>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin of the cube here, HPE and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment. And I'm here with four guests. Please. Welcome Charlie Mulrooney global presales engineering manager at Athi John saws also of Shi joins this global pre-sales technical consultant. And back with me are Terry Richardson, north American channel chief and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Welcome gang. Great to have you all here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thanks. You good to be here? >>All right, Charlie, let's go ahead and start with you. Keeping the earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses, right? Everywhere. Globally. Can you talk Charlie about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable? It? >>Sure. So starting about a year and a half, two years ago, we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports, their chairman's letters, their sec filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral or carbon zero goals starting with 2050 dates. And then since then we've seen 20, 40, and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and RFPs, RFIs that we're fielding. Certainly all now contain elements of that. So this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers, our fortune two 50 and fortune 500 customers. For sure. We're, we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this. We get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand, you know, here's what we have today. What can we do better? What can we do different to help make an impact on those goals? >>So making an impact top of mind, pretty much for everyone, as you mentioned, John SAS, let's bring you into the conversation. Now, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the things that you talk about with respect tohis approach to sustainability, sustainable it, are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space? >>Well, so Charlie touched on something really important that, you know, the, the wake up moment for us was receiving, you know, proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability. And it was really around two years ago, I suppose, for the first time. And those requests started coming from European based companies, cuz they had a bit of a head start over the us based global companies even. And what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to use renewable energy for data centers utilize the, they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance cost and other factors that you typically have at the top. So as we started working with them, I guess at beginning it was more tactical cuz we really had to find a way to respond. >>We were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability, we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second headquarters in Austin, Texas, those are lead gold certified. We've been installing solar panels, reducing waste across the company, recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles, all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in, in, in our offices and in our headquarters. But it's a lot more than that. And what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of, of customers and partners. We have over 30,000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers. And we wanted to find best practices and technologies and services that we could talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a, as a really large global reseller and integrator. We can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple partners that we work with to help solve customer problems. And so over time it's become more strategic and we've been as a company building the, the, the, the, the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that, and then also reporting for CDP Ecova and so forth. And it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years. And we take it very seriously. >>It sounds like, and it also sounds like from the customer's perspective, they're shifting from that tactical, maybe early initial approach to being more strategic, to really enabling sustainable it across their organization. And I imagine from a business driver's perspective, John saws and Charlie, are you hearing customers? You talked about it being part of RFPs, but also where are customers in terms of, we need to have a sustainable it strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers. Charlie, John, what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, that's top of mind with, with all the folks that we're talking to, I would say there's probably a three way tie for the importance of attracting and retaining investors. As you said, plus customers, customers are shopping, their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities and sustainable priorities with their own and who is gonna help them with their own reporting of, you know, scope two and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining talent. It's another element now of when you're bringing on new talent to your organization, they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align. So we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with, with the customers we're talking to. And it was a little surprising, cuz it, we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors, but it really has become quite a bit more than that. And it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization >>More comprehensive across the organization. Let's bring Dr. John Fry into the conversation and Terry your next. So stay tuned. Dr. Fry, can you talk about HPE and S H I partnering together? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them. No one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our collective customers the same way. From an HPE perspective, we bring the expertise on our products. We bring in sustainable it point of view, where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies implement a sustainable it program. But our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers. And in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table. So they extend the reach, they bring their own expertise. Their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just enterprise products. So by working together, we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs, give them the right technology solutions and enhance that customer experience because they get more value from us collectively. >>It really is better together, which is in a very appropriate name for our segment here. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about AMD. How is it helping customers to create that sustainable it strategy? And what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that, that are able to be delivered through partners like Shi? >>Well, Lisa, you used the word enabling just a short while ago. And fundamentally AMD enables HPE and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers. So in the data center space, we began our journey in 2017 with some fundamental design elements for our processor technology that were really keenly focused on improving performance, but also efficiency. So now the, the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about is really that measure of performance per wat. And you'll continue to see AMD enabled customers to, to try to find ways to, to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing, whether it's availability of power data center space, or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals. So we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to HPE and two Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers. >>Sounds like to me, Terry, that it's, that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler, but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability. >>You you're right about that. And, and we actually have tools, greenhouse gas, TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the, the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals. So we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like HPE and Shi >>Better together. As we said at the beginning in just a minute ago, Charlie, let's bring you back in, talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable it and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives. >>So for quite a while, we've had some offerings to help customers, especially in the end user compute side. A lot of customers were interested in, I've got assets for, you know, let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and, you know, those need to be refreshed. What do I do with those? How do I responsibly retire or recycle those? And we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time. It's within the last year or two, when we started offering for them guarantees and assurances assurances of how they can, if that equipment is reusable by somebody else, how can we issue them? You know, credits for carbon credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else. So it's not necessarily going to be e-waste, it's something that can be recycled and reused. We have other programs with helping extend the life of, of some systems where they look at well, I have a awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the, the, the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically. We can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment. So we've been able to come up with some creative solutions specifically around end user compute in the past, but we are looking to new ways now to really help extend that into data center infrastructure and beyond to really help with what are the needs, what are the, the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them. >>That's a great point that you bring up. Charlie and security kind of popped into my head here, John Saul's question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about, or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling, where are you having those customer conversations? Cause I know sustainability is a board level, it's a C level discussion, but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization? >>Well, so it's a, it's a combination of organizations within the customer. These are these global organizations. Typically when we're talking about asset life cycle management, asset recovery, how do you do that in a sustainable green way and securely the customers we're dealing with? I mean, security is top sustainability is right up there too. O obviously, but Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are global rollouts, tens of thousands of employees typically to, to have mobile devices, laptops, and phones, and so forth. And they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to, to the employees. And how do you do that in a sustainably? You need to think about that. Does it all go to a central location or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way? >>And I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that, well for, for example, one European pharmaceutical that states in their reports that they're already in scope one in scope two they're fully net zero at this point. And, and they say, but that only solves 3% of our overall sustainability goals. 97% is scope three, it's travel, it's shipping. It's, it's, it's all the, the, all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times, but they're coming to us now as a, as a supplier and as, and, and we're filling out, you know, forms and RFPs and so forth to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal >>Sustain sustainable supply chain. Absolutely. Yes. Dr. John Fry and Terry, I want to kind of get your perspectives. Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective, customers coming through RFP saying, Hey, we've gotta work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway, HPE and AMD hearing the same thing Dr. Fry will start with you. And then Terry >>Sure, absolutely. We receive about 2,500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year. And that's come up from a few hundred. So yeah, absolutely accelerating. Then the conversations turn deeper. Can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption? Then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can HPE offer net zero or carbon neutral technology solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those solutions in their own carbon footprint. So the questions are getting more sophisticated, the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing. And as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions, I think this trend is just gonna continue up. >>Yeah. And we see the same thing. We get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals. But the surveying that survey work that we've done with customers has led us to, you know, understand that, you know, approximately 75% of customers are gonna make sustainability goals, a key component of their RFIs in 2023, which is right around the corner. And, and, you know, 60% of those same customers really expect to have business level KPIs in the new year that are really related to sustainability. So this is not just a, a kind of a buzzword topic. This is, this is kind of business imperatives that, you know, the company, the companies like HPE and AMD and the partners like I, that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really gonna be ahead of the game. >>That's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't, we're not talking about a buzzword here. We're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all industries and Dr. Far, you mentioned regulations. And something that we just noticed is that the S E C recently said, it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions. If they were, if that were to, to come into play, I'm gonna pun back to Charlie and John saws. How would Shi and, and frankly at HPE and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of regulation were to be implemented. Charlie. >>Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that, with the reporting, we know reporting is a challenge. The scope two reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was gonna be a ways out now, all of a sudden, Hey, if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three targets, then you have to report on them. So that, that has become really important very quickly as word about this requirement is rumbling around there's concern. So we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose, but stay tuned, cuz we have something coming. That's interesting. >>Definitely PED my, my ears are, are, are perk here. Charlie, we'll stay tuned for that. Dr. Fry. Terry, can you talk about together with Shi HPE and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the da data obviously, which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it. We talked a little bit about security, but how are from a better together perspective, Dr. Fry will start with you, how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it? And at these days what it's real time requirements. >>Yeah. It's, it's an increasing challenge. In fact, we have changed the H HP story the way we talk about H HP's value proposition to talk about data first modernization. So how often do you collect data? Where do you store it? How do you avoid moving it? How do you make sure if you're going to collect data, you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value. And then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable it, because when I talk to technology executives, what they tell me again, and again, is there's this presumption within their user community, that storage is free. And so when, when they have needs for collecting data, for example, if, if once an hour would do okay, but the system would collect it once a minute, the default, the user asks for of course, once a minute. And then are you getting insights from that data? Or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge, because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network. There's huge power and carbon implications of doing that. So it's really making a better decision about what do we collect, why do we collect it, what we're gonna do with it when we collect and how we store it. >>And, and for years, customers have really talked about, you know, modernization and the need to modernize their data center. You know, I, I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that catalyst to really drive true modernization. And as they think forward, you know, when we work with, with HPE, you know, they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in, you know, specific customer workloads from the largest, super computers down to kind of general purpose servers. And when we work with partners like Shi, not only can they deliver the full suite of offerings for on premise deployments, they're also very well positioned to leverage the public cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there. And, and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end to end sustainability goal. >>That's a great point that, that it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be an end to end goal. We're just about out of time, but I wanted to give John saws the last word here, take us out, John, what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest, but what are some of the things that you are excited about as HPE AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives? >>Sure. Couple comments here. So Charlie, yeah, you touched on some upcoming capabilities that Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management. See, this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way. This is a train coming at everybody very quickly and they're not ready. Most customers aren't ready. And if we can help as, as a reseller integrator assessments, to be able to understand what they're currently running compare to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state, that seems valuable if we can help in that way. That's, those are things that we're looking into specifically, you know, greenhouse gas, emissions, relevant assessments, and, and, and within the comments of, of, of Terry and, and John around the, the power per wat and the vast portfolio of, of technologies that they, that they had to address various workloads is, is fantastic. >>We'd be able to help point to technologies like that and move customers in that direction. I think as a, as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers, I saw an article on BBC this morning that I, I, I think if, if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems. The BBC article mentioned this was Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, and they have a big project called merge. And today was a go live date. And BBC us news outlets have been reporting on it. They basically changed the model from a model called power of work, which takes a, a lot of compute and graphic, GPU power and so forth around the world. And it's now called power of stake, which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct. >>They have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency. And if they're wrong, it's taken from them. This new model reduces the emissions of their environment by 99 plus percent. The June emissions from Ethereum were, it was 120 telos per, per year, a Terra terat hours per year. And they reduced it actually, that's the equivalent of what the net Netherlands needed for energy, so comparable to a medium sized country. So if you can think differently about how to solve problems, it may be on-prem, it may be GreenLake. It may be, it may be the public cloud in some cases or other, you know, interesting, innovative technologies that, that AMD HPE, other partners that we can bring in along, along with them as well, we can solve problems differently. There is a lot going on >>The opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting. We thank you so much for talking together about how HPE AMD and SSHA are really working in partnership in synergy to help your customers across every organization, really become much more focused, much more collaborative about sustainable it. Guys. We so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My >>Pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

foreign [Music] Lisa Martin of the cube here hpe and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment and I'm here with four guests please welcome Charlie mulrooney Global pre-sales engineering manager at SHI John saw is also of shi joins us Global pre-sales Technical consultant and back with me are Terry Richardson North American Channel Chief and Dr John Fry Chief technologist of sustainable transformation at hpe welcome gang great to have you here all here Thank you Lisa thank you good to be here all right Charlie let's go ahead and start with you keeping the Earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses right everywhere globally can you talk truly about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable I.T sure so starting about a year and a half two years ago we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest Enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports their Chairman's letters their SEC filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral uh or carbon zero goals starting with 20 50 dates and then since then we've seen 20 40 and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and rfps rfis that we're Fielding certainly all now contain elements of that so this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers our Fortune 250 and Fortune 500 customers for sure where we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this we get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand you know here's what we have today what can we do better what can we do different to help make it an impact on those goals so making an impact top of Mind pretty much for everyone as you mentioned John Sal's let's bring you into the conversation now when you're in customer conversations what are some of the things that you talk about with respect to shi's approach to sustainability sustainable I.T are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space well so Charlie touched on something really important that you know the the wake-up moment for us was receiving you know proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability and it was really around two years ago I suppose for the first time and those requests started coming from european-based companies because they had a bit of a head start uh over the U.S based global companies even um and what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to uh use renewable energy for data centers uh utilized they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance costs and other factors that you typically had at the top so as we started working with them uh I guess that beginning was more tactical because we really had to find a way to respond uh we were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second Headquarters in Austin Texas um those are the gold certified we've been installing solar panels producing waste across the company recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in in uh in our offices and in our headquarters um but it's a lot more than that and what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of supply of customers and partners we have over 30 000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers and we wanted to find best practices and Technologies and services that we could uh talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a as a really large Global uh reseller and integrator we can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple uh partners that we work with to help solve customer problems and so over time it's become more strategic and we've been uh as a company building the uh the the the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that um and then also reporting for CDP echovatus and so forth and it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years and we take it very seriously it sounds like it also sounds like from the customer's perspective they're shifting from that tactical maybe early initial approach to being more strategic to really enabling sustainable I.T across their organization and I imagine from a business driver's perspective John saws and Charlie are you hearing customers you talked about it being part of rfps but also where are customers in terms of we need to have a sustainable I.T strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers Charlie John what are your thoughts on that yeah that's top of mind with uh with all the folks that we're talking to uh I would say there's probably a three-way tie for the importance of uh attracting and retaining investors as you said plus customers customers are shopping their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities in sustainable priorities uh with their own and who is going to help them with their own reporting of you know spoke to and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining Talent uh it's another element now of when you're bringing on a new talent to your organization they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align so we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with with the customers we're talking to it was a little surprising because we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors but it really has become quite a bit more than that and it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization more comprehensive across the organization let's bring Dr John Fry into the conversation and Terry your neck so stay tuned Dr Frey can you talk about hpe and Shia partnering together what are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned yeah it's a great question and one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them no one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our Collective customers the same way from an hpe perspective we bring the expertise on our products we bring in a sustainable I.T point of view where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies Implement a sustainable I.T program but our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers and in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table so they extend the reach they bring their own expertise their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just Enterprise Products so by working together we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs give them the right Technology Solutions and enhance that customer experience it's because they get more value from us collectively it really is better together which is a very appropriate name for our segment here Terry let's bring you into the conversation talk to us about AMD how is it helping customers to create that sustainable I.T strategy and what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that that are able to be delivered through Partners like Shi well Lisa you use the word enabling um just a short while ago and fundamentally AMD enables hpe and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers so in the data center space We Begin our journey in 2017 with some fundamental Design Elements for our processor technology that we're really keenly focused on improving performance but also efficiency so now the the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about was really that measure of performance per watt and you'll continue to see AMD enable um customers to to try to find ways to to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing whether it's availability of power data center space or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals so we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to hpe and to Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers sounds like to me Terry that it's that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability you're right about that and and we actually have tools greenhouse gas TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals so we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like hpe and Shi Better Together as we've said at the beginning and just a minute ago Charlie let's bring you back in talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable I.T and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives so for quite a while we've had uh some offerings to help customers especially in the end user compute side a lot of customers were interested in I've got assets for you know let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and you know those need to be refreshed what do I do with those how do I responsibly retire or recycle those and we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time it's within the last year or two when we started offering for them guarantees and Assurance assurances of how they can if that equipment is reusable by somebody else how can we issue them you know credits for uh carving credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else so it's not necessarily going to be E-Waste it's uh something that can be recycled and reused we have other programs with helping extend the life of of some systems where they look at boy I have an awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically we can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment so we've been able to accomplish some Creative Solutions specifically around end user compute in the past but we are looking to new ways now to to really help extend that into Data Center infrastructure and Beyond to really help with what are the needs what are the the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them [Music] that's a great point that you bring up Charlie and the security kind of popped into my head here John saw his question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling where are you having those customer conversations I know sustainability is a board level it's a c-level discussion but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization well so it's a it's a combination of um organizations within the customer these are these Global organizations typically when we're talking about asset like cycle management asset recovery how do you do that in a sustainable Green Way and securely the customers we're dealing with I mean security is top sustainability is right up there too obviously but uh um Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are Global rollouts tens of thousands of employees typically to to have mobile devices laptops and phones and so forth um and they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to to the employees and how do you do that in a sustainable way you need to think about that does it all go to a central location um or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that well for for example one European pharmaceutical that the states and their reports that they are already in scope one in scope two they're fully uh Net Zero at this point and and they say but that only solves three percent of our overall sustainability goals uh 97 is scope three it's travel it's shipping it's it's uh it's all the all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times but they're coming to us now as a as a supplier and ask and and we're filling out forms and rfps and so forth uh to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal so sustainable supply chain absolutely Dr John Fry and Terry I want to kind of get your perspectives Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective customers coming through RFP saying hey we've got to work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway hpe and AMD hearing the same thing Dr Fry will start with you and then Terry sure absolutely we receive about 2500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year and that's come up from a few hundred so yeah absolutely accelerating then the conversations turn deeper can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can hpe offer Net Zero or carbon neutral Technology Solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those Solutions in their own carbon footprint so the questions are getting more sophisticated the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing and as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions I think this trend is just going to continue up yeah and we see the same thing uh we get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals but the surveying that the survey work that we've done with customers has led us to you know understand that you know approximately 75 percent of customers are going to make sustainability goals a key component of their rfis in 2023 which is right around the corner and you know 60 of those same customers really expect to have business level kpis uh in the new year that are really related to sustainability so this is not just a a kind of a buzzword topic this is this is kind of business imperatives that you know the company the companies like hpe and AMD and the partners like Shi that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really going to be ahead of the game that's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't we're not talking about a buzzword here we're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all Industries and Dr Farr you mentioned regulations and something that we just noticed is that the SEC recently said it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions um if they were if that were to to come into play I'm going to come back to Charlie and John saws how would Shi and frankly at hpe and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of Regulation were to be implemented Charlie yeah so we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that with the reporting we know reporting is a challenge uh the scope 2 reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was going to be a ways out now all of a sudden hey if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three uh targets and you have to report on them so that that has become really important very quickly uh as word about this requirement is rumbling around uh there's concern so we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose but stay tuned because we have something coming that's interesting definitely peaked my ears are are parked here Charlie well stay tuned for that Dr Brian Terry can you talk about together with Shi hpe and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the data obviously which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it we talked a little bit about security but how are from a Better Together perspective Dr Fry will start with you how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it and these days what is real-time requirements yeah it's an increasing challenge in fact we have changed the HP Story the way we talk about hpe's value proposition to talk about data first modernization so how often do you collect data where do you store it how do you avoid moving it how do you make sure if you're going to collect data you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value and then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable I.T because when I talk to technology Executives what they tell me again and again is there's this presumption within their user community that storage is free and so when when they have needs for collecting data for example if if once an hour would do okay but the system would collect it once a minute the default the user asks for of course is once a minute and then are you getting insights from that data or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network there's huge power and carbon implications of doing that so it's really making a better decision about what do we collect why do we collect it what we're going to do with it when we collect and how we store it and for years customers have really talked about you know modernization and the need to modernize their data center you know I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that Catalyst to really Drive true modernization and as they think forward um you know when we work with with hpe you know they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in you know specific customer workloads from the larger supercomputers down to kind of general purpose servers and when we work with Partners like Shi not only can they deliver the full Suite of um offerings for on-premise deployments they're also very well positioned to leverage the public Cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end-to-end sustainability goal that's a great point that that it needs to be strategic but it also needs to be an end-to-end goal we're just about out of time but I wanted to give John saws the last word here take us out John what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest but what are some of the things that you're excited about as hpe AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives sure um a couple of comments here um so Charlie yeah you touched on some upcoming capabilities uh that uh Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management see this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way this is a train coming at everybody very quickly and um they're not ready most customers aren't ready and if we can help um as as a reseller integrator assessments to be able to understand what they're currently running compared to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state that seems valuable if we can help in that way that's those are things that we're looking into specifically uh you know greenhouse gas emissions relevant assessments and and um and what in the comments uh of Terry and John around the power per watt and um the vast um uh portfolio of technologies that they that they had to address various workloads is uh is fantastic we'd be able to help point to Technologies like that and move customers in that direction I think as a as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers I saw an article on BBC this morning that I I think if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems um the BBC article mentioned this was ethereum a cryptocurrency and they have a big project called merge and today was a go live date and BBC US news outlets have been reporting on it they basically changed the model from a model called The Power of work which takes a a lot of compute and graphic GPU power and so forth around the world and it's now called a power of stake which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct they have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency and if they're wrong it's taken from them this new model reduces the emissions of their um uh environment by 99 plus percent the June emissions from ethereum were it was 120 uh terawatts per per year terawatt hours per year and they reduced it um actually that's the equivalent of what the Netherlands needed for energy so the comparable to a medium-sized country so if you can think differently about how to solve problems it may be on-prem it may be extremely it may be that may be the public cloud in some cases or other you know interesting Innovative Technologies that the AMD hpe other partners that we can bring in along along with them as well we can solve problems differently there is a lot going on the opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting we thank you so much for talking together about how hpe AMD and sha are really working in partnership in Synergy to help your customers across every organization really become much more focused much more collaborative about sustainable I.T guys we so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights Thank you Lisa thank you my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin in a moment Dan Molina is going to join me he's the co-president and chief technology officer of nth generation you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music]

>> 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)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to events, we extract the signal from the noise. A lot of noise here but the signal's all around automation and robotic process automation. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman, my co-host. Guy Kirkwood's here he's the UiPath chief evangelist otherwise known as the chief injector of Kool-Aid. Welcome. (guests chuckling) And Craig LeClair, the Vice President at Forrester. Covers this market, wrote the seminal document on this space. Knows it inside out. Craig, great to see you again. >> Yeah, nice to see you again. It's great to be back at theCUBE. >> So let's start with the analyst perspective. Take us back to when you first discovered RPA, why you got excited about it, and what Forrester Research is all about in that space. >> Yeah, it's been a very a interesting ride. Most of these companies, at least that are the higher value ones in the category they've been around for a long time. They've been around for over a decade, and no one ever heard of them three years ago. So I had covered at Forrester, business process management and some of the business rules engines, and I've always been in process. I just got this sense that there was a way that companies could make progress and digital transformation and overcome the technical debt that they had. A lot of the progress has been tepid in digital transformation because it takes tremendous amount of time and tons of consultants to modernize that core system that really runs the company. So along comes this RPA technology that allows you to build human equivalence that patch up the inefficiencies without touching. I came in on American Airlines and the system that cut my ticket was designed in 1960. It's the same Sabre reservation system. That's the big obstacle that a lot of companies have been struggling to really take advantage of AI in general. A lot of the more moonshot and more sophisticated promises haven't been realized. RPA is a very practical form of automation that companies can get a handle on right now, and move the dial for digital transformation. >> So Guy we heard a vision set forth by Daniel this morning. Basically a chicken in every pot, I call it, a robot for every person. Now what Craig was just saying about essentially cutting the line on technical debt, do you have clear evidence of that in your customer base? Maybe you could give some examples. >> What we're really seeing is that as organizations have to deal with the stresses, what Leslie Wilcox professor at LSE describes as the stresses within organizations and particularly in environments where the demographics are changing. What we're seeing is that organizations have to automate. So the best example of that is in Japan where the Japanese population peaked in 2010. It's now falling as a whole, plus all the baby boomers, people of Craig's and my age are now retiring. So we're now in a position where they measure levels of dangerous overwork as being more that 106 hours a week. That isn't 106 hour a week in total, that's 106 hours a week in addition to the 60 hours a week the Japanese people normally work. And there is a word in Japanese, which is (speaking in foreign language), which means to work oneself to death. So there really is no choice. So what we're seeing happening in Japan will be replicated in Western Europe and certainly in the US over the next few years. So what's driving that is the rise of the ecosystems of technologies of which RPA and AI are part, and that's really what we're seeing within the market. >> Craig, sometimes these big waves particularly in infrastructure, you kind of saw it with virtualization and some other wonky techs, like data reduction. They could be a one-time step function, and not an ongoing business value creator. Where does RPA fit in there? How can organizations make sure that this is a continuous business value generator as opposed to a one time hit? >> Good question. >> Well, I like the concept of RPA as a platform that can lead to more intelligence and more integration with AI components. It allows companies to build an automation center or a center of excellence focused on automation. But the next thing they're going to do after building some simple robots that are doing repetitive tasks, is they're going to say "Oh well wouldn't it be better "if my employee could have a textual chat with a chatbot "that then was interacting with the digital worker "that I built with the bot." Or they're going to say "You know what? I really want to use that machine learning algorithm "for my underwriting process, but I can use these bots "to go out and collect all the data from the core systems "and elsewhere and from the web and feed the algorithms "so that I could make a better decision." So again it goes back to that backing off the moonshot approach that we've been talking about that AI has been taking because of the tremendous amount of money spent by the major players to lay out the promise of AI has really been a little dysfunctional in getting organizations' eye off the ball in terms of what could be done with slightly more intelligent automation. So RPA will be a flash in the pan unless it starts to embed these more learning-capable AI modules. But I think it has a very good chance of doing that particularly now with so much investment coming into the category right. >> Craig, it's really interesting. When I heard you describe that it reminds me of the home automation. The Cortanas and Alexas and consumer side where you're seeing this. You've got the consumer side where you can build skills yourself, you know teenagers people can do that. One of the challenges always on the business side is how do you get the momentum when you don't have the consumer side. How do those interact? >> It's the technical debt issue and it's just like the mobile peak in 2011. Consumers in their hands had much better mobility right away than businesses. It took businesses five, they're still not there in building a great mobile environment. So these Alexa in our kitchen snooping on our conversation and to some extent Netflix that observes our behavior. That's a light form of AI. There is a learning from that behavior that's updating an algorithm autonomously in Netflix to understand what you want to watch. There's no one with a spreadsheet back there right. So this has given us in a sense a false sense of progress with all of AI. The reality is business is just getting started. Business is nowhere with AI. RPA is an initial foray on that path. We're in Miami so I'll call it a gateway drug. >> In fact there's also an element that the Siris, the Cortanas, the Alexas, are very poor at understanding specific ontologies that are required for industry, and that's where the limitation is right now. We're working with an organization called Humly, they're focused on those ontologies for specific industries. So if the robot doesn't understand something, then you could say to the robot Okay sit that in the Wells account, if you're in a bank, and it understands that Wells in that case means Wells Fargo it doesn't mean a hole in the ground with water at the bottom or a town in Somerset in the UK, 'cause they're all wells. So it's getting that understanding correct. >> I wonder if you guys could comment on this. Stu and I were at Splunk earlier this week and they were talking up NLP and we were saying one of the problems is that NLP is sometimes not that great. And they made a comment that I thought was very interesting. They said frankly a lot of the stuff that we're ingesting is text and it's actually pretty good. I would imagine the same is true for RPA. Is that what you see? >> You were talking about that on stage. With regards to the text analytics. >> Yes. So RPA doesn't handle unstructured content the way that NLP does. So NLP can handle voice, it can handle text. For the bots to work in RPA today you have to have a layer of analytics that understands those documents, understands those emails and creates a nice clean file that the bots can then work with. But what's happening is the text analytics layer is slowly merging with the RPA bots platforms so it's going to be viewed as one solution. But it's more about categories of use cases that deal with forms and documents and emails rather than natural language, which is where it's at. >> So known business processes really is the starting point. >> Known business-- >> One example we've got live is an insurance company in South Africa called Hollard, and they've used a combination of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, plus IBM Watson and it's orchestrated doing NLP and orchestrated by UiPath. So that's dealing with utterly unstructured data. That's the 1.5 million emails that that organization gets in a year. They've managed to automate 98% of that, so it never sees a human. And their reduction in cost is 91% cost in reduction per transaction. And that's done by one of our implementation partners, a company called LarcAI down there. It's superb. >> Yeah, so text analytics is hard. Last several years we have that sentiment out of it, but if I understand it correctly Craig, you're saying if you apply it to a known process it actually could have outcomes that can save money. >> Yes, absolutely yes. >> As Guy was just saying. >> I think it's moving from that rules-based activity to more experience-based activity as more of these technologies become merged. >> Will the technology in your view advance to the point, because the known processes. okay, there's probably a lot of work to be done there, but today there's so many unknown processes. It's like this messy, unpredictable thing. Will machine intelligence combined with robotic process automation get to the point, and if so when, that we can actually be more flexible and adapt to some of these unknown processes or is that just decades off? >> No, no, I think we talk at Forrester about the concept of convergence. Meaning the convergence of the physical world and the digital world. So essentially digital's getting embedded in everything physical that we have right. Think of IoT applications and so forth. But essentially that data coming from those physical devices is unstructured data that the machine learning algorithms are going to make sense of, and make decisions about. So we're very close to seeing that in factory environments. We're seeing that in self-driving cars. The fleet managers that are now understanding where things are based on the signals coming from them. So there's a lot of opportunity that's right here on the horizon. >> Craig, a lot of the technologies you mentioned, we may have had a lot of the technical issues sorted out, but it's the people interactions some things like autonomous vehicles, there's government policies going to be one of the biggest inhibitors out there. When you look at the RPA space, what should workers how do they prepare for this? How do companies, make sure that they can embrace this and be better for it? >> That's a really tough and thoughtful question. The RPA category really attacks what we call the cubicle population. And there are we're estimating four million cubicles will be emptied out in five years by RPA technology specifically. That's how we built the market forecast 'cause each one of the digital workers replacing a cubicle worker will cost $11,000 or what. That's how we built up the market forecast. They're going to be automation deficits. It's not all going to be relocating people. We think that there's going to be a lot of disruption in the outsource community first. So companies are going to look at contractors. They're going to look at the BPO contract. Then they're going to look at their internal staff. Our numbers are pretty clear. We think they're going to be four million automation deficits in five years due to RPA technology specifically. Now there will be better jobs for those that are remaining. But I think it's a big change management issue. When you first talk about robots to employees you can tell them that their jobs are going to get better, they're going to be more human. They're going to have a much more exhilarating experience. And their response to you is, What they're thinking is, "Damn robot's going to take my job." That's what they're thinking. So you have to walk them up the mountain and really understand what their career path is and move them into this motion of adaptive and continual learning and what we call constructive ambition. Which is another whole subject. But there are employees that have a higher level of curiosity and are more willing to adapt to get on the other side of the digital divide. Yep. >> You mentioned the market. You guys did a market forecast. I've seen, read stats, a little over a billion today. I don't know if that's consistent with your numbers? >> Yeah that's about right. >> Is this a 10X market? When does it get to 10 billion? Is it five, seven, 10 years? >> So we go out five years and have it be close to three billion. I think the numbers I presented on stage were 3.2 billion in five years. Now that's just software licenses and it's not the services community that surround that. >> You'd probably triple it if you add in services. >> I think two to three times service license ratio. There's always an issue at this point in emerging markets. Some of the valuations that are there, that market three billion has to be a bit bigger than that in eight or nine years to justify those valuations. That's always the fascinating capital structure questions we create with these sorts of things. >> So you describe this sort of one for one replacement. I'm presuming there's other potential use cases, or maybe not, that you forecast. Is that right? >> Oh no for the cubicles? >> Yes, it's not just cubicle replacement in that three billion right? It's other uplifts. >> No there are use cases that help in factory automation, in supply chain, in guys carrying around clipboards in warehouses. There are a tremendous number of use cases, but the primary focus are back office workers that tend to be in cubicles and contact center employees who are always in cubicles. >> And then we'll see if the non-obvious ones emerge. >> I think ultimately what's going to happen is the number of people doing back office corporate functions, so that's both finance and accounting procurement, HR type roles and indeed the industry specific roles. So claims processing insurance will diminish over time. But I think what we're going to see is an increase in the number of people doing customer experience, because it's the customer intimacy that is really going to differentiate organizations going forward. >> The market's moving very fast. Reading your report, it's like you were saying yesterday's features are now table steaks. Everybody's watching everybody else. You heard Daniel today saying, "Hey our competitors are watching. "We're open they're going to steal from us so be it." The rising tide lifts all boats. What do you advise clients in terms of where they should start, how they should get started? Obviously pick some quick wins. But what do you tell people? >> I always same pretty much the same advice you give almost on any emerging technology. Start with a good solution provider that you trust. Focus on a proof of concept, POC and a pilot. Start small and grow incrementally, and walk people up the mountain as you do that. That's the solution. I also have this report I call The Rule of Fives, that there are certain tasks that are perfect for RPA and they should meet these three rules of five. A relatively small number of decisions, relatively small number of applications involved, and a relatively small number of clicks in the click stream. 500 clicks, five apps, five decisions. Look for those in high volume that have high transaction volume and you'll hit RPA goal. You'll be able to offset 2 1/2 to four FTE's for one bot. And if you follow those rules, follow the proof of concept, good solution partner everyone's winning. >> You have practical advice to get started and actually get to an outcome. Anything you'd add to that? >> In most organizations what they're now doing, is picking one, two, or three different technologies to actually play with to start. And that's a really good way. So we recommend that organizations pick three, four, five processes and do a hackathon and very quickly they work out which organizations they want to work with. It's not necessarily just the technology and in a lot of cases UiPath isn't the right answer. But that is a very good way for them to realize what they want to do and the speed with which they'll want to do it. >> Great, well guys thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your knowledge. >> Thank you. >> Pleasure. >> Appreciate your time. >> Thanks very much indeed. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back from UiPathForward Americas. 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