>>Hi, I'm Peter Burress. And welcome back to know the Cube conversation. This one from B M sees Helix Immersion Day at Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. Once again, we've got a great set of topics for today Today, Right now we're gonna talk about is the everybody talks about the explosion in the amount of data, but nobody talks about the resulting or associated explosion in software. And that may in fact, be that an even bigger issue than the explosion and data. Because ultimately, we want to apply that data and get work done. That's gonna require that we rethink service's rethink service management, rethink operations and rethink operations management in the context of how all this new software is gonna create new work but also can perform new classes of work. Soto have that conversation. We've got a couple of great guests. New York. And here is the BMC president of Digital Service is in operations management division to BMC. Welcome back to the Cube. >>Thank you. >>And me Here shoot Close the CEO of Automation anywhere here. Welcome to the Cube. So Naoki, I want to start with you. A year ago, we started on this journey of how this new digital service is is going to evolve to do Maur types of work for people. How has be emcees? Helix Platform evolved in that time. >>So if you remember last time, it's almost a year. Back when we launched Helix, which was all around taking the service management capability that we had on Prem Minute available in cloud continue rise so customers can run and cut of their choice and provided experience through various channels bought as channel off that customer experience. This is what we had released last time. We call it the three C's for Helix, Everything in cloud containerized with cognitive capabilities so customers can transform that experience in this version. What we are extending helix is with the operation side. So although I Tom capabilities that we have in our platform are now a part off Felix, so we have one entering platform so that customers can discover every asset that they have on prominent loud monitor those assets detected anomalies service bought four lines of business and for i t. For immediate issues that happen, vulnerabilities that are there in the system and automatically optimized capacity and cost on holistic. This whole closed loop off operations and service coming together is what this next day off innovations that were launching BMC Helix >>Soma here New York He's talked about very successfully, and Felix has been a very successful platform for improving user experience. But up front, I noted that we're not just talking about human beings as users anymore. We're talking about software is users R p a robotic process. Automation is a central feature of some of these new trends. Tell us a little bit about how robotic process automation is driving an increased need for this kind of digital service in operations management capability? >>Sure think it a high level you have to think of. The new organization has augmented organization that are human and what's working side by side, each doing what they're best at. And so, in a specific example of a service organization, uh, the the BMC hell ex ist Licht Alexis Taking this is Think of this as a utility where the way you plug it into an electricity outlet and switch on the light and you get the electricity, you plug into the BMC helix, and behind it, you have augmented workforce of chat boards are pia bots, human beings each doing what they're best at and giving a far superior customer experience and like any other that is happening now. And that's the future off service industry. >>But when you point a human, so to speak metaphorically into that system, there's a certain amount of time there's a certain amount of training. There's a certain, and as a consequence, you can have a little bit more predictable scale. That doesn't mean that you don't end up with a lot of complexity, but our p A seems that the potential of our P A seems that you're going to increase the rate at which these users, in this case, digital users are going to enter into the system. You don't have a training regimen you can attach to them. They have to be tested. They have to be discovered. You have to be put in operation with reliability. How is that ultimately driving the need for some of these new capabilities? >>I think you if you think of this, if you think of this box as a digital workers, you almost have to go through the same process that you would go through human beings. You onboard them in terms of you, configure them. You trained them with cognitive capabilities and the and then in. The one difference is the monitor themselves. Without any bias they give, they can give you. They can give their own performance rating performance rating card. Um, but the beauty off this is when human and what's work together because there are some functions that the bots can do well. And then at some point they can hand off to the human beings and human beings. Do some of the more interesting work that is based on judgment. Call customer service. All of that, um, so that the combination is is the end goal for everybody >>and to add would be here said right, that customer experience, whether you're providing experience to employees, are consumers and customers. That is the ultimate goal. That's ultimate result of what you want to get and the speed at which you provided experiences, the accuracy of which you provide experience of the cause, that which you provided experience becomes a competitive sensation, which is where all this automation, this augmentation that they're doing with humans and bots is what enables us to do that right for or large enterprise customers May major service organizations trying to transform into that beautiful. >>But increasingly, it seems as though the, uh, the things that we have to do to orchestrate in ministry Maur users digital and human undertaking Maur complex tasks where each is best applied is really driving a lot of new data mentioned upfront, an enormous amount of software and you said new experiences. But those experiences have to be reliable, have to be secure. They have to be predictable. So that suggests this overwhelming impact of all of these capabilities. You talk about a digital tsunami? What are some of the key things? Do you think Enterprise is gonna have to do to start engaging that? >>Yeah, I'm incredibly college 40 nursery revolution. Whether we call our initial transformation, I think what we all are experiencing is the tsunami Texan ami, right, Tsunami of clouds, where you have corruption clouds, private clouds have a close marriage clouds, tsunami of devices, not just more valid visors, but also has everything alone, as is getting connected devices, tsunami of channels. I mean, as an end user, I wantto experience that in the channel of my preference lack as a journalism as a channel tsunami of bots, off conversation, bullets in our Peabody. So in this tsunami, I think what everyone is trying to figure out is, how do they manage this explosion? It's humanly impossible to do it all manually. You have toe augment it. But of course, intelligence, I'm all. But then, of course, boss, become a big part of that augmentation toe. Orchestrate all of them back to back cross. >>I would say that the this is no longer nice to have, because if you look it from over consumer's perspective, last 20 years of digital technologies off from my Amazons and Google's of the World, Netflix and others they have created this mind set off instant customer gratification, and we all been trained for it. So what was acceptable five years ago is no longer acceptable in our own lives, I e. And so this new standard off instant result instant outcome. Instant respond. Instant delivery V. Just expected. Right. Once you're end, consumer begins to do that. We as a business is no longer have a choice that's writing on the wall. And so what? This new platform Zehr doing like you'd be emcee. Hellickson automation anywhere is delivering their instant gratification. And when you think about it, more and more of the new customers that are millennials, they don't know any other way. So for them, this is the only experience they will relate. Oh, so again, this is not nice to see Oh, it is. But it is the only way only the world will operate, right? >>Well, what we're trying to do is take on new classes of customer experience, new operational opportunities to improve our profitability, innovate and find new value propositions. But you mentioned time arrival rate of transaction is no longer predictable. It's gonna be defined by the market, not by your employees. We could go on and on and on with that. What is taught us a little bit about automation anywhere and what automation anywhere is doing to try to ensure that as businesses go off to attend to the complexity creates new value at the same time can introduce simplicity where they could get scale and more automation. >>Sure, you earlier mentioned that with explosion of data came the explosion off applications And what? Let me focus on what problem or permission anywhere solves. If you look at large organizations, they have vast amount of applications, sometimes 408 100 few 1000 what we have seen. What we've been doing historically is using people as a human bridges between this applications. And we have a prettier that way for too long. And that's the world today. >>So humans are the interface >>humans at the bridges between applications and often called the salty air operations. That's the easiest way to describe it. So the what are two mission ever does is it offers this technology platform robotic process automation area in an Arctic split form that integrates all off it together into a seamless automation bought that can go across and with the eye it can make intelligent, intelligent choices. Um, and so now take that Combined with the BMC, Alex, and you have a seamless service platform that can deliver superior experience. >>So we've got now these swivel chair users now being software, which means that we could discover them more easily. We can monitor them more easily, and that feeds. He looks >>absolutely so you know, in our consumer wall, in a day to day life We are used to a certain experience of how we consume data or consume experiences with our TVs and all the channels that experience that we have an identity. Life is what people expect when they walk into the company, right walking to the Enterprise, which every IittIe organization is trying to figure out. How do they get to that level of maturity? So this is what the combination of what we're doing with Felix and automation anywhere brewing's that consumer great experiences into an enterprise >>world. Some here when we think about our p A. We're applying it in interesting and innovative ways, no question about it. But there are certain patterns of success. Give us some visibility into what you are seeing leads to success. And then what's the future of our P? A. How's that gonna involve over the next few years? >>Sure. Um, R P has been deployed across virtually every industry and virtually every department, so there are many ways to get started in All of them are right. But often we find is that you can either start in a central organization where in terror organization is doing everything centrally. It is a great way to get started. But eventually we learned that the Federated Way is the best way to end where hundreds of offices all over the world, if you are especially large organization, each business unit is doing it with I t providing governments and central security and policies and an actual bots running and being implemented all over the world eventually for a large gilt transformation. That is a common pattern we have seen among successful customers. >>And where do you think this is? Houses pattern going to evolve as enterprises gained more familiarity with it, innovating new and interesting ways and his automation anywhere, and others advance the state of the art. Where do you think it's gonna end up? >>The read is going is is I define it as an app store experience or a Google play experience. So if you think about how we operate over mobile devices today, if you want something on your device, you would look for a nap that does that. We're getting to a point where there is bought for everything in a digital worker for everything. So if you need certain job done, you first go to a what store? Uh that is an automation anywhere website. Look for about that. Does something higher or download that Bart. Get the work done and it comes pre built. Like many. There are works with BMC Felix on many of those, So s. So that is your 1st 1st way you will look, look for getting your work done in a new body economy. And if it if there's no but available, then you look for other options. It will transform how we work and how we think of >>work. In many respects, it's the gig economy with perfect contractor, and it's that leads to some very in string challenges. Ultimately, we start thinking about service Is so Ni aki based on what me here just talked about. Where does digital service is go as our P A joins other classes of users in creating those new experiences at new Prophet points and new value propositions, >>it becomes a competitive. How you provide that service can become a big competitive sensation for financial institutions. For telcos, which is a service industry, right, you're providing that service and, like two meters point, then the user hits that switch. They expect the light to come on If I'm an end user, that consumer warning a service from my telco provider, all from my, um, financial institution. I expect that service to be instantaneous at the highest accuracy accuracy at which super wide is gonna start driving competitor, official for financial institutions of financial institution Telco two Telco and that So I C companies, differentiating and really surviving are thriving in the long term. >>It's no longer becoming something that's nice to have its jacks or better in business, too. >>That's right. And the demo of the live demo that we saw today was really impressive because it sure that what would have taken a few days to happen now happens in three minutes. Right? It is, which is, which is almost the time it takes to call an uber. You know, when interpreters begin to do work at a pace that what you call an uber that's that's that's the future. Yes, it's here. >>Yes, so do I mean the demo that we do the entire enter and demo to request additional storage and being able to provisional remediating issues that we see predict cost and make it available to the end user develop whoever it is is asking for it in minutes. Alright, which used to take days and days. No, no, no, not to mention sometimes in pixels. >>It's typically done faster at scale, with greater reliability. Greater greater security, Certainly greater predictability, et cetera. All right. Here. Shukla, CEO of automation Anywhere. Yeah. Kenny, our president off the dental Service is and operations management division at BMC. Thanks both of you for being on the Cube. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Once again, I'm Peter Burress and I want to thank you for participating in this cube conversation from Santa Clara Marriott at B M sees helix immersion days until next time.

>> From New York City, it's theCUBE! Covering Automation Anywhere, Imagine. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in Midown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019. We were here last year, it's about 1,500 people who are excited to be back, the RPA space is really, really hot as evidenced by tons of investment coming into it and we're excited to have the CEO, fresh of the keynote but here Shukla the CEO and co-founder of Automation Anywhere. Great to see you and great job on the keynote. >> Thank you, great to see you too. >> Yeah, so I wanted to jump into some of the top level themes that you outlined that I think are so important and one of them was this whole concept of democratization of automation. We hear about it in Big Data, we hear about it at citizen developers and you guys are taking it really into the automation space and you had three things that were really important. One, it has to work for anyone. It's got to be available anywhere, which implies on anything. And it has to be available to any company, regardless of size. It sounds like you've really baked those concepts into a lot of the announcements that you've had today and where you're taking the company. So I wonder if you can dive a little bit deeper as to why those are guiding principles. >> Absolutely. I think what guides us there is that we believe that the power of technology lies when it impacts the lives of millions of people and makes them better. So you if you start with that premise, how do you make that possible. Now when you look at any technology that has affected, made millions of lives better, they had these three characteristics in common. Take an example of a personal computer or internet. It was available to anyone, for any kinds of people, any profile of people. It was available anywhere in any device and it was available for any sized company. So we have seen this play out a few times in our lifetime so, we have learned from that, that if our mission is to make power of RPA and AI reach millions of people and make their lives better, if that's the mission then we have to make this possible for anyone, for anywhere and for any sized company. >> And a big piece of that was the announcement of the community version which is free. So I'm sure there were some interesting discussions about moving to a freemium model and actually giving the software free for people that qualify. I wonder if you can talk about those discussions and clearly there's a bigger picture that you're focused on, versus just the revenue for one or two small customers. >> Right, so our community edition is free for small businesses, student and individual developers. And the reason why we did this is for two reasons. One is, we believe the students are our future and they will take this technology forward and we need more and more people with digital skills. So it seemed like the right place to invest and enable them with the next set of technologies. The reason to make it available free for developers is, we believe that today about 95% of processes that we automate are the processes that we do manually today. But that is changing very fast. In three to five years, 30% of things that we will automate will be the things that are not part of our lives today. It is things that we don't know yet, right? >> Right, right. >> And that happens every time. The way we use phones and everything, nobody could've predicted this. So we know that will happen like it happened in internet and other evolution. It will happen in our space as well. And developers are an amazing asset, they are the ones who will discover, find these new ways that none of us know about and they will create this new future in front of our eyes. So it makes sense to empower developers and especially developers are very picky, they want the best software available. They won't settle for anything less and because we have the complete intelligent digital workforce platform that includes the best RPA, artificial intelligence and analytics, (coughs) we thought they would love the power of this combined platform that is not available anywhere else. And true to the cause, as soon as we announced it we had an amazing success. The requests are pouring in from 120 countries worldwide and the adoption has been phenomenal. >> And you mentioned that on stage on the keynote that there's some examples out there where people are not doing automating of processes that they already did but are really starting to get creative in the uses of this tool and I think we see it over and over as you said, people miss the hype recurve, it's hard to see the future and it's hard to apply what we're doing today to what we're going to be doing in the future, because we really don't know. >> That's right. I think sometimes I describe this way to people, that when the new technology comes, people think that new technology is the train and the world is the stations. So the station remains where it is and the tain moves on, right? That's not how real world is. The real world is, the world is a train itself, that's moving forward and technology is one of the, you can say it's the first-- >> The locomotive. >> First locomotive or one of the pieces in it. But the whole world is moving as well. So we often, many of us get this wrong that, we make a mistake to think that, how will this new technology fill in a stationary world where that's not the case, the world is moving. >> The other thing you brought up I thought was pretty interesting is that, this is not to displace workers, it's to enable workers to do better and I couldn't help but think of, just like my PC helps me do my job better, the internet helps me do my job better, my phone and my ERP system all help me do my job better. So, of course, why wouldn't I want a powered AI assistant to help me do my job better. >> That's absolutely true. Look, I have a very extraordinary privilege of seeing this transformation through the eyes of thousands of people who use our platform every day, and I've visited about, of the 2,800 plus customers we have, I have visited hundreds of them and talked to thousands of people on the ground who use this technology. And there is not a single one of them who would go back. And I invariably ask that, after a few discussions I would say "Would you ever consider going back?", and the answer is universal across any country, any verticle. People do not want to go back to, why would you, why would you do a robotic job? And so, it is more clear than ever before that this transformation is certainly not about us, certainly not about bots. It is about empowering people so that they're more productive unlike any other time in human history. Taking it a step further, as you said, compared to where PCs brought us. >> You said, again I could go on your keynote all day long, another great thing you brought up which was just crushing, I think you said that 4% of people have jobs that need some degree of creativity. That is horrible! >> Is it not? Is it not? >> That is horrible. And again to personalize it, you talked about your kids and this world that they're going to be coming into, why would we want to put them into a robotic job? >> Right. So the data shows that only 4% of US jobs require medium creativity. And as a parent that is, I'm troubled by it because we, like all parents, we tell our children they can do anything. What do we mean by they can do anything? If they get one of those 4% jobs, that's still a medium level of creativity so probably we hope they get 4.1% of those jobs that require full human capacity, yeah? >> Right, right. >> That's not anything they can do. They don't have as many opportunities that they should have. And I think we need to create a better world with more opportunities for our children. I'll settle at 40% but 4% isn't acceptable. >> So a little bit about the business, cause the deeper stuff I think is more interesting, but the business is doing well, again. Since we last met you had this huge A round, I think someone said "The largest A round ever.". You put over half a billion dollars into the bank. A, what is that show in terms of validation from the marketplace, for the opportunities you guys are addressing? And then B, with great resources comes great responsibility, you know? So what are you doing next as you look into 2019, what are some of your top priorities? >> So we have been very fortunate to get the, as you mentioned about 550,000,000 in our series A round and it is, if not the largest, one of the largest series A round ever. I think it shows, first of all it's a validation of our market leadership and the growth of the category both. We continue to invest heavily in three areas. First is our RND investment continues to grow, especially in AI and making RPA accessible to millions. So those investments continue. We are significantly investing in the global expansion across, now we have offices in about 30, 35 countries worldwide. And the third is, we will carefully look at acquiring maybe new technologies and new acquisitions to make our digital labor platform more complete and offer customers more similar solutions. >> Right. So last question before I let you go, I know they got you flying back to back to back all day. It's really about the ecosystem. The Partner Ecosystem, you've got obviously a bunch of system integrators here which validates that they see a huge opportunity, but talk about how you're developing an ecosystem to extend the reach beyond just the people that work at Automation Anywhere. >> So we have two important pillars to our ecosystem. We have our site system integrators. We bought 700 plus partners who provide invaluable experience in various domains all over the world. Many of them provide the bots and the bot store that are domain specific, process specific, ready to tax and audit and finance and accounting and supply chain and oil and gas and telcos, across all industries. So they bridge the gap between technology and the customer specific, domain specific process. That's one very important pillar. The second important pillar is the software companies. So we have a great deal of partnerships with many of them, for example we have a continued partnership with IBM, with their digital business automation group. We recently announced partnership with Workrave that is very important to us. It has an enormous potential of how when you combine best in class, HR and cloud finance with best in class intelligent digital workforce. The possibilities of value creation is enormous. We today announced our partnership with Oracle and we extended our partnership with Microsoft on multiple fronts, and there are many more as well. So the two key pillars to our creating an ecosystem. Again, all of this is, almost everything that we do comes down to a single mission statement which is, how do we take the power of RPA and AI to millions of people and make their life better? >> Great, great mission. So again, thanks for having us. Congratulations on a great event and we look forward to watching the next year unfold. >> Thank you, I look forward to it (laughter) >> Alright he's been here, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We're at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019 in Midtown Manhattan, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From Times Square in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018 in downtown New York city. We're really excited to have our next guest, the CEO is Mihir Shukla, the co-founder and also CEO. Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> So you're just coming off your keynote, there was so many great themes. Before we jump into the keynote, for people who aren't as familiar with Automation Anywhere, give 'em kind of the short history. Why did you guys start this, when did you guys start it, and where are we today? >> Sure, Automation Anywhere started about 14 years ago. The goal was to bring the power of automation to every businesses and every desktop. We have been true to our vision all along. This one took longer for all to realize that this is the right way to go about it. But now, it is virtually adopted by every business across every industry. >> So its RPA, Robotic Process Automation, for those people who aren't familiar with-- >> That's right. >> Or more commonly referred to, I guess, as bots. >> That's right. So the RPA refers to the Robotic Process Automation, as you said. What it does is it simulates human behavior on a computer. So it can type on a computer, it can read a computer screen, it can apply set of rules, and often it can make basic cognitive decisions as well, if it is as sophisticated RPA as our is. So with combination of this, it can operate any application like people can and run lots and lots of things on a computer in an autonomous way. >> Right, but the scale and power of compute, of storage and networking, not only for your internal systems, but for the customer systems coming in to interact with these, has changed quite a bit in the last 14 years. >> That is absolutely right. I think one of the things that, as you said, with the compute power, network, bandwidth, everything increased. But the way we operated for a long time is everything comes to this manual operation, and the everything slows down because human beings can process only at so much speed. >> Right. >> Now with RPA coming in, you can have end-to-end digital where things that are coming digitally can get processed digitally and don't get bogged down. >> We go to a lot of shows and the consumerization of IT is something that comes up all the time. People expect now, their work behavior, their work applications to act like Amazon or act like Google or act like the things that they're familiar with on their phone. You really nailed it though, into instant gratification. That's really the thing that is driving businesses to have to perform at the level of say, an Amazon e-commerce application or a Google search application. They're not quite there yet but that is this driver that's just incessant and people need to perform for their customers. >> That's absolutely right. I think, as you said, this, what I call, digital native companies, the Amazons, Googles, Netflix of the world, they've created this standard, and it is such a wonderful experience that we all begin to expect it everywhere else we go. >> Right. >> And that expectation continues to increase. And with more and more millennials and generation Z coming in, they don't know of any other way to begin with. It is a must have if you want return of customers. >> Right, now you touched on one of my favorite numbers, a number of times in the keynote, the 80/20 rule. And you touched upon the fact that really only 20% of the processes in most enterprises now are automated, 80% are still not, and really that that's the endgame. That's your mission and where you see the opportunity. >> That is right. The idea is to rate, as you said, 20% of the processes are automated and 80% is manual. And the only way to get to 80% automation is to consumerize automation. So you touched upon that too. The consumerization of automation is the only way we'll get there. If we keep it limited, it will take us too long. >> Right. >> And the other things we offer in Automation Anywhere is a product that is so intuitive to use, that anybody can create a bot. Our customer base, now there are thousands of people trained. Last year we had 35,000 people trained. This year will cross 100,000. And this could be any business user, anyone could automate it. One interesting fact is that we had bot games yesterday. This was the idea where we had lots of people come together and compete to create the smartest, best performing bot, and people from all of the companies and world came to compete against it. The person who won was a business user. >> Right, right. >> That kind of attested to the fact that how easy it is to be used by everybody. >> Right, well, you made an interesting comment again, one of the most popular breakout sessions, if it's not already sold out, is the Build-A-Bot. >> Yes. >> And you specifically called out business executives, business leaders to take an hour out of their day and learn how to build one of these things so they realize how easy it is, how simple it is and the power so that you really get this kind of top level down drivers to drive more automation. >> That's right, that's right. My experience has been that if this is such a large transformation, if business leader experience it themselves, be the transformation you want to bring. >> Right, right. >> And I've learned that from other leaders, in one of the previous sessions, I had one of the CFO who sat down, a very large, fortune 100 CFO to Build-A-Bot. And when the bot ran, he was so excited about it. He said Mihir, we just beat our forecast 10-person last quarter 10 days ago, and I was not this excited. This is doable! If I can do it, anybody, I don't do this for a living, and if I could do it, anybody could do it. >> Right. >> And I think it's great for people to experience it >> So another interesting thing, kind of the consumerization of the automation, if you will, is that you guys have a bot store. It's funny, in the keynote, again, you showed a lot of different bots in there, organized by integration to different SAS applications or functions or a number of things. What struck me is that they all look relatively, the processes are relatively simple, but these are the crazy, boring tasks that unfortunately take up so much of our time. But you're basically building out a store. I don't even need to build my own bot. I can go in and use best practices. >> That's absolutely right. So, there are so many things everybody does in finance, accounting, HR, and many, many other areas, and all of that is available. But there are vast kinds of bots. So, there is a bot that is coming out which is called a 606 Bot. This is the new standard on how revenue recognition must happen. And that's a complex thing, usually done by Big Four and many others to kind of help you work this through. So, there are bots available for that kind of a high-intellectual capacity work as well. I mentioned in my keynote that in healthcare, in diagnostics, in the research, finding new drug treatments, a vast amount of things bots are being used. So, I think its an all spectral for our work style, whether it is routine, mundane or very high-valued work. As long as it can be automated, why not? >> Why not? So, another interesting topic that comes up at all the shows we go to is this whole debate between machines and people. Are machines taking the work of people? But you've actually identified your bots, you call 'em out as a digital workforce. So, you're really saying that its the people plus the machines 'cause what we really need to do, even just to maintain the growth for our economy to continue on the path that its been on. >> That is absolutely correct. I think that the bots act like your digital colleagues, right, and they work with you. I know there has been lots of discussions on this topic and lots of books on it and what not, but I'll share with you my experience, which is, I must have visited over 1,000 large customers, I must have visited with over 500 of them, walked on the floor of those companies and talked to people who use bots. There is not a single person, Jeff, in my encounter in last 14 years, I have come across who would go back to doing it manually. (Jeff laughs) If you are a 20 or 30 plus year person doing this job, would you do that? Would you not work on the most cutting-edge technology so that you are more employable? What we see is that companies who adopt these bots have three times more resume. Now, that's also understandable. When you walk on the floor of some of these companies, there is a sense of excitement. On Friday, they have bot parties, they cut a cake because bots are being born. They have names for it. Many of them are attached to it, right? Almost like a pet, I would say. >> Right, right. >> That is the closest I can think of. When you see all of this excitement, and how excited people are, it's hard to reconcile between what you hear on one side and the other side. I think people will come around like they have for all other things. When computers came, people had the same concern, the internet and everything else. >> Right, right. >> I think in many ways, this will help us improve the standard of living and take us to a higher level. >> So, this is interesting, you talked in the keynote about the difference between just kind of a interesting technology and really transformative technology. You identified mobile phones and internet, search, I think there was one more. >> E-commerce. >> E-commerce, and what really were the factors that make that so transformative. You know, reducing friction and 80% of the value at 20% of the cost in real time. >> That's right. >> You've been at this for 14 years, but you seem pretty damn excited, if you excuse my French. >> Right. >> So as you look out, I'll give you the last word, how are things changing from when you started to today, and as you look forward, I would never ask you to look ahead 14 years, that's like forever and ever and ever, but over the next couple, how do you see the adoption and ramp of this technology going forward? >> I think for us, we have always been on an exponential curve, but the way world is built, you, you know, the first part of the exponential curve looks linear, although it is exponential, and now we are on the hottest part of the curve where everybody can see it, right? I think the next couple of years or even more are gonna be most fascinating. The world has realized that this is the next large productivity driver. There are very few left now and so it is being adopted worldwide, I mentioned in the keynote that 70% of the largest organization in the world are now engaged with us, right? So, to see the world transform through the lens of a software and these amazing stories the customers tell. It is very rewarding. >> All right, well Mihir, thanks for taking a few minutes, thanks for having us here to the event, and congratulations to you and the team. >> Thank you, it was nice to talk to you. >> All right, he's Mihir, I'm Jeff here at Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018 in Manhattan. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, welcome to another Wikibon digital community event, this one sponsored by BMC Software. Every organization faces the challenge of how to do service management and operations management better. The ideal is to start bringing them together, but traditionally, they've been undertaken by different groups, often utilizing different tools. And that's what we're going to talk about today in today's digital community event. What can we do to improve our digital business operations, competitiveness, and customer experience, by doing a better job of bringing together those core resources that handle service management and operations management activities. As with all digital community events, this one's going to feature some upfront conversations with a number of thought leaders in this crucial space, and then we're going to run a crowd chat, which will be your opportunity to share your insights, ask your questions, and ultimately, communicate with others like you in the community that focuses on this important issue. So stay through to the end and help us participate in that digital community event. Now, recently, I had an opportunity to attend BMC Helix's Immersion Day, and while there, theCUBE was able to conduct a number of different interviews. One of the best ones we had was a great conversation with Nayaki Nayyar, who is the president of service management and operations management at the BMC Helix division, and Mihir Shukla, who is the CEO of Automation Anywhere. Let's hear what they had to say about the potential of bringing service management and operations management together. >> So, Nayaki, I want to start with you. A year ago, we started on this journey of how this new digital services platform is going to evolve to do more types of work for people. How has BMC's Helix platform evolved in that time? >> So, if you remember last time, it was almost a year back when we launched Helix, which was all around taking the service management capability that we had on prem, made it available in Cloud, containerized, so customers can run in cloud of their choice, and provided experience through various channels, bought as a channel of that customer experience. This is what we had released last time, we call it the three C's for Helix, everything in cloud, containerized, with cognitive capabilities, so customers can transform their experience. In this version, what we are extending Helix is with the operations side, so all the ITOM capabilities that we have in our platform are now a part of Helix, so we have one end-to-end platform, so that customers can discover every asset that they have on prem and cloud, monitor those assets, detect any anomalies, service both for lines of business and for IT, remediate any issues that happen, vulnerabilities that are there in the system, and automatically optimize capacity and cost and holistically, this whole closed loop of operations and service coming together is what this next wave of innovations that we are launching with BMC Helix. >> So, Mihir, Nayaki's talked about, very successfully, and Helix has been a very successful platform for improving user experience, but up front I noted that we're not just talking about human beings as users anymore, we're now talking about software as users. RPA, robotic process automation, is a central feature of some of these new trends. Tell us a little bit about how robotic process automation is driving an increased need for this kind of digital service in operations management capability. >> Sure, think in a high level, you have to think of the new organization as augmented organization that are human and bots working side by side, each doing what they're best at. And so in a specific example of a service organization, where BMC Helix is taking this is, think of this as a utility, where the way you plug it into an electricity outlet and switch on the light and you get the electricity, you plug into the BMC Helix, and behind it you have augmented workflows of chart bots, RPA bots, human beings, each doing what they're best at, and giving a far superior customer experience, unlike any other. That is happening now, and that's the future of service industry. >> But when you plug a human, so to speak, metaphorically, into that system, there's a certain amount of time, there's a certain amount of training, and as a consequence you can have a little bit more predictable scale. That doesn't mean that you don't end up with a lot of complexity, but RPA seems, the potential of RPA seems that you're going to increase the rate at which these users, in this case, digital users, are going to enter into the system, you don't have a training regimen you can attach to them, they have to be tested, they have to be discovered, they have to be put in operation with reliability, how is that ultimately driving the need for some of these new capabilities? >> I think if you think of these bots as digital workers, you almost have to go through the same process that you would go through human beings. You onboard them, in terms of, you configure them, you train them with cognitive capabilities, and then the one difference is they monitor themselves, without any bias, they can give their own performance rating card. But the beauty of this is when human and bots work together, because there are some functions that the bots can do well and then at some point they can hand off to the human beings, and human beings do some of the more interesting work that is based on judgment call, customer service, all of that. So that the combination is the end goal for everybody. >> And to add to what Mihir said, right, that customer experience, whether you're providing an experience to employees or consumers or end customers, that is the ultimate goal, that's the ultimate result of what you want to get, and the speed at which you provide that experience is the accuracy at which you provide experience, the cost at which you provide that experience becomes a comparative differentiation, which is where all this automation, this augmentation that they're doing with humans and bots, is what enables us to do that, right? For all large enterprise customers, major service organizations trying to transform into that future goal. >> But increasingly it seems as though the things that we have to do, to orchestrate and administrate, more users, digital and human, undertaking more complex tasks where each is best applied, is really driving a lot of new data, as I mentioned upfront, an enormous amount of new software, and you said new experiences, but those experiences have to be reliable, have to be secure, they have to be predictable. So that suggests this overwhelming impact of all of these capabilities. You talk about a digital tsunami. What are some of the key things that you think enterprises are going to have to do to start engaging that? >> Yeah, and whether we call it revolution, whether we call it digital transformation, I think what we all are experiencing is a tsunami, tech tsunami, right, tsunami of clouds where you have professional clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, managed clouds. Tsunami of devices, not just the mobile devices, but also as everything is getting connected, IoT devices. Tsunami of channels, as an end user, I want to experience that in the channel of my preference, Slack as a channel, SM as a channel. A tsunami of bots, of conversation bots and RPA bots, so in this tsunami, I think what everyone is trying to figure out is, how do they manage this explosion? It's humanly impossible to do it all manually you have to augment it, with of course, intelligence AIML, but then of course bots become a big part of that augmentation to orchestrate all of that back to back process. >> I would say that this is no longer nice to have, because if you look at it from a more consumer's perspective, last 20 years of digital technologies from Amazons and Googles of the world, Netflix and others, they have created this mindset of instant customer gratification. And we all been trained for it, so what was acceptable five years ago is no longer acceptable in our own lives. And so this new standard of instant result, instant outcome, instant respond, instant delivery, we just expect it, right? Once your end consumer begins to do that, we as a business no longer have a choice, that's writing on the wall. And so what these new platforms are doing, like with BMC Helix and Automation Anywhere, is delivering that instant gratification, right? And when you think about it more and more of the new customers that are millennials, they don't know any other way. So for them, this is the only experience they will relate to, so again, this is not nice to have. It is the only way world will operate, right? >> We're going to turn back to the conversation that I had with Nayaki and Mihir shortly, but first, let's see what BMC's actually doing as they try to bring together service management and operations management, by watching a quick demo that they've prepared. (techno music) (music continues) >> Great demonstration of how these technologies are coming together in a real world sense. Now let's hear more of the conversation I had with Nayaki and Mihir about bringing together service management and operations management, but specifically focusing on how this class of technology is going to be extended, and made even more powerful for business as they think about not just IT, but other classes of automation. Let's hear what they had to say. >> So if you look at large organizations, they have vast amount of applications. Sometimes 400, 800, few thousand. And what we have been doing historically is using people as a human bridges between these applications, and we have operated that way for too long, and that's the world today. >> So humans are the interface, they're the system interfaces. >> Humans are the bridges between applications, and we often call it a swivel chair operations, that's an easiest way to describe it. So what Automation Anywhere does, is it offers this technology platform, robotic process automation, AI in an RTX platform, that integrates all of it together into a seamless automation bot that can go across, and with AI it can make intelligent choices. And so now we can take that, combined with the BMC Helix, and you have a seamless service platform that can deliver a superior experience. >> So we've got now the swivel chair users, now being software, which means that we can discover them more easily, we can monitor them more easily, and that feeds Helix. >> Absolutely, so you know in our consumer world, in our day to day life, we are used to a certain experience of how we consume data or consume experiences with our TVs and all the channels. That experience that we have in our day to day life is what people expect when they walk into the company, right, walk into the enterprise, which every IT organization is trying to figure out how do they get to that level of maturity. So this is what the combination of what we are doing with Helix and Automation Anywhere, brings that consumer grid experiences into an enterprise world. >> So Mihir, when we think about RPA, we're applying it in interesting and innovative ways, no question about it. But there are certain patterns of success, give us some visibility into what you are seeing leads to success, and then what's the future of RPA, how's that going to evolve over the next few years? >> Sure, so RPA has been deployed across virtually every industry and virtually every department. So there are many ways to get started and all of them are right. But often we find is that you can either start in a central organization wherein that organization is doing everything centrally. It is a great way to get started, but eventually we learn that the federated way's the best way to end. Where hundreds of offices all over the world, if you're especially a large organization, each business unit is doing it with IT providing governance and central security and policies, and actual bots running and being implemented all over the world. Eventually for a large-scale transformation, there is a common pattern we have seen among successful customers. >> And where do you think this pattern going to evolve, as enterprises gain more familiarity with it, innovate in new and interesting ways, and as Automation Anywhere and others advance the state of the art, where do you think it's going to end up? >> The rate it's going is, is I define it as an app store experience or a Google Play experience. So if you think about how we operate our mobile devices today, if you want something on your device, you will look for an app that does that. We are getting to a point where there is bot for everything, and a digital worker for everything, so if you need certain job done, you first go to a bot store, that is an Automation Anywhere website, look for a bot that does something, hire or download that bot, get the work done, and it comes prebuilt like many there are works with BMC Helix, and many others. So that is your first way you will look for getting your work done in a new bot economy, and if there's no bot available, then you look for other options. It will transform how we work and how we think of work. >> In many respects, it's the gig economy with perfect contractor, right? And it leads to some very interesting challenges, ultimately, when we start thinking about services. So Nayaki, based on what Mihir just talked about, where does digital services go as RPA joins other classes of users in creating those new experiences at new profit points and new value propositions? >> It becomes a compare of how you provide that service, can become a big competitive differentiation for financial institutions, for Telcos, which is a service industry, right, you provide that service, and like to Mihir's point, when the user hits that switch, they expect the light to come on, so if I'm an end user, the consumer, wanting a service from my Telco provider or from my financial institution, I expect that service to be instantaneous, and the highest accuracy, accuracy at which you provide is going to start driving competitive differentiation from financial institution to financial institution, Telco to Telco, and that's how I see companies differentiating and really surviving or thriving in the long term. >> Now let's hear from a really important partner, a CDO, someone who's thinking about how these technologies are going to be applied to the front lines of business change. Sanjay Srivastava is the CDO at Genpact, and he and I had a great conversation at BMC Immersion Days about what this means to digital business transformation. How will service management and operations management in combination accelerate and make more successful businesses' efforts to transform digitally. Let's hear what Sanjay had to say. >> So tell us a little bit about, what is a digital service outcome and why is it so important? >> Yeah, well I think the reality is that what technology is doing is it's disintermediating the ecosystem, so many of the industries are clients-operated, and they have to go back and reimagine their value proposition at the core of what they do with the use of new, innovative technologies, and it's that intersection of new capabilities, of new innovative business models that really use emerging technologies, but intersect them with their business models, with their business processes, and the requirements of their clients, and help them rethink, reimagine, and deliver their new value proposition. That's really what it's all about. >> So a digital service outcome would then be the things that the business must do and must do well, but ideally, with a different experience or with a different degree of flexibility and agility, or with a different cost profile, have I got that right? >> Correct. >> So when we think about that, what are some of the key elements of a digital service success? >> We like to think about three critical success factors in driving any digital transformation. The first one is the notion of experience, and what I mean by that is not user interface for a piece of software, but the journey of a customer, an employee, a provider, a partner, in engaging with you and your business model. When we think about journey mapping that scientifically, we think about design, thinking on the back of that, and we think about re-imagining what the new experience looks like. One of the largest things we've got in the industry is digital transformation on the back of cost take out of productivity or efficiency is insufficient drive and optimize the value that digital can bring. And using experience as the compass, as sort of the north star in that journey is a meaningful differentiator and driver of business benefit, so that's number one. I think the second area that's become increasingly apparent is the intersection of domain with digital. And the thinking there is that to materialize the benefit of digital in an enterprise, you have to intersect it with the specifics of that business, how users interact, what clients seek, how does business actually happen? We talk about artificial intelligence a lot, we do a lot of work in AI as an example, and the key thing about machine learning is goal orientation, and what is goal orientation? It's about understanding the specifics of the environments, you can actually orient the goal of the machine learning algorithm to deliver high accuracy results. And it's something that can often easily get overlooked, so indexing on the two halves of the whole, the yin and the yang, the piece around digital, and the innovative technologies, and being able to leverage and take advantage of them, but equally, be founded in domain, understand the environment, and use that knowledge to drive the right materialization of the end outcome. And that's the second critical success factor, I think, to get it right. I think the third one is the notion of how do you build a framework for innovation? You know, it's not the sort of thing where a large fortune company, Fortune 500 companies can necessarily experiment and it's a little bit of a go happy go lucky strategy, doesn't really work, you have to innovate at scale, you have to do it in a fundamental fashion, you have to do it as a critical success factor. And so one of the biggest things we focus on is how do you innovate at the edge? Innovation must be at the edge, this is where the rubber meets the road. But governance has to be at the core. >> Well let me build on that for a second, 'cause you said innovation's at the edge, so basically that means where the brand promise is being enacted for the customer, and that could be at an industrial automation setting or it could be in just making a recommendation, it could be any number of things, but it's where the value proposition is realized for the customer. >> Correct, that's exactly right, and that's where innovation must happen. So as a large corporation, you must be able, it's important to set up a framework that allows you to do innovation at the edge, otherwise it's not meaningful innovation if you, "Well, it's just a lot of busy work." And yet as you do that, and as you change your business model, as you bring new components to the equation, how do you drive governance, and it's increasingly becoming more important, you think about, we're going to be in a AI first world increasingly, more and more that's the reality of the world we're going in, and in that AI first world, I work here in Palo Alto, walk into my office, a couple of hundred people any given day. If tomorrow morning I walked in and 100 people didn't show up for work, I would know right away, because I can see them. Now fast forward to an environment where we have digital workers, we have automation bots, we have conversational AI Chatbots. And in that world, understanding which of my AI components are on, which ones are off, which ones showed up for work today, which ones fell sick, and really being able to understand that governance, and that's just the productivity piece of it. Then you think about data and security, AI changes complete dimensions on that. And you think about bias and explainability, it just become increasingly important, a notion of a digital ethics board, and thinking about ethics more pervasively. So I think that companies and clients we serve that do really well in digital transformation are those that key in on those three things, the notion of experience is the true compass for how you drive transformation. The ability to intermix domain and digital in a meaningfully intersecting fashion. And to be thoughtful, proactive, and get governance right up front in the journey to come. >> So let me again build on that a little bit, 'cause people are increasingly recognizing that we're not going to centralize with cloud, we're going to greater distribute. We're going to distribute data more, we're going to distribute function more, but you just added another dimension, that some of us have been thinking about for a long time, and that's this notion of distributing authorities so that an individual at the edge can make the decision based on the data and the resources that are available, with the appropriate set of authorities, and that has to be handled at a central, in a overall coherent governant way. So that leads to the next question. >> And just before you go there, I mean I think the best example of that, is we do that, most corporations do that really well in the financial scheme of things. Businesses at the edge make decisions on a day to day basis on pricing and relationships and so on and so forth, and yet there's a central other committee that looks through the financials and makes sure it meets the right requirements and has the right framework, and much in the same way, we're going to start seeing digital ethics committees that become part of these large corporations as they think about digitizing the business. >> Governance at the end of the day is how do you orchestrate multiple divergent claims against a common set of assets, and being able to do that is absolutely essential, and it leads to this notion of we've got these ideas of digital business, digital services and operations management. How are we going to weave them together utilizing some of these new technologies, new fabrics that are now possible to both achieve the outcomes we're talking about at scale and at speed? >> Yeah, well the technology capabilities are improving really well in that area, and so the good news is they're the set of tools that are now available that give you the ingredients, the components of the recipe that's required to make dinner, if you will. The work that needs to happen is actually how to orchestrate that, to figure out which components need to come in, and how do you pull together a vertical stack that has the right components to meet your needs today, and more importantly, to address the needs of the future, because this is changing like no other time in history. >> You want options with everything you do now, you want to make sure that you have a string of options for the future, and it's especially important here. >> That's right, that's exactly right. And the quick framework we've established there is sort of the three-legged stool of, how do you integrate quickly, how do you modularize your investments and then how do you govern them into one integrated whole, and those become really important. I'll give you examples, much of the work we do, we'll work with a consumer bank for instance, and they'll want to do a robotic process automation engagement, we'll run them for nine months, they'll get 1800 robots up and running. And the next question becomes, well now we have all this data that we didn't really have, because now we have an RPA running, how do I learn some machine learning insights from there, and so we then work with them to actually derive some insights and get these questions answered. And then the engagement changes to, well now that we have this pattern recognition then we understand more questions are going to be asked, how do I respond to those questions, A, automatically, and before they get asked, this notion of next best action. And so you think about that journey of a traditional client, the requirements change from robotics to machine learning to conversational AI to something else, and keeping that string of investments, that innovative sort of streak true, and yet being able to manage, govern, and protect the investments, that's the key role. >> We want to thank all the thought leaders that participated in preparing their thoughts for this digital community event, especially the folks at BMC Software. But now here's your opportunity to weigh in on how you see service management and operations management coming together in your business. How's it going to affect your IT organization, your IT organization's ability to serve your business, and your business overall? This is your opportunity to participate in a crowd chat where the community comes together and shares insights, asks each other questions, and engages with these thought leaders to try to get the answers that you need to move forward on the journey to bring together service management and operations management in your shop. Let's crowd chat!