>> Male: TheCUBE presents, UIPATH, Forward 5 brought to you by, UIPATH. >> Okay the party has started here at forward 5 UIPATH big customer event if you're watching the cube. We're wrapping up day one with the co-CE0 segment. Daniel Dines is here. He's the founder and Co-CEO of UIPATH and Rob Enslin, is co-CEO. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for spending some time with us. I know you're super busy. >> Thanks Dave. >> So I've been looking forward to this. Daniel you know I've followed the company for a long time. The really interesting path you took, to get to where you are today. How did you guys meet? And why did you decide to hire Rob? >> Male: (laughs) >> Rob: Well let me start. I uh, I was looking for a partner. Actually, in our work to your stand here, we are talking about how, how you feel in this job. You feel so alone. Because you are the center of all pressure points. And having a partner, having someone that has your back, it's kind of awesome. So I was looking for a partner. And our current friend, Carl Escenbach, he introduced us to each other, and we instantly clicked. And this is the type of job where it's uh either work well or it doesn't. It cannot be anything in the middle. >> Right, okay with Carl, we know Carl well. Awesome operator. Knows the business super well. So Rob, what attracted you to UIPATH? You had a great situation at google. You guys were growing like crazy. Why did you decide to come here? What did you see that attracted you? >> Yeah you know when I, when I went to google, I went to google because I really believed that data and AI was necessary for companies. And business is to be competitive in the future. And we did some great stuff at google cloud in the 3 years. But I knew UIPATH from a couple of years ago when they were mainly a RPA space. And I just felt that there was a place in time when automation was going expand. And as I sat down with Carl a couple of times, spoke to carl. And then I sat down with Daniel, I knew that there was something special with UIPATH, that could be a generational opportunity. Not any for myself but for the company in the future. And then I, you know I got to know Daniel. And at this stage of my career I was like, I'm pretty fussy about what I want to do and what I want and where I want to go. First of all, I want to go to a company that had great product, had a great culture, and I wanted to work with somebody that we could shake the future together and you know, Daniel and I just hit it off from the very first time we met. He got to meet my family, my dogs and we did the whole, we did the whole courting thing before we actually decided this was going to be a good thing for both of us. >> Dave: That's good. >> Rob: Yeah. >> Dave: You got to meet the family. That's very good. >> We just had, John Furrier and I just had, Mohit Aron and Sanjay Poonen into out studio. Cause Mohit, you know, formal google. Long time. And they decided to kind of split duties. Mohit's going into product, he didn't keep his CEO title. He walked. How are you guys splitting you time? What are each of you going to, responsible for? >> Daniel: Well its, its kind of similar. On a day by day operation I, I rely heavily on Rob. We do it together. Strategic decisions about the company's destiny. I'm doing mostly the product these days. Which is a big relief for me. And I think we also split a bit of customers visit. Which is great. I still enjoy meeting customers. I need, customers are food for my cause. >> Dave: (laughs) yeah and your awesome product visionary. You've been there since day one. Now Rob, you said in the key note today that you've seen around about a hundred customers. You've transverse the world. What did you learn from them that informed you? That gave you confidence that the the move to the internet platform, even though you had already started that. >> Male: Yeah. >> But you're really doubling down on that >> Rob: You know when I... >> from a stand point. >> Rob: You know Dave, when you think about it, like I was, I was so impressed that Daniel had the vision to create a platform 3 years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> All right. And as we went around the world. As I went around the world, and it was one of the very first things I've seen. I've got to understand how customers see UIPATH, from their advantage point. What are they looking for from us? Why is this company, why doe customers like this company so much? And as I went around the world. I went to Asia a couple, I went to Asia, Australia, Singapore, Japan. I was in Europe twice. We did the trip together. We went to visit customers. And it was very much the same thing. Helps us expand automation faster. And we are so surprise, at the break of your platform. We never knew that. And so it kind of just had, for me, it was conviction. It's like, this walls is the right decision you've made. There's so much opportunity there. And that's, you know that's kind of what I've learned through the last four five months. >> Dave: Now as you know Daniel, I've written a lot about your company. One of the things I've said is that, that start ups, if I can call you that back pre-IPO, typically don't have as much international exposure as UIPATH had. I mean you sort of, you sort of started as an international company and became more US centric. You said, in the, in the key note today, you're talking to Ray Wong about people may don't understand that challenges of FX. Point being, when you convert international dollars into US dollars there are less of them cause the dollars stronger. But still, I've always felt like that international footprint is an advantage. Rob you came from SAP, you know, again European based company. I don't, (stutters), do you regret that? Now? I mean I know it's technical, I'm sure you don't, but talk about that sort of international exposure? Why that's a long term benefit. >> Well, you, first of all, you expand faster. I think we expanded faster than our competition because our global footprint was larger. And we had the courage. Go in Japan, for instance. Everybody told me, it's impossible to make for such a small starter. It's impossible to make a business in Japan. But we didn't believe it. We're just crazy and we went there, and be built a very sizable business in Japan. Fifty-five percent of our revenue, even today, it's outside U.S. Now of course that has a down side. When uh, When the local currencies, you know, are losing the value compared to the dollars, we're impacted. As we go to... to investors, until now, so we are seeing like a (indistinct) in terms of ARI. It's huge. Only because (indistinct) and losing the business in Russia. But it still, it's the strength of our company. Things will come back. And then, you know, the growth engine will re-accelerate again. >> Dave: Yeah but when the dollars weakens that'll be in your favor. Rob I want to pick up on something you said today in your keynote. You went back and started, you know the cycles of ERP and you know, internet, et cetera. I kind of have a love hate with ERP. I have to be honest. >> Male: (laughing) >> But it, but but (chuckles) but if I go back to that. Late eighties nineties, you wouldn't have be able to pick SAP as the winner. And then SAP emerged. You know, very clearly. But the more interesting thing, is that the customers who are implementing ERP well. The practitioners did better than their peers, and dominated their industries. And their stocks went up. Their evaluations went up. Different worlds obviously but, do you see the same thing happening with RPA and automation? What gives you confidence that that's the case? >> I absolutely do see the same thing happening with automation and RPA being a part of, in being a part of that. The reason, the reason I believe that is speed is so critical. (stutters) And if you think about how hard it is for a CIO or a c level executive to consume the technology coming at them, plus all the changes in the world being thrown at them. It's compiling and compiling and compiling. We have an incredible solution, that can help companies. And there comes certain times, the love outcomes to the business. Like no one else gets. And when I see that, I view that as just like the beginning of what's going to happen in the future so, in many ways, and I've said this to many of my friends, it feels like 1992, 1993 to me. And it's interesting because no one really understood then why SAP would be great in 1992 and 93. And they got a couple of things right. They got the eco system right. Their new partners were important. And the knew they needed to drive business outcome for companies, in which they did. And so I feel like we are in a very similar place. Very different technology obviously. And the speed of change now is so dramatic, compared to what it was. And there's very few technology that can provide that level of speed and accomodation to their customers. >> All right, let's talk about priorities. You guys got a lot of work to do and you've, you've laid it out to the financial community. You've got to have profitable growth, because of FX, it part, you've lowered your forecast. But I think there's some conservative in their as well. Um, but you got to do that balance. You've given some guidance on gross margins. Cloud maybe brings that down a little bit. RnD I saw wide range. Thirteen to seventeen percent. I hope you keep spending on RnD. Big fan of that. You know stock buybacks and, RnD if in your position are going to be better. And the product priorities, continue to build that out. But question, let's start with the product. So you've got an on-prem stack and you've got a cloud stack that's emerging, how do you balance those out? How do you do the integration? You've done a great job with the integration. Does it, are you concerned about your ability to continue to work at that speed with two code bases? I wonder if you could address that? >> Daniel: We've become a cloud first company. We deliver all of our products first in the cloud. We've deliver on the two week (indistinct) in the cloud. So that helps us integrate quite fast. I think we made a very good business decision to build our cloud team in Seattle. In Bellevue to be specific. And we have access to great talent that knows how to build serious cloud service. Which is hard to find dollar. And uh, so, and also we, we have, we benef- one of our only benefits was, we have the really good architecture. We have an architecture that work easily on-prem and on the cloud. And even today, our work flow foundation, our local designers, were easy to modernize. So right now we are launching studio weapon. But behind the scene, it's the same workflow engine. Our customers don't have to rewrite anything. It just works. And it does the same to take our own brand product and brand it in the multicloud. So, it's, there is no friction at all. Actually cloud is just helping us accelerate. But we benefit then again of a really solid architectural foundation. >> Daniel: Architecture matters. We've seen that in this industry. We got the B52s rocking out in the background, I love it, but I've got so many questions for you guys. I want to talk about the go to market. Because Rob, it's obviously a strength of yours. You've come in. You've communicated to the street, that you're reshaping the sales floors. Are they lowering the ratios of sales? People, the customers at the high end, mid range as well, using digital. I mean the numbers are one to ten now. At the top. One to maybe fifty at the mid range. Where are you in terms of that journey? You've got to find people, you got to train them, how do you get the productivity out of those guys? Take us through your thinking there? >> Rob: Yeah firstly, I think we have enough resources. Having resources is not an issue. Um, we have an incredible vehicle to acquire customers inside the company. Our digital sales motion, it's probably the best I've seen. And so we have the ability to acquire customers really fast. And we get the first workload in really fast. The challenge is we need to, we need to be able to drive a (indistinct) model and we graduate customs when we acquire them into the direct sales floors. And then direct sales floors, we're not going to go one to thirty, we're talking one to ten for the direct sales floor. And even the high up in the pyramid, we want to have an even denser model than that. And the whole purpose is to drive the time to consumption much quicker, much faster. So we know exactly if we acquire a customer, will they spend? Do they have a (indistinct) spend? On what level do they have a (indistinct) spend? And therefore when we capture them, we can immediately surround them, and put the right resources so we can grow faster. We think this will have a significant impact on the organization. We'll start to implement certain pieces in the next quarter. Um, things like packaging solutions. Putting them in, enabling the sales organization. And buy the beginning of next year, we'll be ready to actually go full board, globally. We already put some pieces in place when I joined. Chris Weber, my chief business officer, did a great job doing some of those pieces. So we're on the journey already. >> Dave: Yeah and even before you guys were public and you weren't publishing your NRR numbers. Our ETR survey partner, we, we always thought you had very low churn. And I think you broke out just yesterday. The, the NRR for overseas vs U.S, U.S I think was 140 plus percent. >> Male: Yeah >> Very very strong. A little, a little less overseas but the churn is still very low. >> Male: Yep. >> Okay so that's super positive. Customer affinity, I was wanted to code these events. I listen to the key notes very carefully, and then interview customers on the cube, and I try to identify, is there alignment there? And I see very strong alignment, I have to say, and strong customer affinity. So that's in your favor. I have, Daniel, I got another question for you on product. What is Symantec automation? What the heck is that? Can you explain that? I don't understand >> Dave, have you seen the demo in my (indistinct)? >> Dave: You know, I had to leave and do interviews, so I, uh, I missed it. >> I think, I think that demo answer complete your question. So in the s-, you know there saying that great, you can not distinguish great technology by magic. I think technology should be simple. And we, we show today, one of the simplest demo that you can imagine. But it's so, such a complex technology behind the scene, that you also can not imagine. So what was demo? We show how one business user, without any technical skills, can build any type of document. Can be a passport, can be an invoice, can be a legal (indistinct), and just go, "I want to copy data from here, and I want to paste data there". Can be a spreadsheet, can be another obligation, and like a human user, without understanding, without having prior knowledge about data, document layout, about screens, screens layouts, nothing, we analyze real time. Document. We discover, we discover the meaning of the information. We analyze the screen. We understand the screen but we understand the meaning of the screen. And we understand how the information in one side relate to the other side. And we just connects the dots and we copy the information and we paste it. A job that you'll do as a human user, maybe three minutes, is done in ten seconds. This is powerful. >> Yeah that is powerful. Thank you for that. I mean, and you take the date, whether it's transaction data or unstructured data and and and bring meaning out of it. That's powerful. Last question and I'll let you guys go. Rob, you got traders, and you've got long term investors. All right traders going to be defensive, today. I get that. Make the case for UIPATH, for long term investors. >> Rob: I think we're going to be a multi-gern- multi-billion company and we're going to be a generational company of our time. And we will define enterprise automation. And it's going to be a long term game and we feel like really strong that we'll be the lead in that game. >> Dave: Guys, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Great show. Always fun at UiPath Forward. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. >> Thanks dave. >> Appreciate it as well. >> Okay wrap it up, day one, we're here tomorrow, first thing, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching, forward 5, Uipath big customer event, we'll see you tomorrow. (music)

>> Announcer: From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath FORWARD IV brought to you by UiPath. >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. We are wrapping up day two of our coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've had an amazing event talking with customers, partners, and users, and UiPath folks themselves. And who better to wrap up the show with than Daniel Dines the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome, Daniel, great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm becoming a regular at theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's good to see you again. >> You are, this is your fifth... >> Fifth time on theCUBE. >> Fifth time, yes. >> Fifth time, but as you said before we went live, first time since the IPO. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> UiPath has been a rocket ship for a very long time. I'm sure a tremendous amount of acceleration has occurred since the IPO. We can all see the numbers. You're a public company now, ARR of 726 million. You've got over 9,000 customers. We got the chance to speak with a few of them here today. We know how important the voice of the customer is to UiPath and how very symbiotic it is. But I want to talk about the culture of the company. How is that going? How is it being maintained especially since the big splashy IPO just about six months ago? >> Well, I always believe that in order to build a durable company, culture is maybe the most important thing. I think long lasting companies have very foundational culture. So we've built it, and we invested a lot in the last 5-6 years because in the beginning when it's just a bunch of people, they don't have a culture. It's maybe like a vibe of a group of friends. But then when you go and try to dial in your culture, I think it's important that you look at your roots and who are you? What defines you? So we ended up of this really core values, which is to be humble. To me, it's one of quintessential value of every human being. And all of us want to work with humble people much more inclined to listen, to change their mind. And then we say, you have to be humble, but you have to be bold in the same time. This rocket ship need a bold crew onboard. So you need to be fast because the fastest company will always win. And you need to be immersed because my theory with life and jobs is in whatever you do, you have to be immersed. I don't believe necessarily in life-work balance. I believe in life-work cycles, in life-work immersion. So when you are with family, you are immersed. When you work, you are immersed. That will bring the best of you and the best of productivity. So we try so much to keep our culture alive, to hire people that add to the culture, that nicely fit into the culture. And recently we took a veteran of UiPath and we appointed her as Chief Culture Officer. So I'm very happy of this move. So I think we are one of the few companies that really have a Chief Culture Officer reporting directly to the CEO. So we're really serious of building our culture along the way. And as I said yesterday in my keynote, I think our values are universal values. I think they have the value of the new way of working. All of us would like to work in a company, in an environment that fosters these values. >> I certainly think the events of the last 18 months have forced many more people to be humble and embrace humility. Because everybody on video conferencing, your dog walks in, your kids walk in, you're exposed. They have to be more humble because that's just how they were getting work done. I've seen and heard a lot of humility from your folks and a lot of bold statements from customers as well. We had the CIO of Coca-Cola on talking about how UiPath is fundamental in their transformation. I think that the fact that you are doing an event here in person, whereas as Dave was saying earlier this week, your competitors are on webcams is a great example of the boldness of this company and its culture. >> Well, thank you. I think that we've made a really good decision to do this event in person. Maybe on Zoom over the last 18 months, we kind of lost a bit how important is to connect with people. It's not only about the message, it's about the trust. And I think we are deeply embedded into the critical systems of our customers. They need to trust us. They need to work with the company that they look in their eyes and say, "Yes, we are here for you." And you cannot do it over Zoom. Even I really like Zoom and Eric Yuan is a friend of mine, but a combination I think, and going into this hybrid world, I think it's actually extremely beneficial for all of us. Meeting in person a few times a year, then continuing the relationship over Zoom in time, I think it's awesome. >> Yeah, and the fact that you were able to get so many customers here, I think that's, Lisa, why a lot of companies don't have physical events 'cause they can't get their customers here. You got 2000 customers here, customers and partners, but a lot of customers. I've spoken to dozens and they're easy to find. So I think that's one point I want the audience to know. You've always been on the culture train. And enduring companies, CEOs of great enduring companies, always come back to culture. So that's important. And of course, product. You said today, you're a product guy. That's when you get excited. You've changed the industry. And I think, I've never bought into the narrative about replacing jobs. I'd never been a fan of protecting the past from the future. It's inevitable, but I think the way you've changed the market, I wonder if you could comment is... You had legacy RPA tools that were expensive and cumbersome. And so people had to get the ROI and it took a long time. So that was an obvious way to get it is to reduce headcount. You came in and said, short money you can actually try it even a free version. You compressed that ROI and the light bulb went off, and so people then said, "Oh, wow, this isn't about replacing jobs, but making my life better." And you've always said that. And that's I think one way in which you've changed the market quite dramatically, and now you have a lot of people following that path. >> That was always kind of our biggest competitive advantage. We showed our customers and our partners, this is a technology that gives you the faster time to value and actually faster time to value translate into much higher return on investment. In a typical automation project, the license cost is maybe 5% of the project cost. So the moment you shrink the development time, the implementation time, you increase exponentially the return on investment. So this is why speaking about our roadmap, and we always start with this high level, how can we reduce the development time? So how can we reduce the friction? How can we expand the use cases? Because these are essential themes for us, always thinking customer first, customer value and that serves us pretty well really. We win a lot in all the contests where we go side by side with other competitors. It was a very simple strategy for us. Asking customers, "Just go and test it side-by-side and see," and they see. We implement the same process in halftime, half of resources involved. It's an easy math multiplied by a thousand processes and it's done. >> When theCUBE started Daniel in 2010. It was our first year. And so it coincided with big data movement. And we said at the time that the companies who can figure out how to apply big data are going to make a lot of money, more than the big data vendors. And I think in a way now the problem with big data was too complicated, right? There were only a few big internet giants who could figure out Hadoop and all that stuff. Automation, I think is even bigger in a way, 'cause it involves data. It involves AI, it's transformative. And so we're saying the same thing here. The companies that are applying automation, and we've seen a lot of them here, Coca-Cola, Merck, Applied Materials, on and on and on, are actually the ones that are going to not only survive but thrive, incumbents that don't have to invent AI necessarily or invent their own automation. But coming back to you 'cause I think your company can make a lot of money. You've set the TAM at 60 billion. I think it actually could be well over 100 billion, but we don't have to have that conversation here. It's just convergence of all these markets that guys like IDC and Gartner, they count in stove pipes. So anyway, big, no shortage of opportunity. My question to you is feels like you have the potential to build a next great software company and with the founder as the CEO, and there aren't a lot of them left. Michael Dell is not a software company, but his name is still, Larry Ellison is still there, Marc Benioff. How do you think about the endurance, the enduring UiPath? Are you envisioning building the next great software company, may take 20 years? >> People were asking me for a long time. Did you envision that you'd get here from the beginning? And I always tell them, no. Otherwise I would have been considered mad. (Lisa and Dave laughing) So you build the vision over time. I don't believe in people that start a small SaaS company and they say, "We are going to change the world." This is not how the world works. Really, you build and you understand the customer and you build more. But at some point I realized we change so much how people work, we get the best out of them. It's something major here. And if you look in history, we are in this trap that started with agriculture. This is the trap of manual, repetitive, low value tasks that we have to do. And it took the humanity of us. And I talked to Tom Montag about with this book "Sapiens". It's interesting and that book comes with the theory that our biggest quality is our ability to collaborate. Well, our technology gives people the ability to collaborate more. So, in this way, I think it's truly transformative. And yes, I believe now that we can build the next generation of software company. >> How do you like... That's the wrong question. How are you doing with the 90-day shot clock as Michael Dell calls it? It's a new world for you, right? You've never been a CEO of a public company, the street's getting to know you like, "Who is this guy?" I'll give you another cute story. There were three companies in the early CUBE days, Tableau, Splunk, and ServiceNow that had the kind of customer passion that you have. I think ServiceNow could be one of the next great software companies. Tableau now part of Salesforce. I think Splunk was under capitalized, but we see the same kind of passion here. So now you're the CEO of a public company, except the street's getting to know you a little bit. They're like, "Hmm, how do we read the guy?" All that stuff. That'll sort itself out. But so what's life like on the public markets? >> Well, I don't think anyone prepares you for the life of a public company. (Dave laughing) I thought it's going to be easier, but it's not, because we were used to deal with private investors and it's much easier because I think private investors have access to a lot more data. They look into your books. So they understand your business model. With public investors, they have access only to like a spreadsheet of numbers. So they need to figure out a business model, the trajectory from just a split. It's way more difficult. I've come to appreciate their job. It's much more difficult. So they have to get all the cues from how I dress, how do I say this word? They watch the FED announcements. What do they mean to say by this? And I and the shim we are first time in a job as a public company CEO, public company CFO. So of course it's a lot of learning for us and like in any learning environment, initial learning curve is tough, but you progress quite a lot. So I believe that over the next few quarters, we will be in the position to build trust with the street and they will understand better our business model, and they see that we are building everything for creating durable growth. >> It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. I know it's a cliche, but it really does apply here. >> You've certainly built a tremendous amount of trust within your 9,000 strong customer base. I think I was reading that your 70% of your revenue comes from existing customers. I think this is a great use case for how to do land and expand really well. So, the DNA I think is there at UiPath to be able to build that trust with the street. >> Yeah, absolutely. Our 9,000 plus customers, it's our wealth. This is our IP in a way. It's even better than in our pro. It's our customers. We have one of the best net retention rate in the industry of 144%. So that speaks volume. >> Lisa: It does. >> Automation for good. I know you've read some of the stuff I've written. I've covered you guys pretty extensively over the years. And that theme sounds like a lot of motherhood and apple pie, but one of the things that I wrote is that you look at the productivity decline and particularly in Western countries over the last two decades. Now I know with the pandemic and especially in 2021, productivity is going up for reasons that I think are understood, but the trend is clear. So when you think about big problems, climate change, diversity, income inequality, health of populations, overpopulation, on and on and on and on. You're not going to solve those problems by throwing labor at them. It has to be automation. So that to me is the tie to automation for good. And a lot of people might roll their eyes at it. But does that resonate with you? >> It totally resonates with me. Look at US. US population is not growing at the rates that we were used to. It's going to plateau at some point. It's just obvious. Like it plateaued in Japan, in Japan it's decreasing. US will see a decrease at some point. How do you increase the GDP? If your population is declining, productivity is declining. How do you increase GDP? Because the moment we stop increasing GDP, everything will collapse. The modern world is built on the idea of continuous economical growth. The moment growth stops, the world stops. We'll go back to our case and restart the engine. So, automation is hugely important in continuous GDP growth, which is the engine of our life. >> Which by the way is important because the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, that's how growth allows the people at the bottom to rise up to the middle and the middle to the top. So that's how you deal with that problem. You asked Tom Montag about crypto. So I have to ask you about crypto. What are your thoughts? Are you a fan? Are you not a fan? Do you have any wisdom? >> I have to admit, I never really understood the use cases of crypto. Technology behind crypto, blockchain is fascinating technology, but crypto in itself, I was never a fan. Tom Montag today gave me one of the best explanation of the very same. Look, Daniel, from Americans perspective we have the dollars, and this is the global currency. Crypto doesn't have so much sense, but think about a country like Columbia or Venezuela, countries where there people don't have so much trust in their currency, and where different political system can seize your assets from you. You need to be able to be capable of putting them into something else that is outside government context. I believe this is a good use case but I still don't believe that crypto is that type of asset that you know will survive the test of time. I think it's really too much... To me the difference between gold and Bitcoin is that it's too... You cannot replicate gold whatever you... It's impossible, unless you are God you cannot create gold two, right? It's impossible, but you can create Bitcoin 2. And at some point the fashion will move from Bitcoin 2 to Bitcoin 3. So I don't think the value that you can build in one particular crypto currency right now will stay over time. But it's just me. I was the wrong so many times in my life. >> You've been busy. You haven't had time to study crypto. >> I agree, totally agree. (Lisa and Dave laughing) >> What's been some of the feedback from the customers that are here. We saw yesterday a standing room only keynote. I'm sure it was great for you to be on stage again actually interacting with your customers and your partners. What's been some of the feedback as we've seen really this shift from an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform? >> Well, first of all, it was really great to be on stage. I don't know, I'm not a good presenter, really. But going there in front of people felt me with energy. Suddenly I felt a lot of comfort. So, I was capable of being myself with the people, which is really awesome. And the transition to a platform, from a product to a platform was really very well received by our customers because even in our competitive situations, when we are capable of explaining to them, what is the value of having an independent automation platform that is not tied to any big silos that application providers creates, we win and we win by default somehow. You've seen them now. So I think even the next evolution of semantic automation, this one is very well with our customers. >> Well, Daniel, it's been fantastic having you on. We have a good cadence here, and I hope we can continue it. On theCUBE, we love to identify early stage companies. Although as I wrote, you had a long, strange path to IPO because you took a long, long time and I think did it the right way to get product market fit. >> Absolutely. >> And that's not necessarily the way Silicon Valley works, double, double, triple, triple, and that you got product market fit, you got loyal customer base, and I think that's a key part of your success and you can see it and so congratulations, but many more years to come and we're really watching. >> Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys again. Thank you, that was awesome really. Great discussion. >> Exactly, good. Great to have you here in person and thanks for having us here in person as well. We look forward to FORWARD V. >> You will be invited forever. Thank you, guys, really. >> Forever, did you hear that? All right, for Daniel Dines and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV day two. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Hi, this is David Linton. You're watching the Cubes coverage of the Cube on Cloud, our own virtual event where we're trying to understand the future of cloud, where we've come from and where we're going. And we're bringing in visionaries to really have that detailed conversation. Daniel Jones is here. He's the CEO of automation specialist. You. I path Daniel. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights here. >>Thank you so much for inviting me. They've appreciated. >>That's always a pleasure to get together with folks that have started companies with a seed of a vision and have exploded in tow. You know, great success. And when I wanna go back to the the the founding days of you, I path 2005. It was a pre cloud. There's certainly pre cloud as we know it today. A w s came out in 2006. Aw, and then we saw the clouds Ascendancy. But but your original founding premise there was no cloud, you know, it wasn't like a startup could just spend up stuff in the cloud. But what you've seen that evolution. So when you first started to see cloud evolved, What did you think? Did you think Oh, well, we'll see what happens. Or did you? Did you know at the time that this was gonna be a bigas? It actually has become. What were your thoughts back then? >>Well, I honestly, I thought that we are kind of agent. And maybe it's stupid to not to pie foot in tow, The new trends in technology like Cloud Mobile social and I we kept, you know, working on this computer vision technology that 15 years ago, war was not really hot. But with the evolution of self driving cars and the latest development in AI, we we've been able to capture our investments in the domain that was not hot. But suddenly, you know, became the word the of the greatest minds in I t. And we definitely we specialize Our computer vision toe a narrow use case, but still, it's the It's the key of what we've done in, uh, in the end, the robots are powered by computer vision technology. This kind of a robot emulate how human user work. So obviously we use vision a lot in our day by day work and having the best technology that allows our robots to interact with the computer screen more like human user is quintessential and, uh, making our business reliable and easy to use. So we were lucky. But I always felt that maybe I should change it. And we were feeling I remember you know, many discussions with my, you know, initial developers because we like what you're doing. What we felt a bit left outside my door. What way? Got lucky in the end. >>So So I have a premise here and that when you go back to the early days of cloud, what they got right was they were attacking the human labor problem and they automate it was storage. It was it was networking. It was compute. But really the automation that they brought toe i t. And the quality that that drove and the flexibility was, you know, a game changer. Of course, we know that now. And you know, many of us at the time were very excited about Cloud. I'm not sure we predicted the impact that it had, but my premise is that there's a parallel in your business with the automation that you're driving into the business. We've talked toe people, for instance, that some of your customers have said, You know I can't do Six Sigma. I can't afford to do six Sigma before things like R P. A. For business process. I do that for Mission critical things, but now I can apply six Sigma thinking across my entire business that drives quality. It takes costs out of my business. So what do you think about that premise? That there's a parallel between the early days of cloud taking human labor out of the equation and driving quality and flexibility, cost saving speed and revenue, etcetera and what you're doing on the business side, >>it is clearly a parallel. I can tell that the cloud was built by looking at ICTY Automation use cases first of all, because this is all software engineers understand the most software engineers. Let's be you little on this. They don't understand the business work. They don't understand all how the rial work is performing a big enterprise and they don't care. Sometimes when in my own discussions with our CFO, he is surprised that I don't know all the use cases in the world. Yes, of course. I don't know exactly how an insurance company work All the processes in a health care, all the banking processes. I have intellectual curiosity how they were. But what interests me the most is our computer vision technology that works uniformly well across different. That was the same from the cloud. So initially they built and they build a cow cloud one toe, help them when what they know the best. And now, for we were put in the face of having great technology, this computer region technology, but without having a great use case in the I t world that we understood. And when we when I'm speaking about our early days like 12, 13, 14, I believe this technology has a lot less applicable bility in the real world. Because again, we were thinking of some sorts of small I T automation gigs that were not possible just doing the AP ice. But when I discovered the messy world of business processes and how important is to emulate people when you think automation, that was a big ah ha moment. So I believe that we can do for business processes what the cloud has done for I t processes on. We are really patient now about this business processes on helping people toe eliminate all the repetitive work that is their delegate. This work two robots and have the people that are required to do this work do do better. A smaller number of tasks every day. Everyone has own, as on her or him played today like, let's say, 10, 20 different activities. Some of them can be completely delegated to rob to robots, and they are the low value type of activities, while they can focus on the high value activities like interaction with people, creativity, decision making and this type of human like things that we as humans really love. >>I love that you shared that story, but you thought it was a very narrow, sort of set of use cases when you first started and then, you know, that's that's just an awesome founders, you know, really ization. I love it when we've often said in the Cube that, you know, for decades we've marched to the tune of Moore's Law. That was the innovation engine. No longer is that case. It's a combination of of data, applied machine intelligence and cloud for scale. And I guess the computer vision pieces How you in just the data you've you've made some investments in a I and there's many more to come the industry in general and the cloud is sort of the piece of that equation that we see for scale. So I wonder how you see those pieces fitting to your business. Uh, and how important is the cloud for your scale? At last? Uh, at last year, I path forward. There was a lot of talk amongst your customers about scaling. Is the cloud critical for that scale? >>Yeah, I believe so. And we are thinking of clouds in tow. Distinct ways number one. We're offering Onda manage automation service in our own close, using where we host everything by ourselves, including our orchestrator, and then be next to have the plans to include our the robots that execute the automation And people simply can't connect to our cloud building automation and just scheduled to run without any maintainers. And they will have access to oh, great analytics, Everything integrated. So this is a major force to us, and the way we launching G a. This cloud offering in April this year, and I can tell you that until now, 20% of our customers already are in a shape or another in this type of offering, not 20% dollar amount, but 20% of our customers. And it's clear that at this point this has mawr applicability into the long tail, a smaller customers than in the on our biggest customers. But the second, this thing type of cloud offering that we focus on is toe have best in class support and best in class multi cloud support for the cloud of choice of our customers. For instance, if you go in if you go in a w, g, c, p usher and you buy a subscription there, you wear buildings. Specialized editions were with one click. You will be able to install our technology in those clouds and you'll be ableto scale up and down your robots. You can connect your robots to our many service were within your tenant, but basically the angle is toe lesson. Ah lot the administration, the maintainers footprint of your installation, either on our own cloud, even on your cloud of choice. I'm a strong believer that we will see an accelerated transition from the completely on Prem Workloads into these two source of cloud workloads. >>I wanna ask you, is a a technologist if you see. So you mentioned that you're gonna take your products and your support. Multiple clouds will run on any cloud in A lot of companies are talking about that, you know, for their respective whether it's a database or, you know, whatever storage device, etcetera. Do you see the day where you'll actually start? You're collaborating across clouds. Where the user, uh, maybe maybe the user today doesn't know, but maybe a developer does know which cloud it's running on. But do you see any value in actual, you know, connecting across clouds where the data and one cloud is relevant for the data? Another cloud is I know there are latent see issues. Is that you know, technically feasible. And is it it? Will it drive business value? What do you think about that cross cloud connection? >>I believe it is already happening. There is a mesh between between various services and who knows in which cloud they are awful. Already. I feel the Leighton see is less and less of a problem as much as the biggest cloud provider have have a very distributed geographically president. So as long as I can playing AWS in East Coast, on on Asia in East Coast, it's not such a big Leighton see issue. Uh huh. Frankly, in the past, our customers at least start telling us they seen how it is to be completely looking toe one technology on people would like Toa have optionality. It's not necessarily that I will use three clothes, but I would like to use the vendor that gives me optionally even. And this is what we're trying to offer. >>Do you, when you think about the future of work? I mean, e said before the cloud one dato was infrastructure storage, networking, computing Uh, it seems like to Dato we're bringing in more ai new workloads. We're seeing, you know, analytics and machine intelligence applied to the data and then, you know, distributed at scale self serve to the business. How do you see the future of work specifically as it relates toe automation affecting that, uh on you know what role does cloud play there? What's your vision? >>So as the workloads will move to cloud. It's absolutely critical that the processes will move to cloud, so there is no way back. I think, that moving in tow, moving from home for and software into cloud will make even easier toe automate this type of workloads into the cloud. It's gonna be less maintain us. You will deal less with legacy applications that require some special care. It's kind of a bit more easier to automate modern Onley, Web based type of application so that Z we'll see an acceleration on the moving to cloud. But again, there will be different sorts of cloud from a completely manage automation service from us toe managing yourself the automation in your cloud tenant, but not on prayer. I'm not a big believer that we will accept unless very few critical sectors I don't think that we will see home Primor roads in the past five years. >>I mean, I agree in this case, the business case for on Prem just gets, you know, less and less. I mean, it'll be a certain applications for sure. My last question is, when thinking about from a software developer standpoint, you obviously you're gonna wanna run in a W S and G, C P and Azure. Uh, perhaps Alibaba, Uh, do you look at other clouds? Whether their regional clouds, of course. You got your own cloud. Maybe Oracle. IBM. How do you think about those? Do you just sort of evaluated on a case by case basis? You let customers, you know, tell you where you need to be. >>Yeah, way focus on the on the three big clouds today, but we're building on the top off Q Burnett is most of our way. We have a big shift in tow building que Burnett is micro services. And my guess is that all mother clouds would offer fantastic support for kubernetes. So what What it takes when you create a new edition for another cloud is toe is toe have the underlying services. Like if we plan to use snowflake, for instance in our analytics offering, you better have snowflake in another cloud. Otherwise, probably the the analytics will will have toe be delayed or use a less of one part technology. So it's not only about what we are building, but it's also, you know, the vast availability of other set of technologies that we try toe use when you choose a technology. Now, first of all, we are looking. We need to choose something that is multi cloud. There's who's dedicated from one cloud vendor. That's that's our first priority. This is why I've mentioned snowflake and then when when we moved into a cloud. We are limited by the offerings that are there, but I my belief is in the main clouds, probably in the US I don't know one of the region's what's gonna happen, but in the main crowds in the U. S. In I believe that they will. In the end, they will catch up in terms off offering and convincing of other defenders toe have kind of kind of similar offering on their own. I don't know if, besides, the Big Three, or you'll see someone and that is able to compete could be too much fragmented. Maybe they will be dedicated clouds for certain services. But for General Cloud, I think three is more than enough. >>Yeah, and so, you know, in the early days of cloud, people talked about dial tone, and essentially, that's what's becoming. It's the it's the value that's running on top of the cloud from software companies like ey Path and others that is really driving. So the cloud to Dato the next generation Daniel Dennett is thanks so much for sharing your vision on participating in the Cuban cloud. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure, Dave. Thank you so much for inviting. >>You're welcome. You always great to talk to you. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right into this short break. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Yeah.

okay here we go hi everybody this is dave vellante and you're watching thecube's coverage of the cube on cloud our own virtual event where we're trying to understand the future of cloud where we've come from and where we're going and we're bringing in visionaries to really have that that detailed conversation daniel dines is here he's the ceo of automation specialist uipath daniel thanks for coming on and sharing your insights here thank you so much for inviting me dave appreciate it that's always a pleasure to get together with with folks that have started companies with a seed of a vision and have exploded into you know great success and and but i want to go back to the the founding days of uipath 2005. it was pre-cloud there's certainly pre-cloud as we know it today aws came out in 2006 and then we we saw the clouds ascendancy but but your original founding premise there was no cloud you know it wasn't like a startup that could just spin up stuff in the cloud but you've seen that evolution so when you first started to see cloud evolve what did you think did you think oh well we'll see what happens or did you did you know at the time that this was going to be as big as it actually has become what were your thoughts back then well i honestly i i thought that we are kind of ancient and maybe it's stupid to not to private into the new trends in technology like cloud mobile social but i we kept you know working on this computer vision technology that uh 15 years ago was not really hot but with the evolution of self-driving cars and the latest development in ai we we've been able to capture our investments in a domain that was not hot but suddenly you know became the word of the greatest minds in i.t and we definitely we we specialize our computer vision to a narrow use case but still it's the it's the key of what we've done in uh in the end the robots are powered by computer vision technology this kind of a robot emulate how human user work so obviously we use vision a lot in our day by day work and having the best technology that allows our robots to interact with the computer screen more like a human user is quintessential in uh in making our business reliable and easy to use so we were lucky but i always felt that maybe i should change it and we we were feeling i i remember you know many discussions with my you know initial developers because we like what we were doing but we felt a bit left outside by the world but we got lucky in the end so so i have a premise here and that when you go back to the early days of cloud what they got right was they were attacking the the human labor problem and they automated it was storage it was it was networking it was compute but really the automation that they brought to it and the quality that that drove and the flexibility uh was you know a game changer of course we we know that now and you know many of us at the time were very excited about cloud i'm not sure we predicted the impact that it had but my premise is that there's a parallel in your business with the automation that you're driving into the business we've talked to people for instance some of your customers have said you know i can't do six sigma i can't afford to do six sigma before things like rpa for business process i do that for mission critical things but now i can apply six sigma thinking across my entire business that drives quality it takes cost out of my business so what do you think about that premise that there's a parallel between the early days of cloud taking human labor out of the equation and driving quality and flexibility cost saving speed and revenue etc and what you're doing on the business side it is clearly a parallel i can tell that the cloud was built by looking at it automation use cases first of all because this is what software engineers understand the most software engineers let's be you know honest they don't understand the business work they they don't understand all how the real work is performed in a big enterprise and they don't care sometimes when in my own discussions with our cfo he is surprised that i don't know all the use cases in the world yes of course i don't know exactly how an insurance company work all the processes in healthcare all the banking processes i have intellectual curiosity how they work but what interests me the most is our computer vision technology that works uniformly well across different that was the same from the cloud so initially they built in the they built the cloud to help them when what they know the best and now for we were put in the face of having great technology this computer vision technology but without having a great use case in the iit world that we understood and when we when i'm speaking about our early days like 12 13 14 i believe this technology has a lot less applicability in the real world because again we were thinking of some sorts of small it automation gigs that were not possible just doing the apis but when i discovered the messy world of business processes and how important is to emulate people when you think automation that was the big aha moment so i believe that we can do for business processes what the cloud has done for i.t processes and we are really patient now about these business processes and helping people to eliminate all the repetitive work that is there delegate this work to robots and have the people that are required to do this work do do better a smaller number of tasks every day everyone has one as on her or him played today like let's say 10 20 different activities some of them can be completely delegated to rock to robots and they are the low value type of activities while they can focus on the high value activities like interaction with people creativity decision making and this type of human-like things that we as humans really love i love that uh you shared that story but you you thought it was a very narrow sort of set of use cases when you first started and then you know that's that's just an awesome founders you know realization i i love it when we've often said in the cube that you know for decades we've marched to the the tune of moore's law that was the innovation engine no longer is the case it's a combination of of data applied machine intelligence and cloud for scale and i guess the computer vision piece is how you ingest the data uh you you've you've made some investments in in ai and there's many more to come the industry in general and the cloud is is sort of the piece of that equation that we see for scale so i wonder how you see those pieces fitting to your business and how important is the cloud for your scale at last uh at last ui path forward there was a lot of talk amongst our customers about scaling is the cloud critical for that scale yeah i believe so and we are thinking of cloud in two distinct ways number one we are offering and manage automation service in our own cloud using uh where we host everything by ourselves including our orchestrator and then next we have the plans to include our the robots that execute the automation and people simply can connect to our cloud build an automation and just schedule it to run without any maintenance and they will have have access to great analytics everything integrated so this is a major focus to us and the way we launching ga this cloud offering in april this year and i can tell you that until now 20 percent of our customers already are in a shape or another in this type of offering not 20 dollar amount but 20 of our customers and it's clear that at this point this has more applicability into the long tail a smaller customers than in the on our biggest customers but the second distinct type of cloud offering that we focus on is to have best-in-class support in best-in-class multi-cloud support for the cloud of choice of our customers for instance if you go in if you go in aws gcp azure and you buy a subscription there you we we are building specialized editions where with one click you will be able to install our technology in those clouds and you will be able to to scale up and down your robots you can connect your robots to our many services were within your tenant but basically the end goal is to lessen a lot the administration the maintenance footprint of your installation either on our own cloud even on your cloud of choice i'm a strong believer that we will see an accelerated transition from the completely on prem workloads into these two source cloud workloads i want to ask you as a as a technologist if you see so you mentioned that you're going to take your products and you support multiple clouds it'll run on any cloud and a lot of companies are talking about that you know for their respective whether it's a database or you know whatever storage device etc do you see the the day where you'll actually start you're collaborating across clouds where the user uh maybe maybe the user today doesn't know but but maybe a developer does know which cloud it's running on but do you see any value in actual you know connecting across clouds where the data in one cloud is relevant for the data another cloud is i know there are latency issues is is that you know technically feasible and is it will it drive business value what do you think about that cross-cloud connection i believe it is already happening there is a mesh between between various services and who knows in which cloud they are offered already i feel the latency is less and less of a problem as much as the biggest cloud provider have have a very distributed geographically present so as long as i can play in aws in east coast on azure in east coast it's not such a big latency issue and frankly in the past our customers at least are telling us they seen how it is to be completely locked into one technology and people would like to have optionality it's not necessarily that i will use three clouds but i would like to use a vendor that gives me optionality even the and this is what we are trying to offer do you when you think about the future of work i mean as i said before the cloud 1.0 is infrastructure storage networking compute and it seems like 2.0 we're bringing in more ai new workloads uh we're seeing you know analytics and and machine intelligence applied to the data and then you know distributed at scale self-serve to the business how do you see the future of work specifically as it relates to automation affecting that uh and you know what role does cloud play there what's your vision so as the workloads will move to cloud it's absolutely critical that the processes will move to cloud so there is no way back and i i think that uh moving into moving from opera and software into cloud will make even easier to automate this type of workloads into the cloud it's gonna be less maintenance you will deal less with legacy applications that require some special care it's kind of a bit more easier to automate modern only web-based type of application so that's uh we will see an acceleration on the on the moving to cloud but again there will be different sorts of cloud from a completely managed automation service from us to managing yourself the automation in your cloud tenant but not on-prem i'm not a big believer that we will ex unless very few critical sectors i don't think that we will see on-prem workloads in the past five years i mean i agree in the business the business case for on-prem just gets you know less and less i mean it'll there's certain applications for sure my last question is when thinking about from a software developer standpoint you obviously you're going to want to run in aws and gcp and azure uh perhaps alibaba do you look at other clouds whether they're regional clouds of course you've got your own cloud maybe oracle ibm how do you think about those do you just sort of evaluate them on a case-by-case basis you let customers you know tell you where where you need to be yeah we we we focus on the on the three big clouds today but we are building on the top of kubernetes most of our we we have a big shift into building kubernetes microservices and my guess is that all modern clouds will offer fantastic support for kubernetes so what what it takes when you create an edition for another cloud is to is to have the underlying services like if we plan to use snowflake for instance in our analytics offering you better have snowflake in another cloud otherwise probably the the analytics will will have to be delayed or use less of one part technology so it's not only about what we are building but it's also you know the vast availability of other set of technologies that we try to use when you choose a technology now first of all we are looking we need to choose something that is multi-cloud versus dedicated from one cloud vendor that's that's our first priority this is why i've mentioned snowflake and then when you when we move into a cloud we are limited by the offerings that are there but i my belief is in the in the main clouds probably in the us i don't know on other regions what's going to happen but in the main clouds in the us and i believe that they will in the end they will catch up in terms of offering and convincing other other vendors to to have kind of similar offering on their own i don't know if besides the big three we will see someone and that is able to compete could be too much fragmented maybe they will be dedicated clouds for certain services but for general cloud i think three is more than enough yeah and so you know in the early days of cloud people talked about dial tone and essentially that's what's becoming it's the it's the value that's running on top of the cloud from software companies like uipath and others that is really driving sort of the cloud 2.0 the next generation daniel dines thanks so much for sharing your your vision uh and participating in the cube on cloud really appreciate it my pleasure dave thank you so much for inviting you're welcome always great to talk to you and thank you for watching everybody keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest ready for this short break this is dave vellante for the cube

>>Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. >>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante. Welcome to this cube conversation. This is a company that we've been following now for the last couple of years in a trend in robotic process automation, and then automation specifically, uh, it's a, it's a company in an area that we really like. Uh, we've been researching this and publishing and Daniel Dienes is here. He's the CEO of UI path. Yeah, it was great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for inviting me, David. >>That's our pleasure. So let's, let's get an update in your business. You know, we covert obviously you sent everybody for a loop. We had been and have been following you guys quite, quite closely. How's how are things going for UI path? How has the pandemic affected your business? >>We we've designed this company from day one to work in a hybrid mode, local and under, obviously working from anywhere. And the transition to working from anywhere model was a really fast to implement for us. So COVID-19 itself. In the fact of the way we work on the business side, I would say that we are seeing, you know, mixed of events, some, uh, industries that was, that were mostly affected by COVID we're putting their budgets one hole while other industries were increasing 10 times. What I can tell you that in, um, in a nutshell, the numbers for us were really good. We are able to keep eating and beating the thought gets that we set pretty COVID and we focused quite a lot on helping our customers, not the gating through these murky waters. We have quite a lot of, um, involvement in healthcare and federal business. We worked with a few hospitals to help with accelerating the COVID test. In one case, we were able to save two hours a day for every nurse. So instead of filling up paperwork, they are able to focus on the patient. And that's not one isolated instance. We've done tremendous work across the, across the globe. And, uh, you know, we, uh, you know, that we raised our last round in, uh, June end of June. And that was a recognition of our accelerated business, >>Right? Yes. I mean, you raised it in the, of the pandemic, you know, I I've been saying that. I mean, everybody of course says the covert has accelerated a number of trends and I've been saying there's a, that there's now an increased mandate for automation, I think there was before, but yeah, maybe there was some complacency, although you didn't see it in your numbers, you guys obviously growing very right fast. You mentioned healthcare. I would think of banking and financial as well, which of course was a stronghold. But when you think about in the U S anyway, that the payroll protection act and the number of loans that had to be processed, you know, bank bankers would talk to me and say, we are volume, increased two orders of magnitude. We had, we had no way to do it. And they turn to automation to do that. So, so I've said that there is an automation mandate, and I think there, there, there has been because of the productivity gap, particularly in the U S in Europe, you don't see it so much in, in of course in China. Uh, but, but certainly the U S in the last couple of decades has declined in terms of productivity. So, you know, people are not going to be able to solve the world's biggest problems without automation. How are you thinking about that? Um, in, in this post COVID world, >>As you said, the awareness that we have to automate has increased 10 times compared to pre COVID the days. I would not say that yet automation is number one priority on the company's leader's agenda, not in the same way as conferencing and video conferencing, and all this directly affected, positively affected the software industries. But I believe that, uh, while automation is slower to adopt, and it requires a lot more investment to adopt it's, uh, it's gone, uh, dominate the agenda post COVID in the, in the sense that people will have to recoup, you know, all the losses that they had in the COVID, they learn their lessons. And, uh, you know, for instance, I talked to the few CEOs of watch, you know, fortune 500 businesses, and they are telling me, Daniel, I wish that we have started earlier. So now we are seeing, you know, an adoption that is more top down and adoption that is starting from the C level suite, even the CEO of large enterprises. >>Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that if a customer has tasted, you know, the benefits of, of RPA and automation, uh, and as realizes what it can do for their business, they're gonna maybe double down on it, especially in a time when revenues might be under pressure. Uh, and, and you're not hiring a, a no, a lot of people have put, you know, freezes on number of head layoffs. You've got to do more with less you guys. I wonder if you could bring up this, this chart, I want to share this and get Daniel's reaction. So we all were talking about land and expand. So what this is ETR data, and what it does is it asks customers where they're at. Do they know about a vendor in this case? It's it's UI path is on the left and automation anywhere, and then some others, but do you know about the vendor? >>And, and are you planning on, you know, are you evaluating it? Are you planning to implement it? Uh, and this chart shows those respondents that said, yes, we, we, we are a customer. And we, we plan to expand our usage and you can see over the last three surveys that the yellow is even an uptick. And so people, this essentially the takeaway here is that once people taste it, that you land, and then they expand and find new use cases, are you seeing that in your business? And maybe you can give us some, some high level examples we've seen quite the look >>We have today more than 60 customers with, uh, over a million dollars in spending with us, uh, more than, uh, like 800 customers that spend more than a hundred K we've lost. And our net expansion rate is more than 140% consistent over many past quarters that shows a very solid, uh, expansion desire from our customers. And it shows that our technology is very well suitable for large case automation, deployments, enterprise wide, especially with our, uh, program or robot for every person. We are seeing huge interest and way bigger deals. We are able to lend upfront work to upscale our existing customers. You know, in a way I don't believe that in five years from now on, we will ever have people just to mindlessly move data from one screen to the other. I think this is a thing of the past, as much as plowing the fields is a thing of the past. >>So I wonder if he could talk a little bit about the, where you've come from as a company. So, I mean, you started in 2005. So, I mean, I think of you as a startup, but you've been around for a long time. Uh, and, and my sense is you started as a product company, but, you know, recently you guys announced this end to end platform for what you call or maybe Gardner calls. I don't know their term of hyper automation, but, but you've gone from a product company to a platform company. I wonder if you could talk about how you think about that transition and, and, and the platform generally >>To become a platform requires of certain level. And it's in a way, a harder business to promote to one enterprise customer. They, uh, they are very likely to test water with the product, but when, uh, you know, bad thing, everything, automation, why don't a platform, it's a different game. So this is why we, uh, we had to go from the steps of products, you know, product then like a couple of products, and then putting everything together into a platform. The power of the platform in, uh, in this particular instance comes from, uh, the integration of all pieces in a platform and an automation, white platform will have a different sets of products that play from the discovery of the processes that you automated, the implementation and maintenance of the process into the analytics that helps you track your progress. And also you have technologies that addresses two different persona in an enterprise from, you know, software engineers, RPA developers into the citizen developers. >>So it's a, it's a, it's a huge offering. And, um, the, what is really important for us is that we give full fledged platform. So an enterprise customer knows we will be able to build everything on the top of this platform, and they will offer best in class where it matters. And we believe that best-in-class matters in few important areas like RPA, like process mining, like analytics, while they will offer good enough where they will offer integration with best-in-class products where, uh, it's, uh, it's not so important in the, in the grand scheme of deploying automation, but the integration is tremendously important piece, put yourself in the shoes of a big enterprise instead of buying 20 different products, different, a licensing agreement, different maintainers stuff, different teams to support them. You just have one and they, and you have the guarantee. They work very well together. It's a very big proposition. I did requires maturity of the platform when they are making, you know, big strides into having the credibility that you know is required to have such a big investment. >>Well, I have to bring you bring that up. I have to ask you, so you guys are obviously a RPA and automation specialist building out a platform, very focused on that. And we always talk about this best of breed versus, uh, versus integrated suites. And you're sort of talking about integration. Of course, we saw Microsoft come out and as, as well as others, IBM, I think SAP have announced sort of what I would consider one dot products, you know, not nearly as robust as you and some of your, your leading competition, but how do you think about that in terms of staying ahead of that? I mean, you know, we all know Microsoft, you used to work there, they come out with a one Datto and, you know, then the two dot O and it's just still, and then eventually they get it right? So you have to move fast. >>Yes, absolutely. And we, we proved that we can move fast. We've built this company from zero five years ago to, you know, we are almost half a billion dollar in era today. So wait, we are fast. This is one of the four tenants of our culture be fast. But speaking about what the strategy in, uh, I believe that the space of low code, no code business application development, and the hyper automation space will, uh, converge into one single space, a company like Microsoft started with, uh, a simple product like, uh, if TTT and, uh, that was dedicated only to citizen developer to build very, you know, small and quick integrations. Like if you look at, uh, if you look at the power automate use cases, you'll see one of the most common use cases to set on a lot for myself. Well, I understand the value of such use case, but it's a far cry from setting an alarm and to automating, you know, end to end, procure to pay or order to cash for a big enterprise or COVID testing. >>And basically where we are coming from two different angles. We are coming from the RPA angle that is putting computer vision at the center of the technology. And they are coming from weak API integration. And we are making, we are making progress, you know, towards each other. My belief, I believe that, um, we have an advantage here in a sense that, uh, RPA is a technology that can produce immediate returns, but the labs K Y LA while the anther type of technologies, first of all, traditional automation, and then all this new type of API economy, API integrations kind of largely failed to show scalability within big enterprises. They are nice to have, but they are not essential when you are choosing a platform. My, uh, take is that you are choosing a platform based on what you need the most. This is where you choose the best in class. And you need the certainty that you partner with a vendor that invest the most. Well, this is our bread and butter. This is where we start. And of course we are offering every piece that the other are doing while they are also getting into, into our world. But our advantage being cloud agnostic, being ERP, agnostic, being CRM agnostic, and having started from the most sensitive technology that offer you, you know, the most, uh, the most savings center, best productivity increases. It's a tremendous advantage. >>And of course, you know, I'm excited about this opportunity and I've talked to a number of your customers. And so, you know, to me, that's the proof in the pudding, but you mentioned your annual recurring revenue, you know, approaching half a billion. So I got add, and, you know, as well that in my breaking analysis, we took a look at the total available market for RPA. And then I think, well, we've extended that I think we kinda missed the broader automation agenda in the platform thinking, and we've, we've updated those figures. I mean, it's, uh, it's hundreds of billions of dollars of an opportunity at least. And so the reason I bring this up is of course, last week we saw the hottest software IPO in history, and snowflake is a company with $400 million ARR growing at 120%. The company went from, you know, early this year, $15 billion valuation went up to 20, went up to 30. >>They, they launched a 33 billion within five minutes. It was worth 80 billion. You know, of course it's settling down now in the 60 billion, but unbelievable. And I would argue that your total available market is perhaps even even larger. I would say it is larger because it has a deeper business impact, uh, than, than say a snowflake. And of course, people watching my programs know that I'm a very, very high on that company. So my question is, what do you think about that, that IPO? How are you thinking about your, your own IPO? It would seem that that UI path is in a great position to at some point become a public company. >>We, first of all, if you are speaking about the time way, nobody would argue that our team is not higher than a snowflake. Pam, I, we can argue that their market is maybe more consolidated. Everybody understands data market in a way, and our market might be way more scattered across different use cases, but in a way, it's the market of data versus the market of all data versus old processes in the world. It's way, way more people are tasked today with processes then to analyzing and working with data in the way we are going after a very large problem that we have to solve. And we have to empower people of doing what they are naturally built to do, like, you know, talking to other people, socially interact, being creative, making decision, instead of doing this numbing part of their daily jobs that aren't required by this state of the industry. >>So our time we talked with different bankers and I've seen various figures from like 200 BD, one, two way into like two, three years for something that it's happy with. So time is the problem. It's the way, the way we are. I think, uh, we, uh, what we want to build, it's a durable business and it's a, it's a durable growth. Why in the same time being a cashflow positive, and we are very close to achieve this goals. And that will look, I believe that will be a very compelling proposition for our own IPO. I don't know if we can get snowflake multiples or not, but this is the feeling not the more, the biggest thing when my agenda, my, my agenda is to build a longterm sustainable, durable business. I am looking to next five to 10 years of this business. And IPO is just the fundraising event in, in, you know, after all. >>Great. So yeah, that's good. I wanted to ask you kind of what the, what the parameters are and, you know, I think you answered it is you're not rushing to get in, to draft off of some event that you had no control over that that notion of cashflow positive is really interesting to me. I said about the snowflake. I feel they have plenty of Tam just like you guys. And I agreed somewhere between 200 billion and 3 trillion. That's about right. And so, and, but, but I think that the, what I said about Snowflake's IPO is that I'm not worried about their lack of profitability right now. At some point I'm really going to be focused on their operating cash flow. And if you can, if you can come out with the large Tam, your, your growth that you're at the large ARR and cashflow positive, I can't wait to see that IPO Daniel. That's going to be super exciting. So we'll, we'll, uh, we'll be patient, but Daniel Dienes thank you so much for coming back into QBR. I was a great guest. Really appreciate the update on your business. >>Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation. Thanks. You're welcome. And >>Keep it right there. Everybody we'll be back with our next guest. Run up to this short break. This is Dave Volante.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Everybody. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of UI path forward UI pass, third North America event and we're excited to be here. This is our second year here. Daniel DNAs is here. He's the CEO of the rocket ship known as UI path. Welcome back to the cube. Great to see you again. >>Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here. >>Oh, so it's our, it's our pleasure and it's been great to be able to document this and we've been saying all week that we see the ecosystem developing the customer base, that UI path very reminiscent of some of the very successful companies that we've seen. But we've never seen a company sort of growing this fast. I have to start with you. Our big idea person kind of go big or go home mentality. But did you really see it getting here so fast? >>Well we, we kind of see it a year ago going here. I can not say that. I've seen it five years, five years ago, I couldn't see, I couldn't see me even in front of a hundred people speaking not to talk about 3000 like can close today, yesterday. >>Well, it's gotta make you very happy. You set it up on stages. When you see your saw the software that you developed, your, you're a developer, you're a coder affecting people's lives. The way some of the examples that you gave, it was a little tear in your eye maybe out of saying, but how to tug at your heart a little bit. That's got to be as a developer and of course now CEO, that's gotta be very gratifying to see your technology have an impact on people's lives. >>Okay, well I can tell you it is a really gratifying, in the end it's, um, we, we, we've built technology, you know, to, first of all, we are proud as engineers to build the best technology that we can, but it's, uh, it makes us a lot more, it's a lot more touching seeing that you can help humans to become better, to become healthier, to even save lives, to help refugees. It's a, it's an amazing feeling. It's when >>I talk to people about robotic process automation, most people don't, don't really are connected and they'll say things to me like, really is there that much room for automation? We've been in the computer industry for 50 years, we've been automating everything back office, front office. How much more room is there? And you put forth the premise last night in your keynote essentially said technology is actually created inefficiencies that >>despite all the automation that we've had now we have all these processes that can be improved. So necessarily the first time I had heard that put forward. I guess my question is, so technology got us into this problem, can technology get us out? >> Yeah. Um, first of all, I'm a software engineer, so I didn't believe there are so many inefficiencies in within the business world. I fought the law. Gender prizes should have been automated completely. Everything should run as move, as ineffectually. But in reality, the alert is far away from this. And as I said yesterday, email and a pro plus activity tools, especially spreadsheets and line of business application has changed completely. How we perform or in front office and back office. But uh, it's, it's a lot of skit work because it's, it's work created when people build business processes, they work with different systems and they always touch the system by looking at the user interface of the, by looking at human readable interfaces of these systems and uh, and when you go and automate them it's kind of difficult to translate into a BIS. >>So where are the at the on the field. So our approach is just through replicates Q months using the same tools, the same thing. Knowledge is that thought for media to business people building and the it's the only way that can work at scale. Of course you can take one particular process, build an it project flow developers with them be successful but you cannot do it. The large scale that an enterprise has, it's the only technology that can work at the large scale. Like I believe in the transportation industry, self-loving cars are the only solution to the industry or not. It's not feasible to say I will build much larger freeways. No, you put self driving cars or self driving trucks driving in the night on the freeway and this is how you will free daily, you know, everything else for the norm of agriculture. Same sort of concept. >>Like there's nothing, I can't make more land. Right? But as you grow your company, um, you guys growing so fast, are you able to use automations to support that growth? I'm sure there are some inefficiencies in it because there's a pace of growth. Helped me understand that this is, this is our story. So way we've built initial finance processes, finance, HR, procurement processes in the very manual slides using people and then scaling up when each a point where we've become a big consumers of all our own technology. It's not, it's not about what we use the most modern systems in the world. It's not a vote that they are not integrated. It's about all the, all the words build by this business people, all the reports that we are creating or all this stuff required a lot of work. We have automated more than a hundred thousand manual hours within you iPod today. >>A mother company built on the best technology stick, all that. Do you feel, feel like that's part of the reason why you've been able to grow so fast? Maybe faster than other historical examples of software companies? Systems are one thing way we weren't able to grow as fast by couple of reasons. First of all, we went global from day one. We were not the typical Silicon Valley company that says I will win in North America and then I will replicate this model across the world because they lose about three to five years in Muslim America just Lang to perfect the machine at least at least then we just went when globally they want an hour. It helps because we can make a business case easy so we can, we can go into a lot of gentle price, show them how it works and it does not require such a huge investment. >>That list to get started and second is it's evolved our culture. We put the big emphasize in keeping our culture customer focus and we put humility as the core. Then that evolved culture and I, I know it might sounds a bit pretentious to see, we put humility, but it's a humility that gives you a, a great, great framework of how you operate. You can, it makes you listen to people, it makes you able to change your mind. It makes you actually accelerate because people that change their mind or they look to find foster better solution that people that are stuck and they need a lot of data until they make, because they are afraid of losing face in making decision. So it's something that works. So it's uh, it's this, those two things combined gave us this cake. It's very interesting you say that because there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. >>Um, many companies have succeeded with extremely dogmatic approach. I mean, I would argue Microsoft, much of its success was it was built around personal productivity, you know, or bust. Um, yet your philosophy is be more open minded. You're humble. Listen to the customers change fast if necessary. Kind of a different philosophy maybe than some others have used in the past. I believe that our philosophy is, is helping us, I don't know, maybe a Microsoft has change. Yeah, exactly that. Satya. So, so it's uh, it's not, so I think this is, this is built in the fabric of how humans operate. We talk to other humans, we learned their needs and then we address their needs. I think it's arrogance to say, I know your boss, I will do this is what you have to do. Like many more traditional software companies are doing, we were very fortunate to build these products by listening to customers. >>That's, that's luck. You don't have to find product market fit. Listen to customers. Market is big. Bring what they want. Well the funny thing is, you know, we talking about the analysts meeting and I do remember you, you're there the other day. You said that you made a bunch of mistakes early on that you got ahead a build it and they will come a mentality. You've kind of built it and then you had to go out, listen to people and figure out how to apply it. Right. Actually I've been using a lot of parallels to service now. It's kind of right. Fred Luddy did, he built, he built a platform and then the VC said, well what do we use it for? He goes, anything good? He had to go and talk to people into the route. Okay, how do I apply it? But you said, well kind of made some mistakes early on, but you recovered from those mistakes by listening. >>It sounds like the definitely in the bill. Coming from a software engineer background, I, uh, I have, uh, at least I had the tendency to don't give enough credit to sales, to marketing even to the customers it was, we clearly understand the customers in the, so we build technology for the sake of technology. So we were really fortunate to have some MALDI customers. We didn't understand how because I fought that custom was, should all to themselves to test and find the best technology out there and just go there. I was really kind of, I had a lot of blind sports, so on how this world operates, but after I've stopped it to visit customers and understand their pain points and their requests actually realize they are smarter than us in using our own technology because they use it in the real world. So then message that that completely transformed my thinking. So I went back to my engineering team, sunlight, unlike the one guys on this day, I don't want to ever hear, we don't fix bugs and we do features and we do this. When the customers say, you do this, you say, thank you, thank you for showing me the light. I will do this. That's, that makes me create a better broad your feet >>back as a gift. The feedback is a gift. So I want to ask you about the statement you made yesterday in your keynote about we are cloud first and you announced a SAS capability today. I said I signed up, took me seconds, and now I've got to do some work to invite some other people and start doing some automations. But when you were in your apartment in Bucharest or wherever you started the company, why not cloud then? >>Most of our customers are still on prem. So way we have to be where customers are with the clouds first four years ago we wouldn't be here today. Oh. So we started close to the customers way and learn a lot from really large customers that thought a bit more reluctant to go into cloud and now as I think all in all in life is about timing. I think it's the right time timing to benefit the other segments of the market and allow for automation on demand was the infrastructure. Bryce, that people that are still on prem pay are huge. Compare some in some companies only to provision a server would be like 200 K period one time on. Then you have people to maintain them. Offering a many surveys by us in our own cloud looking at the best, you know, we create the best infrastructure, most efficient. We have the best people understanding our technology. We're seeing it. I think it's a great business proposition, but now we were ready to do it. >>Well, plus it sets up potentially new pricing models, you know, consumption based pricing models. You hear a lot of, a lot of row, a lot of bots, uh, are, are sitting idle as a customer. Help just charge me when I'm using violet, thinking of, you know, the serverless and functions. But this is possible only with economy of scale. So the cloud is, you're going to your cloud, you're not going to build it on Azure or AWS or you guys may use, we'll use Bob Lee Clow shows, which is infrastructure. You just have this look Chelios. Yeah. Okay. Um, I'm going ask you about, uh, IPO. Um, what, can you share with us your thoughts? You know, the window seems to be closing a little bit different, right? You know, Uber's and now Slack, you know, not such a successful. And what are your thoughts on IPO? Well, I think that the enterprise software >>companies were actually pretty successful in IPO and this year. And they have one of the, you know, a lot of just multiples that we have. We're seeing. So you cannot compare marketplace companies like who you are or Lyft to enterprise software. So I think for a good enterprise software company, they will always be a place to land a good IPO regardless of timing. Timing is, doesn't work for us. We are still, we are still a young company in many ways. We are 40 years old company. So it will be one of the yellow most earliest IPO. Very, very, very early. We need the bit, we need more at least one year. Like we want do an IPO in 2020, but we've been here the 2021 would be a good year for that. Depends on the climate, but we have met on the client, you have them, you're very well capitalized. Right? It's not like you need to do upsell Kevin the motivation and we still have five would bribe private Gabby. The markets are very frothy so you can still raise a lot of money and very good volume. >>Right. So the motivation for IPO is, is what awareness maybe for the employee. >>Yeah. Exited for the employees. And, uh, you'll just get to a size where you cannot be prideful. And most of our customers are public and they are much more comfortable dealing with the public. >>Yeah, for sure. It's part of your transparency edict, but I mean, well a lot of companies that have raised a ton of dough at the Cloudera for example, waited and waited and waited and then, you know, they go public. It's like, then the public doesn't get to participate in the upside. So I'm sure you're having those conversations thinking about it though. You know, the little guy wants to invest too and you're like, yeah, why not, right? Yeah. So let's go this. It's very exciting times and as you say, it depends on the time and we'll see what happens with the 2020 election who can, who can predict those things. But, so I want to ask you about the Capitol because software is a very capital efficient marketplace, but, but we see companies, you know, you included raising hundreds of millions, sometimes a billion plus dollars. Why such large raises? Where do you see that going? You mentioned engineering, you'd have plenty of money to do engineering. Is it really promotion? We tried to get to escape philosophy. We >>build a big market and we have invested in a mode in order to, if you go fast, well let's take cold car. Okay, the fosters or car go, the more guess it consumes. Right, so you need, if you want to comprise the time, it's costly, but that helps you extend much faster when when large markets and build a large bill, really a large company. In the short time, we could have been much more efficient if we, instead of four years, we would have built this company in 10 years. Many companies, if they would reach our size in 10 years, I will still be happy, but we've done it in four instead of 10 and then it was if you have unit capital to grow fast, >>I think it's the right approach because I do think there's going to be consolidation in this market and I think the company that achieves escape velocity and you are the favorite to do that now, we'll do very, very well. I think the market's much larger than the market forecast suggests. I think the Tam is way, way, way under, and again, we call this on service now as well. We saw this early on at the core. People tell how the core is really not that big, but, but the, but the adjacencies and the potential market is, it's, it's, it's way more than 16 billion or whatever that number is you showed. I think it's, it's, it's, it's 30 40 you know, perhaps even even bigger. >>I think as people realize that this is the really, the only way you can achieve automation on this, a smaller type of processes, but large volume, I think they will. They will go more and more. >>Well then, I know you're super busy and you've got to go. Thanks so much for coming again. Thank you guys for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be right back. Right after this short break. You're watching the cube from UI path forward three right back.

>> Narrator: Live, from Miami Beach, Florida it's theCUBE covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. We got all the action going on behind us. We are seeing the ascendancy of Robotic Process Automation, software robots. one of the leader's in that industry, one of the innovators, Daniel Dines is here, he's the founder and CEO of UiPath. Hot off the keynote, Daniel, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Daniel: Thank you for inviting me. >> Dave: You're very welcome, so, the great setup here, the Fontainebleau in Miami's an awesome venue for a conference this size; about 1500 people. In your keynote, you talked about your vision and we want to get into that but, go back to why you started UiPath. >> Daniel: I started UiPath to have joy at work, to do what I like, and to build something big. >> Dave: And you're a Developer, right? I mean you code-- >> Daniel: I am a Software Engineer. >> Dave: I mean, I can tell by the way you're dressed. (laughter) Developer CEO. >> Daniel: Yeah. >> Dave: Yeah, okay, so but you have a vision. You talked about a robot for every person. You mentioned Bill Gates, the PC for every person. I said a chicken for every pot, Harry Truman. What is that vision? Tell us about it. >> Daniel: Well, in our old day they work, we do a lot of menial stuff, repetitive, boring stuff. It's-- that is not human-- it's not human-like. Why not having this robot that we can talk to, we can command and just do the boring stuff for us? I think it's no-brainer. >> Dave: Right. >> Daniel: We just didn't think it's possible. We showed with our technology this is possible, actually. This is an angle of automation that people didn't think it was possible before. >> Dave: Well, so I neglected to congratulate you on your early success, I mean, you said one of your tenants is you're humble. So you got a lot of work to do, we understand that. But you've raised over $400 million to date, you just had a giant raise, we had Carl Eschenbach on in our Palo Alto studios. He was-- he was one of the guys in the round. So that's confirmation that this is a big market, we've pegged it at around a billion dollars today, 10x growth by 2023, so very impressive growth potential. What's driving that growth? >> Daniel: It's all from the customers. When they see it working, it's a "wow," it's different, they won't go back to the same way of delivering work. It's changing how people really work. You see people becoming joyful when we show them the robot, and they say, "I don't need to do this stuff anymore? Wow." Imagine people doing the same reports every day, going through hundreds of page and clicking the same-- this is, this is nirvana. >> Dave: And we saw customers, UnitedHealth was on stage today, Mr. Yamamoto has a thousand robots, Wells Fargo's up there, you had some partners. So you're doing that hard integration work as well. Stu, you noted that the global presence of this company was impressing you. You're thoughts on that. >> Stu: Yeah, absolutely, I mean first of all, company started in Romania, we had-- you know you don't see too many American keynotes where there's a video up there in a foreign language. It's Japanese with English subtitles, you've got customers already starting with a global footprint. What's it like being a founder in a start-up from Europe playing in a global marketplace? >> Daniel: Well, actually it help us to become-- we've been born global. We are one of the first start-ups born global from day one. We've been this company, with Japanese talent, Indian talent, Romanian talent, American talent. And being from this remote part of Europe help us... think big, because really are-- we cannot build this start-up only with Romanians. That's clear, we don't have the pool of talent. So why not just go in global, get the best talent we can and spread global? And we are one of the few companies in the world that has their revenue split equally across the three big continents. >> Stu: Yeah, Daniel, the other thing that struck me-- you're growing the company very fast. We talked about the money, but you said you're going to have over 4,000 employees by 2019. You know, I play a lot in the open source world, it's often small-team, you've got to go marketplace, how come you need so many employees for a software company? Maybe explain a little bit that relationship with a customer, how much you, you're technical people, what they need to do to interact and help them to grow these; is it verticals, you know, what's that dynamic? >> Daniel: Well, first of all, we hire more than 1,000 people in last year alone. We started from 200 and now we are 1,400. We need all these people because this technology is at the intersection of software and services. We need to help our customers scale, and we need to inject a lot of customer success people making our customer successful. My, my way of building a company is customer first. We want to offer this boutique type of approach to our customers, and they are happy. And they-- and we build this trust relationship. This is why we need so many-- We have 2,000 customers. Next year, we have 5,000 customers. We need our people to help them grow. >> Dave: We're going to have Craig Le Clair on a little later. He's the Vice President of Forrester Research. They've done a deep dive in this marketplace in the last couple years now. UiPath has jumped from number three to number one in the Forrester wave, and when you look at that report, really, the feature and function analysis shows you guys lead in a number of places. In listening to your keynote, I discerned several things that I wonder if you could explain for our audience. It sounds like computer vision is a key linchpin to your architecture, and there seems to be an orchestrator and then maybe a studio to enable simple low code, or even no code automations to be developed. Can you describe, so a layperson-- your architecture, and why you've been able to jump into the lead. >> Daniel: Well, we've done everything wrong as a start-up. We spent like seven years building a computer vision technology that-- it was of little use, back then. We did it just because we liked it. And now, this is our powerful weapon, because, what's important for this robot is to be accurate, and to be able to work in any situations. Why our technology works better, is that we do way better the extra mile of automation. 80% of the job anyone can do, even with free software. But the last 20% is where the real issues is. And with the last 20% there is no automation. And we are doing way faster. So all our signal sources-- the fact that we've done something against Lean, against every principal in start-up, we had the lecture in building so many years technology, without even envisioning the use. But when we found the market, and it was a great product market, then we scale the company. >> Dave: There are a couple key statistics that I want to bring up and get your thoughts on. We know that there are now more jobs than there are people to fill those jobs. We also know that the productivity hasn't been increasing, so your vision is to really close that gap through RPA and automation. So your narrative is really that you're not replacing humans, you're augmenting humans, but at the same time, there's got to be some training involved. You guys are making a huge commitment in training. You're going to train a million people, that's the goal, within three years. We have Tom Clancy on next. We're going to ask him how he's going to do that. But talk about that skills gap and how you're embracing re-training. >> Daniel: Well, we realize that at some point that change management, it's kind of the key-- it's the cornerstone of delivering this technology. Because there is inertia, there is fear, and-- if we bring, at the same time, automation and training, it solves this-- that solve this issue. And we have to think big; this is why: one million is a big goal, but we will achieve it because we-- I love my way to think big. I was thinking small for so many years, and thinking big it's like, it's like liberty. You sat down and realize, "Yes, you can." >> Stu: Daniel, we talk a lot about digital transformation. The automation often doesn't get talked, but in big companies; Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, seems a natural fit, I saw some of them are your partners, you came from Microsoft, maybe talk about that dynamic about how some of the, you know, big players that, you know, have the business process applications, how your solution fits with them, you know, are they going to be paying attention to this space? >> Daniel: Well, digital transformation, it's a big initiative for everybody. And RPA, it's actually right now, recognizes the first step in digital transformation. And obviously that if was RPA, AI, big business applications, it's not one single angle, but we covered the last mile of automation. We've covered the impossible, before, before this. And our automation first view of the world is beyond digital transformation because companies will exist after they build for digital transformation. But automation first is a, is a mindset. It's rethinking your operations by applying automation first. >> Dave: You have an open mindset, which is interesting. You even said on stage that, "Look, our competitors are beginning to mimic "some of our features and functions and our approach." And you said, "That's okay." I was surprised by that, especially given your Microsoft background, which was like, grind competitors into the ground. What's changed? Why the open mindset and why do you believe that's the right approach? >> Daniel: Look at Microsoft, Microsoft has changed. This is the-- it's much better, it's-- you feel better as a human. When you can offer something, "This is up, take it, give me feedback." We've been able to build way faster than them, having our open and free community. Open the software-- It gives you more joy as a developer seeing thousands of people than just guarding my little secret just for fear someone will copy it. It's way better. >> Dave: Now, you said on stage that a lot of people laughed at you when you were starting this company, you dream big. Somebody once said, Stu, that, "If you believe you can do it, "or you don't believe you can do it, you're right." "So you got to believe," was one of the things that you said. >> Daniel: That's the first thing. >> Dave: Yeah, so share with the young people out here who are dreaming big, everybody in their early 20's, they're dreaming big. Tell us about your story, your dreams, people who laughed at you, what were they laughing about and how did you power through that? Where did you get your conviction? >> Daniel: Well, first of all, they don't dream big enough. It's very difficult to big dream enough because you have your, you know-- it's the common sense that comes into the picture and it's the fear of other people laughing at you. And we haven't dreamt big enough. For 10-- for the first 10 years, we just wanted to make a good technology, the best technology that we can but that's not big enough. Big enough is change the world, big enough is bring something that makes people life better. This is big enough. If they think making people lives better, that's big enough. Nothing else is big enough. >> Dave: Well I love the fact, Daniel, that your mission-driven; that's clear. You're having some fun. You know this-- these apps are really a lot of fun. Do you still code? >> Daniel: No but I do a lot of software design and review. >> Dave: Okay, so you help, so the coders, they-- how do-- what's that dynamic like? You have-- obviously experienced developer. Do you sort of, tell them which path to go down or which path not to go down? Do you challenge them? What's your style, as a leader? >> Daniel: I challenge them to do things faster, always. They-- I ask them, let's do this feature and they say, "Two month." "No, two days." Why not? And then we go and break that one and it's a lot of conversation but usually we will deliver. Fast-- fast is also a way of being. Fastest company wins, and fast is a-- it's not easy to change the mind. Because you want-- maybe you want to be very organized, very sophisticated. If you are fast, you have to be ready to make mistakes, reverse your decision going, but you will go fast in the end. >> Dave: So that is kind of Steve Jobs-like, set a really challenging goal, and people somehow will figure it out, but culturally, you seem friendlier, nicer. It's not grinding people anymore, it's inspiring them. Is that a fair assessment? >> Daniel: My goal is to have the happiest team employees everywhere. Hap-- I like to be happy. I started this company for the joy of doing what I like, why not, this is, this is what I want for everyone. And we are-- we recently scored in comparably as one of the best company in terms of people happiness. >> Dave: Well congratulations, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Daniel: Thank you very much for inviting me. >> Dave: Really a pleasure having you. Alright, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, we're live from UiPath... in Miami, you're watching theCUBE. Stay right there. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Like a marathon runner pumped up on adrenaline, UiPath sprinted to the lead in what is surely going to be a long journey toward enabling the modern automated enterprise. Now, in doing so the company has established itself as a leader in enterprise automation while at the same time, it got out over its skis on critical execution items and it disappointed investors along the way. In our view, the company has plenty of upside potential, but will have to slog through its current challenges, including restructuring its go-to market, prioritizing investments, balancing growth with profitability and dealing with a very difficult macro environment. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis and ahead of Forward 5, UiPath's big customer event, we once again dig into RPA and automation leader, UiPath, to share our most current data and view of the company's prospects relative to the competition and the market overall. Now, since the pandemic, four sectors have consistently outperformed in the overall spending landscape in the ETR dataset, cloud, containers, machine learning/AI, and robotic process automation. For the first time in a long time ML and AI and RPA have dropped below the elevated 40% line shown in this ETR graph with the red dotted line. The data here plots the net score or spending momentum for each sector with we put in video conferencing, we added it in simply to provide height to the vertical access. Now, you see those squiggly lines, they show the pattern for ML/AI and RPA, and they demonstrate the downward trajectory over time with only the most current period dropping below the 40% net score mark. While this is not surprising, it underscores one component of the macro headwinds facing all companies generally and UiPath specifically, that is the discretionary nature of certain technology investments. This has been a topic of conversation on theCUBE since the spring spanning data players like Mongo and Snowflake, the cloud, security, and other sectors. The point is ML/AI and RPA appear to be more discretionary than certain sectors, including cloud. Containers most likely benefit from the fact that much of the activity is spending on internal resources, staff like developers as much of the action in containers is free and open source. Now, security is not shown on this graphic, but as we've reported extensively in the last week at CrowdStrike's Falcon conference, security is somewhat less discretionary than other sectors. Now, as it relates to the big four that we've been highlighting since the pandemic hit, we're starting to see priorities shift from strategic investments like AI and automation to more tactical areas to keep the lights on. UiPath has not been immune to this downward pressure, but the company is still able to show some impressive metrics. Here's a snapshot chart from its investor deck. For the first time UiPath's ARR has surpassed $1 billion. The company now has more than 10,000 customers with a large number generating more than $100,000 in ARR. While not shown in this data, UiPath reported this month in its second quarter close that it had $191 million plus ARR customers, which is up 13% sequentially from its Q1. As well, the company's NRR is over 130%, which is very solid and underscores the low churn that we've previously reported for the company. But with that increased ARR comes slower growth. Here's some data we compiled that shows the dramatic growth in ARR, the blue bars, compared with the rapid deceleration and growth. That's the orange line on the right hand access there. For the first time UiPath's ARR growth dipped below 50% last quarter. Now, we've projected 34% and 25% respectively for the company's Q3 in Q4, which is slightly higher than the upper range of UiPath's CFO, Ashim Gupta's guidance from the last earnings call. That still puts UiPath exiting its fiscal year at a 25% ARR growth rate. While it's not unexpected that a company reaching $1 billion in ARR, that milestone, will begin to show lower, slower growth, net new ARR is well off its fiscal year '22 levels. The other perhaps more concerning factor is the company, despite strong 80% gross margins, remains unprofitable and free cash flow negative. New CEO, Rob Enslin, has emphasized the focus on profitability, and we'd like to see a consistent and more disciplined Rule of 40 or Rule of 45 to 50 type of performance going forward. As a result of this decelerating growth and lowered guidance stemming from significant macro challenges including currency fluctuations and weaker demand, especially in Europe and EP and inconsistent performance, the stock, as shown here, has been on a steady decline. What all growth stocks are facing, you know, challenges relative to inflation, rising interest rates, and looming recession, but as seen here, UiPath has significantly underperformed relative to the tech-heavy NASDAQ. UiPath has admitted to execution challenges, and it has brought in an expanded management team to facilitate its sales transition and desire to become a more strategic platform play versus a tactical point product. Now, adding to this challenge of foreign exchange issues, as we've previously reported unlike most high flying tech companies from Silicon Valley, UiPath has a much larger proportion of its business coming from locations outside of the United States, around 50% of its revenue, in fact. Because it prices in local currencies, when you convert back to appreciated dollars, there are less of them, and that weighs down on revenue. Now, we asked Breaking Analysis contributor, Chip Simonton, for his take on this stock, and he told us, "From a technical standpoint, there's really not much you can say, it just looks like a falling knife. It's trading at an all time low but that doesn't mean it can't go lower. New management with a good product is always a positive with a stock like this, but this is just a bad environment for UiPath and all growth stocks really, and," he added, "95% of money managers have never operated in this type of environment before. So that creates more uncertainty. There will be a bottom, but picking it in this high-inflation, high-interest rate world hasn't worked too well lately. There's really no floor to these stocks that don't have earnings, until you start to trade to cash levels." Well, okay, let's see, UiPath has $1.6 billion in cash in the balance sheet and no debt, so we're a long ways off from that target, the cash value with its current $7 billion valuation. You have to go back to April 2019 to UiPaths Series D to find a $7 billion valuation. So Simonton says, "The stock still could go lower." The valuation range for this stock has been quite remarkable from around $50 billion last May to $7 billion today. That's quite a swing. And the spending data from ETR sort of supports this story. This graphic here shows the net score or spending momentum granularity for UiPath. The lime green is new additions to the platform. The forest green is spending 6% or more. The gray is flat spending. The pink is spending down 6% or worse. And the bright red is churn. Subtract the red from the green and you get net score, which is that blue line. The yellow line is pervasiveness within the data set. Now, that yellow line is skewed somewhat because of Microsoft citations. There's a belief from some that competition from Microsoft is the reason for UiPath's troubles, but Microsoft is really delivering RPA for individuals and isn't an enterprise automation platform at least not today, but it's Microsoft, so you can't discount their presence in the market. And it probably is having some impact, but we think there are many other factors weighing on UiPath. Now, this is data through the July survey but taking a glimpse at the early October returns they're trending with the arrows, meaning less green more gray and red, which is going to lower UiPath's overall net score, which is consistent with the macro headwinds and the business performance that it's been seeing. Now, nonetheless, UiPath continues to get high marks from its customers, and relative to it's peers it maintains a leadership position. So this chart from ETR, shows net score or spending velocity in the vertical access, an overlap or presence in the dataset on the horizontal access. Microsoft continues to have a big presence, and as we mentioned, somewhat skews the data. UiPath has maintained its lead relative to automation anywhere on the horizontal access, and remains ahead of the legacy pack of business process and other RPA vendors. Solonis has popped up in the ETR data set recently as a process mining player and has a pretty high net score. It's a critical space UiPath has entered, via its acquisition of ProcessGold back in October 2019. Now, you can also see what we did is we added in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for robotic process automation. We didn't blow it up here but we circled the position of UiPath. You can see it's leading in both the vertical and the horizontal access, ahead of automation anywhere as well as Microsoft and others. Now, we're still not seeing the likes of SAP, Service Now, and Salesforce showing up in the ETR data, but these enterprise software vendors are in a reasonable position to capitalize on automation opportunities within their installed basis. This is why it's so important that UiPath transitions to an enterprise-wide horizontal play that can cut across multiple ERP, CRM, HCM, and service management platforms. While the big software companies can add automation to their respective stovepipes, and they're doing that, UiPath's opportunity is to bring automation to enable enterprises to build on top of and across these SaaS platforms that most companies are running. Now, on the chart, you see the red arrows slanting down. That signifies the expected trend from the upcoming October ETR survey, which is currently in the field and will run through early next month. Suffice it to say that there is downward spending pressure across the board, and we would expect most of these names, including UiPath, to dip below the 40% dotted line. Now, as it relates to the conversation about platform versus product, let's dig into that a bit more. Here's a graphic from UiPath's investor deck that underscores the move from product to platform. UiPath has expanded its platform from its initial on-prem point product to focus on automating tasks for individuals and back offices to a cloud-first platform approach. The company has added in technology from a number of acquisitions and added organically to those. These include, the previously mentioned, ProcessGold for process discovery, process documentation from the acquisition of StepShot, API automation via the acquisition of Cloud Elements, to its more recent acquisition of Re:infer, a natural language processing specialist. Now, we expect the platform to be a big focus of discussion at Forward 5 next week in Las Vegas. So let's close in on our expectations for the three-day event next week at the Venetian. UiPath's user conference has grown over the years and the Venetian should be by far be the biggest and most heavily attended in the company's history. We expect UiPath to really emphasize the role of automation, specifically in the context of digital transformation, and how UiPath has evolved, again, from point product to platform to support digital transformation. Expect to focus on platform maturity. When UiPath announced its platform intentions back in 2019, which was the last physical face-to-face customer event prior to COVID, it essentially was laying out a statement of direction. And over the past three years, it has matured the platform and taken it from vision to reality. You know, I said the last event, actually, the last event was 2021. Of course, theCUBE was there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. But prior to that, 2019 is when they laid out that platform vision. Now, in a conjunction with this evolution, the company has evolved its partnerships, pairing up with the likes of Snowflake and the data cloud, CrowdStrike, to provide better security, and, of course, the big Global System Integrators, to help implement enterprise automation. And this is where we expect to hear a lot from customers. I've heard, there'll be over 100 speaking at the show about the outcomes and how they're digitally transforming. Now, I mentioned earlier that we haven't seen the big ERP and enterprise software companies show up yet in the ETR data, but believe me they're out there and they're selling automation and RPA and they're competing. So expect UiPath to position themselves and deposition those companies. Position UiPath as a layer above these bespoke platforms shown here on number four. With process discovery and task discovery, building automation across enterprise apps, and operationalizing process workflows as a horizontal play. And I'm sure there'll be some new graphics on this platform that we can share after the event that will emphasize this positioning. And finally, as we showed earlier in the platform discussion, we expect to hear a lot about the new platform capabilities and use cases, and not just RPA, but process mining, testing, testing automation, which is a new vector of growth for UiPath, document processing. And also, we expect UiPath to address its low code development capabilities to expand the number of people in the organization that can create automation capabilities and automations. Those domain experts is what we're talking about here that deeply understand the business but aren't software engineers. Enabling them is going to be really important, and we expect to hear more about that. And we expect this conference to set the tone for a new chapter in UiPath's history. The company's second in-person gathering, but the first one was last October. So really this is going to be sort of a build upon that, and many in-person events. For the first time this year, UiPath was one of the first to bring back its physical event, but we expect it to be bigger than what was at the Bellagio, and a lot of people were concerned about traveling. Although UiPath got a lot of customers there, but I think they're going to really up the game in terms of attendance this year. And really, that comparison is unfair because UiPath, again, it was sort of the middle of COVID last year. But anyway, we expect this new operations and go-to-market oriented focus from co-CEO, Rob Enslin, and new sales management, we're going to be, you know, hearing from them. And the so-called adult supervision has really been lacking at UiPath, historically. Daniel Dines will no doubt continue to have a big presence at the event and at the company. He's not a figurehead by any means. He's got a deep understanding of the product and the market and we'll be interviewing both Daniel and Rob Enslin on theCUBE to find out how they see the future. So tune in next week, or if you're in Las Vegas, definitely stop by theCUBE. If you're not go to thecube.net, you'll be able to watch all of our coverage. Okay, we're going to leave it there today. I want to thank Chip Simonton again for his input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Morrison who's on production and manages our podcasts. Ken Schiffman, as well, from our Boston office, our Boston studio. Kristen Martin, and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE that does some great editing. Thanks all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you could email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante. If you got anything interesting, I'll respond. If not, please keep trying, or comment on my LinkedIn post and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (gentle techno music)

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has always been an unconventional company. You know it started with humble beginnings. It's essentially a software development shop. Then it caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology. It's really, it's simplification mantra and it created a very easy to deploy software robot system for bespoke departments so they could automate mundane tasks. You know the story. The company grew rapidly, was able to go public early this year. Now consistent with its out-of-the-ordinary approach, while other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UiPath is moving ahead with Forward IV, it's annual user conference next week with a live audience there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It's also fast forwarding as a company, determined to lead the charge beyond RPA and execute on a more all-encompassing Enterprise automation agenda. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Forward IV, we'll update you in the RPA market the progress that UiPath has made since its IPO and bringing some ETR customer survey data that's contextualized the company's position in the overall market and relative to the competition. Here's a quick rundown of today's agenda. First I want to tell you theCube is going to be at Forward IV at the Bellagio next week. UiPath, this is their big customer event. It's live, it's a physical event. It's primarily outdoors. You have to be vaccinated to attend. Now, this not completely out of the ordinary. John Furrier and theCube were at AWS Public Sector this past week and we were at Mobile World Congress in one of the first big hybrid events of the year at Barcelona. We thought that event would kick of the fall event season, live event in earnest but the COVID crisis has caused many tech firms, most tech firms actually, to hit pause button. Not UiPath, they're moving ahead. They're going forward and we see a growing trend for smaller VIP events with a virtual component, topic maybe for another day. Now we've talked extensively about the productivity challenges and the automation mandate the pandemic has thrust upon us. Now, we've seen pretty dramatic productivity improvements as remote work kicked in but its brought new stresses. For example, according to Qualtrics, 32% of working moms said their mental health has declined since the pandemic hit. 15% of working dads said the same by the way. So, one has to question the sustainability of this perpetual workday. And we're seeing a continuum of automation solutions emerging and we'll talk about that today. We're seeing tons of M&A as well but now, in that continuum, on the left-side of the spectrum, there's Microsoft who in some ways, they stand alone and their Azure is becoming ubiquitous as a SaaS-Cloud collaboration and productivity platform. Microsoft is everywhere and in virtually every market, whether video conferencing, security, database, cloud, CRM, analytics, you name it. Microsoft is pretty much there and RPA is no different. With the acquisition of Softomotive last year, Microsoft entered the RTA market in earnest and is penetrating very deeply into the space, particularly as it pertains to personal productivity building on its software stake. Now in the middle of that spectrum if you will, we're seeing more M&A and that's defined really by the big software giants. Think of this domain as integrated software place. SAP, they acquired Contextere. They also acquired a company called Process Insights, Service now acquired Inttellebot. Salesforce acquired Servicetrace, we see Infor entering the frame and I would put even Pega, Pega systems in this camp. Software companies focused on integrating RPA into their broader workflows, into their software platforms and this is important because these platforms are entrenched Their well guardants of thoughts and complicated with lots of touchpoints and integration points and frankly they are much harder to automate because of their entrenched legacy. Now, on the far side of that spectrum, are the horizontal automation players and that's been let by UiPath with automation anywhere as the number two player in this domain. And I even put a blue prism in there more M&A recently announced that Vista is going to acquire them Vista also owns Tibco, they are going to merge those two companies. You know Tibco is come up with the integration play. So again I would put them in that you know, horizontal piece of the spectrum. So with that as background, we're going to look at how UiPath has performed since we last covered them and IPO and I'm going to bring in some ETR survey data to get the spending view from customers and we'll wrap up. Now, just to emphasize the importance of automation and the automation mandate, we talk about it all the time in this program. We use this ETR chart. It's a two dimensional view with net score which is the measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share which is a proxy for pervasiveness in the data set that's on the horizontal axis. Now note that red dotted line, it signifies companies within elevated position on the net score vertical axis anything over that is considered pretty good. Very good. Now this shows every spending segment within the ETR taxonomy. And the four spending categories with the greatest velocity are AI, cloud, containers and RPA. And they have topped the charts for quite a while now. They are the only 4 categories which have sustained above that 40% line consistently throughout the pandemic and even before. Now the impressive thing about cloud of course is it has both spending momentum on the vertical axis and a very large market share or presence in the data set. The point is RPA is nascent still. It has an affinity with AI as a means of more intelligently identifying and streamlining process improvements. And so we expect those two to remain elevated and grow to the right together. UiPath pegs its TAM, total available market at 60 billion. And the reality is that could be understated. Okay, as we reported from the UiPath S1 analysis we did pre IPO, the company at that time had an ARR annual recurring revenue of $580 million and it was growing at 65% annually. And nearly 8000 customers at the time, a 1000 of which had an ARR in excess of a 100k. And the net revenue retention the company had was over 145%. So let's take a look at the pictures 6 months forward. We mentioned the $60 billion TAM, ARR now up over $726.5 million on its way to a billion ARR holding pretty steady at 60% growth as is NRR, net revenue retention and more then a 1000 new customers and 200 more with over a 100000 in ARR and a small operating profit which by the way exceeded the consensuses pretty substantially. Profitability is not shown here and no one seems to care anyway these days. It's all about growing into that TAM. Well that's a pretty good looking picture, isn't it? The company had a beat and a raise for the quarter earlier this month, so looking good right. Well you ask how come the stock is not doing better. That's an interesting question. So let's first look at the stocks performance on a relative basis. Here we show UiPath performance against Pega systems and blue prism, the other two publicly traded automation. Pure plays sort of in the case of Pega. So UiPath outperformed post its IPO but since the early summer Pega is been the big winner while UiPath slowly decelerated. You see Blue prism was at the lag until it was announced that it was in an acquisition talks with a couple of PE firms and the prospects of a bidding war sent that yellow line up as you can see. UiPath as you can see on the inset, has a much higher valuation than Pega and way higher than blue Prism. Pega interestingly is growing revenues nicely at around 40%. And I think what's happening is that the street simply wants more. Even though UiPath beat and raised, Wallstreet is still getting comfortable with management which is new to the public market game and the company just needs to demonstrate a track record and build trust. There's also some education around billings and multi-year contracts that the company addressed on its last earnings call. But the street was concerned about ARR for new logos. It appears to be slowing down sequentially and a notable decline in billings momentum which UiPath CFO addressed on the earnings call saying look they don't need the trade margin for prepaid multi year deals, given the strong cash position. Why give anything up. And even though I said nobody cares about profitability well, I guess that's true until you guide for an operating loss when you've been showing small profit in recent quarters what UiPath did. Then, obviously people start to care. So UiPath is in bit of an unknown territory to the street and it has a valuation, it's pretty rich. Very rich actually at 30 times revenue multiple or greater than 30 times revenue multiple. So that's why in my view, investors are being cautious. But I want to address a dynamic that we have seen with this high growth rocket chip companies. Something we talked about Snowflake and I think you are seeing some of that here with UiPath. Different model in the sense that Snowflake is pure cloud but I'm talking about concerns around ARR and from new logos and that growth in a sequential basis. And here's what's happening in my view with UiPath. You have a company that started within departments with a smaller average contract size, ACV maybe 25000, may be 50000 but not deep six figure deals. That wasn't UiPath's play. And because the company focused so heavily on simplicity and made it really easy to adapt, customers saw really fast ROI. I mean break-even in months. So we very quickly saw expansion into other departments. So when ACV started to rise and installations expanded within each customer, UiPath realized it had to move beyond a point product and it started thing about a platform and making acquisitions like Processgold and others and this marked a much deeper expansion into the customer base. And you can see that here in this UiPath chart that they shared at their investor deck, customers that bought in 2016 and 2017 expanded their spend 13, 15, 18, 20x So the LTV, life time value of the customer is growing dramatically and because UiPath is focused on simplicity, and has a very facile premium model much easier to try before you buy than its competitors it's CAC, Customer acquisition cost are likely much lower than some of its peers. And that's a key dynamic. So don't get freaked out by some of those concerns that we raised earlier because just like Snowflake what's happening is that the company for sure is gaining new customers, may be just not at the same rate but don't miss the forest through the trees I.e getting more money from their existing customers which means retention, loyalty and growth. Now speaking of forest, this chart is the dynamic I'm talking about, its an ETR graphic that shows the components of net score against spending momentum. Net score breaks down into 5 areas. That lime green at the top is new additions. Okay, so that's only 11% of the customer mentions. By the way we are talking about more than a 125 responses for UiPath. So it's meaningful, it's actually larger in this survey or certainly comparable to Microsoft. So that's just something right there. The next bar is the forest green. Forest green is what I want you to focus. That's customer spending 6% or more in the second half of the year relative to the first half. The gray is flat spending which is quite large. The pink or light red, that's spending customers spending 6% or worse, that's a 4% number. But look at the bottom bar. There is no bar, that's churn. 0% of the responders in the survey are churning. And Churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies. 0% defections. So you've got 46% spending more, nobody leaving. That's the dynamic powering UiPath right now and I would take this picture any day over a larger lime green and a smaller forest green and a bigger churn number. Okay, it's pretty good, not Snowflake good but it's solid. So how does this picture compare to UiPath's peers. Let's take a look at that. So this is ETR data, same data showing the granularity net score for Microsoft power automate, UiPath automation anywhere, Blue Prism and Pega. So as we said before, Microsoft is ubiquitous. What can we say about that. But UiPath is right there with a more robust platform. Not to overlook Microsoft, you can't but UiPath will you that the don't compete head to head for enterprise automation deals with Microsoft and may be they will over time. They do however compete head to head with automation anywhere. And their picture is quite strong as you can see here. You know as is Blue Prism's picture and even Pega. Although Blue Prism automation anywhere UiPtah and power automate all have net scores on this chart as you can see the tables in the upper right over 40%, Pega does not. But you can see Pega as a pure play RPA vendor it's a little bit of sort of apples and oranges there but they do sell RPA and ETR captures in their taxonomy so why not include them. Also note that UiPath has as I said before more mentions in the survey than power automate which is actually quite interesting given the ubiquity of Microsoft. Now, one other notable note is the bright red that's defections and only UiPath is showing zero defections Everybody else has at least little of the slims on defections. Okay, so take that as you will but its another data point, the one that is powerful nit only for UiPath but really for the entire sector. Now the last ETR data point that we want to share is the famous two dimensional view. Like the sector chart we showed earlier, this graphic shows the net score on the vertical axis that's against spending velocity and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. So as we said earlier, UiPath actually has a greater presence in the survey than the ever present Microsoft. Remember, this is the July survey. We don't have full results from the September-October survey yet and we can't release them until ETR is out of its quiet period but I expect the entire sector, like everything is going to be slightly down because as reported last week tech spending is moderated slightly in the second half of this year. But we don't expect the picture to change dramatically UiPath and power automate we think are going to lead in market presence and those two plus automation anywhere is going to show the strength in spending momentum as will most of the sector. We'll see who comes in above the 40% line. Okay, what to watch at Forward IV. So in summary I'll be looking for a few things. One, UiPath has hinted toward a big platform announcement that will deepen its capabilities to beyond being an RPA point tool into much more of an enterprise automation platform, rewriting a lot of the code Linux, cloud, better automation of the UI, you are going to hear all kind of new product announcements that are coming so I'll be listening for those details. I want to hear more from customers that further confirm what I've been hearing from them over the last couple of years and get more data especially on their ROI, on their land and expand, I want to understand that dynamic and that true enterprise automation. It's going to be good to get an update face to face and test some of our assumptions here and see where the gaps are and where UiPath can improve. Third, I want to talk to ecosystem players to see where they are in participating in the value chain here. What kind of partner has UiPath become since its IPO, are they investing more in the ecosystem, how do partners fit into that flywheel. Fourth, I want to hear from UiPath management Daniel Dines and other UiPath leaders, their exiting toddler wheel and coming into an adolescence phase or early adulthood. And what does that progression look like, how does it feel, what's the vibe at the show. And finally I'm very excited to participate in a live in-person event to see what's working, to see how hybrid events are evolving, we got to good glimpse at Mobile congress and this week in DC at public sector summit. As you know theCube is doing hybrid events for years and we intend to continue to lead in this regard and bring you the best real time information as possible. Okay, that's it for today. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search breaking analysis podcast. We publish each week on Wikibound.com and Siliconangle.com and you can always connect on twitter @dvellante or email me at David.vellante@siliconangle.com Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCube insights powered by ETR. Be well and will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has had a long, strange trip to IPO. How so you ask? Well, the company was started in 2005. But it's culture, is akin to a frenetic startup. The firm shunned conventions and instead of focusing on a narrow geographic area to prove its product market fit before it started to grow, it aggressively launched international operations prior to reaching unicorn status. Well prior, when it had very little revenue, around a million dollars. Today, more than 60% of UiPath business is outside of the United States. Despite its headquarters being in New York city. There's more, according to recent SEC filings, UiPath total revenue grew 81% last year. But it's free cash flow, is actually positive, modestly. Wait, there's more. The company raised $750 million in a Series F in early February, at a whopping $35 billion valuation. Yet, the implied back of napkin valuation, based on the number of shares outstanding after the offering multiplied by the proposed maximum offering price per share yields evaluation of just under 26 billion. (Dave chuckling) And there's even more to this crazy story. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our learnings, from sifting through hundreds of pages (paper rustling) of UiPath's red herring. So you didn't have to, we'll share our thoughts on its market, its competitive position and its outlook. Let's start with a question. Mark Roberge, is a venture capitalist. He's a managing director at Stage 2 Capital and he's also a teacher, a professor at the B-School in Harvard. One of his favorite questions that he asks his students and others, is what's the best way to grow a company? And he uses this chart to answer that question. On the vertical axis is customer retention and the horizontal axis is growth to growth rate and you can see he's got modest and awesome and so forth. Now, so I want to let you look at it for a second. What's the best path to growth? Of course you want to be in that green circle. Awesome retention of more than 90% and awesome growth but what's the best way to get there? Should you blitz scale and go for the double double, triple, triple blow it out and grow your go to market team on the horizontal axis or should be more careful and focus on nailing retention and then, and only then go for growth? What do you think? What do you think most VCs would say? What would you say? When you want to maybe run the table, capture the flag before your competitors could get there or would you want to take a more conservative approach? What would Daniel Dines say the CEO of UiPath? Again, I'll let you think about that for a second. Let's talk about UiPath. What did they do? Well, I shared at the top that the company shunned conventions and expanded internationally, very rapidly. Well before it hit escape velocity and they grew like crazy and it got out of control and he had to reign it in, plug some holes, but the growth didn't stop, go. So very clearly based on it's performance and reading through the S1, the company has great retention. It uses a metric called gross retention rate which is at 96 or 97%, very high. Says customers are sticking with it. So maybe that's the right formula go for growth and grow like crazy. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. Go fast horizontally, and you can go vertically. Let me tell you what I think Mark Roberge would say, he told me you can do that. But churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies and perhaps the better path is to nail product market fit. And then your retention metrics, before you go into hyperbolic growth mode. There's all science behind this, which may be antithetical to the way many investors want to roll the dice and go for super growth, like go fast or die. Well, it worked for UiPath you might say, right. Well, no. And this is where the story gets even more interesting and long and strange for UiPath. As we shared earlier, UiPath was founded in 2005 out of Bucharest Romania. The company actually started as a software outsourcing startup. It called the company, DeskOver and it built automation libraries and SDKs for companies like Microsoft, IBM and Google and others. It also built automation scripts and developed importantly computer vision technology which became part of its secret sauce. In December 2015, DeskOver changed its name to UiPath and became a Delaware Corp and moved its headquarters to New York City a couple of years later. So our belief is that UiPath actually took the preferred path of Mark Roberge, five ticks North, then five more East. They slow-cooked for the better part of 10 years trying to figure out what market to serve. And they spent that decade figuring out their product market fit. And then they threw gas in the fire. Pretty crazy. All right, let's take a peak (chuckling) at the takeaways from the UiPath S1 the numbers are impressive. 580 million ARR with 65% growth. That asterisk is there because like you, we thought ARR stood for annual recurring revenue. It really stands for annualized renewal run rate. annualized renewal run rate is a metric that is one of UiPath's internal KPIs and are likely communicate that publicly over time. We'll explain that further in a moment. UiPath has a very solid customer base. Nearly 8,000, I've interviewed many of them. They're extremely happy. They have very high retention. They get great penetration into the fortune 500, around 63% of the fortune 500 has UiPath. Most of UiPath business around 70% comes from existing customers. I always say you're going to get more money out of existing customers than new customers but everybody's trying to go out and get new customers. But UiPath I think is taking a really interesting approach. It's their land and expand and they didn't invent that term but I'll come back to that. It kind of reminds me of the early days of Tableau. Actually I think Tableau is an interesting example. Like UiPath, Tableau started out as pretty much a point tool and it had, but it had very passionate customers. It was solving problems. It was simplifying things. And it would have bid into a company and grow and grow. Now the market fundamentals for UiPath are very good. Automation is super hot right now. And the pandemic has created an automation mandate to date and I'll share some data there as well. UiPath is a leader. I'm going to show you the Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA. That's kind of a good little snapshot. UiPath pegs it's TAM at 60 billion dollars based on some bottoms up calculations and some data from Bain. Pre-pandemic, we pegged it at over 30 billion and we felt that was conservative. Post-pandemic, we think the TAM is definitely higher because of that automation mandate, it's been accelerated. Now, according to the S1, UiPath is going to raise around 1.2 billion. And as we said, if that's an implied valuation that is lower than the Series F, so we suspect the Series F investors have some kind of ratchet in there. UiPath needed the cash from its Series F investors. So it took in 750 million in February and its balance sheet in the S1 shows about 474 million in cash and equivalent. So as I say, it needed that cash. UiPath has had significant expense reductions that we'll show you in some detail. And it's brought in some fresh talent to provide some adult supervision around 70% of its executive leadership team and outside directors came to the company after 2019 and the company's S1, it disclosed that it's independent accounting firm identified last year what it called the "material weakness in our internal controls over financial report relating to revenue recognition for the fiscal year ending 2018, caused by a lack of oversight and technical competence within the finance department". Now the company outlined the steps it took to remediate the problem, including hiring new talent. However, we said that last year, we felt UiPath wasn't quite ready to go public. So it really had to get its act together. It was not as we said at the time, the well-oiled machine, that we said was Snowflake under Mike Scarpelli's firm operating guidance. The guy's the operational guru, but we suspect the company wants to take advantage of this mock market. It's a good time to go public. It needs the cash to bolster its balance sheet. And the public offering is going to give it cache in a stronger competitive posture relative to its main new competitor, autumn newbie competitor Automation Anywhere and the big whales like Microsoft and others that aspire and are watching what UiPath is doing and saying, hey we want a piece of that action. Now, one other note, UiPath's CEO Daniel Dines owns 100% of the class B shares of the company and has a 35 to one voting power. So he controls the company, subject of course to his fiduciary responsibilities but if UiPath, let's say it gets in trouble financially, he has more latitude to do secondary offerings. And at the same time, it's insulated from activist shareholders taking over his company. So lots of detail in the S1 and we just wanted to give you some of those highlights. Here are the pretty graphs. If whoever wrote this F1 was a genius. It's just beautiful. As we said, ARR, annualized renewal run rate all it does is it annualizes the invoice amount from subscriptions in the maintenance portion of the revenue. In other words, the parts that are recurring revenue, it excludes revenue from support and perpetual license. Like one-time licenses and services is just kind of the UiPath's and maybe that's some sort of legacy there. It's future is that recurring revenue. So it's pretty similar to what we think of as ARR, but it's not exact. Lots of customers with a growing number of six and seven figure accounts and a dollar-based net retention of 145%. This figure represents the rate of net expansion of the UiPath ARR, from existing listing customers over a 12 month period. Translation. This says UiPath's existing customers are spending more with the company, land and expand and we'll share some data from ETR on that. And as you can see, the growth of 86% CAGR over the past nine quarters, very impressive. Let's talk about some of the fundamentals of UiPath's business. Here's some data from the Brookings Institute and the OECD that shows productivity statistics for the US. The smaller charts in the right are for Germany and Japan. And I've shared some similar data before the US showed in the middle there. Showed productivity improvements with the personal productivity boom in the mid to late 90s. And it spilled into the early 2000s. But since then you can see it's dropped off quite significantly. Germany and Japan are also under pressure as are most developed countries. China's labor productivity might show declines but it's level, is at level significantly higher than these countries, April 16th headline of the Wall Street Journal says that China's GDP grew 18% this quarter. So, we've talked about the snapback in post-COVID and the post-isolation economy, but these are kind of one time bounces. But anyway, the point is we're reaching the limits of what humans can do alone to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. And automation is one key to shifting labor away from these more mundane tasks toward more productive and more important activities that can deliver lasting benefits. This according to UiPath, is its stated purpose to accelerate human achievement, big. And the market is ready to be automated, for the most part. Now the post-isolation economy is increasingly going to focus on automation to drive toward activity as we've discussed extensively, I got to share the RPA Magic Quadrant where nearly everyone's a winner, many people are of course happy. Many companies are happy, just to get into the Magic Quadrant. You can't just, you have to have certain criteria. So that's good. That's what I mean by everybody wins. We've reported extensively on UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Yeah, we think we might shuffle the deck a little bit on this picture. Maybe creating more separation between UiPath and Automation Anywhere and the rest. And from our advantage point, UiPath's IPO is going to either force Automation Anywhere to respond. And I don't know what its numbers are. I don't know if it's ready. I suspect it's not, we'd see that already but I bet you it's trying to get there. Or if they don't, UiPath is going to extend its lead even further, that would be our prediction. Now personally, I would have Pegasystems higher on the vertical. Of course they're not an IPO, RPA specialist, so I kind of get what Gartner is doing there but I think they're executing well. And I'd probably, in a broader context I'd probably maybe drop blue prism down a little bit, even though last year was a pretty good year for the company. And I would definitely have Microsoft looming larger up in the upper left as a challenger more than a visionary in my opinion, but look, Gartner does good work and its analysts are very deep into this stuff, deeper than I am. So I don't want to discount that. It's just how I see it. Let's bring in the ETR data and show some of the backup here. This is a candlestick chart that shows the components of net score, which is spending momentum, however, ETR goes out every quarter. Says you're spending more, you're spending less. They subtract the lesses from the mores and that's net score. It's more complicated than that, but that's that blue line that you see in the top and yes it's trending downward but it's still highly elevated. We'll talk about that. The market share is in the yellow line at the bottom there. That green represents the percentage of customers that are spending more and the reds are spending less or replacing. That gray is flat. And again, even though UiPath's net score is declining, it's that 61%, that's a very elevated score. Anything over 40% in our view is impressive. So it's, UiPath's been holding in the 60s and 70s percents over the past several years. That's very good. Now that yellow line market share, yes it dips a bit, but again it's nuanced. And this is because Microsoft is so pervasive in the data stat. It's got so many mentions that it tends to somewhat overwhelm and skew these curves. So let's break down net score a little bit. Here's another way to look at this data. This is a wheel chart we show this often it shows the components of net score and what's happening here is that bright red is defection. So look at it, it's very small that wouldn't be churn. It's tiny. Remember that it's churn is the killer for software companies. And so that forest green is existing customers spending more at 49%, that's big. That lime green is new customers. So again, it's from the S1, 70% of UiPath's revenue comes from existing customers. And this really kind of underscores that. Now here's more evidence in the ETR data in terms of land and expand. This is a snapshot from the January survey and it lines up UiPath next to its competitors. And it cuts the data just on those companies that are increasing spending. It's so that forest green that we saw earlier. So what we saw in Q1 was the pace of new customer acquisition for UiPath was decelerating from previous highs. But UiPath, it shows here is outpacing its competition in terms of increasing spend from existing customers. So we think that's really important. UiPath gets very high scores in terms of customer satisfaction. There's, I've talked to many in theCUBE. There's places on the web where we have customer ratings. And so you want to check that out, but it'll confirm that the churn is low, satisfaction is high. Yeah, they get dinged sometimes on pricing. They get dinged sometimes, lately on service cause they're growing so fast. So, maybe they've taken the eye off the ball in a couple of counts, but generally speaking clients are leaning in, they're investing heavily. They're creating centers of excellence around RPA and automation, and UiPath is very focused on that. Again, land and expand. Now here's further evidence that UiPath has a strong account presence, even in accounts where its competitors are presence. In the 149 shared accounts from the Q1 survey where UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Microsoft have a presence, UiPath's net score or spending velocity is not only highly elevated, it's relative momentum, is accelerating compared to last year. So there's some really good news in the numbers but some other things stood out in the S1 that are concerning or at least worth paying attention to. So we want to talk about that. Here is the income statement and look at the growth. The company was doing like 1 million dollars in 2015 like I said before. And when it started to expand internationally it surpassed 600 million last year. It's insane growth. And look at the gross profit. Gross margin is almost 90% because revenue grew so rapidly. And last year, its cost went down in some areas like its services, less travel was part of that. Now jump down to the net loss line. And normally you would expect a company growing at this rate to show a loss. The street wants growth and UiPath is losing money, but it's net loss went from 519 million, half a billion down to only 92 million. And that's because the operating expenses went way down. Now, again, typically a company growing at this rate would show corresponding increases in sales and marketing expense, R&D and even G&A but all three declined in the past 12 months. Now reading the notes, there was definitely some meaningful savings from no travel and canceled events. UiPath has great events around the world. In fact theCUBE, Knock Wood is going to be at its event in October, in Las Vegas at the Bellagio . So we're stoked for that. But, to drop expenses that precipitously with such high growth, is kind of strange. Go look at Snowflake's income statement. They're in hyper-growth as well. We like to compare it to Snowflake is a very well-run company and it's in hyper-growth mode, but it's sales and marketing and R&D and G&A expense lines. They're all growing along with that revenue. Now, perhaps they're growing at a slower rate. Perhaps the percent of revenue is declining as it should as they achieve operating leverage but they're not shrinking in absolute dollar terms as shown in the UiPath S1. So either UiPath has applied some magic automation mojo to it's business (chuckling). Like magic beans or magic grits with my cousin Vinny. Maybe it has found the Holy grail of operating leverage. It's a company that's all about automation or the company was running way too hot on the expense side and had a cut and clean up its income statement for the IPO and conserve some cash. Our guess is the latter but maybe there's a combination there. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt. And just to add a bit more to this long, strange trip. When have you seen an explosive growth company just about to go public, show positive cashflow? Maybe it's happened, but it's rare in the tech and software business these days. Again, go look at companies like Snowflake. They're not showing positive cashflow, not yet anyway. They're growing and trying to run the table. So you have to ask why is UiPath operating this way? And we think it's because they were so hot and burning cash that they had to reel things in a little bit and get ready to IPO. It's going to be really interesting to see how this stock reacts when it does IPO. So here's some things that we want you to pay attention to. We have to ask. Is this IPO, is it window dressing? Or did UiPath again uncover some new productivity and operating leverage model. I doubt there's anything radically new here. This company doesn't want to miss the window. So I think it said, okay, let's do this. Let's get ready for IPO. We got to cut expenses. It had a lot of good advisors. It surrounded itself with a new board. Extended that board, new management, and really want to take advantage of this because it needs the cash. In addition, it really does want to maintain its lead. It's got Automation Anywhere competing with it. It's got Microsoft looming large. And so it wants to continue to lead. It's made some really interesting acquisitions. It's got very strong vision as you saw in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and obviously it's executing well but it's really had to tighten things up. So we think it's used the IPO as a fortune forcing function to really get its house in order. Now, will the automation mandate sustain? We think it will. The forced match to digital worked, it was effective. It wasn't pleasant, but even in a downturn we think it will confer advantage to automation players and particularly companies like UiPath that have simplified automation in a big way and have done a great job of putting in training, great freemium model and has a culture that is really committed to the future of humankind. It sounds ambitious and crazy but talk to these people, you'll see it's true. Pricing, UiPath had to dramatically expand or did dramatically expand its portfolio and had to reprice everything. And I'm not so worried about that. I think it'll figure that pricing out for that portfolio expansion. My bigger concern is for SaaS companies in general. I don't like SaaS pricing that has been popularized by Workday and ServiceNow, and Salesforce and DocuSign and all these companies that essentially lock you in for a year or two and basically charge you upfront. It's really is a one-way street. You can't dial down. You can only dial up. It's not true Cloud pricing. You look at companies like Stripe and Datadog and Snowflake. It is true Cloud pricing. It's consumption pricing. I think the traditional SaaS pricing model is flawed. It's very unfairly weighted toward the vendors and I think it's going to change. Now, the reason we put cloud on the chart is because we think Cloud pricing is the right way to price. Let people dial up and dial down, let them cancel anytime and compete on the basis of your product excellence. And yeah, give them a price concession if they do lock in. But the starting point we think should be that flexibility, pay by the drink. Cancel anytime. I mentioned some companies that are doing that as well. If you look at the modern SaaS startups and the forward-thinking VCs they're really pushing their startups to this model. So we think over time that the term lock-in model is going to give way to true consumption-based pricing and at the clients option, allow them to lock-in for a better price, way better model. And UiPath's Cloud revenue today is minimal but over time, we think it's going to continue to grow that cloud. And we think it will force a rethink in pricing and in revenue recognition. So watch for that. How is the street going to react to Daniel Dines having basically full control of the company? Generally, we feel that that solid execution if UiPath can execute is going to outweigh those concerns. In fact, I'm very confident that it will. We'll see, I kind of like what the CEO says has enough mojo to say (chuckling) you know what, I'm not going to let what happened to for instance, EMC happen to me. You saw Michael Dell do that. You saw just this week they're spinning out VMware, he's maintaining his control. VMware Dell shareholders get get 40.44 shares for every Dell share they're holding. And who's the biggest shareholder? Michael Dell. So he's, you got two companies, one chairman. He's controlling the table. Michael Dell beat the great Icahn. Who beats Carl Icahn? Well, Michael Dell beats Carl Icahn. So Daniel Dines has looked at that and says, you know what? I'm not just going to give up my company. And the reason I like that with an if, is that we think will allow the company to focus more on the long-term. The if is, it's got to execute otherwise it's so much pressure and look, the bottom line is that UiPath has really favorable market momentum and fundamentals. But it is signing up for the 90 day short clock. The fact that the CEO has control again means they can look more long term and invest accordingly. Oftentimes that's easier said than done. It does come down to execution. So it is going to be fun to watch (chuckling). That's it for now, thanks to the community for your comments and insights and really always appreciate your feedback. Remember, I publish each week on Wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for the Breaking Analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And we'll see you in clubhouse. Follow me and get notified when we start a room, which we've been doing with John Furrier and Sarbjeet Johal and others. And we love to riff on these topics and don't forget, please check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Be well everybody. And we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Hi, everyone; I am thrilled to personally invite you to a special event created and hosted by "theCUBE." On January 21st, we're holding "theCUBE on Cloud," our first editorial event of the year. We have lined up a fantastic guest list of experts in their respective fields, talking about CIOs, COOs, CEOs, and technologists, analysts, and practitioners. We're going to share their vision of Cloud in the coming decade. Of course, we also have guests from the big three Cloud companies, who are going to sit down with our hosts and have unscripted conversations that "theCUBE" is known for. For example, Mahlon Thompson Bukovec is the head of AWS's storage business, and she'll talk about the future of infrastructure in the Cloud. Amit Zavery is one of Thomas Kurian's lieutenants at Google, and he'll share a vision of the future of application development and how Google plans to compete in Cloud. And J.G. Chirapurath leads Microsoft's data and analytics business. He's going to address our questions about how Microsoft plans to simplify the complexity of tools in the Azure ecosystem and compete broadly with the other Cloud players. But this event, it's not just about the big three Cloud players. It's about how to take advantage of the biggest trends in Cloud, and, of course, data in the coming decade, because those two superpowers along with AI are going to create trillions of dollars in value, and not just for sellers, but for practitioners who apply technology to their businesses. For example, one of our guests, Zhamak Dehghani, lays out her vision of a new data architecture that breaks the decade-long failures of so-called big data architectures and data warehouse and data lakes. And she puts forth a model of a data mesh, not a centralized, monolithic data architecture, but a distributed data model. Now that dovetails into an interview we do with the CEO of Fungible, who will talk about the emergence of the DPU, the data processing unit, and that's a new class of alternative processors that's going to support these massively distributed systems. We also have a number of CXOs who are going to bring practical knowledge and experience to the program. Allen Nance, he led technology transformation for Phillips. Dan Sheehan is a CIO, COO, and CTO and has led teams at Dunkin' brands, Modell's Sporting Goods and other firms. Cathy Southwick has been a CIO at a large firm like AT&T and now is moving at the pace of Silicon Valley at Pure Storage. Automation in the Cloud is another theme we'll hit on with Daniel Dines, who founded and heads the top RPA company. And of course, we'll have a focus on developers in the Cloud with Rachel Stevens of RedMonk. That's a leading edge analyst firm focused exclusively on the developer community. And much more that I just don't have time to go into here, but rest assured, John Furrier and I will be bringing our thoughts, our hard-hitting opinions, along with some special guests that you don't want to miss. So click on the link below and register for this free event, "theCUBE on Cloud." Join us and join the conversation. We'll see you there.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the Release Show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Every body welcome back, to this special presentation, theCUBE has been covering the RPA space for quite some time. UiPath just had recently a huge launch, and Daniel Dines, as the CEO and founder of UiPath, has set forth the vision, of a robot for every person. (Giggles) pretty substantial goals that he has. And Brandon Node is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Product at UiPath. Brandon, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So that is a really ambitious goal. And, we're going to poke at that a little bit, and ask you to sort of defend it. Give us some proof points and help us understand sort of why you guys are so confident in this vision. You guys obviously the leader in RPA, growing like crazy, you've shared some metrics, very transparent. So we'd love to have these transparent and open honest computation. So I'm going to start with just sort of the basic, I mean, people understand RPA, just as in terms of automating a lot of mundane tasks, these tasks, you know, are often very repetitive or rules based. They're sort of interacting with existing applications. Now, in the early days of RPA, these are stable legacy apps with people sitting in front of a screen. So I guess my first question to you is, you know, some of the criticisms of RPA have been that if the app changes, you know, the robot breaks. So, first of all, is that the correct way to be thinking about the state of RPA. Today, is that an outdated view? And let's get into it so we can understand how we achieve robot for every person. >> Your thought sure. So I think it's a fair point in that RPA, by definition is built on top of applications. And it's always been the case that you need to be in coordination with your release teams with the application teams to understand what's happening there. Do I think it's a fair statement on where the industry is? I don't think so I think that is a small component of what the center of excellence looks at. And when you look at RPA, at scale today, there are many considerations governance, change management training, things that make these companies successful and these companies that are embracing it as part of their strategic plan for digital transformation. So for sure, it's a part of the story. But I would say, it's just a small part, the bigger part of the story is really about how you bring RPA into the culture. And that's what I think we'll talk about some more with the robot for every person. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, and I want to get back into that sort of how you make RPA strategic but before we get there, so a lot of people have said. Okay, you know're your interacting with existing legacy applications stable. There's no problem, you kind of sort of refuted that. But a lot of people also talk about a point into the API economy that API's are really a way that your platform or other your competitors platform can interact with applications. And that begins to sort of widen the opportunity, sort of modernize both infrastructure and applications. Where do where does the API economy, the whole equation? >> Sure. When you look at RPA, we shouldn't look at it as just a narrow set of implementations. RPA is capable of connecting directly to API's directly to it interfaces to you know, mouse and click style integrations as well as deeper levels, connecting directly to the lower levels of the application bypassing the mouse and keyboard entirely. So think about RPA, not just as keyboard and mouse automations, but also benefiting from all of those API's that exists, also being able to span the full spectrum of automation. >> So I want to talk sometimes I joke, you know, tongue in cheek, it's sort of a pejorative, I say, hey, RPA sometimes paves the cow path. But you know, what if my cow path works, and I can pave it and allows me to go faster and automate. So what? There's other opportunities I can I can attack. So my question is, where are you seeing people really applying RPA today, and how rapidly are they going forward? You know, really transforming. You mentioned digital transformation. And you guys announced a ton of product getting into it where do you see them in terms of glomming on to some of those more strategic areas >> Yeah, absolutely. So we've had lots of conversation around what the right methodology is for RPA, kind of like you said, should I just automate the process as it is? Or should I break down the process, assess it, re-engineer it and then automate? And the answer is, we have customers all over the spectrum. And there's a lot to be said for automating the process as is, if a robot can do it in a minute and a half as is. But if I re engineer it, it can do it in a minute flat. Where's your time best spent? And I think the biggest consideration that companies need to have right now with regard to automation is just really around opportunity costs. If I can automate a process as is and put my re-engineering team on to a bigger problem, that's going to get a bigger lift for the organization. ploy those people there, right? So what you end up having is this kind of mosaic of opportunities. How much does it cost to automate? How much does it cost to re engineer? What's my benefit going to be from that automation or from that re engineering, and now you have different tools that you can apply to your backlog. So, for sure, RPA can automate things as it is as is as well as do take that re-engineering approach and make sure that you are getting the most out of that automation. In terms of the strategic nature of it. Again, all over the map. You know, we've always said automate the mundane automate the repeatable. I was a customer before I was an employee, some of my automations were actually my most critical things, the things that I couldn't let fall through the cracks under any circumstances. So while they were maybe relatively easy for a human To do the compliance pick up that I had the guaranteed delivery pick up that I had, to me made it worth it. >> How does artificial intelligence address some of this in terms of, of making RPA more strategic. In one hand, it is going to inject some, simplicity into the process. On the other hand, you know, people cerned about AI, where does it fit? In? What form does it take? Is it natural language processing? Is it? Is it actually taking actions like systems of agency? How should we think about that? >> Sure. I think about it as, again, a spectrum. You know, so many of these questions, there's not a single answer. There. It's really about what you want to accomplish and how you're going to approach it. So for instance, let's say I'm a company and I want to build the next best action AI model or ML model. right, I'm going to start with the data that I have from my operation. So I may want to use RPA. To help extract data out of processes the build repository that I'm going to build my, my model off of, or let's say I, you know, we have customers that are implementing complex models to help with with their customers. And they have those models being surfaced through RPA. So now I have the model, but I want a human to review it before it takes action. I can surface that in an attended automation in a form or something that's pre built that gives the agent guidance on what to do. And then at the fully autonomous side, you have AI and ML models attached to chat bots that are hooked into RPA processes that can service customers in real time. >> You know, I want to ask you about sort of Product versus platforms in their, their book, the second Machine Age Andy McAfee and Erik brynjolfsson MIT professors years ago sort of laid out, they said products or platforms beat products. And I think a lot of the criticisms of EA around point products, you guys made a big deal. In your your last release, you didn't really talk specifically about this. But to me, my one of my takeaways is, you're building out a platform, you talked about a spectrum. You know, you've got, you know, studio x versus low code, you've got your studio, which is for RPA developers, you got Studio Pro, for hardcore, you know what to do quality assurance, so you've really got a spectrum of capabilities. So it strikes me that one of the ways in which you get to a robot for every person is that you've got a platform that can evolve, you know, with the market. And I wonder if you could sort of talk about that and really try to plug it into that vision that Daniel set out a couple years ago. >> Absolutely. You know, to be honest, this always been a blessing and a curse for us, right? When you install UiPath, you have all of these tools, all of these capabilities. And you've got some places that you can start immediately we place a number of pre existing code bases and modules up on our marketplace. For instance, we have sample code that you can use that we provide. But still, you need to take the platform and customize it for your applications for your business. And when we talk about the platform mindset, really what our primary goal is, is to build something robust enough, flexible enough, reliable enough that any company can use it within their operations. And you see that that's borne out on our customer list that we publish. And we talked about, you have every industry covered, every region covered, and and that's our Challenge is really to make something robust enough to be everywhere, but intuitive and understandable enough that anyone can pick an entry point and begin to use that platform. >> So when we talk about a robot for every person, I want to know better definition around a person we talking about every worker, or is it even more sort of ambitious. >> More ambitious, because it's not just a worker, an employee, it includes students, teachers, take the broadest definition. And think about how taking advantage of automation or being able to write your own automations is beneficial. There's, there's no limit my son is in first grade. He's taking a class right now as part of his curriculum, on the basics of coding. He's doing loops and retries and step based algorithm. Islamic teaching, this is something that's ubiquitous, this applies to everybody. >> That's awesome. Scary at the same time. [Laughter] So I'm talking about this idea of bringing your own AI to the equation. You guys referenced that a little bit of your kind of fabric approach. But can you clarify sort of how you see that playing out? >> This goes straight back to the platform concept, right? If it's the case, that you already have an existing model, and I talk to customers almost daily, who have some form of intelligence existing within their platform today, right? It could be a model that helps with payment processing. Could be that next best action model, right? Data science has been on its own rocket ship for the past couple decades. And by now, most enterprise companies already have models that they're using. Or somewhere or something, we don't want to come in and say, rebuild that model with us. We're not a takeout company. We're an integration company. So we want you to be able to use those existing models, connect them directly to orchestrator. And once it's connected to orchestrator, that means that your developers can access those models directly within the automations that they're writing. So the ability to attach what you already have, those assets that you've already been working on, and make it one click, one drag and drop accessible to your developers is huge. >> It is huge. I mean, I think that's you can observe markets, the ones that have less friction in terms of, you know, their deployments tend to have greater adoption, you're not asking people to rip and replace. This is really sort of additive and you can get some quick wins. I want to come back to mentioned, you know, security, you mentioned that you've got to be in sync with your your teams. What's the right regime? I'm particularly interested in the security and compliance piece because a lot of times users when they hear it security, compliance governance, they go slow me down, say no. How do you help square that circle? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And it's funny because the narrative has changed so much. A year and a half ago, we were educating people on you know, the fact that robots won't go rogue, they won't. All of a sudden just start doing things that you haven't told him to do or haven't programmed in. Right. It was very much a fear of the unknown. I don't have those conversations anymore. Now the conversations with customers are really around. I will enable people to build around automations. I wanted to democratize RPA but I don't want people to automate things. That I don't want them to, for instance, I have a legacy database, it has a limited amount of bandwidth of capacity. So if all of my developers hit that database at once, I could slow down the the access to that database. So maybe I want to blacklist that from my development environments, because that's off limits for automation. And from our standpoint, we're completely okay with this. We want customers to use RPA for the right tools for their organization and give them the ability to build governance into the development tools and into the overall framework, so that it's very much in line with what their expectations. >> Brandon, I really appreciate you helping me wrap up this sort of RPA market analysis, the post UI path, Folks, you can you can DM me @DaveVellante or hit me on Twitter, and you know, love to hear your comment. UiPath as I've said, very open and transparent in the organization, go hit them up, challenge them as I have. Brandon again, thanks so much for for coming on theCUBE and helping us with this program. >> Great. Thanks for having me. It's always great to be here. All right, you're welcome. And thank you everybody for watching Dave volante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. 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(upbeat music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two of UiPath Forward III, the third North American conference that UiPath-- The rocket ship that is UiPath. Clemmie Malley is here. She's the Enterprise RPA Center of Excellence Lead at NextEra Energy. Welcome. Great to have you. And Mariesa Coughanour, who is the Managing Principal of Intelligent Automation and Technology at Cognizant. Nice to see you guys. >> Nice seeing you. >> Nice to see you. >> Thanks for coming on. How's the show going for you? >> It's been great so far. >> Yes. >> It's been awesome. >> Have you been to multiple... >> This is my third. >> Yep. >> Really? Okay, great. How does this compare? >> It has changed significantly in three years, so. It was very small in New York in 2017 and even last year grew, but now it's a two-year event taking over. >> Yeah, last year Miami was-- >> I don't know. >> It was nice. >> Definitely smaller than this, but it was happening. Kind of hip vibe. We're here in Vegas, everybody loves to be in Vegas. CUBE comes to Vegas a lot. So tell me more about your role at NextEra Energy. But let's start with the company. You guys are multi billion, many, many, tens of billions, probably close to $20 billion energy firm. Really dynamic industry. >> Yeah, so NextEra Energy is actually an awesome company, right? So we're the world's largest in clean renewable energy. So with wind and solar, really, and we also have Florida Power and Light, which is one of the child companies to NextEra as a parent, which is headquartered out of Florida. So it's usually the regulated side of power in the state of Florida. >> We know those guys. We've actually done some work with Florida Power and Light. Cool people down there. And we heard, one of the keynotes today, Craig LeClaire, was saying, "Yeah, the Center of Excellence, "that's actually maybe asking too much." But there are a lot of folks here that are sort of involved in a COE and that's kind of your role. But I was surprised to hear him say that. I don't know if you were in the keynote this morning, but was it a challenge to get a Center of Excellence? What is that all about? >> So I think there's a little bit of caution around doing it initially. People are very aggressive. And we actually learned from this story. So when we started, it was more about showing value, building as many automations as possible. We didn't really care about having a COE. The COE just happened to form. >> Okay. >> Because we found out we needed some level of governance and control around what we were doing. But now that I look back on it, it's really instrumental to making sure we have the success. So whether you do a hybrid development to automation, which you can have citizen development, or you're fully centralized, I think having the strong COE to have that core governance model and control and process is important. >> Mariesa, so your title is not, there's not RPA in your title, right? RPA is too narrow, right? >> Yeah. >> In your business you're trying to help transform companies, it's all about automation. But maybe explain a little bit about your practice and your role. >> Sure, so Cognizant's been on the automation journey now for three years. We started back in 2014 and right out the gate it was all about intelligent automation, just not RPA. Because we knew to be able to do end-to-end solutions you would need multiple technologies to really get the job done and get the outcomes they wanted. So we sit now, over 2,500 folks at our practice, going out, working cross-industry, cross-regions to be able to work with people like Clemmie to put in their program. And we've even added some stuff recently. A lot of it actually inspired by NextEra. And we have an advisory team now. And our whole job is to go in and help people unstuck their programs, for lack of a better way to say it. Help them think about, how do you put that foundation? Get a little bit stronger and actually enable scale, and putting in all this technology to get outcomes? Versus just focusing on just the pure play RPA, which a lot of people struggle to gain the benefits from. >> So Clemmie, what leads you to the decision to bring in an outside firm like Cognizant? What's that discussion like internally? >> So, I'll just give you a little bit of backstory, because I think that's interesting, as well. When we started playing with RPA in late 2016, early 2017, we knew that we wanted to do a lot of things in-house, but in order to have a flex model and really develop automations across the company, we needed to have a partner. And we wanted them to focus more on delivery, so developing, and then partner with us to give us some best practices, things that we could do better. When we founded the COE we knew what we wanted to do. So we actually had two other partners before we went with Cognizant, and that was a huge challenge for us. We found we were reworking a lot of the code that they gave us. They weren't there to be our partners. They wanted to come and actually do the work for us, instead of enabling us to be successful. And we actually said, "We don't want a partner." And then Cognizant came in and they actually were like, "Let's give you somebody." So we wanted somebody around delivery, because we said, "Okay, now that we centralize, "we have a good foundation, a good model, "we're going to need to focus on scale. "So how do we do that? "We need a flex model." So Cognizant came in and they said, "Well, we're going to offer you a delivery lead "to help focus on making sure "you get the automations out the door." Well, Mariesa actually showed up, which was one of the best hidden surprises that we received. And she really just came in, learned the company, learned our culture, and was able to say, "Okay, here's some guidance. "What can you instill? "What can you bring?" Tracking, and start capturing the outcomes that she's mentioned. And I know that was a little bit more, but it's been quite a journey. >> No, it's really good, back up. So Mariesa, I'm hearing from Clemmie that you were willing to teach these guys how to fish, as opposed to just perpetual, hourly, daily rate billing. >> Yep. And that's really what our belief is. We can go in, and yes, we can augment, from resourcing perspective, help them deliver, develop, support everything, which we do. And we work with Clemmie and others to do that. But what's really important to get to scale was how do we teach them how to go do this? Because if you're going to really embed this type of automation culture and mindset, you have to teach people how to do it. It's not about just leaning on me. I needed to help Clemmie. I need to help her team, and also their leadership and their employees. On how do you identify opportunities, and how then do you make these things actually work and run? >> So you really understand the organization. Clemmie was saying you learned the culture. >> Yeah. >> So you're not just a salesperson going in and hanging out in theCUBE. So you're kind of an extension, really, of the staff. So, either of you, if you can explain to me sort of, where RPA fits into this broader vision. That would really be helpful. >> Sure, so maybe I can kick a little bit off from what I'm seeing from clients like Clemmie, and also other customers. So what you'll find is RPA tends to be like this gateway. It's the stepping stone to all things automation. Because folks in the business, they really understand it. It's rule-based, right? It's a game of Simon Says, in some ways, when you first get this going. And then after that, it's enabling the other technology and looking at, "Look, if I want to go end-to-end, "what do I need to get the job done? "What do I need around data intake? "How do I have the right framework "to pick the right OCR tool, "or put analytics on, "or machine learning?" Because there's so much out there today and you need to have the stuff that's right-fit to come in. And so it's really about looking at what's that company strategy? And then looking at this as a tool set. And how to use these tools to go and get the job done. And that's what we were doing a lot with Clemmie and team when we sat down. They have a steering committee that's chaired by their CIO, Chief Accounting Officer, and senior leaders from every business unit across their enterprise. >> So you mentioned scaling. >> Yep. >> We heard today in the predictions segment that we're going to move from snowflake to snowball. And so I would think for scaling it's important to identify reusable components. And so how have you, how has that played out for you? And how's the scaling going? >> Yeah, so that's been one really cool component that we've built out in the COE. So I had my team actually vote on a name and we said, "We want to go after reusable components." They decided to call them Microbots. So it's a cool little term that we coined. >> That's cool. >> And our CIO and CAO actually talk about them frequently. "How are our Microbots? "How many do we have? "What are they doing?" So it's pretty catchy. But what it's really enabled us is to build these reusable snippets of code that are specific to how we perform as a company that we can plug and play and reduce our cycle time. So we've actually reduced our cycle time by over 50%. And reusable components is one of the major key components. >> So how do you share those components? Are they available in some kind of internal marketplace? And how do you train people to actually know what to apply where? >> Right. So because we're centralized, it's a little bit easier, right? We have a stored repository, where they're available. We document them-- >> And it's the COE-- Sorry to interrupt. It's the COE's responsibility, and-- >> Exactly. So the COE has it. We're actually working with Cognizant right now to figure out how can we document those further, right? And UiPath. There's a lot of cool tools that were introduced this week. So I think we're definitely going to be leveraging from them. But the ability to really show what they are, make them available, and we're doing all of that internally right now. Probably a little manual. So it'll be great to have that available. >> So Amazon has this cool concept they call working backwards documents. I don't know if you ever heard this. But what they do is they basically write the press release, thinking five years in advance. This is how they started AWS, they actually wrote. This is what we want, and then they work backwards from there. So my question is around engineering outcomes. Can you engineer outcomes, and is that how you were thinking about this? Or is it just too many unknown parts of the process that you can't predict? >> So I think one of the things that we did was we did think about, "What do we want to achieve with this?" So one of the big programs that Clemmie and the team have is also around accelerate. And their key initiatives to drive, whether it's improve customer experience, more efficiencies of certain processes across the company. And so we looked at that first, and said, "Okay, how do we enable that?" That's a top strategy driven by their CEO. And even when we prioritize all the work, we actually build a model for them. So that it's objective. So if any opportunities that come in align to those key outcomes that the company's striving for, they can prioritize first to be worked on. I actually also think this is where this is all going. Everyone focuses today on these automation COEs and automation teams, but what you will see, and this is happening at NextEra, and all the places we're starting to see this scale, is you end up with this outcomes management office. This is a core nucleus of a team that is automation, there's IT at the table, there's this lean quality mindset at the table, and they're actually looking at opportunities and saying, "All right, this one's yours. "This one's yours and then I'll pick up from you." And it's driving, then, the right outcomes for the organization versus just saying, "I have a hammer, I'm going to go find a nail," which sometimes happens. >> Right, oh, for sure. And it may be a fine nail to hit, but it might not be the most strategic-- >> Exactly. >> Or the most valuable. So what are some examples of areas that you're most excited about? Where you've applied automation and have given a business outcome that's been successful? >> Yeah, so we are an energy company. And we've had a lot of really awesome brainstorming sessions that we've held with UiPath and Cognizant. And a couple of key ones that have come out of it, really around storm season is big for us in the state of Florida. And making sure that our critical infrastructure is available. So our nursing homes, our hospitals, and so on. So we've actually built automations that help us to ping and make sure that they're available, so that we can stay proactive, right? There's also a cool use-case around, really, the intelligent automations space. So our linemen in their trucks are saying, "Hey, we spend a lot of time having to log on the computer, "log our tickets, "and then we have to turn our computers off, "drive to the next site, "and we're not able to restore as much power "or resolve issues as quickly as possible." So we said, "How can we enable them?" Speech recognition, where they can talk to it, it can log a ticket for them on their behalf. So it's pretty exciting. >> So that's kind of an interesting example. Where RPA, in and of itself's not going to solve that problem, right, but speech recognition-- >> It's a combination. >> So you got to bring in other technology, so using, what, some NLP capability, or? >> Yeah, so that's one we're currently working on. But yes, you would need some type of cognitive speech recognition, and. >> So you sort of playing around with that in R&D right now? The speech [Mumbles]. >> Yeah. >> Which, as you know, is not perfect, right? >> It is not. >> Talk to us. We know about it all. Because we transcribe every word that's said on theCUBE. And so, there's some good ones and there's some not so good ones. And they're getting better, though. They're getting better. And that's going to be kind of commodity shortly. You really need just good enough, right? I mean, is that true? Or do you need near perfect? >> So I think there's a happy medium. It depends on what you're trying to do. In this case we're logging tickets, so there might be some variability that you can have. But I will say, so NextEra is really focused on energy, but they're also trying to set themselves apart. So they're trying to focus on innovation, as well. So this is a lot of the areas that they're focusing on: the machine learning, and the processing, and we even have chat bots that they're coining and branding internally, so it's pretty exciting. >> So NextEra is, are you entirely new energy? Is that right? No fossil fuels, or? >> So it's all clean energy, yes. Across the enterprise. >> Awesome. How's that going? Obviously you guys are very successful, but, I mean, what's kind of happening in the energy business today? You're sort of seeing a resurgence in oil, right, but? >> Yeah, so I think we had a really good boom. A couple years ago there were a lot of tax credits that we were able to grow that side of our company. And it enabled us to really pivot to be the clean energy that we are. >> I mean, that's key, right? I mean, United States, we want to lead in clean energy. And I'm not sure we are. I mean, like you say, there was tax incentives and credits that sort of drove a lot of innovation, but am I correct? You see countries outside the U.S., really, maybe leaning in harder. I mean, obviously we got NextEra, but. >> I mean, I think there's definitely competition out there. We're focused on trying to be, maybe not the best, but compete with the best. We're also trying to focus on what's next, right? So be proactive, and grow the company in a multitude of ways. Maybe even outside the energy sector, just to make sure that we can compete. But really what we're focused on is the clean renewables, so. >> That's awesome. I mean, as a country we need this, and it's great to have organizations like yours. Mariesa, I'll give you the final word. Kind of, the landscape of automation. What inning are we in? Baseball analogy. Or how far can this thing go? And what's your sort of, as you pull out the binoculars, maybe not the telescope, but the binoculars, where do you see it going? >> I think there's a lot of runway left. So if you look at a lot of the research out there today, I heard today, 10% was quoted by one person. I heard 13% quoted from HFS around where are we at on scale from an RPA perspective? And that's just RPA. >> Yeah. >> So that means there's still so much out there to still go and look at and be able to make an impact. But if you look, there's also a lot of runway on this intelligent automation. And that's where, I think, we have to shift the focus. You're seeing it now, at these conferences. That you're starting to see people talk about, "How do I integrate? "How do I actually think about connecting the dots "to get bigger and broader outcomes for an organization?" and I think that's where we're going to shift to, is talking about how do we bring together multiple technologies to be able to go and get these end-to-end solutions for customers? And ultimately go, what we were talking a little bit about before, on outcome-focused for an organization. Not talking about just, "How do I go do AI? "How do I go put a bot in?" But, "I want to choose this outcome for my customer. "I need to grow the top line. "I'm getting this feedback." Or even internally, "I want to get more efficient so I can deliver." And focus there, and then what we'll do is find the right tools to be able to move all that forward. >> It's interesting. We're out of time, but you think about, it's somewhat surprising when people hear what you just said, Mariesa, because people think, "Wow, we've had all this technology for 50 years. "Haven't we automated everything?" Well, Daniel Dines, last night, put forth the premise that all this technology's actually creating inefficiencies and somewhat creating the problem. So technology's kind of got us into the problem. We'll see if technology can get us out. All right? Thanks, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break. UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman. This is our one day coverage of UiPath. UiPath Forward Americas. UiPath does these events all over the world. They've reached about 14,000 customers to date and about 1,500 here, Stu. A great show, a lot of energy. We're watching the ascendancy of robotic process automation, the simplification of software robots. Courtney Dominiguez is here, she's the Vice President of World Fuel Services and she's joined by Ashim Gupta who's the UiPath's Chief Customer Success Officer. Welcome folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> So, Courtney, let's start with you. World Fuel Services: what's that all about? >> So we're a logistics company, an energy logistics company. We're actually based here in Miami, Florida so it was a short commute over to the Fountain Blue for the day. >> Lucky you. >> Yes, exactly. So, yeah, we do fuel globally, all over the world. So we do for aviation, marine, and land. We also focus on renewable energy and we're really developing over in Europe as well. >> So, interesting, a lot of interesting drivers and dynamics in your business, fast moving, a lot of change, sometimes hard to predict. >> Yes. >> In terms of your role, talk about your role and what some of the key business drivers are that force you to be on top of your game. >> Yeah, so, I'm in charge of shared services and automation for the company so it's really my role to help us operate more efficiently and do things smarter. You know everybody's being challenged to do more with less and as you grow the business, your transaction accounts grow as well so we're really in charge of transforming and providing solutions. UiPath is a component, a big component, of what we're going to be rolling out and helping to really do transformation. >> So, Ashim, Courtney saying, do more with less, that's got to be music to your ears. Your job is to make, Courtney, her company, successful. So, talk about your role and how you actually make your success. >> Sure, so, one, I was a former customer. So you look at Daniel Dines' strategy and UiPath's strategy and it's bringing people in who really have a passion for the industry and have that experience to go and try and operationalize a lot of our mission. As a former customer, I know a lot of times you get sold software and you don't get a lot of the tools or you got to go buy another set of tools to make the first set of tools work. So customer success is about giving technical talent and really great experts and put them in the hands of our best customers to answer the questions that are out there as they embark on their RPA journey. That can go from anything from infrastructure, technical hurdles that they may face to how to really think about RPA, how to eventualize it within their areas. And by doing that, we get people to up that adoption curve, they start seeing the benefits of RPA and it becomes a no-brainer, both for the company to invest in and employees to understand the value that RPA brings. >> So, Courtney, was RPA kind of a no-brainer for you? Was it a, "What is this technology?" How did you go about sort of bringing RPA into your organization? >> Yeah, I think all of the above. So, it seems very intuitive. You know, you want to do things smarter and do things more efficiently but that makes people nervous too so there's a lot of people that say, "I like what I do" "and if you do it smarter and more efficient," "do you still need me?" And I also think that, from the top, it's easy to say robots, and that sounds really cool but really putting it into the water supply is a different story. So, one of the things that we did, we hosted a RPA awareness day, partnered with UiPath. They came in and worked with us on that. And then after that we hosted a bot-a-thon. So, we went out and we had our whole enterprise download the community version of UiPath and just had them start experimenting and coming up with their own ideas and honestly, it was a great crowd-sourcing engine for us. And we just came up with an instant pipeline of ideas and people really caught on and bought into it at that point. So it was fantastic. >> Courtney, I want you to expand a little bit on that. In my career, I've always said, "I know next quarter," "next year, I'm going to have more to do." When I managed a group in operations it was, "You need to figure out what you can get rid of," "you know, what you can," I mean automated a decade ago was quite different than what you do today but I like what you said about how you engaged everybody and got them to, kind of, get over that fear of the unknown. How long's the process going to take? Did you have senior management involvement in the planning? >> Yeah honestly, this was a great, ground roots kind of a way of getting it out and it didn't take long at all. I mean we've only been on this journey a couple of months quite honestly and it's caught on like wildfire and we're really excited about it. So you know, I think it's great that we were able to partner some of our great, younger talent with some of our more, people who've been doing it for a long time. And we partnered together, we partnered them together and then they came up with their own ideas. It's easy for me to, Monday morning, quarterback, and stand on the other side and say, "Oh, you should do this or do that" but the people that are doing it everyday are the ones who have the best ideas. They know what they don't want to do. They know what they want to spend their time working on. So they're the best ones to figure out how to make that other stuff that's not quite as fun go away. So, yeah, it's been fantastic. >> So, Ashim, if I could ask, how do you help your customers figure out what the right metric is? What is success for them? You've been on the customer side, you've been talking to users, it's often like, "Oh, I think I'm going to be able" "to save money but maybe it's growing revenue." There's a lot of pieces there. >> I mean, a lot of it starts with listening because I don't think there's one right answer. You know, a lot of software companies come in and say, "It is just about cost", or, "It is just about X". We think about it very differently. Some of our customers think about it in terms of cost equality, getting accurate data, getting things done 100% accurate and getting data quality up. Some of them, it is a productivity game, right? It's important to get that cost down. We have customers in Japan who are using it to augment their workforce because they need more workers than the market can supply and RPA gets it. So I would say the first is listening to our customers. The second piece of it is, then, there are some standard things across our customer base that we're all learning together. You know, one of our customers started looking at the time, the run time of a bot. Or how long, how much infrastructure does it consume? So we're able to get best practices across to be able to figure out what are the right metrics that suits our customers' needs. >> Courtney, I'm trying to understand if it was a top-down initiative or a bottoms-up or both? >> It's both, yeah I think it's really both. So I think it's that top level setting the direction and saying, "This is what we want to do." One of the things we have at World Fuel is, a lot of people have the mantra, and Dan said this this morning as well, is, "We don't want to touch the keyboard." Right? We want to be no-touch. We want things to come through seamlessly. So that's getting great data quality at the beginning with customer onboarding and then getting it all the way through and out the door because, at the end of the day, we need to get the invoices out and the money back in, right? And I need accurate data to do that and do things efficiently. So, I think it's from the top saying, "We want to be no-touch", and then it's up to my team to help provide solutions and work with the businesses and figure out how to make that happen. >> So it sounds like you had this ideation initiative and did you just pick one or two or did you say, "Okay, guys, go?" Where did you start, what did you have to do to really prove out the value? >> We did, we definitely picked one or two. It went with quick wins but when you go with quick wins and you say, "This is what we did in a really short" "amount of time with minimal effort," "think of the art of the possible, think of what we can do?" And now our focus is not on quick wins. Our focus is on, "How do we transform our business? "How do we take this tool and really apply it" "and transform the way we work?" So I think it's important to have those quick wins initially and just kind of set the stage because that gets everybody thinking, "Wow, this can be really big." >> What kind of person was required to build the robots? Somebody who's fairly technical or was it a business person, was it a team, two people team? >> I have the best team ever and I really think we got a lot of them internally. Really, citizen, kind of data, scientist people. Not anybody that was necessarily trained in it. Now we're getting more and more data scientists added to the team. So we're getting more developer-type skills. We also have BAs, so we've got some people who are great at looking at process and how can we make things more efficient? It's a combination but I do really think that some of our best resources have just been people that are really eager to learn. I mean, UiPath does an amazing job of putting the certification and the academy, and so many online tools it's free. I mean, it's so easy to work with them and really pick it up. You know you don't need a lot of training and that's one of the reasons we selected UiPath you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out. And they really make it all so readily available. >> A lot of the customers we talked to today on theCUBE have gone through a business case, some rigorous, some sort of back-of-napkin, What kind of business case and justification did you go through? >> So we started small with the bots. So we said, "Lets prove it out with a small number of bots" "and if we can do that, then we can scale". And we were just chatting earlier that now we really want to look at it and say, "Over the next three", "six, 12 months, how can we really scale this" "and what do we think that looks like?" Again, start small and then, now okay now we know what's out there and we know what we can get so let's go big and we're ready to do that now. >> So did you go through a rigorous, sort of, quantification of the business value or was it more like, "Hey, it's low risk. Let's try it, see what we get." >> Yeah, yeah, it's low risk, let's just do it. >> I mean what was the result, what was the business event? >> Honestly, it's been fantastic. I mean the results back that we've had have been savings of 100,000s of dollars with minimal, again, minimal effort and minimal, really unsure of what we were going to get out of it. So, it's phenomenal. >> And the denominator, and I say denominator I'm talking about benefit divided by cost-- >> Yeah. >> Sounds like the denominator was pretty low. >> Pretty low, yeah. >> One of the best ways to get our eyes, lower the denominator. I always talk to my kids about this when it comes to college cost so you know what I mean, (laughing) And really, with the community version, getting that out there and free and just having people start playing around with it? I mean, that right there keeps your cost pretty low because they're funneling and putting ideas in the pipeline and then when it comes time to develop it and make it production ready, that's where our effort is involved but to just get that into the pipeline with a little bit of effort and a little bit of cost is a no-brainer. >> So it's clear, your strategy as a company is to lower the barriers to entry for your clients, train them, free training, get them hooked, and then let the rest of it soar. >> Yeah, I mean, one is we share that, our CEO talked about that today, we share that joy that automation brings to a lot of people's work. That's what drives them. So for us, it's not about nickel and diming people every step of the way, it is arming them with what they need to fulfill the mission for what we sold them automation or RPA for. And that's a huge part of it so it goes beyond just the academy, just the training, you know, it's the intimacy that we want to keep with our customers. So we're growing very fast in our number of employees. So, even though, I think we're getting close to 2,000 customers, our goal is to get to 2,000 employees here very quickly. And our CEO really stresses customer first in that equation so we learn and we do little pivot points along the way. An example could be internal marketing, helping people drive awareness. You know, the bot-a-thon that Courtney had for her team, we want to be able to sponsor those things. You know, be partners in getting that name of RPA out there. So it's everything they need to try to get up that curve. >> Courtney, your enthusiasm is palpable, as much of the feedback that we've had from customers, but if you had to do it over again, would you change anything, would you go faster? Would you have done anything differently if you'd had a mulligan? >> One of the concerns is that I feel like we've got a lot of momentum and I want to keep it going. So I want to, like Ashim, we need to scale our team as well so that we're able to handle that pipeline of work coming in and that we don't stall out because I really see a lot of enthusiasm for what we're developing and we want to be able to keep up with that. I love moving fast, I wish we could move faster, I push my team to say, "How much faster can we go?", because there's commitments as well at the board level saying, you know, "What are you guys doing and how are you transforming?" But I wouldn't do anything over so far. So far it's been fantastic. >> You know It strikes me that when you put in a robot, and automate a process, you're saving for an individual, and arm or a leg, you know, Lots of arms and legs. How have you thought about virtualizing those arms and legs into a team that can really drive this to your last point, through the organization, to keep that momentum going? >> Yeah, that's what we're looking in now, right? We want to look at that digital roadmap and say, not arms and legs, but we actually want to look at real resources and that doesn't necessarily mean a resource reduction, it just means being able to scale and do things more efficiently and hopefully, redeploy those resources to do stuff that requires a brain, right? >> Ashim, I'm curious. Do you have some tools to help customers as to how they scale and grow and keep the momentum going? It reminds me of a rocket going on, you've got those booster levels, and you want to reach escape velocity but then probably, keep accelerating. >> Yeah, so you'll start seeing our platform expanding this. At this conference, and Daniel must have talked about it, we launched UiPath Go. Getting openness and collaboration within organizations and across organizations, that's really what our Go platform will enable people to do. Sharing automations, learning best practices, being able to connect with different companies, different partners at a fast pace, that's so important because there's not a cookie cutter approach to this, we need collective knowledge to ramp up the speed and then, slowly by slowly, the features that we're starting to do: sharable libraries within the platform, you're going to see other process discovery type automations come out or tools that we're starting to roll out to our customers. And then we have events. Yesterday, Courtney was a part of our customer advisory counsel. It is incredible, when you put customers like Courtney in a room, who are so passionate and are incredible, sharing what's working and what's not and everybody leaves saying, "Okay, these are the two things that I'm either" "going to look out for or that I'm going" "to do differently to make sure the journey happens ahead." Those are just a few. >> Courtney, Daniel was on earlier today and we were asking him to give some advice to these young people, you know, he's kind of inspirational. He talked about this morning in his keynote about people laughed him out of their office and so forth. And one of the things he said is, "I didn't think big enough," "I started to think bigger, you got to think bigger." So as you put on your think-big hat, where do you think this could go? >> So I really see UiPath and RPA collaborating, right? I mean, we were investing in a lot of smart tools and I want to see how all of those tools can work together. I don't want it to be just UiPath or just another tool, or workflow tool. I want to see how they can all, because to me, that's where the value really comes in. I mean if you're leveraging best-of-breed options and best-of-breed tools and then we can say, "How do all of these work together?" That's transformational. So, really, at the end of next year, what I want my team and what I want my leaders to say is, "Wow. They have really transformed the way that we work" "and the way that we do business." To me, that's a win. If Ashim can make me successful in that, I'll be a happy camper. >> Awesome, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. We're seeing some of these trends that we talked about: the productivity gap, we have more jobs than we have employees to fill those jobs. The productivity line's not moving. RPA and the ascendancy of RPAs promises to change that and we'll be covering that ongoing. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward Americas. Stu Miniman And Dave Vellante. We will be right back.