(energetic music) >> Live from Miami Beach, Florida. It's theCUBE covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome to Miami everybody. This is theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering the UiPathForward Americas conference. UiPath is a company that has come out of nowhere, really. And, is a leader in robotic process automation, RPA. It really is about software robots. I am Dave Vellante and I am here with Stu Miniman. We have one day of coverage, Stu. We are all over the place this weekend. Aren't we? Stu and I were in Orlando earlier. Flew down. Quick flight to Miami and we're getting the Kool-Aid injection from the RPA crowd. We're at the Fontainebleau in Miami. Kind of cool hotel. Stu you might remember, I am sure, you do, several years ago we did the very first .NEXT tour. .NEXT from Nutanix at this event. About this same size, maybe a little smaller. This is a little bigger. >> Dave, this is probably twice the size, about 1,500 people here. I remember about a year ago you were, started buzzing about RPA. Big growth in the market, you know really enjoyed getting into the keynote here. You know, you said we were at splunk and data was at the center of everything, and the CEO here for (mumbles), it's automation first. We talked about mobile first, cloud first, automation first. I know we got a lot of things we want to talk about because you know, I think back through my career, and I know you do too, automation is something we've been talking about for years. We struggle with it. There's challenges there, but there's a lot of things coming together and that's why we have this new era that RPA is striking at to really explode this market. >> Yeah, so I made a little prediction that I put out on Twitter, I'll share with folks. I said there's a wide and a gap between the number of jobs available worldwide and the number for people to fill them. That's something that we know. And there's a productivity gap. And the numbers aren't showing up. We're not seeing bump-ups in productivity even though spending on technology is kind of through the roof. Robotic Process Automation is going to become a fundamental component of closing that gap because companies, as part of the digital process transformation, they want to automate. The market today is around a billion. We see it growing 10 x over the next five to seven years. We're going to have some analysts on today from Forester, we'll dig into that a little bit, they cover this market really, really closely. So, we're hearing a lot more about RPA. We heard it last week at Infor, Charles Phillips was a big proponent of this. UiPath has been in this business now for a few years. It came out of Romania. Daniel Dines, former Microsoft executive, very interesting fellow. First time I've seen him speak. We're going to meet him today. He is a techy. Comes on stage with a T-shirt, you know. He's very sort of thoughtful, he's talking about open, about culture, about having fun. Really dedicated to listening to customers and growing this business. He said, he gave us a data point that they went from nothing, just a couple of million dollars, two years ago. They'll do 140 million. They're doing 140 million now in annual reccurring revenue. On their way to 200. I would estimate, they'll probably get there. If not by the end of year, probably by the first quarter next year. So let's take look at some of the things that we heard in the keynote. We heard from customers. A lot of partners here. Seen a lot of the big SIs diving in. That's always a sign of big markets. What did you learn today at the keynotes? >> Yeah, Dave, first thing there is definitely, one of the push backs about automation is, "Oh wait what is that "going to do for jobs?" You touched on it. There's a lot of staff they threw out. They said that RPA can really bring, you know, 75% productivity improvement because we know productivity improvement kind of stalled out over all in the market. And, what we want to do is get rid of mundane tasks. Dave, I spent a long time of my career helping to get, you know, how to we get infrastructure simpler? How do we get rid of those routine things? The storage robe they said if you were configuring LUNs, you need to go find other jobs. If you were networking certain basic things, we're going to automate that with software. But there are things that the automation are going to be able to do, so that you can be more creative. You can spend more time doing some higher level functions. And that's where we have a skills gap. I'm excited we're going to have Tom Clancy, who you and I know. I've got his book on the shelf and not Tom Clancy the fiction author, but you know the Tom Clancy who has done certifications and education through storage and cloud and now how do we get people ready for this next wave of how you can do people and machines. One of my favorite events, Dave, that we ever did was the Second Machine Age with MIT in London. Talking about it's really people plus machines, is really where you're going to get that boom. You've interviewed Garry Kasparov on this topic and it's just fascinating and it really excites me as someone, I mean, I've lived with my computers all my life and just as a technologist, I'm optimistic at how, you know, the two sides together can be much more powerful than either alone. >> Well, it's an important topic Stu. A lot of the shows that we go to, the vendors don't want to talk about that. "Oh, we don't want to talk about displacing humans." UiPath's perspective on that, and we'll poke them a little on that is, "That's old news. "People are happy because they're replacing their 'mundane tasks.'" And while that's true, there's some action on Twitter. (mumbles name) just tweeted out, replying to some of the stuff that we were talking about here, in the hashtag, which is UiPathForward, #UiPathForward, "Automation displaces unskilled workers, "that's the crux of the problem. "We need best algorithms to automate re-training and "re-skilling of workers. "That's what we need the most for best socio-economic "outcomes, in parallel to automation through "algorithm driven machines," he's right. That gap, and we talked about this at 2MA, is it going to be a creativity gap? It's an education issue, it's an education challenge. 'Cause you just don't want to displace, unskilled workers, we want to re-train people. >> Right, absolutely. You could have this hollowing out of the market place otherwise, where you have really low paid workers on the one end, and you have really high-end creative workers but the middle, you know, the middle class workers could be displaced if they are not re-trained, they're not put forward. The World Economic Forum actually said that this automation is going to create 60-million net new jobs. Now, 60-million, it sounds like a big number, but it is a large global workforce. And, actually Dave, one of the things that really struck me is, not only do you have a Romanian founder but up on stage we had, a Japanese customer giving a video in Japanese with the subtitles in English. Not something that you typically see at a U.S. show. Very global, in their reach. You talked about the community and very open source focus of something we've seen. This is how software grows very fast as you get those people working. It's something I want to understand. They've got, the UiPath that's 2,000 customers but they've got 114,000 certified RPA developers. So, I'm like, okay, wait. Those numbers don't make sense to me yet, but I'm sure our guests are going to be able to explain them. >> And, so you're right about the need for education. I was impressed that UiPath is actually spending some of it the money that it's raised. This company, just did a monster raise, 225-million. We had Carl Ashenbach on in theCUBE studio to talk about that. Jeff Freck interviewed him last week. You can find that interview on our YouTube play list and I think on out website as well. But they invested, I think it was 10-million dollars with the goal of training a million students in the next three years. They've hired Tom Clancy, who we know from the old EMC education world. EMC training and education world. So they got a pro in here who knows to scale training. So that's huge. They've also started a 20-million investment fund investing in start ups and eco-system companies, so they're putting their money where their mouth is. The company has raised over 400-million dollars to date. They've got a 3-billion dollar evaluation. Some of the other things we've heard from the keynote today, um, they've got about 1,400 employees which is way up. They were just 270, I believe, last year. And they're claiming, and I think it's probably true, they're the fastest growing enterprise software company in history, which is kind of astounding. Like you said, given that they came out of Romania, this global company maybe that's part of the reason why. >> I mean, Dave, they said his goal is they're going to have 4,000 employees by 2019. Wait, there are a software company and they raised huge amounts of money. AS you said, they are a triple unicorn with a three billion dollar valuation. Why does a software company need so many employees? And 3,000, at least 3,000 of those are going to be technical because this is intricate. This is not push button simplicity. There's training that needs to happen. How much do they need to engage? How much of this is vertical knowledge that they need to get? I was at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago. Microsoft is going really deep vertically because AI requires specialized knowledge in each verticals. How much of that is needed from RPA? You've got a little booklet that they have of some basic 101 of the RPA skills. >> I don't know if you can see this, but... Is that the right camera? So, it's this kind of robot pack. It's kind of fun. Kind of go through, it says, you got to reliable friend you can automate, you know, sending them a little birthday wish. They got QR codes in the back you can download it. You know, waiters so you can order online food. There's something called Tackle, for you fantasy football players who help you sort of automate your fantasy football picks. Which is kind of cool. So, that's fun. There's fun culture here, but really it's about digital transformation and driving it to the heart of process automation. Daniel Dines, talked about taking things from hours to minutes, from sort of accurate to perfectly accurate. You know, slow to fast. From very time consuming to automated. So, he puts forth this vision of automation first. He talked about the waves, main frames, you know the traditional waves client server, internet, etc. And then, you know I really want to poke at this and dig into it a little bit. He talked about a computer vision and that seemed to be a technical enabler. So, I'm envisioning this sort of computer vision, this visual, this ability to visualize a robot, to visualize what's happening on the screen, and then a studio to be able to program these things. I think those are a couple of the components I discerned. But, it's really about a cultural shift, a mind shift, is what Daniel talked about, towards an automation first opportunity. >> And Dave, one of the things you said right there... Three things, the convergence of computer vision, the Summer of AI, and what he meant by that is that we've lived through a bunch of winters. And we've been talking about this. And, then the business.. >> Ice age of a, uh... >> Business, process, automation together, those put together and we can create that automation first era. And, he talked about... We've been talking about automation since the creation of the first computer. So, it's not a new idea. Just like, you know we've been talking on theCUBE for years. You know, data science isn't a new thing. We sometimes give these things new terms like RPA. But, I love digging into why these are real, and just as we've seen these are real indicators, you know, intelligence with like, whether you call it AI or ML, are doing things in various environments that we could not do in the past. Just borders of magnitude, more processing, data is more important. We could do more there. You know, are we on the cusp of really automation. being able to deliver on the things that we've been trying to talk about a couple of generations? >> So a couple of other stats that I thought were interesting. Daniel put forth a vision of one robot for every person to use. A computer for every person. A chicken for every pot, kind of thing (laughs) So, that was kind of cool. >> "PC for every person," Bill Gates. >> Right, an open and free mind set, so he talked a about, Daniel talked about of an era of openness. And UiPath has a market place where all the automations. you can put automations in there, they're all free to use. So, they're making money on the software and not on the automation. So, they really have this... He said, "We're making our competitors better. "They're copying what we're doing, "and we think that's a good thing. "Because it's going to help change the world." It's about affecting society, so the rising tides lift all boats. >> Yeah Dave, it reminds me a lot of, you know, you look at GitHub, you look at Docker Hub. There's lots of places. This is where code lives in these open market places. You know, not quite like the AWS or IBM market places where you can you can just buy software, but the question is how many developers get in there. They say they got 250,000 community members already there. So, and already what do they have? I think hundreds of processes that are built in there, so that will be a good metric we can see to how fast that scales. >> We had heard from a couple of customers, and Wells Fargo was up there, and United Health. Mr. Yamomoto from SNBC, they have 1,000 robots. So, they are really completely transforming their organization. We heard from a partner, Data Robot, Jeremy Atchins, somebody who's been on theCUBE before, Data Robot. They showed an automated loan processing where you could go in, talk to a chat bot and within minutes get qualified for a loan. I don't know if you noticed the loan amount was $7,000 and the interest rate was 13.6% so the applicant, really, must not of had great credit history. Cause that's kind of loan shark rates, but anyway, it was kind of a cool demo with the back end data robot munging all the data, doing whatever they had to do, transferring through a CSV into the software robot and then making that decision. So, that was kind of cool, those integrations seemed to be pretty key. I want to learn more about that. >> I mean it reminds me of chat box have been hot in a lot of areas lately, as how we can improve customer support and automate things on infrastructure in the likes of, we'll see how those intersections meet. >> Yeah, so we're going to be covering this all day. We got technologists coming on, customers, partners. Stu and I will be jamming. He's @Stu and I'm @Dvellante. Shoot us any questions, comments. Thanks for the ones we've had so far. We're here at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. Pretty crazy hotel. A lot of history here. A lot of pictures of Frank Sinatra on the wall. Keep it right there, buddy. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. (energetic music)