>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>We're back in Las Vegas. UI path forward three. You're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Bobby Patrick is here. He's the COO of UI path. Welcome. Hi Dave. Good to see it to be here. Wow. Great to have the cube here again. Right? Q loves these hot shows like this. I mean this is, you've said Gardner hasn't done the fastest growing software segment you've seen in the data that we share from ETR. You guys are off the chart in terms of net score. It's happening. I hanging onto the rocket ship. How's it feel? Well it's crazy. I mean it's great. You all have seen some of the growth along the way too, right? I mean we had our first forward event less than two years ago and you know about 500 plus plus non UI path and people then go year later. It was Miami USY. >>There's probably a lot. Cube I think was Miami right yet and a, and that was a great event, but that was more in the 13 1400 range. This one's almost 3000 and the most amazing part about it was we had 8% attrition from the registrations. Yeah. That's never seen that we're averaging 18% of 20% for all of our, most of our events worldwide. But 8% the commitment is unbelievable. Even 18 to to 20% is very good. I mean normally you'll see 25 to sometimes as high as 50% yeah. It just underscores the heat. >> Well I think what's also great, other stats that you might find interesting. So over 50% of the attendees here are exec. Our senior executives, like for the first time we actually had S you know, C level executive CHRs and CEOs on stage. Right. You could feel the interest level. Now of course we want RPA developers at events too, right? >>But this show really does speak, I think to the bigger value propositions and the bigger business transformation opportunity from RPA. And I mean, you've come so far where no one knew RPA two years ago to the CIO of Morgan Stanley on stage, just warning raving about it. That's, we've come a long way in two years. >> Well, and I saw a lot of the banks here hovering around, you know, knocking on your door so they, they know they are like heat seeking missiles, you know, so, but the growth has been amazing. I mean I think ARR in 2017 was what, 25 million at this time. Uh, at the end of 17 it was 43 and 43 and 25 and now you're at 12 times higher now 1212 X solve X growth, which is the fastest growing software company. I think in that we know from one to 100 we were, we did that in 21 months and all that. >>And we had banks who now we're not really counting anymore and we're kind of, you know, now focus more on customer expansion. Even though we hit 5,000 customers, which we started the year at 2050 ish. We just crossed 5,000. I mean, so the number of customers is great, but there's no question. This conference is focused on scaling, helping them grow at enterprise wide with, with, with RPA. So I think our focus will be in to shift a bit, you know, to really customer expansion. Uh, and that's a lot of what this announcements, the product announcements were about a lot of what the theme here is about. We had four dozen customers on, on stage, you know, the Uber's of the world, the Amazons of the world. It's all about how they've been scaling. So that's the story now. Well, you know, we do a lot of these events and I go back to some of the, uh, when the cube first started, companies like Tablo, Dallas Blunck great service. >>Now, I mean, these you can, and when you talk to customers, first of all, it's easy to get customers to come talk about RPA. Yeah. And they're, they're all saying the same thing. I mean, Jeanne younger said she's never been more excited in her career from security benefit. But the thing is, Bobby, it's, I feel like they're, they're really just getting started. Yeah. I mean most of the use cases that you see are again, automating mundane task. We had one which was the American fidelity, which is a really bringing in AI. Right. But they're really just getting started. It's like one to 3% penetration. So what are your thoughts on that to kind of land and expand, if you will? I think, you know, look, last year we announced our vision of a robot for every person. At that point we had SNBC on stage and they were the one behind it. >>And they are an amazing story. Now we have a dozen or so that are onstage talking about a robot for every person like st and others. And so, but that, that, that's a pretty, pretty, pretty bold vision I think. Look, I think it's important to look at it both ways. Um, there's huge gold and applying RPA to solve real problems. There's a big opportunity, enterprise wide, no question. We've got that. But I look New York Foundling was on stage yesterday. We have New York Foundling is a 150 year old associate. Our charity in New York focused on child welfare, started by three fishers of charity. They focused on infants. And anyway, it's an amazing firm. Just the passion that New York family had on stage with Daniel yesterday was amazing. But what they flew here because for once they found a technology that actually makes a huge difference for them and what in their mission. >>So their first RPA operation was they have 850 clinicians every week. They spend four hours a week moving their contact, uh, a new contact data associate with child child issues from system to system to spreadsheet and paper to system, right? They use RPA and they now say for a 200,000 hours a year. But more importantly, those clinicians spend those four hours every week with children not moving. So I'm still taking, I think Daniel had a bit of a tear in his eye, hearing them talk about it on stage, but I'm still taken by, by the, by the sheer massive opportunity for RPA in, in a particular to solve some really amazing things. Now on a mass scale, a company can drive, you know, 10, 15, 20% productivity by every employee having a robot. Yes, that's true on a mass scale. They can completely transform their business, your transform customer experience, transform the workplace on a mass scale. >>And that, that is, that's a sea level GFC level goal and that's a big deal. But I love the stories that are very real. Um, and, and I think those are important to still do plug some great tech for good story. Look, tech gives, you know, the whole Facebook stuff and the fake news got beat up and it had Benny come out recently say, Hey, it's, it's not just about increasing the value to shareholders, you know, it's about tech for good and doing other things affecting lifestyle's life changing. And Michael Dell is another one. Now I've, I've, I've kind of said tongue in cheek, you know, show me the CEO misses is four quarters in a row and see if that holds up. But nonetheless, you love to see successful companies giving back. It seems to be, it's part of your, well look I've been part of hardware companies and I met you all through a few of them and others they have good noble causes but it was hard to really connect the dots. >>Yes there CPS underneath a number of these things. But I think judging by the emotional connection that these customers have on stage, right and these are the Walmarts and Uber's and others in the world judging by the employee and job satisfaction that they talk about the benefits there. I just, I my career, I have not seen that kind of real direct impact from you know, from B2B software for example on the lives of people both everyday at work but also just solving the solving, you know, help accelerate human achievement. Right. And so many amazing ways. We had the CEO of the U N I T shared services group on stage yesterday and they have a real challenge with, you know, with the growth of refugees worldwide and he would express them and they can't hit keep up. They don't have the funding, which is, you know, with everybody and, and Trump and others trying to hold back money. >>But they had this massive charter for of good, the only way they get there is through digital. The new CEO, the new head of the U N is a technology engineer. He came in and said, the way we solve this is with templates, with technology. And they decided, they said on stage yesterday that RPA and RPA has the path to AI and the greater, the greater new technologies and that's how they're going to do it. And it's just a, it's a really, it's, I think it's, it feels really great. You know, it's funny too, one of the things we've been talking about this week is people might be somewhat surprised that there's so much head room left for automation because the boy, 50 years of tech, Kevin, we automated everything. That's the other, but, and Daniel put forth the premise last night, it actually, technology is created more process problems or inefficiencies. >>So it's almost like tech has created this new problem. Can tech get us out of the problem? Well, essentially you think about all the applications we use in our lives, right? Um, you know, although people do have, you know, a Salesforce stack and sometimes in this SAP, the reality is they have a mix of a bunch of systems and then we add Slack to it and we add other tools and we add all the tools alone, have some great value. But from a process perspective of how we work everyday, right? How a business user might work at a call center, they have to interact then. And the reality is they're often interacting with old systems too because moving them is not easy, right? So now you've got old systems, new systems and, and really the only way to do that is to put a layer on top of the systems of engagement and the systems of record, right? >>A layer on top that's easy to actually build an application that goes between all of these different, these different applications, outlook, Excel, legacy systems and salesforce.com and so on and so on and, and build an app that solves a real problem, have it have outcomes quickly. And this is why, Dave, we unveiled the vision here that we believe that automation is the application. And when you begin to think about I could solve a problem now without requiring a bunch of it engineers who already are maxed out, right? Uh, I can solve a problem that can directly impact the businesses or directly impact customers. And I can do that on top of these old technologies by just dragging and dropping and using a designer tool like studio or studio X in a business user can do that. That's, that's a game changer. I think what's amazing is when you go to talk to a CIO who says, I've been automating for 20 years, you know, take up the ROI. >>Once they realize this is different, the light bulb goes off. We call it the automation first mindset. A light bulb goes off and you realize, okay, this is a very different whole different way of creating value for, for an organization. I think about how people weigh the way that people work today. You're constantly context switching. You're in different systems. Like you said, Slack, you're getting texts and you want to be responsive. You want to be real time. I know Jeff Frick who was the GM of the cube has got two giant screens right on his desk. I myself, I always have 1520 tabs open if I go, Oh you got so many tabs on my, yeah. Cause I'm constantly context switching, pulling things out of email, going back and forth and so and so. I'm starting to grok this notion of the automation is the app. >>At first I thought, okay, it's the killer app, but it's not about stitching things together with through API APIs. It's really about bringing an automation perspective across the organization. We heard it from Pepsi yesterday. Yeah, right. Sort of the fabric, the automation fabric throughout the organization. Now that's aspirational for most companies today, but that really is the vision. Well, I think you had Layla from Coca-Cola also on, right. And her V their vision there and they actually took the CDO role of the CIO and put them together. And they're realizing now that that transformation is driven by this new way of thinking. Yeah, I think, you know, look, we introduced a whole set of new brand new products and capabilities around scaling around helping build these applications quicker. I, I think, you know, fast forward one year from now, the, you know, the vision we outlined will be very obvious the way people interact with, you know, via UI path to build applications, assault come, the speed to the operate will be transformational and, and so, you know, and you see this conference hear me walk around. >>I mean you saw last year in the year before you see the year before, but it's, it's a whole, the speed at which we're evolving here, I think it's unprecedented. And so I'll talk a little bit about the market for has Crigler killer was awesome this morning. He really knows his stuff now. Last year I saw some data from him and said the market by 2020 4 billion, and I said, no way. It's going to be much larger than that. Gonna be 10 billion by 2020 I did Dave Volante fork, Becca napkin by old IDC day forecast. Now what he, what he showed today is data. It actually was 10 billion by 2020 because he was including services, the services, which is what I was including in my number as well, but the of it, which was so good for him now, but the only thing is he had this kind of linear growth and that's not how these rocket ship Marcus grow. >>They're more like an old guy for an S curve. You're going to get some steep part now, so I'd love to see like a longer term forecast because that it feels like that's how this is going to evolve. Right now it's like you've seated the base and you can just feel the momentum building and then I would expect you're going to see massive steep sort of exponential growth. Steeper. There may be, you know, nonlinear because that's how these markets go >> to come from the expansion potential, right? And none of our customers are more than 1% audit automated from an RPA perspective. So that shows you the massive opportunity. But back to the market site, data size, Craig and I and the other analysts, we talk often about this. I think the Tam views are very low and you'll look at our market share, let's just get some real data out there, right? >>Our market share in 2017 was 5% let's use Craig's linear data for now. You know, our market share this year is over 20% our market share applying, and I don't want to give the exact numbers as you don't provide guidance anymore, is substantially we're substantially gaining share now. I believe that's the reality of the market. I think because we know blue prisms numbers, we go four times faster than the every quarter automation. The world won't share their numbers. But you know, I can make some guesses, but either way I think, you know, I think we're gaining share on them significantly. I think, you know, Craig's not gonna want us to be 50% of the market two years, he's just not. And so he's going to have to figure out how to identify how to think. That brought more broadly about, about that market trend. He talked about it on stage today about how does he calculate the AI impact and the other pieces now the process mining now that now that we are integrating process mining into RPA, right? >>It's strategic component of that. How does that also involve the market? So I think you have both the expansion and the plot product portfolio, which drives it. And then you have the fact that customers are going to add more automations at faster pace and more robots and that's where the expansion really kicks in. And we often say, you know, look as a, as a, as a, as a company that, you know, one day we'll be public company, our ARR numbers. Very important. We do openly transparently share that. But you know, the other big metric will be, you know, dollar based net expansion rate that shows really how customers are expanding. I think that, I know it, our numbers, we haven't shared it yet. I know all the SAS companies, the top 10 I can tell you, you know we're higher than all of them. >>The market projections are low. And I think he knows it well. >> Speaking of Tam, and when we, I saw this with, with service now, now service now the core was it right? So the, the ROI was not as obvious with, with, with you guys, you're touching business process. And so, so in David Flory are way, way back, did an analysis of service and now he said, wow, the Tam is way being way under counted by everybody. That wall street analyst Gardner, it feels like the same here because there are so many adjacencies and just talk to the customers and you're seeing that the Tam could be enormous, much bigger than the whatever 16 billion a Daniel show, the other Danielson tangles, the guy's balls. He said, Oh that's 16 billion. That's you. I pass this data. And you know, we laugh, but I'm, I'm like listening. Say I wonder if he's serious cause this guy thinks big. >>I mean, who would've thought that he'd be at this point by now? And you're just getting started? Well, I think, you know, one thing I think is, you know, we're, we're, you know, we were a little bit kind of over a little less humble when we talked about things like valuation over the last few years. We were trying to show this market's real, you know, we want to now focus more on outcomes and things get a little less from around those numbers. And I think that shows the evolution of a company's maturity, um, that we, I think we're going through right now. Uh, you know, the outcomes of, you know, Walmart on stage saying, you know, their first robot that was, this was, this was two years ago, delivered 360,000 hours of capacity for them in, in, in, in, in HR, right? That, you know, I think those, that's where we're gonna be focused because the reality is if we can deliver these big outcomes and continue them and we can go company-wide deliver on the robot for every, every, every, every person, then you know, the numbers follow along with it. >>Well we saw some M and a this week as well, which again leads me to the larger Tam cause we had PD on, um, with Rudy and you can start to see how, okay now we're going to actually move into that vision that the guy from PepsiCo laid out this, this fabric of this automation fabric across the organization. So M and a is, is a part of that as well. That starts to open up new Tam. Opportunity does. And I think, you know, a process mind is a great example of a market that is pretty well known in Europe, not so much in the U S um, and there are really only a few players in that, in that market today. Look, we're going to do what we did in RPA. We're going to do the same thing. You're process mining. We're going to just say anything we're doing in it, not as democratization, you'll our strategy will be to go mass market with these technologies, make it very easy for accessibility for every single person in the case of process mining, every business analyst to be able to mind their processes for them and, and ultimately that flows through to drive faster implementations and then faster, faster outcomes. >>I think our approach, again, our approach to the business users, our approach to democratization, um, you know it's very different than our competitors. A lot of these low code companies, I won't name a number cause I don't remember our partners here at our conference. They're IT-focused their services heavy and, and you know, their growth rates I'll be at okay are 30% year over year in this market. That shouldn't be the case at all. I mean we're a 200 plus a year. We are still and we've got big numbers and we have a whole different approach to the market. I don't think people have figured it out yet, Dave. Exactly, exactly. The strategy behind which is, which is when you have business users, subject matter experts and citizen developers that can access our technology and build automations quickly and deliver value proof for their company. And you do that in mass scale. >>Right. And then you will now allow with our apps for your end users, I get a call center to engage with a robot as part of their daily operation that none of the other it vendors who are all kind of conventional thinking and that's not, our models are very different, which I think shows in our numbers and and, and the growth rates. Yeah. Well you bet on simplicity early on. In fact, when you join you iPad, you challenged me so you have some of your Wiki bond analysts go out. I remember head download our stuff and then try to download the competitors and they'll tell us, you know how easy it as well we were able to download UI path. We, we built some simple automations. We couldn't get ahold of the other other, other companies products we tried. We were told we'll go to the reseller or how much did you have to spend and okay so you bet on simplicity, which was interesting because Daniel last night kind of admitted, look, he tracked the audience. >>He said thank you for taking a chance on us because frankly a couple of years ago this wasn't fully baked right and and so, so I want to talk about last, the last topic is sort of one of the things Craig talked about was consolidation and I've been saying that all week and said this, this market is going to consolidate. You guys are a leader now you've got to get escape velocity cause the leader makes a lot of money and becomes, gets big. The number two does. Okay, number three man, everybody else and the big guys are starting to jump in as well. You saw SAP, you know, makes an announcement and you guys are specialists and so your thoughts on hitting escape velocity, I wouldn't say you're quite there yet. I want to see more on the ecosystem. There's maybe, who knows, maybe there's an IPO coming. I've predicted that there is, but your thoughts on achieving escape velocity and some of the metrics around there, whether it's customer adoption penetration, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, I mean we definitely don't have a timetable on an IPO, but we have investors, public investors and VCs that at some point are going to want, this is the reality of how, of how it works. Right. Um, you know, I think the, uh, you know, I think the numbers to focus right now are on around, you know, customer outcomes. I think the ecosystem is a good one. Right? You know, we have, I'd say the biggest ecosystem for us to date has been the SAP ecosystem. When we look at our advisory board members, for others, that's really where, where the action is. Supply chain management, ERP, you know, certainly CRM and others, we don't have a view that, so our competitors have, but we have chosen not to take money from our, from ecosystem companies because we don't, our customers here are building processes, all the automation across ecosystems. >>Right? So you know, we don't want to go bet on say just one like Salesforce or Workday. We want to help them across all the ecosystem now. So I think it's a little bit of a different strategy there. Look, I think the interesting thing is the SAP is the world. They bought a small company in France called contexture. They're trying to do this themselves. Microsoft, Microsoft didn't in Mark Benioff and Salesforce are asked on every earnings call now what are you doing for RPA? So they've got pressure. So maybe they invest in one of our competitors or maybe they, you'll take flow in Microsoft and expanded. I think we can't move fast enough because you know, I don't know if Microsoft has, I mean they're a great sponsor by the way. So I don't want to only be careful we swept with what I say. But you know, strategically speaking, these larger companies operate in 18 months, 12 1824 months kind of planning cycles. >>If he did that, he will never keep up with us. There's no one at any of our traditional large enterprise software companies that ever would have bet that we would come out and say that the best way to build applications right to solve problems will be through RPA. Either there'll be a layer on top of all their technologies that makes it easier than ever for business users to build applications and solve problems, that's going to scare them to death. Why? Because you don't have to move all your legacy systems anymore. Yes, you've got tons of databases, but guess what? Don't worry about it. Leave him alone. Stop spending money on ridiculous upgrades right now. Just build a new layer and I'm telling you I there. As they figured this out, they're going to keep looking back and say, Oh my God, why didn't we know? >>Why did we know there's it looked I hopefully we could all partner. We're going to try to go down that route, but there's something much bigger going on here and they haven't figured it out. Well, the SAP data is very interesting to me that I'm starting to connect the dots. I just did a piece on my breaking analysis and SAP, they thank you. They, they've acquired 31 companies over the last nine years, right? And they've not bit the bullet on integration the way Oracle had to with fusion. Right? And so as a result, there's this, they say throw everything into HANA. It's a memory that's not going to work from an integration standpoint, right? Automation is actually a way to connect, you know, the glue across all those disparate systems, right? And so that makes a lot of sense that you're having success inside SAP and there's no reason that can't continue. >>Why there's, you know, there's a number of major kind of trends we've outlined here. One of, uh, we call human in the loop. And you know, today, you know, when each, when an unattended robot could actually stop a process and instead of sending the exception to a, an it person who monitoring, say, orchestrator actually go to an inbox, a task and box of that business user in a call center or wherever, and that robot can go do something else because it's so, so efficient and productive. But once that human has to solve that problem, right, that robot or a robot will take that back on and keep going. This human and robot interaction, it doesn't exist today and we know we're rolling that out in our UI path apps. I think you know that that's kind of mind blowing and then when you add a, I can't go too far into our roadmap and strategy or when you added the app programming layer and you add data science, that's a little bit of a hint into where we're going because we're open and transparent. >>Our data science connection, it's, it's this platform here, this kind of, I'd like to still call it all RPA. I think that that's a good thing, but the reality is this platform does Tam. What it can do is nothing like it was a year ago and it won't be like where it is today. A year from now you've got the tiger by the tail, Bobby, you got work to do, but congratulations on all the success. It's really been great to be able to document this and cover it, so thanks for coming on the cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching the cube live from UI path forward three from Bellagio in Vegas right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPath Forward Americas, 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We're joined by Cathy Tornbohm, she is the distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Very welcome, nice to be here. >> And Guy Kirkwood, he is the Chief Evangelist at UiPath. Thank you so much. >> Thanks Rebecca. >> So, we're hearing so much of these mantras, these catchphrases of UiPath. "automation first", "a robot for every person", "we're re-booting work", these are the theme's that Guy was touting up on the main stage, Cathy. Beyond that, I'd like to hear from you a little bit about what you're seeing in the RPA space at the moment. What are the trends and the themes that you think are most salient? >> I think the most fascinating thing about RPA right now is that it's really highlighting the problems the organizations have. All their accidents of history are really being brought up by RPA. And then you've got these digital darlings that they're trying to compete with, the Greenfield site kind of people. And some of those don't have beautiful back offices, but let's not go there for a minute. So, it, RPA is an opportunity for companies to link their digital dreams with their existing legacy nightmares. >> And those legacy nightmares include all of the things that Guy was talking about today: the drudgery, the dreariness, those mundane tasks that take up so much of our time. >> Absolutely, and really, if you think about it, in organizations, typically less than 15% of the applications that they're using have got some sort of application programming interface. So if you don't have a way of linking them, you end up with this long turn of applications that aren't linked together, with people literally being swivel-chair integration between the applications. >> Well, why can't you just string a bunch of API's together and automate that way? >> Well, in fact, there's a guy called Ian Barkin who works for Symphony, one of their organizations, it was set up to create automations for organizations. So one of the services businesses since been acquired by Sykes. And he describes it as process sediment, and it builds up in businesses in the same way that sedimentary rock builds up over millions of years. And digging through that, so that you can actually become more efficient is very difficult to do. So doing it on API level means you got to join up all those things individually. Whereas, using RPA, if system 'A' has a user interface, and system 'B' has a user interface, you can just use RPA. >> So, Cathy, you've been following process automation as a category for a number of years. Why RPA, why is it so hot, and why now? We've heard that it's the number one software category... >> Cathy: Fastest growing, yeah. Fastest growing, from Gartner. We've seen spending data that confirms that. Why now? (sighing) >> It's the digital competition that companies are facing, and the recognition that they cannot continue to be quite as bad at some of the things that they are bad at. So it's really that business transformation story back again, business process re-engineering, the same story that we had with BPO like ten years ago, but now, with robots instead. >> Yeah, it's interesting, I was at a, we had a show last weekend, it was the CEO of Suze, Suze... How do ya say it? Anyway, Suze, she said to me, "Well, you know, digital transformation's really about business transformation." And you kind of said the same thing. I mean, thoughts on that? >> I mean, you look at the start of the outsourcing market, the BPA market, twenty years ago. The very first deals were actually IT outsourcing deals that then transformed the business using IT as the enabler. So the first deal that I got involved with ever, in the outsourcing market, was Perot Systems with a British and Asian company. And we were putting in business process re-engineering consultants who actually transformed the business using IT as the enabler for that. There is no difference now, in fact one of the, one of the partners here, one of our original customers, actually put together a plan where we did the implementation, you know, soup to nuts, so that we could find out how we fit in to that whole transformation piece. And our team put together a whole package on all the learnings that we got out of that. And I had to laugh, because they're exactly the same things that every transformation program has had for the last thirty years. >> You know, if you look at kind of the history of certain segments, and I wonder if, Cathy, if you see RPA as one of them, like if you could've figured out who was implementing ERP the best, you didn't know SAP was going to become the leader, but if you could've figured out who was adopting ERP, you could've made a lot of money in the stock market, 'cause those companies had a huge productivity boost. Kind of same thing with Big Data, nobody really made any money in Big Data, so-called 'Big Data', a dupe. But the guys who applied it probably did pretty well. Do you see RPA as similar where the practitioners are going to actually be the ones that add more value to the industry than the new, the newly minted billionaires? >> It's almost the opposite. So the more RPA a company needs, it means the worse they did at managing their ERP in the first place. >> So they're kind of a mess? >> Yeah, yes. That need to be cleaned up, yeah. >> Yes, if you've got a hundred and twenty four ERP's that don't talk to each other, and you want to close your books in any kind of reasonable time frame, you're going to be a massive adopter of RPA, which basically means the more rubbish you are and activity, the more opportunity there is to automate more of it. >> So, what are the metrics that matter when you talk to your clients? >> Well, what I try and encourage clients to do is to really focus on business outcomes. So, much as Guy probably doesn't want me to say this, I don't really care how many 'scripts', aka robots, you've built, or how many run times you've deployed. What I care about is the business impact that you've managed to achieve. So, whatever KPI's are important to you, so are you managing to collect more revenue? Are you managing to make your customers happier because you're managing to decrease average handle times? or increase right first time activities. So anything that you're doing that actually improves the good old business metrics, is just going to be fantastic. So those are the sort of metrics that, really, companies should be focusing on. Not how many scripts they've built, that's absolutely pointless. >> I mean, are they focusing on that? I mean, when you... >> Yeah, lots of people are. >> Yeah? >> Yeah. >> In terms of ROI, we hear from customers that it has had them more accurate, they're more efficient, they're cost saving on human hours of the mundane tasks. But, when you were up on the main stage talking about how we're rebooting work, we're changing this moment, is it sparking the creativity, the imagination, the time spent on strategy in the more higher-level things? Is that, I mean that seems like that's the goal of return on investment. >> It is, within those organizations that are the most mature. So, what we're seeing, is the bifurcation, really, of the market between those organizations that are just starting and scaling up what they can, internal senses of excellence. Those organizations that are using the partners behind us. Those organizations that are using external parties to help them develop that. So Delight, for instance, they are sort of a managed service business. And instead of using people, they're using automation. So, Delight, by accident, has a BPA business in Spain, but then they'll turn that into an automation-heavy business and then providing that managed service. And then, the smartest customers, including SNBC, who we heard from yesterday, are actually turning their back office cost operations into a front office of revenue generator. Now, that is radically different from what we've seen prior. >> So Cathy, I got to ask you, when I was on a plane out here, somebody texted me a picture of the latest hype cycle. And they said, they knew I was going to UiPath, they said, "RPA has entered the trough of disillusionment." I said, "Oh, awesome, Gartner's, Cathy's coming on, and I can ask her about that." Well, what's your take on that? >> I think as Guy says, some people have already sailed through the trough, they've already gone through the challenges, or some of the challenges, and they've already found these fantastic productive things. I mean, we're estimating that people will save close to a million dollars for a large company, and just not having to do re-work of getting it wrong first time with re-keying that data. So, where there's some fantastic savings available, that you know, some of the ones have gone through the trough and done that, a lot of the other ones, they kind of, they don't understand the limitations of RPA and all those other partner tools that they need to put with it. So, don't understand it, can't handle unstructured data by itself. It needs a sister tool, so, what Gartner's talking about right now is this concept of hyper automation where you look across all the different activities that you would need to, sort of replace a person. So the people that are heading into the trough as sort of this second wave of adopters that Guy talked about, that will really struggle because they didn't understand the limitations in the first place. >> Well then, you know the, sometimes, things like the Magic Quadrant, and the trough of disillusionment, they're somewhat misunderstood sometimes, people, you know they see 'em, Gartner's very clever with the way it works things, but, so how should we think about that hype cycle? It's actually, in a way it's progress, isn't it? For an industry where they start... Entering that trough. >> Its, what Gartner says, is all industries have to go through that type of growing pains. And I think that we're seeing that, UiPath's expanded massively, and that's always a challenge for companies as they grow very rapidly. And as companies try and, as they say, take these wrong metrics. So I think things like UiPath buying ProcessGold is fantastic, it's a really, really good move for them. And I expect to see a lot of other process mining companies acquired, brought in to the RPA fold, because, there's four reasons why companies are going to go into this disillusionment, right? These are the main challenges with companies trying to use RPA properly. One is, they don't know what the processes are. So ProcessGold will give you a really good indication, they don't know about the microscopic level, and they don't know about the macro level. So things like digital twins will be something else that we would expect to see very closely partnered with companies like UiPath. And they don't know how to orchestrate their resources. So, other companies, like Innate, that can help you figure out how to do that will become... So its kind of like we're sort of breaking down a lot of what happened in other software categories and re-building them all up, in the way that the business can actually adopt them, hence, the AI Fabric sort of idea. So they don't know the processes, politics, people will lie to you about what they do all day, so they can sabotage your process, and there's a lot of silos within organizations that hate each other and throw things over the wall. So that all needs streamlining, and the more you can do across silos, the more successful any automation project would be. Then you've got, when you take a person out of a process, you take their eyes, their ears, the mouth, the nose. How are you going to replace that when you're trying to take them out, because you've got the keyboard fingers thing with the RPA tool? You need all these other activities replaced, replicated, supported. And then you've got the economics of production, so actually making sure that the scripts that you've built are actually worthwhile and are going to be cost-effective. It's something that we're studying at the moment. So you've got all these, all these different barriers, from all these different angles that are really going to push this thing into the trough for a little bit. And that's why it's great that RPA companies are looking at ways to mitigate that for their customers. >> Now, remember we said, as the understandings. So RPA is really good at dealing with structured data. Rule-spaced activities, deterministic things. That's why in regulatory, highly regulated environments, it's very effective, and the regulators love this sort of stuff. Because it's deterministic. When you look at AI, then we look at it in four ways. So you've got process understanding, which is the ProcessGold acquisition, you look at conversational understanding, 'cause ultimately robots are going to be controlled by voice. So you have to understand, the system has to understand that, let's say you're sitting in a bank, and the robot doesn't understand something, you say, "Okay, robot, stick that in the Well's account." It has to understand that Well's, in this case, means Well's Fargo. It does not mean a hole in the ground, water at the bottom, or a town in Somerset, in the UK, 'cause they're well's. So getting those ontologies correct is so important. So, that's conversational understanding. Document understanding. Because, as Cathy said, companies are still wading around in paper. So, understanding what those different documents are and how to action them is going to be really important. And finally, you're looking at visual understanding. So understanding and viewing things on the screen exactly the same way that humans do. So it's getting that combination right. >> So for RPA to live up to the hype, and there's a lot of hype, and it's a good thing, it's fun to track. It's got to go presumably beyond cleaning up the crime scene, if you will, to this new vision that you and Guy just laid out. What is the distance between, I dunno, sometimes I say 'paving the cow path', which gives you a nice hit, but as you say, it's 'cause companies... Ya know, they're messed up, to this vision of this, actually the guy from Pepsi today talked about it, this fabric of automation across the organization. How big of a gap is that? >> It's very different by every different company on the planet, really, in terms of their accidents of history, what their IT application landscape looks like, and what their business landscape looks like. And when you try and put the two things together, that's where you find the opportunities for any type of automation. >> Well come on, that's such an 'it depends' answer. (laughing) At the macro, will... In your expert opinion, will RPA live up to the hype? So many trends haven't, enterprise data warehousing, Big Data, Doob, all that stuff. You think RPA has the potential to crack through that. >> You mentioned a very good point. I think the most successful companies are the ones that actually will take the person that's managing the data and analytics of how their process is performing, and doing that with their automation strategy. And there are very few companies that've actually worked that out. They've still got totally two walls and they just meet up here at the CEO. So, unless companies actually take a more active business outcomes approach, and look at their end-to-end processes of order to cash and source to pay, these problems will carry on for some time. >> Well that's a great point, I mean, so it's data, it's machine intelligence, I guess Cloud for scale, you guys made a SAS announcement today, it's "automation first", to use your buzz word. >> Cathy: You need it all to come together. >> And it's really developing those best practices in your role as Chief Evangelist in helping understand what the most successful companies do, and then making sure that's implemented. >> Well that's why I spend more of my time listening than I do talking. Because the very nature of being a Chief Evangelist is the best job and the worst job title in the world. It's the best job because I spend my entire time talking to people like Cathy who know about what's happening within the market, and then feeding it back into our organization so we can make the right bets, so we can make the right acquisitions, but develop the right things. The bad thing about the job, is that I keep getting an inordinate number of people on LinkedIn saying, "So pleased that Jesus has entered your life." And I'm not that type of evangelist. (laughing) >> It's in the title. >> You know there's always this age-old debate in the industry of best of breed versus kind of a sweet approach. You see in SAP, for instance, acquired an RPA company, In Four talks about it. And then you get the specialist, UiPath. How do you see that shaking out, as the industry gets kind of more consolidated, how do you see a company like UiPath thriving, continuing to thrive? >> Gartner's going to predict coming in our new prediction series, but... Roughly 20 to 30% of enterprise adoption of AI, machine learning activities for process-based activities, will go through the RPA market. So, and with the IBPMS market, sort of combined together, that process management, because RPA has managed, cleverly, to capture the imagination of the business person. So, actually, there's a lot of IT departments that are talking to us about, how do we, how do we enshrine this activity, foreshadow IT, that's happening in the business, and make it successful, put governance plans in place so it will actually be successful in the way that it's actually now dealing with its own crime scene... (laughing) (mumbling) Its own rubbish, in a much better way. And I think that responsibility of business to understand how it can automate things and how it can manage things will really help a lot. So, I think the RPA players are well-placed to either be acquired into that bigger set of the established, large... Software providers, all to kind of keep blazing a trail for independence of the business. I'm not so sure about this idea that everybody should be programming their own scripts, I think that's a challenge. And I think the new interfaces will help mitigate some of the problems that we've seen with that approach, that hasn't been, haven't been very well done historically, so that's another area that will probably be a bit trough of disillusionment, but, actually, well-managed RPA projects have actually got a really good chance of delivering back very interesting benefits for businesses. >> Yeah, as a discreet innovation category, it does kind of feel that way, and often times, those markets are winner take most, the winner makes a ton of dough, number two makes a little bit of money, number three kind of breaks even, and everybody else gets consolidated or goes out of business, so, you guys go big or go home. That's kind of... Your posture. >> Tomorrow morning I'm doing, I'm doing my predictions for next year, and one of them is that the challenger RPA vendors, and indeed the service organizations that are small, are going to continue to consolidate and get acquired next year. So that's the 2020 prediction for us. >> Great. Well, Guy and Cathy, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great conversation. >> Oh, good, thank you. >> Thank you very much, indeed. Thanks Rebecca. >> Dave: Thanks you guys. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, stay tuned for more of theCUBES live coverage of UiPath. (techno music)

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