>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five, brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sans Convention Center covering UI Path Forward five. This is the fourth time the Cube has covered forward, not counting the years during Covid, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson, coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show back here in Vegas. David talking about UI path. UI path is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO this company that was founded in 2005 and was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. Yeah. And Daniel Deez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard and they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. >>And then all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and, and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but, but they've hit a billion dollars in arr. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously with the, with the downturn, but also some execution misuses. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward customer stories. And the other thing I'll, I'll, I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation software, robots, they're gonna take away jobs. The opposite has happened, the zero unemployment. Now basically we're heading into a recession, we're actually probably in a recession. And so how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain if, if, if, if inflation is five to 7% and you can get 20% from automation. Well, it's a good roi. But you sat in the keynotes, it was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? >>Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second. Isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How, how cool can that possibly be? >>Well, it kinda was in the >>Beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but when you dig into it, to your, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that can automate it are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then frees individuals up frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So when you, when we, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization. Not, you know, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for, for everybody throughout the enterprise. >>Yeah. So let's take a, let's take folks through the, the keynote to, basically we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, you know, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at, at the Venetian, formerly the San Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are orange colors, kinda like pure storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice, it's very welcoming and very cool, but 300 3500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO, automation council and a pickleball court inside this hall, which pickleball is, you know, all the rage. So Bobby, Patrick and Mary Telo kicked it off. Bobby's the cmo, Mary's the head of branding, and Bobby raised four themes. It it, this is a tool that it's, this is RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. >>The second thing is, the big news here is the UI path business platform, something like that. They're calling, but they're talking about about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing, you know, mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately when you're heading into a recession, you can, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that, Dave, is as they were saying before, if you're gonna, if if you're, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation may be a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah. >>There's no question, there's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved. We're in the, you know, we're, we're still in the age of cloud, but automation is gonna be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UI path's role be in that market? And, and, and when you hear, when you hear UI path talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm gonna be looking for in terms of the, the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for them. >>Well, they're betting the company on >>That, that's Rob Ensslin coming in. That's why he's part of the, the equation. But >>That platform play is they are betting the company. And, and the reason is, so the, the, the history here is in the early days of this sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UI path went out, they both raised a ton of money. UI Path rocketed out to the lead. They had a much e easier to install, you know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the other legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, Big Stacks, UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market. And then started building or or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like cloud elements, which is API automation. More recently Reiner, We, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today and they've been putting that together to do not just rpa but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. >>And so Rob Ins insulin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go to market expertise as well as Shim Gupta who's, who's the cfo. So they, they, and they were kinda late with that. They sort of did all this post ipo. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision supervision that's necessary. Rob Sland, I thought was very cogent. He was assertive on stage, he was really clear, he was energetic. He talked about the phases, e r p, Internet cloud and the now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage better, faster, cheaper, pick two. He said, You don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. >>And then what I always, again, love about UiPath is they're no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody, and I think I would say the best of, of, of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on the cube all this week, talked about Changi airport from Singapore. They're adding 50 able to service 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or retail. And how you say that a hundred thousand employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially 12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the, of the UI path finance team is digital. And they've, they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenue's grown. What a 10 x? And really he talked about how to, for how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob ens insulin's keynote? >>First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Ensslin is a brand, and that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll, I'll say it again. It's critically important that they, that they demonstrate this to the marketplace, that they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're, you're, you're never gonna make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's, he's, he's the right person for the job and I, and I I I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are and the critical nature of automation question remains, will you I path to be able to benefit from that trend. >>So a couple things on that. So your point about sap, you know, is right on EY was up on stage. They, EY is a huge SAP customer and they chose UI path to automate their SAP installation, right? And they're going all in with UI path as a partner. Of course. I I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough, right? When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. >>Javier from Spain. Yeah. Yep. >>Talking about he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomer was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've gotta get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple years ago made a tuck in acquisition and got it to this market really providing individual automations and making it, you know, it's Microsoft, they're gonna make it really easy to add it really >>Cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing and, >>And then, and then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019, but as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff. Okay. So they're, they're, they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob ends and put up on the, the slide go big, I, I tweeted, took a page outta Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break? >>I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean this is, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting to stay forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise they will never get beyond where they are now. I I I, I do wanna mention too, to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, so, you know, these, these guys have reached a milestone, there's no question about that. But to get to that next level platform, platform, platform, and I know we'll be, we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple years. >>Yeah. And the key is obviously gonna be keep servicing the customers, you know, all the financial machinations and you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% ARR growth down to roughly 20% when you, when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars though dollars are appreciated. So they're less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but, but we're gonna get into that over the next two days. Dave Ante and Dave, you're watching the Cubes coverage of UI path forward, five from Las Vegas. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by, >>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of forward for UI path forward for live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with David. David's great to be back sitting at an anchor desk. >>Yeah, good to see. This is my first show. Since June, we were at mobile world Congress and I've been, I've been doing a number of shows where they'll they'll the host myself would be there with some guests as a pre-record to some simulive show, but this is real live awesome to be working with you again. So we did live last week at a DC public sector summit for AWS next week's cube con. So it's three in a row. So maybe it's a trend. It we'll see. >>Well, the thing that was really surprising was that we were in the keynote briefly this morning. It was standing room only. There are a lot of people at this conference. They think they were expecting about 2000. And to me it looked like there were at least out, if not more >>Funny leases, most companies, if not virtually all of them, except for a handful are canceling physical events. And because they're saying their customers aren't traveling, but I've talked to over a dozen customers. I just got here yesterday afternoon. I've talked about 10 or 12 customers who are here. They're flying, they're traveling. And we're going to dig into a lot of that. Today. We have Uber coming on the program. We have applied materials coming on, blue cross blue shield. I'm really happy that you AIPAC decided to, to put a number of customers on the cubes so we can test what we're hearing, you know, in the marketing. >>Well, one of the first things that they said in the keynote this morning was we want to hear from our customers, what are we doing? Right? What are we not doing enough of? What do you want more? They've got eight over 8,000 customers. You mentioned some of the ones that are going to be on the program this week, including Chevron and Merck who are on today. And 70% of their revenue comes from existing customers. This is a company that has, is really kind of a use case in land and expand. Yeah. >>And I think you're going to see this trend. You know what it's like with COVID it's day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter, you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the right model. Clearly hybrid is the, is the new abnormal, if you will. And I think we're going to see is, is you're going to have VIP events. And this is kind of a VIP event. It's not, you know, 5,000 people, it's kind of 1500, 2000, but there are a lot of VIP customers here. Obviously the partners here. So what they did before the show is they had a partner summit. It was packed. You talked about standing room only. They had a healthcare summit, it was packed. And so they have these little VIP sections, little events within the event, and then they broadcast it out to a wider audience. And I think that's going to be the normal one. I think you're going to see CEO's in a room, maybe in a hotel and wherever in Manhattan or, or San Francisco. And then they'll broadcast out to that wider audience. I think people are learning how to build better hybrid events, but by the way, this is all new. As I said, hybrid events, I meant virtual events. And now they're learning to learn how to build hybrid events. And that's a whole nother new process. >>It is. But it's also exciting to see the traction, the momentum that is here from, you know, they and they IPO at about what six months ago, you covered that your breaking analysis that you did right before the IPO and the breaking analysis that you did last last week, I believe really fascinating. Interesting acceleration is a theme. We're going to talk about the acceleration of automation and the momentum that the pandemic is driving. But this is a company that's accelerated everything. As you said on your breaking analysis, lightning in a bottle, this is a company that went global very quickly. We're seeing them as some of the leading companies. We can probably count on one hand who are actually coming back to these hybrid events and say, we want to be with our customers again and learn from you what you're doing, what's going on. And we've got a lot of news to share. >>Yeah, we've been covering UI path since 2015. And the piece we wrote back at IPO was, uh, you, you bypass long, strange trip to IPO and it, and it was strange. And that they kind of hung out as a software development shop for the better part of a decade. And then just listening and learning, writing code, they were kind of gigs writing code and loved it. And then they realized, wow, we have something here we can. And they, their uniqueness is they have a computer vision technology. They have the ability to sort of infer what a form looks like and then actually populated. And the thing that UI path did that was different was they made it sound, sounds crazy. They made the product really simple to use, and we know simplicity works. We see that with best example in storage storage, a complicated business, pure storage, right? >>They pop it in. You kind of Veeam is another one. It just works. And so they, they created a freemium model. It made it easy for departments to start small, you know, maybe for 15, 20, 20 $5,000, you could get a software robot and then it would do things like whatever it, it would pull data out of one spreadsheet, put it into another pull date out of one, SAS populated and people then realize, wow, I am saving a ton of time. I can do some other things I'm more productive. And then other people looking over her shoulder would say, Hey, what is that you're using? Can I get that? And then all of a sudden, like you said, lightning in a bottle and it exploded, not a conventional Silicon valley, you know, funded company, even though they got a lot of funding, they got, they raised, I think, close to a billion dollars before they went public. Um, and now they're public went public in April. The stock has been sort of trending downward for the last four or five months, a little bit off on sympathy, but you know, >>What do you think that is? They had such momentum going into it. They clearly have a lot of momentum here. 8,000 plus customers. They've got over 1200 customers with an ARR above a hundred thousand. Why do you think the stock is? >>So I think a couple of things, at least, I think first of all, the street doesn't fully understand this company. You know, Daniel DNAs has never been the CEO of a public company. He's not from Silicon valley. He's, you know, from, from, uh, Eastern Europe and they don't know him that well, uh, they've got, you know, the very, very capable, and so they're educating the streets. So there's a comfort level there. They're looking at their growth and they're inferring from their billings that their growth is, is declining. The new growth from new customers in particular. But there, the ARR is still growing at 60% annually. They also guided a little bit conservatively for the street. And the other thing is they've been profitable. I'm not if a cashflow basis. And then they guided that they would actually be, be somewhat unprofitable in the coming quarter. >>People didn't like that. They don't care about profits until you're somewhat profitable. And then you say, Hey, we're going to be a little less profitable, but of course they get events like this. So that, that, I think it's just a matter of the street getting to understand them. And I will say this, and you know, this, they're getting a lot of business from their existing customers. We saw this with snowflake, uh, Cleveland research, put out a note saying, oh, Snowflake's new customer growth is slowing. We published research from our friends at ETR that showed well, they're getting a lot of business from existing customers that sort of fat middle is really where they're starting to mind. And you can see this with UI path. The lifetime value of the customers is just growing and growing and growing. And so I'm not as concerned. The stocks, you know, we don't, we don't, we're not the stock advisors, but the stock is just over 50. >>Now it wasn't 90 at one point. So it's got a valuation of somewhere around 26 billion, which was closer to 50 billion. So who knows, maybe this is a buying opportunity. There's not a lot of data. So the technical analyst are saying, well, we really don't know where it's going to cook it down to 30. It could go, could go rock it up from here. I think the point Lisa is, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint, it's a long-term play. And these guys are the leaders. And they're, I think moving away from the pack. And the last thing is this concern about competition from Microsoft who bought a company last year to really in earnest, get into this business. And everybody's afraid of Microsoft. >>Well, one thing that we know that's growing considerably is the total addressable market pre pandemic. It was about 30 billion. It's now north of 60 billion. We've seen the pandemic accelerate a lot of things. Talk to me a little bit about automation as its role in digital transformation from your side. >>Yeah, I think, you know, this is again, it's a really good question because when you look at these total available market numbers, the way that companies virtually all companies, whether it's Dell or Cisco or UI path or anybody, they take data from like Gartner and IDC and they say, okay, these are the markets that we kind of play in, and this is how it's growing. What's really happening leases. All these markets are converging because of digital. So to your question, it's a di what's a digital business. A digital business is a data business and they differentiate by the way in which they use data. And if you're not a digital business during the pandemic, you're out of business. So all of these markets, cloud machine intelligence, AI automation, orchestra, uh, container orchestration, container platforms, they're all coming together as one, it's all being built in as one. >>So 60 billion, you know, up from 30 billion, I think it could be a hundred billion. I think, you know, they threw out a stat today that 2% of processes are automated says to me that, I mean, anything digital is going to be automated. So that is hundreds of billions of dollars of, of market opportunity, right? And so there's no shortage of market opportunity for this company. And that's why, by the way, everybody's entering it. We saw SAP make some acquisitions. We S we see in for talking about it, uh, uh, Salesforce, uh, service now, and these SAS companies are all saying, Hey, we can own the automation piece within our stack, what UI path is doing. And the reason why I liked their strategy better is they're a specialist in automation horizontally across all these software stacks. And that's really why they're Tam, I think is, >>And that gives them quite a big differentiator that horizontal play >>It does. I think I see. So I don't see, I think there's a continuum and I think you got Microsoft over here with Azure and personal productivity in their cloud. And then you've got the pure plays, which are really focusing on a broader automation agenda. That's UI path, that's automation, anywhere I would put blue prism in that category blueprints. And by the way, he's getting, getting acquired by Vista, and they're gonna merge them with TIBCO company that, you know, quite a bit about, and that's an integration play. So that's kind of interesting. I would put them as more of a horizontal play. And then in the fat middle, you've got SAP and in four and, you know, IBM is getting to the game. Although they, I think they OEM from a lot of different companies and all those other companies I mentioned before, they're kind of the walled gardens. >>And so I think that UI path is less of a head-to-head competitor with, with Microsoft today anyway, than it is for instance, with automation anywhere. And it's, and it's growing faster than automation, anywhere from what we can tell. And it's, it's still a leader in that horizontal play. You know, you never discount Microsoft, but I think just like for instance, Okta is a specialist in, in, in access identity, access management and privileged, privileged access management and access government, they compete with Microsoft's single sign on, right. But they're a horizontal play. So there's plenty of room for, for both in my view. Anyway, >>Some of the things that you can you think that we're going to hear, you know, seem to be at this inflection point where UI path wants to move away from being an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform they made, they made some announcements about vision a couple of years ago at the last in-person event. What are some of the things you think that are going to be announced in the next couple? >>That's a really good question. I'm glad you picked up on that because they started as a point tool essentially. And then they realized, wow, if we're really going to grow as a company, we have to expand that. So they made acquisite, they've been making acquisitions. One of the key acquisitions they made was a company called process gold. So it's funny when we've done previous, uh, RPA events, I've said RPA in its early days was kind of scripts paving the cow path, meaning you're taking existing processes of saying, okay, we're just going to automate them where UI path is headed in others is they're looking across the enterprise and how do we go end to end? How do we take a broader automation agenda and drive automation throughout the entire organization? And I think that's a lot of what we're going to hear from today. We heard that from executives, APAR, co Kaylon, and, um, and, and, and Ted Coomer talked about their engineering and their product vision. And I think you iPad has to show that that's actually what's happening with customers and they have the portfolio to deliver >>Well, those two executives that you just mentioned, and a lot of others are going to be on the program. The next couple of days jam packed. Dave, I'm looking forward to unpacking what UI path is doing. The acceleration in the automation market. We're going to have a fun >>Couple of days. Thanks for coming on here for David >>Lante. I'm Lisa Martin. We're going to be back live from Las Vegas at UI path forward for in just a minute.