>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to the Bellagio and Las Vegas. The cube is live. I love saying I'm going to say again and again, the cube is live. We are a UI path forward for, at an in-person conference. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante. We're going to be talking about the vision of the UI path platform. We're very excited to welcome to the program. Ted kart, the executive vice president of products and engineering at UI path, Ted, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. It's great to be here with you and it's, it is great to be live. It's been so fun over the last couple of days to spend time with our customers. Uh, it's just been so great for the team and everyone, >>I can imagine what it was like for you yesterday on main stage, looking out to a standing room, only crowd for the first time in probably 20 months. >>Yeah. And that was, that was actually quite fun. As, you know, speaking to a camera, you just don't get the same energy. You got to muster all of the energy yourself. And so it was so great just to be back in front of, uh, uh, live people again, humans. >>Exactly. Well, from a customer perspective, I know that the number is now over 9,000, you guys have an incredibly high retention rate. We're talking 96 plus percent. A significant portion of revenue comes from those existing customers. We talked to a whole bunch of em yesterday. We've got more of them on today. We're hearing that validation from the voice of the customer on what UI path has been doing. Talk to us about the vision that you unveiled yesterday, strategically, what some of the feedback has been from some of those folks that are here in person. >>Great. Well, so let's start the story by looking back first and talking about the phases of the market. Uh, because I really see us entering phase three of the automation market. Uh, phase one I describe is the core RPA platform. Uh, and that was, you know, the elements of that are the runtime, the robot, the thing that knows how to execute these workflows, it knows how to do UI automation. It knows how to do API integration. It knows how to do long running workflows and interact with humans, developer experiences, low code visual developer experiences. Plus the orchestration then that that gives the enterprises, the manageability and the governance. I'd say that was phase one. Okay. Daniel and the team. Then at forward three, the last this community got together right here, the Bellagio I at the end of 2019 rolled out an expanded vision, which we talk about as the platform for the full automation life cycle and that Ella added elements of let's let's help end users engage more easily with their automations. >>They engage with them on their desktop. So they need to think of it like a start menu, like experience with the UI path assistant, they need rich user interfaces. So we introduced a low code application platform, UI path apps. They want to interact with natural language. So we integrate with chat bots. And then we find a lot of customers. When we initially start their journey, they have a lot of knowledge right away of opportunities. They see things in the call center, front office, back office, finance department, they see things to do, but then they say help us find more opportunities to automate. So we have this old discovery area to help them find more opportunities to automate. So this vision of this end to end life cycle, that that covers the core platform plus engagement in discovery. That's the journey we've been on over the last two years. >>And I think, you know, part of what we talked about yesterday was just how we're continuing to fulfill that vision. And then that set the stage for us to talk about a few innovation themes. As we look forward to two phase three, that I would emphasize, we still, we're still building out this end to end automation platform covering the full life cycle, but we do see some pretty important themes going forward. Well, we'll start with four, um, kind of four key themes. Um, one is enterprise grade platform. Uh, the second is, uh, platform expansion, you know, healthy platforms grow and expand what you're able to do with them. What developers are able to build for the notion that discovery becomes more continuous. I liken it to a nervous system for the processes and the work of the enterprise. It's always there watching, helping you find opportunities. Um, and then we talked about this last concept, which is semantic automation, which is the, I'd say the real big idea in the forward-looking vision. >>I wonder if we could, um, and your keynote yesterday, you talked about the fragmentation of the enterprise software business and of course perpetuate advice, the SAS easy button. Great. I got all these different SAS products and you're sort of creating a layer across them. Sort of a couple of questions there. Maybe you could just sort of describe that dynamic and how you guys think about it. And then I got to follow up. >>Yeah. I think if you're a historian, you look back and say in the past a lot of business process centered around the deployment of a few monolithic applications, your ERP, your CRM system. And then if somebody in another department wanted something different, another part of the process you might customize or deploy an ad-on. Now what's great about the SAS era is we have a lot more solutions that are now purpose-built toward a lot more functions. A lot more processes are being automated and that's fantastic, but what's that done is it's expanded the landscape of applications now than enterprises hold typically. And that's where you get to the issue of fragmentation. And the reality is, is the real work in the enterprise. The real work people do every day and the process, it, it spans all of that stuff. And I think as an end user, you can, you resonate with this because you will work with desktop apps. >>You will work with these SAS apps. You'll work with these line of business apps. You'll, you'll have to navigate to this one, cut some data, you know, copy it, paste it over here, you'll work in Excel. You'll send an email and you know, that type of work, nobody really wants to do that. And especially if it's something you have to do all the time. So automation, we are, in fact, not the first platform to walk in the enterprises door and say, Hey, we can help you integrate your systems. We can help you automate business process. This is, is, uh, you know, this goes back to the early two thousands and the arrival of, you know, the, the first-generation integration prod products. So what's so different about RPA and these automation platforms and our automation platform. The difference is really being centered on UI automation, because it's got three key attributes that I think are super important to understanding why this is such a different phenomenon. >>The first is because it, it automates via the UI. It can capture the actual work people are doing so we can emulate the actual work people are doing that's number one and that's critically important. Uh, the second thing is it can reach anything your way. If you've got an integration problem, you don't want connectivity to 82% of your systems. You actually want to cover everything you need to, you need to cover. And UI automation can reach anything that has a user interface. Uh, and then the third thing is because it it's emulating the work people do. It's very intuitive to develop for and as such. The developer experience is a very easy to use. Uh, don't require traditional coding skills. Customers tell us that unleashes more capacity and they get really fast time to value and that's kind of a win-win win. And the interesting thing then is if you think about it, the business wants to move forward at a certain rate, but that applications estate is only going to move forward. It's going to move forward kind of at its own pace as well. And this automation layer can really deal with the sheer between that. It can help you move forward quickly up here while you're waiting for, you know, at this layer to evolve as well. Uh, >>I wonder if you've mentioned, you know, kind of history, if you look back and, and, and, and you're somebody who spent two decades plus, you know, one of the great software companies, if you think about the great software companies, Microsoft, we know how they got there with the PC ascendancy and then took it to new levels. Oracle SAP, Salesforce is vying to become a next great software company. Go. McDermott wants to take service now in that realm. And I have a sense that with your vision of a fully automated enterprise, you guys could aspire to be a next great software company. I think, you know, you're, you're, you're humble, but you're bold. So when somebody who has a historical perspective on great software companies, what do you, what does it take architecturally specifically to be that next great software company? >>Well, it's a great question. Uh, you know, I, I said yesterday to the audience that, you know, the reason I came to UI path is because I do believe this is one of the most significant platforms of this time. And I do believe as we just talked about it's UI automation is the central element. That's really making it different. Now, all these other technologies and capabilities are super important. Uh, we announced yesterday a new service in our platform called the UI path integration service. Uh, we acquired a company named cloud elements six months ago, uh, an API integration company. And that is now landing in the UI path integration service. Uh, we have always had API integration as a part of our platform, but now we've got this richer catalog, we've got new services for developers, and that only expands what they're able to do. >>Um, and, and as we talked about the themes, the future themes of innovation, we talked about this platform expansion, and I served as this historian, you know, healthy, vital platforms grow, and they grow on their own just naturally because there's always some adjacency where if I bring that in, I can enable my community to do something different. They can build something different. And so that was why, for instance, let's embrace more API integration surface area. Why did we enter low code application space? It it's because we thought there was a lot of power for our community to now be able to re build rich user experiences. Um, why did we bring AI and ML in as a first-class citizen with an ML ops platform? We're not trying to be a general hosting of bottles, but we want to make it easy for those skills to be used. >>So there is a thing just about just continuing to expand what you're able to do, but there's an important thing you gotta do as well is you got to stay true to your personas and your user community. So anytime we do this, we think, yes, we're bringing in API integration, but we're not trying to be an I-PASS. We're trying to serve our RPA developer community. And we have to be true to that developer experience and the thing that's made us special. So we really focus on landing it in an integrated way, really helps our community. Do, do you know, more and more with the platform >>You're seeding a new breed of developer, or maybe your ascendancy is coinciding with a new breed of developer. >>Let's say there's a general trend. And we, we labeled the general trend. Now, low code, no code, which I frankly think is this historian is, is just a new way. We're talking about the idea that we, you want to continue to simplify developer experiences. And if you do that, everybody likes it. And it does. It enable you to grow the pool of developers that you have. And in our case, there is a new, you know, this is, this is a large and growing discipline. If you looked on LinkedIn community of RPA developers, there are new personas, new jobs being built around this platform. Today, we have, we're blessed with a very, very large community of developers. This is a new piece of, yeah, I think those are the, those are the range we're talking about. Yes. Um, and it's amazing asset for us as well as we do new things. Uh, we've got community ways they can engage with community builds previews. It gives us a lot of expertise to tap, tap into is we're deciding to do new things, >>Ask how influential that large community is and the product direction roadmap, the vision execution, how influential is that >>They're immensely influential. And that, that goes from when we're early on and we're ideating, and we're talking to our customer advisory boards or customers one-to-one, or as features are starting to come out in community previews. Uh, customers are an instrumental part of that journey. I think that's, this is one of the things. If you spend any time with Daniel at all, uh, you'll understand how important customer centricity and true customer centricity is to him. Um, and I think that's, uh, I only joined the company 18 months ago, but I, I walked into a company that I really understood knew what that meant. The words are easy to say, but really being that and having customers shape who you became, I think that's something that the company has done actually quite well. >>The crowds CrowdStrike announcement was notable. Um, I'm interested in how you're integrating that. I know, you know, that's endpoint security. I know you've done a lot of work historically in identity access with zero and doing some deep integration there, or how should we be thinking about the CrowdStrike gets it's more than just a press release. It's it's, it's there's engineering going on there. What can you tell us? >>Yeah. Yeah. That's a very important thing for us. We, I talked about another one of the key innovation themes is enterprise grade platform. And that one might seem like, well, of course, he's going to say that, but we do want our customers to understand, we know this is a mission critical platform, and you know, now it's now integral to the work people do. It's integral to the process. If it ever fails them, that's a mission critical failure. Yeah. And so we were making deep investments like this. Um, this partnership had CrowdStrike is about delivering a solution that an endpoint protection solution that understands robots and they are not unique in that. Unfortunately, they are subject to a lot of the same forms of attacks that humans can be subject to. Um, and, but they're also unique and then need unique protection. And so, as we came together with CrowdStrike, one of the important elements for us was let's enable their, in this case, Falcon platform to understand robots and let's do it as a seamless part of that experience. >>And so there's a few elements we deliver together. They, they have a lightweight agent that gets deployed with a robot. Um, and then most importantly, we provide metadata. We provide data back to log information, back to CrowdStrike. So now a security analysts sitting in the Falcon console knows when there's an activity that's related to a robot versus related to a human. And then there's also specific mitigation actions that are relative to a robot. You may want to just block that instance of that automation from running again, or you might want to block all instances from running again. And so there's specific mitigation there specific, um, visibility we're providing to the security analyst, but then it's all done in a seamless way. The customer, when they have 2110, they have the latest Falcon release. There's no extra licensing. They just have those two products and it just works. >>How much was that accelerated the last year, 18 months we've seen the tremendous change in the security landscape. Um, ransomware has become a household word. Everybody knows about colonial pipeline. We're seeing so much activity there. It's a matter of when customers get hit, not if how much of the events of the last year have accelerated that partnership with CrowdStrike and how you're enabling RPA to be that protected asset that the organization needs to ensure >>It's protected. It'd be fantastic. If we ever got to a point where we felt like, you know, security was a solved problem and it won't ever be. Um, and, uh, you know, and this is why we felt like we needed a world-class, uh, company to partner with who's an expert in this landscape and they do their part. And we do our part. Um, that was why we took this approach because we know we're not going to build, we're not going to have and build that expertise. We know about robots. We know what we know about that side of thing. They understand security. And by working together, we can connect the dots and we can hear everything. They understand that we're never able to replicate. How unique is that, that, that sort of robot >>Optimized, you know, sort of security, >>Uh it's as far as I know, it's the industry's first solution. It's important to know that endpoint protection does provide protection for robots today. Sure. And all of them do, but it doesn't know about them. It can't tell the security analysts that was an action. A robot took versus a human. Um, and it doesn't know how to take specific mitigation steps. And that's the exciting thing to we've done here. So it's, to my knowledge, that's the first point security offering built for, as we say, the robot workforce. >>And so you bring engineering resources to, to create that value and, and, and collaborate with CrowdStrike. Yeah. >>Yeah. We, we both did work on both sides. It's, it's been a really fantastic partnership and it was great. We had a video from their chief product officer as a part of our discussion yesterday. It's been fantastic relationship and partners. >>So it's one of those tricky thing. I mean, that's IP that you're developing with cross at the same time, you know, you've nailed it, right. It's never going to be solved, but, but one of the ways in which we can counteract the adversaries who are extremely capable is sharing. So it was that IP that gets shared or is that IP that you keep for yourself? >>We're both doing what we do, their IPS, their IPR IPS, our IP. And so it's all, it's all good there. >>Focusing on your core competencies. Well, Ted, thank you for joining Dave and me today, talking about the vision where things are going, the excitement, the partnership expansion, a lot of that activity since the IPO, we appreciate your time today. >>Very exciting times. And then as I said at the open it's, it's great to be here with you. Great to be live. >>Great to be alive. Really is for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. We're live in Las Vegas with UI path forward for, at the Bellagio, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> You're watching continued coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm sure you're joining just a couple of hundred thousand of your closest friends and family on the web as we engage this AWS builder community in a very different way this year. I'm super excited to have one, for the first time Flexera on theCUBE program, I'm Keith Townsend @CTOAdvisor on Twitter and I'm joined by the CEO of Flexera, Jim Ryan. Jim, welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having us Keith. >> And Marie Godfrey, Senior Vice President of Product at Flexera. >> Thanks. It's good to be here. >> Welcome to the show. So, first off, I think most of the industry knows Flexera from the famous survey you guys do every year. Help us understand, what's the purpose of the survey and the intent of it? >> I think the purpose of the survey is to continue to provide the pulse of the market to our customers and the market at large. This is not a revelation to say that cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud is an ever-changing fast, fast moving target in the industry and we find that by pulsing our customers and pulsing the market and then in return, giving people a broader sense as to what's going on, how they view the current top three challenges that they're facing, allows people to just stay relevant and stay current without having to do so much heavy lifting themselves. >> So, talk to me about the other part that's not as famous. Marie, the product, what's the primary goal of Flexera? >> So, to take off from what Jim said, the state of the cloud report that we issue every year is just one of many that we do research on and we published and Flexera hasn't always been known as a cloud management tool or a cloud provider of optimization solutions for the cloud. We have grown up and our legacy is very much on software asset management. So, over the course of both organic and inorganic means, we find ourselves in this great position now to be able to talk to not only our core strengths as an organization and as a company, but also what we do to help our customers optimize their cloud cost. >> So, one of the interesting outputs or data points from the report is this 70/30 split. I've seen it as 80/20, 70/30, more or less the same ideal concept that we spend 30% of our time basically on these innovative projects but 70% of our time basically on traditional IT operations. How does that impact your team's view of the market? >> Well, I think it profoundly impacts our view. You can call it the elephant in the room or you can call it the immovable object. The fact of the matter remains is that although a lot of the focus, attention and an ever increasing share of everybody's budget is being focused and centered on the cloud, if you're a CIO or somebody working in the CIO's organization, what you've got to realize and focus on is that 70% of your applications in your spending in your tech stack, are still on premise and VMs and other things that simply cannot be ignored. So, our overarching value proposition above and beyond remaining relevant in the cloud and publishing the state of the cloud is we focus on giving CIOs and IT teams the insight as to what's going on in your on-prem estate and if we do our jobs properly with our technology stack, it's identifying overuse or cost optimization opportunities, so, you can take dollars from your legacy stack and throw it over to invest in more innovative things that's going to move the needle for your business. >> So, that's a pretty interesting, I think value pop especially where the public cloud show help me understand kind of the overall challenge when we're thinking about public cloud, where typically less than 30% of our resources are probably in the public cloud. For most people watching this interview and the majority are on the private cloud, how does like Flexera help me to extract the value of both environments? >> Well, that's by robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? So, for everybody listening in here, lean in and listen. The biggest problem that we have when we're talking with our customers is that the cloud people aren't talking to the legacy on-prem asset management people and like Americans or everybody else, we got to just get together and talk to one another so, there's money and budget dollars to be extracted on the legacy on-prem last glamorous stuff of the house here and I say with great certainty not knowing all of the situations with everybody that's watching this, that I'm sure that you fight for single Dollar, Euro, Pound, Yen, et cetera, et cetera that you want to spend on your cloud initiatives. By collaborating with your brethren and your sisters over on the other side of the aisle and by looking at what's going on on the on-prem estate here, you can identify opportunities where you can reallocate budget dollars. >> So Marie, you guys have this term that I've not seen before, Technology Value Optimization or TVO, explain that to me. >> So, TVO is just the latest evolution in terms of how we think about our portfolio and our place in this ecosystem. That includes not just your traditional infrastructure management but this bridging and this realization of value when it comes to how we help our customers extract the value from what we do really, really well which is all around discovery of IT assets. It's around knowing my entitlements, it's around understanding my usage and now of course we brought cloud assets into the picture and helping our customers not only understand and see into those cloud assets but really look at how do I right size? How do I reclaim dollars? How do I avoid failed audits and really understand my usage patterns and what it is I need to do to enact and move toward that digital transformation that Jim referred to? So, at the end of the day, how we think about technology value optimization is that critical factor which is all around understanding the return on the investment and how to better understand and monetize the value for our customers in terms of what they have today and where they need to go. >> Ken, I wanted you to shed some light in what we consider or what we should now consider assets in this new era of cloud, and that your traditional products that how could others understand the AS or the asset either is a server or a virtual machine on that server networks switch etcetera but as I look at SaaS and past platforms and infrastructure as a service platform, what is the asset in this new world? >> By my definition, an asset is anything that your company spend money on and you need to get a return on it. So, 10 years ago, if we were having this conversation, an asset would have been a desktop, a router, a server, or maybe it would be a multi-core server and as things started to get a little bit more complicated, we added virtual machines. So, assets weren't just physical devices, they were virtual devices where we really cut our teeth and made a name for ourselves at Flexera was in software license optimization or software asset management, which is you take all of your physical assets and then you throw software applications from IBM, Oracle SAP, Microsoft and you put those two together and what you have are licensable events or financial exposure, because it's not just as simple as buying a database from Oracle, Oracle is going to want to know how many cores you're running on the server, and all of those different combinations in a Rubik's cube of complexity throw off licensable or financial events and while I'd love to tell everybody that the cloud and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is making it easier, it's actually making it more sophisticated and more complicated to try and get your head around it because now you have containers and just when we thought we had figured out VMs and what assets and things are running in VMs, you've got containers that are going up and down and trying to find out what assets are in containers across a hybrid multicloud environment says the latest instantiation of chasing your tail here in the business. >> And then help me think through, or at least visualize this concept of entitlements when it comes to the cloud era. When I had on premises assets, I could go and look at my Oracle license and maybe figure out what I was entitled to but now when I, especially when I think of multicloud multi-service and even hybrid where Microsoft gives me credits or on premises services versus off-prem services, help me understand how I should be looking at that and how Flexera helps. >> I think you've got to be looking at it at closely and you can't look at it in isolation. So what you can't do is look at what you've got spun up in an Azure environment and AWS or Google cloud environment, because you're only going to negotiate one agreement with Microsoft most likely. You're only going to negotiate one ELA with IBM or Oracle, or fill in the blank and you know what, Oracle's not going to care what you're running in just cloud if they come and audit you. They are going to perform an audit, and they're going to want to know what you're running in in an on-prem world in VMs, on your data center and your desktop, and then they're going to want you to bring to full account what you're running in your cloud environments as well. So the way Flexera helps you is that we can discover, and we can give you an unprecedented visibility into what's running throughout your IT assets estate, whether it's on-prem, on a desktop, in a data center, on a SaaS application and an infrastructure platform as a service, pull it back and normalize it and compare that to what you've actually signed with all of your suppliers and when we do our job right, our customers run our algorithms across what you're entitled to use and what you're actually using, and what we find is that there's anywhere from 30 zero to 30% of overused in spend in ways. >> Keith, I just want to add example of where I saw this in real time with one of our solution engineers this about two weeks ago, where he was demonstrating the power of what we deliver across entitlements and usage and understanding where a potential wasted spend is and the customer was really focused on Oracle, and making sure that the Oracle negotiation coming up was going to be one where the customer felt like they were in a position of strengths and really understood what entitlements and usage were but when we showed them that Oracle was one piece of a bigger puzzle and that their cloud spend and AWS spend, and even their spend with some of their largest SaaS applications was actually much smaller than the whole, it really showed the customer the power of looking at these assets back to your question around assets and how do we think about them in a way that compares them to one another so the customer gets a full point of view. >> It's very difficult to get an Apple's and Apple's comparison with hybrid versus public and it's no longer just, I don't know if it was ever simple, but it's just more complex these days. Last question, as you look at the past few years, and I go to the Flexera website and look at your product portfolio, talk to me about the relationship between your customer in the industry and how that's changed and how customers consume Flexera as a product. >> I think over the years, our customers like the market has shifted to our SaaS and cloud offering we back in the day we used to have perpetual licenses and we were focusing on an on-prem scenario only, and our customers rightfully so have become far more demanding much like the market has and they now expect things to be delivered in real time with an agile mindset on a SaaS or cloud native basis and with that becomes a much, much higher expectation in terms of customer success and service that they get, because they're on a subscription basis, they can cancel at any time, just like we can do with our cable service provider. So we've really had to invest a lot, not just in R&D and making sure that our technology delivers outcomes, but in the way that we work with and service our customers. They're far more demanding than that they ever have and I wouldn't want it any other way and we think that our strategic imperatives is just keeping up with that in their high demands and expectations in the future. >> Well, I really appreciate you two taking out the time out of your busy schedules, both of you on the East coast, I'm in a Midwest, couple of hundred thousand people tuning into AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual learning to tackle a lot of these complex problems. The pandemic, the new reality of the market has forced us to address implementing and managing enterprise IT in a completely different way. This conference is a great example of that. We thank our friends at Flexera for sponsoring this interview. You want to learn more about theCUBE's coverage? Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Plenty of content with me and my fellow co-host this year coming out of AWS re:Invent 2020 talk to you next installment of theCUBE. (upbeat music)