission-critical use cases. So, it became a automation professional domain.

We started out with the automation professional in mind and built this Robot Framework and Python-based tools for them and got initial success with them, but we soon realized that it’s too different for the developer persona to be targeting.

They expected to have a drag-and-drop interface in front of them. So, we started thinking, okay, how can we innovate and create something that’s actually meaningfully different in that space. And so, we built a local layer on top of our open-source stack, which allows you to create a local solution, but it generates code in the back end. So, we call it “Code Native Low-Code”.

So, you work on this drag-and-drop interface, you build the automation from individual steps, which might be like opening browser, clicking elements, etc., and in the backend it’s converting that real-time in the code. And back, if you edit the code, you’ll see it in the local as well.

So, that was just the market expectation, and we wanted to sort of not be an outlier there to be perceived as more difficult than the competition, while in real life it really isn’t.

But coming from a background where RPA developer might not have actually written a line of code, presenting them with a VS code editor is just too jarring of an experience. But I think we balanced it the right way, where we can still keep the both worlds next to each other, low-code and then pro-code, as we call it here.

And it has been a pretty interesting journey to build something that hasn’t been built before that way.

Community

Michael: Can you tell us a little bit about the community? You mentioned you started with an open-source project in Python – were you able to bootstrap that community into the RoboCorp community? And how is it going building that community out?

Antti: The Robot Framework Community is pretty extensive. I think the project gets around 1.5 million downloads a month from Python package index. So, it’s used extensively in end-to-end testing in Q&A. And initially, what we took out of that was all the integrations that had been built over the years.

So, we get to leverage this massive base of all these libraries that integrate into various systems that Robot Framework was used to test, started out building our own tooling. And sometimes, the test automation community doesn’t really overlap with the RPA community, so we had to start building our own community as well. Sometimes they do overlap. We have customers who are now consolidating their test automation engineering, first with the RPA engineering, for instance.

We have customers who are coming into our products because they know Robot Framework already, and so they’re experienced with the tech and have confidence in it. So, to a decree, this overlap in those communities, it feels like we are building these two parallel communities that overlap in parts – it’s like a Venn diagram in a way.

How Low-Code Impacts Onboarding

Michael: One of the areas I feel RoboCorp is doing a really good job is by reducing the friction to onboard people into both your community and also into the commercial engagement with RoboCorp. And I wonder if low-code is maybe a gateway for people who go into the pro-code area. But can you talk a little bit about how that journey works from getting newbies and getting them in to be RPA professionals and customers?

Antti: Yeah. For sure, low-code isn’t a big enabler there. You’re not staring at like a blank screen, but you have all these capabilities listed as actions that you can start dragging on a canvas. So, it’s something that pretty much anyone can start doing, and you don’t have to have an in-depth tutorial or training to be able to do that. So, it’s a big enabler.

And also, by the way, we see the test automation community now starting to leverage the automation studio, the local tool as well. It is definitely excitement – low-code. And for good reasons. I mean, you can frame out some solution that you have in mind in minutes rather than learning the syntax from scratch.

And then, when you want to refine the solution, you can go into the code and start customizing it, maybe building custom Python in the creations, Python keywords and so forth. It is actually something that I prefer to use even with my developer background. If I start a new project, I start it with the low-code tools frame it out, get the structure right, and then might go in the VS code and I finish it up. But it’s such a big step up in the ease of getting started that you don’t really need to install Python, bunch of libraries, figure out your Dev environment, all of that – that just goes away. That just gets easy, but both sides of the communi