(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>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.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to the Cube's Coverage of Forward five UI Path Customer event. This is the fourth forward that we've been at. We started in Miami, had some great events. It's all about the customer stories. Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Flow Yees here. She's the director of engineering and development at dsu and Kate Hall is to her right. And Kate is the director of Automation Solutions at dsu. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much. Thanks >>You to >>Be here. Tell us about dsu. You guys are huge company, but but give us the focus. >>Yeah, absolutely. Dentsu, it's one of the largest advertising networks out there. One of the largest in the world with over 66,000 employees and we're operating in a hundred plus countries. We're really proud to serve 95% of the Fortune 100 companies. Household names like Microsoft Factor and Gamble. If you seen the Super Bowls ads last year, Larry, Larry Davids ads for the crypto brand. That's a hilarious one for anyone who haven't seen it. So we're just really proud to be here and we really respect the creatives of our company. >>That was the best commercial, the Super Bowl by far. For sure. I, I said at the top of saying that Dave and I were talking UI pass, a cool company. You guys kinda look like cool people. You got cool jobs. Tell, tell us about your respective roles. What do you guys do? Yeah, >>Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation, so what I really do is to implement the automation operating model and connecting developers across five continents together, making sure that we're delivering and deploying automation projects up to our best standards setting by the operating model. So it's a really, really great job. And when we get to see all these brilliant minds across the world >>And, And Kate, what's your role? Yeah, >>And the Automation Solutions vertical that I head up, the focus is really on converting business requirements into technical designs for flows, developers to deliver. So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, prioritizing them according to the business businesses objectives and making sure that we route them to the right place. So is it, does it need to be an automation first? Do we need to optimize the process? Does this make sense for citizen developers or do we need to bring in the professional resources on flow's >>Team? So you're bilingual, you speak, you're like the translator, you speak geek and wall, right? Is that fair? Okay. So take me back to the, let's, let's do a little mini case study here. How did you guys get started? I'm always interested, was this a top down? Is, is is top down required to be successful? Cuz it does feel like you can have bottom up bottoms up with rpa, but, but how did you guys get started? What was the journey like? >>Yeah, we started back in 2017, very traditional top down approach. So we delivered a couple POCs working directly with UiPath. You know, going back those five years, delivered those really highly scalable top down solutions that drove hundreds of thousands of hours of ROI for the business. However, as people kind of began to embrace automation and they learned that this is something that they could, that could help them, it's not something that they should be afraid of to take away their jobs. You know, DSU is a young company with a lot of young, young creatives. They wanna make their lives better. So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases of, hey I, I need a bot to do this. I need a bot to do that i's gonna save me, you know, 10 hours a week. It's gonna save my team a hundred hours a month, et cetera, et cetera. All of these smaller use cases that were gonna be hugely impactful for the individuals, their teams, even in entire department, but didn't have that scalable ROI for us to put professional development resources against it. So starting in 2020 we really introduced the citizen development program to put the power into those people's hands so that they could create their own solutions. And that was really just a snowball effect to tackle it from the bottom up as well as the top down. >>So a lot of young people, Dave, they not not threatened by robots that racing it. So >>They've grown up with the technology, they know that they can order an Uber from their phone, right? Why am I, you know, sitting here at MITs typing data from Excel into a program that might be older than some of our youngest employees. >>Yeah. Now, now the way you described it, correct me if I'm wrong, the way you described it, it sounds like there's sort of a gating function though. You're not just putting these tools in the hands of people sitting, especially creatives who are there to create. You're not saying, Oh you want things automated, here are the tools. Go ahead. Automated. We'll we, for those of you who want to learn how to use the tools, we'll have you automate that there. Did I hear that right? You're, you're sort of making decisions about what things will be developed even by citizen developers. >>Let me, Do you wanna talk to them about governance? Yeah, absolutely. >>Yeah, so I think we started out with assistant development program, obviously the huge success, right? Last year we're also here at the Cubes. We're very happy to be back again. But I think a lot, a lot had changed and we've grown a lot since last year. One, I have the joy being a part of this team. And then the other thing is that we really expanded and implemented an automation operating model that I mentioned briefly just earlier. So what that enabled us to do is to unite developers from five continents together organically and we're now able to tap into their talent at a global scale. So we are really using this operating model to grow our automation practice in a scalable and also controlled manner. Okay. What I mean by that is that these developer originally were sitting in 18 plus markets, right? There's not much communication collaboration between them. >>And then we went in and bridged them together. What happened is that originally they were only delivering projects and use cases within their region and sometimes these use cases could be very, very much, you know, small scale and not really maximizing their talent. What we are now able to do is tap into a global automation pipeline. So we connecting these highly skilled people to the pipeline elsewhere, the use cases elsewhere that might not be within their regions because one of our focus, a lot of change I mentioned, right? One thing that will never change with our team, it's used automation to elevate people's potential. Now it's really a win-win situation cuz we are connecting the use cases from different pipelines. So the business is happy cuz we are delivering these high scalable solutions. We also utilizing these developers and they're happy because their skills are being maximized and then at the same time growing our automation program. So then that way the citizen development program so that the lower complexities projects are being delivered at a local level and we are able to innovate at a local level. >>I, I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. It's blowing my mind >>Here. It's a whole cycle. >>So let me start with how do you, you know, one of the, one of the concerns I had initially with RPA, cuz just you're talking about some very narrow use cases and your goal is to expand that to realize the potential of each individual, right? But early days I saw a lot of what I call paving the cow path, taking a process that was not a great process and then automating it, right? And that was limiting the potential. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and maybe which processes should be rethought, >>Right? Exactly. A lot of time when we do automation, right, we talk about innovations and all that stuff, but innovation doesn't happen with the same people sitting in the same room doing the same thing. So what we are doing now, able to connect all these people, different developers from different groups, we really bring the diversity together. That's diversity D diverse diversity in the mindset, diversity in the skill. So what are we really able to do and we see how we tackle this problem is to, and that's a problem for a lot of business out there is the short-termism. So there's something, what we do is that we take two approaches. One, before we, you know, for example, when we used to receive a use case, right? Maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into development and start coding and all that good stuff, which is great. >>But what we do with this automation framework, which we think it's a really great service for any company out there that want to grow and mature their automation practice, it's to take a step back, think about, okay, so the China market would be beneficial from this automation. Can we also look at the Philippine market? Can we also look at the Thailand market? Because we also know that they have similar processes and similar auto tools that they use. So we are really able to make our automation in a more meaningful way by scaling a project just beyond one market. Now it's impacting the entire region and benefiting people in the entire region. That is what we say, you know, putting automation for good and then that's what we talked about at dsu, Teaming without limits. And that's a, so >>By taking, we wanna make sure that we're really like taking a step back, connecting all of the dots, building the one thing the right way, the first time. Exactly. And what's really integral into being able to have that transparency, that visibility is that now we're all working on the same platform. So you know, Brian spoke to you last year about our migration into automation cloud, having everything that single pipeline in the cloud. Anybody at DSU can often join the automation community and get access to automation hub, see what's out there, submit their own ideas, use the launchpad to go and take training. Yeah. And get started on their own automation journey as a citizen developer and you know, see the different paths that are available to them from that one central space. >>So by taking us a breath, stepping back, pausing just a bit, the business impact at the tail end is much, much higher. Now you start in 2017 really before you UI path made it's big enterprise play, it acquired process gold, you know, cloud elements now most recently referenced some others. How much of what you guys are, are, are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort of robot installation? Yeah, >>I mean platforms power people and that's what we're here to do as the global automation team. Whether it's powering the citizen developers, the professional developers, anybody who's interacting with our automations at dsu, we wanna make sure that we're connecting the docs for them on a platform basis so that developers can develop and they don't need to develop those simple use cases that could be done by a citizen developer. You know, they're super smart technical people, they wanna do the cool shit with the new stuff. They wanna branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. That's, you know, the nature of human curiosity. Citizen developers, they're thrilled that we're making an investment to upscale them, to give them a new capability so that they can automate their own work. And they don't, they, they're the process experts. They don't need to spend a month talking to us when they could spend that time taking the training, learning how to create something themselves. >>How, how much sort of use case runway when you guys step back and look at your business, do you see a limit to the use cases? I mean where are you, if you had on a spectrum of, you know, maturity, how much more opportunity is there for DSU to automate? >>There's so much I think the, you feel >>Like it's limitless? >>No, I absolutely feel like it's limitless because there one thing, it's, there's the use cases and I think it's all about connecting the talent and making sure that something we do really, you know, making sure that we deliver these use cases, invest the time in our people so we make sure our professional developers part of our team spending 10 to 20% of the time to do learning and development because only limitless if our people are getting the latest and the greatest technology and we want to invest the time and we see this as an investment in the people making sure that we deliver the promise of putting people first. And the second thing, it's also investment in our company's growth. And that's a long term goal. And overcoming just focusing on things our short term. So that is something we really focus to do. And not only the use cases we are doing what we are doing as an operating model for automation. That is also something that we really value because then this is a kind of a playbook and a success model for many companies out there to grow their automation practice. So that's another angle that we are also focusing >>On. Well that, that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and, and I'm sitting here thinking they don't realize they're working themselves out of a job once they get everything automated, what are they gonna do? Right? But, but so, so it sounds like it's a never ending process, but because you guys are, are such a large global organization, it seems like you might have a luxury of being able to benchmark automations from one region and then benchmark them against other regions that aren't using that automation to be able to see very, very quickly not only realize ROI really quickly from the region where it's been implemented, but to be able to compare it to almost a control. Is that, is that part of your process? Yeah, >>Absolutely. Because we are such a global brand and with the automation, automation operating model, what we are able to do, not only focusing on the talent and the people, but also focusing on the infrastructure. So for example, right, maybe there's a first use case developing in Argentina and they have never done these automation before. And when they go to their security team and asking for an Okta bypass service account and the security team Argentina, like we never heard of automation, we don't know what UiPath is, why would I give you a service account for good reason, right? They're doing their job right. But what we able to do with automation model, it's to establish trust between the developers and the security team. So now we have a set up standing infrastructure that we are ready to go whenever an automation's ready to deploy and we're able to get the set up standing infrastructure because we have the governance to make sure the quality would delivered and making sure anything that we deployed, automation that we deploy are developed and governed by the best practice. So that's how we able to kind of get this automation expand globally in a very control and scalable manner because the people that we have build a relationship with. What are >>The governors to how fast you can adopt? Is it just expertise or bandwidth of that expertise or what's the bottleneck? >>Yeah, >>If >>You wanna talk more about, >>So in terms of the pipeline, we really wanna make sure that we are taking that step back and instead of just going, let's develop, develop, develop, here are the requirements like get started and go, we've prove the value of automation at Densu. We wanna make sure we are taking that step back and observing the pipeline. And it's, it's up to us to work with the business to really establish their priorities and the priorities. It's a, it's a big global organization. There might be different priorities in APAC than there are in EM for a good reason. APAC may not be adopted on the same, you know, e r P system for example. So they might have those smaller scale ROI use cases, but that's where we wanna work with them to identify, you know, maybe this is a legitimate need, the ROI is not there, let's upscale some citizen developers so that they can start, you know, working for themselves and get those results faster for those simpler use cases. >>Does, does the funding come from the line of business or IT or a combination? I mean there are obviously budget constraints are very concerned about the macro and the recession. You guys have some global brands, you know, as, as things ebb and flow in the economy, you're competing with other budgets. But where are the budgets coming from inside of dsu? Is it the business, is it the tech >>Group? Yeah, we really consider our automation group is the cause of doing business because we are here connecting people with bridging people together and really elevating. And the reason why we structure it that way, it's people, we do automation at dsu not to reduce head count, not to, you know, not, not just those matrix number that we measure, but really it's to giving time back to the people, giving time back to our business. So then that way they can focus on their wellbeing and that way they can focus on the work-life balance, right? So that's what we say. We are forced for good and by using automation for good as one really great example. So I think because of this agenda and because DSU do prioritize people, you know, so that's why we're getting the funding, we're getting the budget and we are seeing as a cause of doing business. So then we can get these time back using innovation to make people more fulfilling and applying automation in meaningful ways. >>Kate and Flo, congratulations. Your energy is palpable and really great success, wonderful story. Really appreciate you sharing. Thank you so >>Much for having us today. >>You're very welcome. All keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're live from UI path forward at five from Las Vegas. We're in the Venetian Consent Convention Center. Will be right back, right for the short break.

(upbeat music) >> theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody you're watching theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5. We're here at the Venetian Convention Center Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson this morning. Dave, we heard these boomers, these thunder boomers. We thought it was the sound system. (Dave laughing) >> Thought it was something fake. >> But it was actually some crazy weather out here in Vegas. It's rare to see that kind of nuttiness out here. John Morrison is the director of Product and Technology at T-Mobile and Naga Chakravarthy is the Chief Digital Officer at iOpex. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> Next, so John, (commentator booming) so okay, we're serving automation. I don't know if you guys can hear that S0 let's just give him a second here. >> (Commentator) Three different tracks >> I think it's pretty loud. Probably coming through. Usually we don't get that. >> It's live. >> But, it is live. So John, we, we've interviewed a lot of customers that have automation in their title. Your title's, Director of product and technology. Obviously you're here 'cause you have an affinity to automation. But talk about your role and how automation fits into it. >> Sure. Well, I'm the director of product and technology and I oversee what we call the communication, collaboration and productivity applications and services for T-Mobile. Reason I'm here is we took over the automation program and automation is falling within to our productivity portfolio. So I'm here to learn about, from these experts and all these leaders within the UiPath and from our vendors as well. >> Okay. Now tell us about iOpex. So kind of an interesting name. Where'd that come from? I think cloud. When I think opex, but, get rid of my cap. Where's the name come from and what do you guys do? >> Actually we thought hard about what to name about 13 years back. You know, I think all of us, the whole team comes from a service background and then I think we believe that you need to have people and as a lot of operational activities were increasing, you know the dependency on people was also increasing. And we thought that there has to be an angle for us to be very unique in the market. So we thought, you know, I would say iOpex is currently at 3.0 and if you look at what 1.0 was, it's all about driving innovation in operation excellence, right? And the medium was technology. And today, if you ask me from operation excellence that is the base, we are actually looking at how do you drive innovation in operating experiences. That's where automation and all these things becomes very native to us. >> So the market just went right, right to you guys you were ahead of the game. And then, wow, now, >> I have to brag that we fortunately named it Opex, which can be interchangeably used for operation excellence or operating experience. >> Got it. >> So, so John, where did, where did it start? What was the catalyst for your automation journey? How did, was it the, was it the, the merger? Take us through that. >> Sure. So I look at our automation journey, like a crawl, walk, run journey for sure. It started with the partnership of UiPath and iOpex. We had an innovation lab. They came, they set up a proof of concept. Proof of concept was successful. I was then asked to build out an automation program for the T-mobile enterprise. Not having any experience within automation as we had discussed before usually you have automation within the title. We leaned heavily on our partners iOpex being main critical partner in that evolution. And so iOpex came in and helped us build that center of excellence and really helped us put that support team together so that we could be successful as we moved forward. Now, when we had both of those in place, we were able to go to the businesses and find opportunities and showcase what automation was all about. The problem is we were so green is that, you know, we'd go and we'd look at an opportunity, but that opportunity we'd deliver and then our pipeline would be empty and we'd have to go look for other opportunities. So we really had to present and get that executive sponsorship of automation for the enterprise. And I'm going to do a few shoutouts here. Giao Duong, John Lowe and our CIO Brian King, were critical in giving us what we needed to be successful. They gave us the expertise, the funds to do what we needed to, to build out this program. We utilized iOpex, UiPath to really get that expertise in place. And today, our pipeline, we have about 300,000 manual hours of labor savings that we'll deploy by the end of the year. That's a huge success. And that's where we're at right now. The run part of it is going to be, I'll wait. >> Wait. No, it's okay. So you went, you went from hunting to fishing in a barrel? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So the, our next is focused on citizen development, building out that citizen development program, where we will be partnering with UiPath and iOpex to get that in place. And once we have that in place I feel like we're going to be ready to run and we'll see that program just kick off. But like I said before, 300,000 hours of savings in the first year of that program. That's incredible. And we're a large company and we'll, I mean we're just starting so it's going to be fun. >> So many questions. So Naga, is the COE where people typically start or is it sometimes a grassroot effort and then the COE comes later? How do you typically recommend approaching it? >> I think the fact that we started very small there was a clear mandate that we have to take a very strategic approach while we are solving a tactical problem to show that automation is the future and you need to solve using automation, right? And we not only looked at it just from a task automation standpoint, we were starting to look at it from a process, entire end to end process automation. And when we started looking at it, though we were tactically automating it, COE naturally fell in place. So, which means you need to evangelize this across multiple departments. So when you have to have, when you have to have evangelize across multiple departments, what is very important is you need to have the pod leaders identified let's say if you have to go to different departments it is somebody from John's team who's very capable of navigating through different departments' problem statements and how when you, when you navigate it you can rightly evangelize what is the benefit. And when it comes to benefit, right? You need to look at it from both the angles of operation excellence and what is it going to do from a growth standpoint of solving a future problem. So somebody internally within T-Mobile we were able to use very nice, you know John's team, you know, the COE naturally fell in place. All of them were at some point in time doing automation. And slowly it was a path that they took to evangelize and we were able to piggyback and scale it bigger. >> So in the world we're in, whether you're talking about cloud services that are created by hyper scale cloud providers or automation platforms from UiPath, between those shiny toys and what we want to accomplish with them in the world of business and everything else there are organizations like iOpex and you and John are working together to figure out which projects need to be done in a strategic, from a strategic viewpoint but you're also addressing them tactically. I'm curious, >> Yeah. >> How does that business model from an iOpex perspective work do you have people embedded at T-Mobile that are working with John and his folks to identify the next things to automate? Is it a, is it, where is the push and where is the pull coming from in terms of, okay now what do we do next? Because look, let's be frank, in the, from a business perspective, iOpex wants to do as much as it can a value for T-mobile because that's what, that's the business they're in. But, so tell me about that push pull between the two of you. Does that make sense? Yeah, So I'll say real fast that, yeah iOpex is actually part of the T-mobile team. They are embedded. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> We work with them daily. >> Nicholson: Okay. >> Right. They had the expertise they're passing along the expertise to our full-time employees. And so it's like we're all one team. So that should answer that one for sure there. >> Absolutely. Let me add one more point to it. See if, you know, I think with respect to T-Mobile I would say it's a little bit of a special case for us. Why I say that is, when we started the whole conversation of we need to drive automation with you there was a natural way to get embedded, you know as part of their team. Normally what happens is a team, a COE team works and say I will do the discovery and you guys can come and do the solution design. That was not the case, right? I think it was such a strategic investment that T-Mobile made on us, right? We were part of the discovery team. So, which means that we were able to take all the best practices that we learned from outside and openness to accept and start looking at it what's in it for us for the larger good that made us to get to what we call it as building a solution factory for T-Mobile. >> Vellante: I got a lot of questions. >> John: Yeah. >> John, you mentioned your CIO and a couple of other constituents. >> Yes. >> What part of the organization were they from? They helped you with funding, >> Yep. >> And maybe sort of gave you a catalyst. How did this all get funded? If I, if you could, Cause a lot of people ask me well how do I fund this thing? Does it fund itself? Do I do, is it an IT driven initiative line of business? >> So those executives were from the IT team. >> Vellante: Okay. For sure. But a lot of our programs start from grassroots ground up and you know a lot of vendors say, hey, you need it from the top down. This was a perfect example of getting it from the top down. We were working it, it was fine, but it wouldn't have taken off if we didn't have, you know, Brian King and John Lowe providing us that executive sponsorship, going to their peers and telling them about the program and giving us the opportunity to showcase what automation can do. >> How do you choose, I got so many questions I'm going to go rapid fire. How do you choose your automation priorities? Is it process driven? Is it data led? What's the right approach? >> I think it's a combination, right? One fundamentally guiding principle that we always look at is let it not be a task automation, right? Task automation solves a particular problem, but maybe you know, if you start looking at it from a bigger, you need to start looking at it from process angle. And when it comes to process, right? There are a lot of things that gets executed in the systems of record, in the form of workflow. And there's a lot of things that gets executed outside the systems of record, which is in people's mind. That's when data comes in, right? So let's say you use process mining tool of UiPath, you will get to know that there is a bottleneck in a particular process because it's cluttered somewhere. But you also have to look at why is this clutter happening, and you need to start collecting data. So a combination of a data science as well as a process science blends together. And that's when you'll start deciding, hey this is repetitive in nature, this is going to scale, this is an optimization problem. And then you build a scorecard and that scorecard naturally drives the, you know decision making process. Hey, it's going to drive operation excellence problem for me or is it going to be a true business benefit of driving growth? >> So I was going to ask you how you visualize it. You visualize it through, I guess, understanding of the organization, anecdotal comments, research digging, peeling the onion, and then you do some kind of scorecard like approach and say, okay these are the high, high opportunity areas. Okay. So combination. Got it. How about change management? Because Dave, you and I were talking about this before, big organizations that I know they have IT, they got an application portfolio. That application portfolio the applications have dependencies on each other. And then they have a process portfolio that is also related. So any change in process ripples through the applications. Any change in application affects other applications and affects processes. So how do you handle change management? >> So we actually have a change management team and we make sure that before we go forward with anything it's communicated what changes would be in place. And this change management team also does communications broadly for any of our applications, not just automation. So they partner close with iOpex, with our development teams on opportunities that are going out. You want to add anything? >> Yeah. So when it comes to change management, right? Well, John is front-ending all the changes relating to apps and stuff like that by having a steering committee, what really is the proactive thing that we end up doing is right when a bot goes live, there is a life support that we provide for the entire bot that's gone live. And the fundamentally core principle for that entire support to work good is you start looking at what's the benefit that the bot is giving more than that when a bot fails. Right? Why is the bot failing? Is it because the systems of records on which the bot is running? Is it that is failing? Or the inputs that is coming to the systems of record the data format, is it changing or the bot logic is failed? And once we set up a constant monitoring about that we were able to throw insights into the change management team saying that the bot failed because of various reasons. And that kind of compliments the whole change management process. And we get earlier notifications saying, hey there's going to be changes. So which means we go proactively look at, hey, okay fair enough, this systems of records, this data is going to change. Can we test this out in staging before you hit the production? So that way the change becomes a smoother process. >> And how quickly can you diagnose that? Is it hours, minutes, days, weeks, months? >> So, >> Vellante: Depends. >> It's a very subjective question. Right. If we know the pattern early then the SWAT team quickly gets into it and figure out how we could stop something, you know, stop the bot from failing. The moment the bot fails, you know, you need to basically look at how the business is going to going to get affected. But we try to do as much as we could. >> So Naga, I'm going to put you on the spot here. >> Please. >> As a partner of UiPath, this question of platform versus product. In order to scale and survive and thrive into the future UiPath needs to be able to demonstrate that it's more than a tool set, but instead a platform. What's your view on that in general? What differentiates a platform from a product? Does it matter to your organization whether UiPath moves in the direction of platform or not? >> I think, it is, it's undoubtedly platform, right? And a platform in my mind will constantly evolve. And once you think about it as a platform you will end up having a lot of plug and place. If you look at the way UiPath is evolving it is evolving as a platform. It used to be attended bot and unattended bot and plugged with Orchestrator. And if you look at it, the problem of solving the up chain and the down chain naturally came in process mining, task capture, made it up chain, a platform that solves the up chain. And then it slowly evolved into, hey I'm actually doing business process automation. Why could I not do test automation with the same skillset? So a platform will try to look at what is that, you know I've got in myself and how can I reuse across the enterprise? I think that is deeply embedded in the UiPath culture. And that's the kind of platform that, you know anybody like a system integrator like us, we do not have to multi-skill people. You just have to skill in one and you can interchange. That I would say is a good approach. >> So John, what's the future look like? What's the organization's appetite for automation? You know, is there an all you could eat kind of enterprise license approach? >> John: Yeah, so we are enterprise license. >> You are? Okay. >> So, and iOpex helped us move to the cloud so we can move quickly. That was definitely a benefit. The future of it, I would say citizen development is going to be key. Like I want citizen development within every business organization. I want them to be able to discover, deploy, you know, and and just use us, the center of excellence as support as needed. The appetite's there. Every group has automation within their goals or KPIs right? So it's there. We just need to be able to get in front of 'em. It's a large company. So I'm, '23 is going to be huge for us. >> Another fantastic story. I love that UiPath brings the customers to theCUBE. So thank you guys for telling your story. Congratulations on all your success. Good luck in the future. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> All right. Okay. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson UiPath FORWARD5. The bots are running around Dave. We're going to have to get one of the bots to come up here and show people a lot of fun at FORWARD. We're here in Vegas, right back, right after this short break.

The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi, everybody went back live at the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center. Dave Ante with David Nicholson. UI. Paths forward five. This is the fourth forward conference that the Cube has done. So we've seen the ascendancy of UI path, the growth customers. UiPath is one of the first companies to actually come back Post Covid. Last year, 2021 at the Bellagio. They took a chance and it actually worked out great at a couple thousand people there. Lots of customers. We're here with Lauren Joyce, who's the global automation lead at Whirlpool. She's joined by Regener Facade rp, who is the global automation lead at Accenture. Good to see you again. Lauren. Welcome to the Cube first timer. Very much, >>Yes, thank >>You. So you're relatively new to automation, but you, as we were talking, you're a process with talk about the center of excellence that you're building out. What's the importance of that to Whirlpool? >>Absolutely. So we are first looking at automation from our finance organization and they were coming to us with, Hey, here are 12 things we wanna automate. And really what we are finding is that not all of these things were suitable for automation. So we've started on the COE journey of, well, how do we make sure that we're getting the most ROI for our business? Starting with discovery, making sure that what we're automating it makes sense, it's the right process versus just an upgrade or, or retooling set. So for us, especially being a global company, making sure that we had that governance in place, that mindset and what should be automated and when really made sense and helped us on our journey pursuing. >>And, and, and I presume that's where Accenture comes in. I mean, rp, you got deep industry expertise, you've got automation expertise. What role do you play in that prioritization exercise? >>So the, the way we approach any automation implementation is similar to what we did here in our pool. First step is, you know, I call it as knowing where you are in the automation journey. Like what always is, if you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you. So baselining the current automation maturity and the current journey where they are. And once you do that, you identify you are not star and prioritization and the goals that are required and then you build a plan. And exactly how we approach in establishing a center of excellence that drives the automation with rigor, knowing where you are and where you want to get to, >>What's the team look like in a, in a, who's on the bus, You know, who's who's, who's in in the circle if you will. How do you com you know, build, you've written about this, it's like a sports team. You put it together, you need be a quarterback, you need a lineman, you need, you know, wide receivers who's on the center of excellence team. >>So the way you always build the center of excellence is making sure that your business partners and the senior leadership team is committed to the entire automation journey. That's the key ingredient for success. Then you build, one of the critical aspect is the talent, the quarterback, you said the talent. In today's world, automation talent is just not about knowing, you know, RPA techniques or you know, process optimization, but it is an end to end technology stack starting from cloud to data to analytics and entire platform capabilities of automation that combined and coupled with change management and how do you drive an enterprise chain management is very, very critical in terms of implementing automation. >>Absolutely. Lauren, I'm curious, did, did Accenture bring UI path to Whirlpool or did you bring, or did you bring Accenture in and UI path in together? How, how did that interaction? >>Yes. So we brought Accenture in and they really helped us along with that journey and they brought UI path to us. Our European business was actually using Blue Prism and that's when we said no, we wanna standardize specifically on UI path and make sure from a global standpoint we're using the same tooling. And that really helped that as we were building our team, we leaned on their expertise and then even we're retooling people within our corporation of, hey, we took our SAP lead, our GCP lead to be our technical architect and and people that could help speak the language and translate from process and explain that doesn't have to be a large project and explain what automation is to help drive return investment for sure. >>Now you're early in, but have you seen results, you know so far? Can you talk about that, quantify it in any way or? >>Absolutely. So we started our journey December of 2020. We've automated about 60 or so bots, but really everything that we've done is based on hours saved. So we're at about 60,000 hours automated and with some of our biggest, like our big box stores and our KitchenAid small appliances, we've even had hard dollar savings that we had a bot that went live about in 60 days. We had a $3 million return and take took out 3000 hours of human interaction. That was great for us. >>So the world's kind of a mess right now. You got supply chain issues, you got inflation, you got a recession, you got the United States. Anyway, you got the Fed trying to figure out, oh there's sling shoting, you know, some people are, you know, really hurting stock market is starting to show that there's a lot of confusion out there. The world is changed quite a bit obviously the last few years. How do you guys see it? What role has, I wonder if both of you could answer, what role has automation played in helping like, for instance, Whirlpool with maybe supply chain problems or maybe bigger forecasting and, and what are you seeing across organizations? But Lauren if you could start. >>Absolutely. So for us being able to show improvement in a six to eight week development cycle and instead of saying here's a heavy dollar investment or a new tooling that you gotta get people resources up to speed on, we can take where we are today, automate save hours where we're getting our employee engagement scores of I'm overworked, I have too much on my plate, how can you help me? And automation is there to support and that's really helped our business one take unnecessary work off their plate and show very quick value add to the business without having to have huge dollar investments in our, I'm you trying to save money. >>Are people, what are you seeing in terms of, so some of the problems that people I see as sign out here said, oh, in inflation at five to 7% go after productivity and make it in 20% gains. I mean, what are you seeing in the field? >>More than ever, More than ever, automation is more relevant now given the current economy environment that we are operating. Because automation always free up or optimizers the capacity that every enterprise has. Optimizing capacity is very important so that you can take your talented employees and the talented resources to do more strategic transformation program, which helps to sustain and stay and scale in your business. So I see that automation playing a significant role to impact business imperative. >>What are some of the common misconceptions? I mean we talk a lot about people's fear of automation. You know, I don't think that's necessarily a misconception. I think a lot of times people are fearful about automating though. Maybe they, they shouldn't be. We had Dentsu on today, DS like, you know, this giant global branding firm and they get a lot of young kids, they're like, No, bring it on. I don't want to do all this mundane stuff. But you know, a lot of folks are are are concerned, but, so that maybe is one misconception. Are there others, Lauren, that you found that you can share? >>I think we were lucky that we didn't necessarily have that fear of being replaced by automation. I think our change management plan really helped drive that. We included some fun things of any time a bot went live you got almost like a birth certificate of here's the process we save for you, here's how it's grown over six, six months, 12 months, 18 months. But I'm not sure if we had any other major gaps like that or or pitfalls >>Or, or p anything that, >>So my philosophy is automation is human plus machine combination. You can't run just, you know, people can't think that, you know, if my task get automated, I lose the, I lose my my jobs. That's not how it works because you, you do need human expertise, competency skills to kind of argument what you do with automation. And most important thing when you do this change is that most of the enterprises do not believe, do not understand that you have to get even process, right? You don't want to, you know, have an inefficient process and put automation on the top of it. Then you just made your inefficiency run more faster. So you need to kind of make sure that you address inefficiency, optimize your process, then infuse automation, then have human plus machine capability to strengthen your automation. >>Is it really that easy? Sounds easy, right? It, >>So from an, from an Accenture perspective, if you're, if you're looking at the market as a whole or looking at industry verticals, what's the difference between an organization that is leveraging automation and an organization that is not leveraging organ leveraging automation? Is there, is there sort of a range of percentage of efficiency that you can put on that? What does it mean for their bottom line? >>Essent, you must have data on this. Yeah, I mean what, >>Yeah, >>Today, today's world in the technology world, every organization understands the importance of automation that's given. That's a table stake. Now, where an organization is in the journey differs some of the enterprises maybe at the beginning of the maturity spectrum. In my book I talk about automation maturity framework wherein there are the initial stages of automation. Some of them are intelligent automation at the end of the spectrum where they're using data cloud and AI to drive the automation journey. But in every enterprise, the key success of automation depends upon whether you do automation and enterprisewide not in a silo in the organization, but if you do enterprise wide apply across, you get a lot more benefits, lot more efficiency to drive. >>Does does automation being more strategic or key? Does it, does it in a way make investments in automation more, more scrutinized or more circumspect? I, I would, I would use the term discretionary. We heard Bobby Patrick today say this is not discretionary, it's strategic to me. If it's strategic it might be a mandate but it's might be something I can kick down the road. What are you seeing there in the field just in terms of overall demand and sentiment? >>Automation today, as I said, is a table stake. When it becomes an integrated DNA of enterprise, it is always, you know, whether you want to call one pillar of strategy, key DNA of your strategic roadmap you are in investments have to be directly proportional to what you want to accomplish as your business KPIs to thrive and deliver your business with. Otherwise, if you do it as like a one off thing, you know you won't get the benefit. Yeah. >>Or from your standpoint, where do you want to take the automation initiative inside a whirlpool? How are you thinking about scaling it? What have you learned that you can apply to driving scale? >>So we put some strict governance in place who weren't just automating everything under the sun cuz >>Wild west >>Yeah, I can't support that. Right? So we made sure that everything had at least less than a one year invest return on investment and 500 hours worth of automation for us to even consider it as part of our coe. So because of that, we do have some automations that would make sense, but that's why we're looking at a citizen development program or low code, no code. What other types of options are there to make sure that it does become a part of our culture and dna that you can automate those even small parts of your workflow to, to make your day better. >>When, when you're looking at those workflows, do you, are you, are you literally looking over someone's shoulder with a stopwatch and measuring, Measuring how time >>And motion studies? No >>Question. Yeah. I mean is it time and motion studies? I mean, is that sort of the entry level data that that you use or is it more, or is it more automated than that? >>I would say it's a little more automated than that, but we do sit down and we ask our business process, show me what this process looks like to you. And then from that we can take some task mining and look at, okay, how long did it take you to do this? How often are you doing it? And then based on how long the automation would take, see how many hours are saved and how many people are doing that same task on a monthly, daily, weekly basis. >>Great. All right guys, thanks so much for coming in the cube and sharing your story. A whirlpool and always love to have Accenture on. You guys got such a massive observation space, global depth of industry. So thank you very much both. Thank you. Thank you. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante will be back right to the short break, you watching the cubes coverage of UI path forward. Five live from Las Vegas.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward. Five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five from Las Vegas. We're inside. The formerly was The Sands, now it's the Venetian Convention Center. Dave Nicholson. David, Deb. I've never seen it set up like this before. UI Path's. Very cool company. So of course the setup has to be cool, not like tons of concrete. James Furlong is here, the Vice President of Supply Chain Management and projects at Puma. And Derek Weimer is the CEO of Robo, who's an implementation partner, expert at Intelligent Automation. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. Great to have you on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>So what's happening at Puma these days? I love your sneakers, but you guys probably do more than that, but let's tell us about, give us the update on Puma. >>Yeah, absolutely. Puma's one of the world's leading sports, sports brands. So we encompass all things sports. We do footwear, we do apparel, we do accessories. Cobra, Puma golf is underneath our umbrella as well. So we get the added benefit of having that category as well. And yeah, trade, trade all over the world and it's an exciting, exciting brand to be with. >>And di Robo Atlanta based really specialists in intelligent automation. That's pretty much all you do, is that right? >>Yeah, we are a pure play intelligence automation professional services firm. That's all we do. We're the world's largest firm that focuses only on automation headquarter in Germany, but with a large presence here in Americas. >>So we hear from a lot of customers. We've heard from like with the journey it started, you know, mid last decade, Puma James is just getting started. We April you mentioned. So take us through that. What was the catalyst as you're exiting the, the pandemic, the isolation economy we call it? Yeah. What was the catalyst tell, take us through the sort of business case for automation. >>Sure, absolutely. So Puma, our mission is forever faster. It's, it's our mantra and something we live and breathe. So naturally we have an intense focus on innovation and, and automation. So with that mindset, the way this all kicked off is that I had the opportunity to go into some of our distribution facility and I was unbelievably impressed with the automation that I saw there. So how automation augmented the employee workforce. And it was just very impressive to see that some of our state of the art technology and automation at the same time. Then I went back to the office with that excitement and that passion and I saw that we had the opportunity to take that to our employee base as well. We sort of lacked that same intense focus on how do we take automation and technology like I saw at the distribution facilities and bring it to our employees because picture a large workforce of talented, dedicated employees and they just couldn't keep up with the explosive growth who's seen explosive growth over the last couple of years and they just couldn't keep up with it. So I said that that's it. We need to, to take that same passion and innovation and enter in hyper hyper automation. So we went to the leadership team and no surprise they were all in. We went with them with the idea of bringing hyper automation, starting with RPA to, to our office employees. And they were in, they support innovation and they said, Great, what do you need? Really? Go for it. >>The first question wasn't how much, >>Actually the first question I will say that the funny part is, is they said, Well I like this, it sounds too good to be true. And because it, it really does. If you're new to it like we were and I'm pitching all the benefits that RPA could bring, it does sound too good to me. True. So they said, All right, you know, we trust you and, and go for it. What do you need? Resources, just let us know. So sure enough, I had a proof of concept, I had an idea, but now what? I didn't know where to go from there. So that's where we did some intensive research into software suppliers, but also implementation partners because now we knew what we wanted to do. We had excitement, we had leadership buy-in now, now what do I do? So this is when we entered our partnership to figure out, okay, help Puma on this journey. >>How'd you guys find each other? You know, >>Just intensive research and spoke with a lot of people here. Is there a lot of great organizations? But at the end of the day, they really supported everything that Houma stood for, what we're looking to do and had a lot of trust in the beginning and Dirk and his team and how he could help us on this journey. Yeah. >>Now James, your, your job title system for supply chain management. It is, but I understand that you have had a variety of roles within the organization. Now if we're talking about another domain, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Yeah. There's always this concept of domain expertise. Yeah. And how when you're trying to automate things in that realm, domain expertise is critical. Yeah. You have domain expertise outside of your job title. Yeah. So has that helped you with this journey looking at automation, being able to, being able to have insight into those other organizations? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we were pitching it to the leadership team in the beginning, that enabled me to look at each one sitting at the table and saying, alright, and on the sales, on a commercial side, I was a head of sales for one of the trade channels. I could speak directly to him in the benefits it could have with not with tribal knowledge and with an expertise. So it wasn't something that, it was just, oh, that's supply chain. I could sit, you know, with the, our CFO and talk to him about the, the benefits for his group merchandising and legal so on. I was really able to kind of speak to each one of them and how it would support, because I had that knowledge from being blessed of 15 years experience at, at Puma. So yeah, I was able to take all of that and figure out how do I make sure not just supply chain benefits from rpa, but how does the whole organization benefit from not only RPA but the hyper automation strategy. >>So what's an engagement look like? You start, I presume you, you gotta do some type of assessment and, and you know, of some upfront planning work. Yeah. What does that look like? How, what's the starting point? Take us through that >>Journey. Yeah, so exactly. So the, the key when you're trying to get value from Intel automation is finding the right opportunities, right? And you can automate a lot of things, but which are the things that are gonna drive the most value and, and the value that actually matters to the company, right? So where are you trying to get to from a strategic level, your objectives and how do you actually use automation to help you get to there? So the first thing is, what are the opportunities gonna help you do that? And then once you identify, what we recommend is start with something that's gonna be, you know, accessible, small, You're gonna get a quick win. Cuz then the important thing is once you get that out there, you build the momentum and excitement in the organization that then leads to more and more. And then you build a proper pipeline and you and you get that the, the engagement. >>So what was that discovery like? Was it you fly up there and do a, a chalk talk? Or did you already know James, like where you wanted to focus? >>Yeah, I knew I had a solid proof of concept with the disruptions in supply chain we couldn't keep up with, with all the changes and supply. So right away I knew that I have a very substantial impact on the organization and it would be a solid proof of concept. It was something that not only would supply chain steal, but our customers would feel that we would be servicing them better. Our sales team, the commercial team, marketing impacted everybody. But at the same time it was tangible. I saw two people that just physically couldn't get their, their work done despite how talented and hardworking they were. So I, I was in on that proof of concept and then I just took that idea with some strong advice from Dirk and and his team on, okay, well how do I take that? But then also use that to evangelize through the organization. What are some pitfalls to avoid? Because as a proof of concept, they just told me it's too good to be true. I believe in it. So it was so important to me that it >>Was successful. >>It get your neck out. Oh, I sure was. Which is a little scary, but I had confidence that we would >>Do it. But your poc you had to have a systems view. Yes. Right? Cuz you were trying to, I think you, I'm inferring that you had two people working really hard, but they couldn't get their job done. Yeah, for sure. They were just sitting on their hands. Right. Waiting. Okay. So you kind of knew where the bottlenecks were. Yes. And that's what you attacked and or you helped James and her the team think through that or, >>Yeah, exactly. So, so a couple points you were asking about her domain model of knowledge earlier, and I think that's really key to the puma's success with it, is that they've come at it from a business point of view, what matters to the business. And at the point, you know, supply chain challenges, how do we use automation to address that? And then, you know, and then it's gonna, it's actually gonna, you know, pick opportunities that are gonna matter to the business. Yeah, >>Yeah. At the same time, we, we knew this could be a scary thing, right? If it's not done right, you know, automation definitely can, can take a, a wrong path. So what we relied on them for is tell us how to make this successful. We wanted structure, we wanted oversight, we wanted to balance that with speed and really, you know, developing our pipeline, but at the same time, tell us how to do this right? How do we set up a center, our first ever center of excellence? They help us set that up. Our steerco, our process definition documents are like, they really helped us add that structure to how to make this successful, sustainable and make sure that we were standing things up the right way versus launching into a strong proof, proof of concept. But then it's not gonna be scalable if we didn't really take their strong advice on how to make this something, you know, that had the right oversight, the right investment. So that was, that was key as >>Well for us. So when you looked at the POC and James was saying there were potential pitfalls, what were those pitfalls? Like what did you tell Puma, Hey, watch out for this, watch out for that. What was sort of the best advice there? >>Yeah, so I think one is understanding complexity, right? So a lot of opportunities sound good, but you want to make sure that it's, it's feasible with the right tool set. And also that you're not bit off too much in the beginning is really important. And so some of that is that bringing that expertise to say, Okay, yeah, look, that does something, a good process. You're gonna get value out. It's not gonna be overly complicated. It's a good place to start. And then also, I guess the thing too to mention is it's more than just a technology project. And that's the thing that we also really focus on is it's actually as much about the change management, it's much about, you know, what is the right story, the business case around it, the technology actually in a way is the easy part and it's all the stuff around it that really makes the POC effective, >>Obviously the process. Yeah. Been the people I presume getting to adopt, >>Right? And I think, again, with our, our brand mantra forever faster, we, we get that support that the buy-in from the top is is there from, from the beginning. So that's a benefit that some companies don't, they don't have, right? They have a little resistance maybe from the top. We're trying to get everyone's buy in it. And we had that. So we had, you know, the buy-in the engagement, we were ready to go. So now we just needed someone to kind of help us. >>One more if I may. Yeah, yeah. Gabe, six months in. Yes. That's the business impact that, can >>You tell you? That was tremendous. Yeah. >>Really already six months. Wow. >>Yeah, >>Absolutely. Cfo, CFO's dream. Yeah. >>And again, and, and we had a CFO change mid, mid project. So the new CFO comes in, not new to Puma, the same thing. Super, super smart guy. And I had to sit and again pitch, you know, pitch what it is and the support that I needed by way of investment. And he saw the results and he was all in, you know, what do you need, what's next? And instantly was challenging his departments, Why don't he got competitive, right? We're a competitive bunch, so why don't you know, you should have more in the pipeline. And he was, he was bought in. So there was that fear of a new CFO coming in and how do you show value? Because some of it is, it's very easy to show right away, You know, we were able to refocus those two full-time employees on, on higher value chain activity and you know, they're doing a tremendous job and they're, you know, they have the, the bot and the automation supporting them. So he saw that right away. And we can show him that. But he also understands, as does the whole leadership team, the concept of downstream impacts that you can't necessarily, you know, touch and, and put on paper. So he sees some, but then he also recognizes all the other upstream and downstream impacts that it's had and he's all in and supports whatever, whatever we need. >>Yeah. New CFOs like George Seaford taking over for bill walls. >>Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We >>Have, we have to keep showing results and it has to be sustainable. So that's, again, we'll rely on our partnership to say, okay, this is the beginning, you know, what's next? Keep us, you know, honest on oversight and, and any pitfalls that we should avoid because he's excited. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we sustain those results and, and show what's next. Now they all gotta taste to the apple and they're very eager to see what's next in, in, in this hyper automation journey. >>Well, Dirk, you've partnered on this journey, this specific journey with, with, with Puma. But from your perspective in the broader marketplace, what would be the perfect low hanging fruit opportunity that you would like to have somebody call you and say, Hey, we've got, we've got this perspective engagement with a client. What would be the, what would be the like, Oh yeah, that's easy, that's huge roi really quickly, What does that look like? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's a few areas, right? You know, one task automation RPA is a, is a really good entry point, right? Because it's, it's, it's not overly complex. It doesn't involve a lot of complicated technologies. And I'd say the, the usual starting areas, you know, you, you finance back office, you know, shared service, invoice processing, you know, payables is a very good opportunity area. HR is also an area I would look at, you know, in new, new employee onboarding process or you know, payroll, et cetera. And then supply chain is actually becoming more and more, more common, right? So those would be I guess, top three areas I would mention. And >>Then, and then kind of follow onto that, what's the tip of this sphere? What's the sort of emerging market Yeah. >>For >>This kind of technology? >>I think there's two things. One, it's taking a holistic into end view and leveraging multiple, you know, technology, you know, beyond just rpa, right? You know, intelligent document processing, iml, you know, bringing all this to bear to actually do a true digital transformation. That's, that's number one. And then I'd say the second is going from focusing on cost and efficiency to actually getting into the front office and how do you, how do you actually increase revenue? How do you increase margin? How do you actually, you know, help with that, that top line growth. I think that's really, and that's where you're leveraging technologies, you know, like the, the AI as an example to really help you understand how do you optimize. >>So James, that's, that becomes then an enterprise wide initiative. Yeah. That's, that's, is that your vision? Maybe maybe lay that out for >>Us a bit. Yeah, ab absolutely. The, the vision is now that we've seen what, what it can do, how do we take it from being managed by just, you know, supply chain and this proof of concept cuz I manage projects, but now it's bigger than just a supply chain project. And how do we sort of evangelize that through the whole organization And you know, they mentioned on main stage this, the creation of new jobs and, and roles and how a, a company might set out their strategic directive now is, is changing and evolving. So you know that that's our idea now and that what we'll need support next is how should we structure now for success. And so that it's across the whole enterprise. But that's, that's the vision for >>Sure. What worries you do, you worried about it like taking off and getting outta control and not being governed and so you have to be a little bit careful there. >>Yeah, for sure. That was really important to us. And we actually got to leverage a lot of heavy lifting that Puma Global had done at the same time that we were coming up and, and thinking of the idea of rpa. They were having the same thoughts and they did a lot of heavy lifting again, about not only the software providers but also what does the structure look like, the oversight, a center of excellence globally. So we were able to really leverage a lot of best practices and SOPs that they had set out and we were able to kind of leverage those, bring those to Puma North America so that we didn't face that fear cuz that would be a limiting factor for us. So because we were so disciplined and we could leverage the work that they had done, that fear wasn't, wasn't there. Now we have to stay, you know, on top of it. And as people get excited, how do you kind of mirror the excitement and with it at the same time that the oversight and not getting, you know, too, too big, too fast. So that's the balance that we'll, we'll work through now. It's a good problem to have. >>Well, exactly. It is super exciting. Great story. Congratulations on, on the success and good luck. Thank you. Yeah, you very much for coming to the, Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson Andante right back, the cube live from Las Vegas UI path forward. Five.

The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back at forward five UI Paths, Big customer event. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center, Dave Ante and David Nicholson. Javier Castanos is here. He's the Robot Factory director. How's that for a title for Orange ESP Spania. And he's joined by Niva Pillow, who is Senior Director of Telecommunications Industry at UiPath. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks for coming on, Javier. Just off the keynote, it was really amazing to see what you were doing with your dashboard, how much you've operationalized automation, you really far down the journey. But I wanna start with your title. I've never seen this before. Robot Factory director, that's unique. What is that all about? >>Yeah, the Robot Factory is our brand to create the RPA journey to involve all the company in this amazing story regarding automation, because for us, automation is only a piece of the digital transformation and the culture transformation for the employees. >>Your robot factory obviously builds robots. Yeah. For employees and employees build them as well. >>Yeah, both. We have two different ways to, to build robots. We have a citizen developer program with more than 500 and employees certified in UiPath technology, and they build a small robot for the daily task for avoid repetitive task, very board. And in the other hand we have the robot factory team automating the business. The core business processes very complex in the telco industry, you know, and both teams working together, the community of employees, the best ambassadors for to find new opportunities and for discovery for robots and the robot factory are automating real complex processes to impacting our customer satisfaction. >>So if a, if a, if a citizen developer develops a robot, does the factory then have to audit it and make sure it's governed? Or do you add a, maybe I'm not such a good developer. Do you make it better? How does that collaboration work? >>The good thing is with you at Pat, you don't need to be a tech guy. You, you can be a finance guy and every morning you need a report, create an Excel, create a graph, put in a power point and send to your box. And you can create by your own a robot doing that task and going to the bending to take a coffee in, in the meantime that the robot is working. And as soon as you discover in your domain a complex tax, you can call us and say, Hey guys, I need your job because we need to ize this process. You need traceability. And we have a big savings below the desk. It's not only my health, it's the area work. >>Now, Navage, you specialize in the telecommunications industry. Now of course, the telcos are going through a massive transformation. It's almost, I call it revenge. The, the telcos now they're coming back with 5g. It's gonna be a great new future. But what kind of patterns are you seeing in the industry for automation? >>Sure. Look, as you said, telecoms going through quite a transformational era. There's this huge demand for connectivity around the whole world, and that presents opportunities and some challenges. But the key areas of focus right now is really helping the telecom achieve their strategic goals. And they include the customer experience at the most significant point, and thereafter driving a few more efficiencies and improving the employee experience. But organizations like Orange, you know, they start with the customer experience. These are large areas, but they tend to be the patterns where we are really helping telecoms transform and deliver better outcomes. >>Javi, I'm I'm curious about the concept of the citizen developer. Now you said that they don't have to have a deep technical background and they may come from finance or other places, but how do you, how do you recruit these people? What's in it for them? I, I can understand automating a process that is repetitive, mundane, something they don't want to do. But is there ever a concern that they might be automating themselves out of a job? >>Yeah, the, the people use Dex Excel and 30 years ago, Dex Excel does not assist and change our work. Your iPad technology is more or less the same. It's changing the way that you are working with your desktop every morning. You can create for your daily task a robot by yourself and executing your corporate desktop. And then you can save this time or use to improve your satisfaction as employee. Because sometimes in, in, in this kind of companies, we have a telecommunications engineering with a lot of talent making repetitive task. And with this technology, you can use your talent only to improve the processes. So we train these people in Miami, the training is very easy. A robot enter on the web searching, Google make different search regarding prices on, on device creates an Excel and only in a few hours that kind of people that we have in all companies that very easy excel some macros and these kind of things is the people prepared to jump to the next step to the robotization. So in all areas, in all departments, there are people prepared. In our company, 500 people. >>I, I'd like to get into a little mini case study if we could, and understand orange esp Spania is way deep. You should see this dashboard that Javier showed. I mean it's amazing, I think you said 7 million euro business benefit so far to date. But you can slice it and dice it and look at a lot of different angles. But where did you get started? Did you get started? Was it a bottoms up? In other words, an individual started to automate on their desktop. Was it a top down? The, the, the CEO said this is, we're gonna automate. How did it, I mean I'm sure you get this question a lot nivo, but where did it start at Orange? >>Yeah. Our story is very linked with the finance department because the citizen developer are saving internal hours and transforming the employee satisfaction and improving the talent and the reskilling of the people. But in the other hand, from the efficiency point of view, if you look for, for the finance approach, what happened, we, we take one profit and now domain perhaps 80% of the process. And next month the invoice reduce because your external cost disappear because the robot is making the task is improving the satisfaction of the customers. Because sometimes we have a, a human back office or another kind of task. And the compliance, the, the SLAs, the, the, the delay on time with all the people disappear with the robots because the robots are working at night. We can and repeating the job, 1, 1 1. And every tracking of that task are controlled by finance. Because if you save in a transaction three minutes, when you multiply for a thousand, a thousand, thousand tasks, you save on real time, you can see how much money you are saving and making the the things better. Not only a question of money is a question of money, but a attempt below that the customer is, is taking better experience for us. >>Robots don't sleep Nova. >>I never, >>So you started in finance and how much have you gone permeated other parts of the organization? What other parts of the organization are adopting RPA and automation? Where are you on that journey? >>More or less? Our eight, nine hundred and fifty three FTS equivalent robots working okay's like a contact center. It's robots navigating through the user interface applications, making transactions for our customers. So when you put in the middle of your customer relation, you can transform all because if a human agent is making a very complex process for, because telco is a complex market and very fast, perhaps the robot can help the human agent saving time and taking advantage of that part of, of the operations. And at the end, the operation is short and the customer satisfaction is better. And we measure the MPAs, the net, the net promoter score. And when you combine human agents with robots, the satisfaction improve because the transaction is made on real time very fast and doesn't fail. >>Is this a common story nivas that you're seeing in Telco in terms of the, the starting points? Does it tend to be bottoms up? Does it more top down? What are you seeing in >>Look, it actually varies by telecom. You know, Orange started their journey with us four years ago. So companies that have started while they tend to start in finance or IT or, or hr, but the customer experience I think is the ultimate area where many telecoms focus and what Harvey Edge just shared is it doesn't matter if a customer's calling you through a contact center or reaching you through a chatbot. They want their issue resolved at the first point. And what the robots do is they integrate information from multiple sources and provide that data to the agent so you can actually resolve the issue. And that is the beautiful example of humans and robots working together. Because if you know what the data's telling you, if it's a billing issue and a customer's been been billed because they have gone overseas and used international roaming and they weren't aware that the contract had that as a leader or a person in a contact center, you can make the right decision quite often. It takes a long time to find the data, but in this way you can actually address the issue real time, first point of resolution. And we're seeing up to 60% increase in first time resolutions across telecoms, irrespective of whether it's a chat bot or a contact center or a service desk. >>That's key. I mean, that's as a, that's consumer, that's what you just want to get off the phone or you want to get off the chat notice. So I have to ask you, what would you say is your secret to success? >>The secret is to be transparent with the organization, serve the savings and put on the table. We put on the table to the finance guys every month, all the robots that we put in production the month before and it's finance will declare officially the savings for each robot. As soon as you reach this, the credibility appear because it's not the robot factory team telling Aren, saving a lot of money of the company. No, no. It's the finance guys that trust on you. And as soon as you ask more money to buy more license or to improve the processes on whatever finance say, okay, these guys, as soon as we invest money in robots, we obtain twice or three times more by savings and they are improving not only for the quantity point of view, the quality is improving too. Because when you, a brief example, when you have a wifi problem connection and you call to our contact center, there is an ecosystem for more than 25 robots working from the beginning of your call, testing your line and making decisions. If we are going to send you a new router or you have a connectivity problem or, and the robot decide of, we are going to send to you a new install at your home and then the human manage you and take the conversation. But all the decisions are made by robots. So it's very powerful from the point of view of customer satisfaction. >>So what I'm hearing is you started four years ago. Yeah. And it, it, the ROI for your first instantiation was very fast, I presume inside of 12 months or what was the, how fast did you get a return with >>In the first three months we developed 25 robots and we saved more than 1 million to the company in three >>Months. In three months. Okay. So it was self-funding. >>Yeah. >>Right. You took that million dollars and you said, Okay, let's double down on that. Let's do it again. Do it again. Do it >>Again. It's only a question of resources and budget and only companies wants to create robots, but sometimes big companies only put on that one people to people. From the beginning of our story, we put 13 people and a budget. So if you have resources, the things happen be because the process are very accomplished. Sometimes you start one process. Sometimes our block, and we started at the beginning, a lot of process and imagine in telco we developed 900 processes, but every day we have a new opportunity for discovery. So I, I think the scalability is, is, is a challenge, but it's very, is possible if you put people and money >>And we, we focused on, we talk a lot in, in, in the broader IT world about the edge. And so I sort of think of these citizen developers as living at the edge. Part of your robot factory is at the core of the enterprise also. Is that, is that correct? Yes. >>Yes. >>Now what, what is, what has that looked like in terms of ROI cycles and development cycles? What kinds of projects do you work on at the core that are, that are different than what citizen soldiers are doing at the edge? >>Yeah. When, when we need to apply a discount or change your taif or switch on your bonus or your voicemail, that kind of transactions with impacting customers are made by the robot factory with robots made by the robot factory team. With a big traceability. With a big security because okay, with, with human awake the robot, we need to, to make a traceability because we have thousand of agents in the contact center working with robots and we have a lot of security disability and these kind of things. But in the other hand, internally we have a lot of task and a lot of processes for the citizen developers. There are very important tasks for the employee, perhaps not impacting in, in final customers, but we combine both. Because if you only work in one way, the citizen developer are making a lot of savings in terms of internal hours, but it's not real money. But in the other hand, you have the robot factory business processes impacting the money, combining both, you obtain the most powerful tool because the ambassadors, the, the, the employees are discovering you new opportunities. >>Last question, Javier, Why did you choose UiPath? What were the determining factors four years ago? >>Yeah, we, we were researching a lot in the market, but UiPath is pretty easy. You don't need to be an IT guy. People from, from customer care, people from finance in every areas. We have a lot of people learning this, this technology because it's easy, intuitive and very nice from the point of view of look and field. >>This a common story. This is really, we've reported on this a lot. This is how you UiPath really was able to get its foothold in the marketplace because of the simplicity. If you look at the legacy tools and even some of the modern tools, they were a lot more complicated. Now of course, UiPath is expanding its platform. So thank you very much. Don't welcome. Thank, thanks for coming. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. All right, you, you're gonna hear a lot of customer stories cuz that's what UI path brings in the cube. Proof is in the pudding. We right back at forward five from Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's coverage here. Monaco took a trip all the way out here to cover the Monaco crypto summit. I'm John feer, host of the cube, a lot of action happening presented by digital bits and this ecosystem that's coming together, building on top of digital bits and other blockchains to bring value at the application. These new app, super apps are emerging. Almost every category's gonna be decentralized. This is our opinion and the world believes it. And they're here as well. We've got Oscar ballet CEO co-founder of Agora verse ago is a shopping metaverse coming out soon. We'll get the dates, Oscar. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>We were just talking before you came on camera. You're a young gun, young entrepreneur. You're a gamer. Yeah, a little bit too old to miss the eSports windows. You said, you know, like 25. It's great until that's you missed the window. I wish I was 25 gaming the pandemic with remote work, big tailwind acceleration around the idea of this new digital VI virtual hybrid world. We're living in where people want to have experiences that are similar to physical and virtual. You're doing something really cool around shopping. Yeah. Take a explain. What's going on when the, I know it's not out yet. It's in preview. Yeah. Take a minute to explain. >>Absolutely. So a goers really is a way to create those online storefront environments, virtual environments that are really much inspired by video games in their usage and kind of how the experience goes forward. We want to recreate the brand's theme, aesthetic storytelling or the NFT project as well. All of that created in a virtual setting, which is way more interesting than looking at a traditional webpage. And also you can do some crazy stuff that you can't do in real life, in a real life store, you know, with some crazy effects and lighting and stuff. So it's, it's a whole new frontier that we are trying to cover. And we believe that there is a real use case for shopping centric S experiences and to actually make the S a bit more than a buzzword than that. It is at the moment. >>Okay. So a Agora is the shopping. Metaverse a Agora verse is the company name and product name. You're on the Solona blockchain. Got my notes here, but I gotta ask you, I mean, people are trying to do this right now. We see a lot of high end clients like Microsoft showroom, showroom vibes. Yeah. Not so much. E-commerce per se, but more like the big, I mean it's low hanging fruit. Yeah. How do you guys compare to some other apps out there? Other metaverses? >>I think compared to the bigger companies, we are way more flexible and we can act way more quickly than they can. They still have a lot of ground to cover. And a lot of convincing to do with their communities of users metaverse is not really the most popular topic at the moment. It's still very much kind of looked at as a trend, as something that is just passing and they have to deal with this community interaction that is not really favorable for them. There are other questions about the metaverse that are not being talked about as often, but the ecological costs, for example, of running a metaverse like Facebook envisions it, of running those virtual headsets, running those environments. It's very costy on, on, on the ecological side of things and it's not as often mentioned. And I think that's actually their biggest challenge. >>Can you get an example for folks that don't are in the weeds on that? What's the what's what do you mean by that? The cost of build the headsets? Is it the >>Servers? It's more of the servers, really? You need to run a lot of servers, which is really costly on the environment and environmental questions are at the center of public debates. Anyways, and companies have to play that game as well. So they will have to find kind of this balance between, well, building this cool metaverse, but doing it in an ecological friendly manner as well. I think that's their toughest challenge. >>And what's your solution just using the blockchain? Well, an answer to that, cause some people say, Hey, that's not that's, that's not. So eco-friendly either, >>That's part of it. And it's also part of why we're choosing an ecosystem such as Lana as a starter. It's not limited to only Salana, but Salala is, is known as a blockchain. That is very much ecological. Inclined transactions are less polluting. And definitely this problem is, is tackled in the fact that we are offering this product on a case by case scenario brands come to us, we build this environment and we run something that is proper to them. So the scale of it is also way less important that what Facebook is trying to build. >>Yeah. They're trying to build the all encompassing. Yeah. All singing old dancing, as we say system, and then they're not getting a lot of luck. They just got slammed dunked this week on the news, I saw the, you know, FTC moved against them on the acquisition of the exercise app. >>It's it's a tough, it's a tough battle for them. Let's say they >>Still have, they got a headwind. I wouldn't say tailwind. They broke democracy. So they gotta pay for it. Right. Exactly. I always say definitely revenge going on there. I'm not a big fan of what they did. The FTC. I think that's bad move. They shouldn't block acquisitions, but they do buy, they don't really build much. That's well documented. Facebook really hasn't built anything except for Facebook. That's right. Mean what's the one thing Facebook has done besides Facebook. >>I mean, >>It's everything they've tried is failed except for Facebook. Yeah. >>So we'll see what's going on with the Methodist side. >>Well, so successful, not really one trick bony. Yeah. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp, you know, and not really successful. >>That's true. They do have the, the means though, to maybe become successful with something. So >>You're walking out there, John just said, Facebook's not successful. I meant they don't. They have a one product company. They use their money to buy everything. Yeah. And that's some people don't like that, but anyway, the startups like to get bought out. Yeah. Okay. So let's get back to the metaverse it's coming out is the business model to build for others. Are you gonna have a system for users? What's what's the approach? How do you, how are we view viewing this? What's the, the business you're going after? >>So we are very much a B2B type of service where we can create custom kind of tailor made virtual environments for brands, where we dedicate our team to building those environments, which has been what we have been at the start to really kickstart the initiative. But we're also developing the tool that will allow antibody to develop their own shop themselves, using what we give them to do something kind of like the Sims for those that know, building their environment and building their shop, which will they, they, they will then be to put online and for anybody of their user base customers to have a look at. So it's, it's kind of, yeah, the tailor made experience, but also the more broader experience where we want to create this tool, develop this tool, make it accessible to the public with a subscription based model where any individual that has an idea and maybe a product that is interesting for the metaverse be able to create this virtual storefront and upload it directly. >>How long does it take to build an environment? Let's say I was, I wanna do a cube. Yeah. I go to a lot of venues all around the world. Yeah. MOSCON and San Francisco, the San convention center in Las Vegas, we're here in Monaco. How do I replicate these environments? Do I call you up and say, Hey, I need some artists. Do you guys render it? What's the take us through the process. >>Yeah. It's, it's basically a case by case scenario at the moment, very much. We're working with our partners that find brands that are interested in getting into the metaverse and we then design the shops. Well, it depends on the brands. Some have a really clear idea of what they want. Some are a bit more open to it and they're like, well, we have this and this, can you build something? >>I mean, I mean, I can see the apple store saying, Hey, you know, they're pretty standard apple stores. You got cases of iWatches. Yeah. I mean that's easily to, replicateable probably good ROI for them. >>Exactly. It's it's is that what you're thinking? Their team. Exactly. Yeah. It depends. And we, we want to add a layer of something cuz just replicating the store simply. Yeah. It's it's maybe not as interesting, you know, it just, oh, okay. I'm in the store. It's white, everywhere. It's apple. Right. It's like, oh I'm in at the dentist, but we want to add some video game elements to the, to those experiences. But very subtle ones, ones that won't make you feel, oh, I'm playing one of these games, you know? It's yeah. Very supple. >>You can, you can jump into immersive experience as defined by the brand. Yeah. I mean the brand will control the values. So you're say apple and you're at the iWatch table. Yeah. You could have a digital assistant pop in there with an avatar. Exactly. You can jump down a rabbit hole and say, Hey, I want this iWatch. I'm a bike mountain biker. For example, I could get experience of mountain biking with my watch on I fall off, ambulance sticks me up. I mean, all these things that they advertise is what goes >>On. Yeah. And we can recreate these experiences and what they're advertising and into a more immersive experience is what we're trying to our, our goal is to create experiences. We know that, you know, why does someone is someone spend so much at Disneyland? It's like triple the price of whatever, because you know, it's Mickey mouse around you. It's, that's the experience that comes around. And often the experience is more important than the product. Sometimes >>It's hard. It's really hard to get that first class citizen experience with the event or venue physical. Yeah. Which is a big challenge. I know the metaverse are gonna try to solve this. So I gotta ask you what's your vision on solving that? Okay. Cause that's the holy grail. That's what we're talking about here. Yeah. I got a physical event or place. I wanna replicate it in the metaverse but create that just as good first party citizen like experience. >>Yeah. I mean that's the whole event event type of business side of the metaverse is also a huge one. It's one that we are choosing to tackle after the e-commerce one. But it's definitely something that has been asked a lot by the brands where like we want to create, like, we want to release this store for an event that is in real life, but we want to make it accessible to the largest number. That's why we saw with Fortnite as well. All those events, the fashion week in the central land. And >>Sand's a Cub in the Fortnite too. >>There you go. And so the, the event aspect is super important and we want those meta shops to be places where a brand can organize an event. Let's say they want to make the entrance paid. They can do an NFD for that if they want. And then they have to, the user has to connect the NFD to access the event with an idea. Right. But that's definitely possible. And that's how we leverage blockchain as well with those companies and say, you know, you're not familiar with >>This method. You're badging, you know, you're the gaming where we were talking earlier. Yeah. Badging and credentials and access methods. A tech concept can be easily forwarded to NFTs. Yeah, >>Exactly. Exactly. And brands are interested in that. >>Sure. Of course. Yeah. By being the NFT. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I gotta ask you the origination story. Take me through the, the, how this all started. Yeah. Was it a seat of an idea you and your friends get together? Yeah. It was an it scratch. And when you're really into this, what's the origination story and where you're at now. >>So we started off in January really with a, quite a, a different idea. It was called the loft business club. It's an NFT collection on the Salina blockchain. And the whole idea beyond it is that NFT holders would have access to their virtual apartments that we called the lofts. It got very popular. We got a really big following at the start. It was really the trend back in January, February. And we managed to, to sell out successfully the whole collection of 5,000 NFTs. And yeah, we started as a group of friends, really like-minded friends from my hometown in, in, met in France who are today, the co-founders and the associates with different backgrounds. Leo has the marketing side of things. A club has the 3d designing. We had all our different skills coming into it. Obviously my English was quite helpful as well cause French people in English it's, it's not often the best French English. Yeah. And I was, the COO has been doing amazing on the kind of the serious stuff. You know, the taxis lawyers >>Operational to all of trains running on time. >>Exactly >>Sure. People get their jobs done. >>Yeah, exactly. So >>It's well too long of a lunch cuz you know, French would take what, two hour lunches. Yeah. You >>Have to enjoy it. Yeah. >>Coffee and stuff. That's wine, you know about creative, >>But yeah, it's, it's a friend stuff that started as a, as a passion project and got so quick. And today I'm here talking to you in this setting. It's like, >>You're pretty excited. >>I mean it's super excited. It's such a we're you know, we feel like we're building something that's new and our developer team, we're now a team of 15 in total with developers based in Paris, mostly. And everybody is, is feeling like, you know, they're contributing to something new and that's, what's exciting about it. You know, it's something that's not really done or it's trying to be done, but nobody really knows the way >>It's pioneering days. But the, but the pandemic has shifted the culture faster because people like certainly the gen Zs are like, I don't wanna reuse that old stuff. Yeah. And, but they still want to go to like games or events or go to stores. Yeah. But once to go to a store, I mean, I go to apple store all the time where I live in Palo Alto, California. And it's like, yeah, I love that store. And I know it by heart. I don't, I don't have to go there. Yeah. Walking into the genius bar virtually I get the same job done. Yeah, >>Exactly. That's that's what we want to do. And the other pandemic is just it's it's been all about improving, you know, people's condition, life conditions at home, I think. And that's what kind of boosted the whole metaverse conversation and Facebook really grabbing onto it as well. It's just that people were stuck at home and for gamers, that's fine. We used to be stuck at home playing video games all day. Yeah. We survived the pandemic fine. But for other people it was a bit more of a new >>Experience. Well, Oscar, one of the cool things is that you said like mind you and your founding team, always the secret to success. But now you see a lot of old guys like me and gals coming in too, your smart people are like-minded they get it. Especially ones that have seen the ways before, when you have this kind of change, it's a cultural shift and technology shift and business model shift at the same time. Yeah. And to me there's gonna be chaos, but at the end of the day, >>I mean there's fun and >>Chaos. That's opportunity. There's a fun and fun and opportunity. >>It's fun and chaos, you know, and yeah. Likeminded people and the team has really been the driving factor with our company. We are all very much excited about what we're doing and it's been driving us forward. >>Well, keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the cube and sharing, sharing a story with us in the world. We really appreciate we'll keep in touch with you guys. Do love what you do. Oscar ballet here inside the cube Argo verse eCommerce shop. The beginning of this wave is happening. The convergence of physical virtual is a hybrid mode. It's a steady state. It is not gonna go away. It's only gonna get bigger, more cooler, more relevant than ever before. Cube covering it like a blanket here in Monaco, crypto summit. I'm John furrier. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here covering day three, HPE Discover 2022, it's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, great to see you face to face, it's been a while. >> Same here, last couple of years, we were all virtual. >> Yeah, that's right. So we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog fooding, everybody likes to course correct and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne, is it really that pretty? >> It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. >> Right, take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys, obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role and your team but now you've got GreenLake coming in and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022 everything will be as a service and then everything went remote, VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? >> Yeah, so from business perspective, that's a great point to start that, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be Everything-as-a-Service company and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID. But guess what? So many businesses became digital and as-a-service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are Everything-as-a-Service. So great from business perspective but, when I look at our own transformation, behind the scene, what IT has been busy with and we haven't caught a breadth because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE, edge to cloud platform as a service company. >> You know, I saw a survey, I referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was been by Couchbase, it was a CIO survey, so they asked, who was responsible at your organization for the digital transformation? And overwhelming, like 75% said, CIO, which surprised me 'cause, you know, in line with the business and so forth but in fact I thought, well, maybe, because of the forced march to digital that's what was top of their mind, so who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation? Describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot but, end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful and COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions time if you Google it but, CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one and it wasn't about doing digital which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as-a-service company. >> So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability and I've made the comment that, if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill, that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much and that's completely changed, why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your your peers think about energy costs today? >> Yeah, so, at some point look, ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boards are becoming aware of it. If you look at 2-4% of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure, as part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it which runs on a GreenLake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure but, we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency, by 2020 if you have achieved three times, the plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where, infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multifold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with GreenLake type implementations, demand from your hyperscaler to provide that, what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure, second piece is, we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data, provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting a mission through their products and how can they make it better going forward, and that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. >> You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up 'cause I was going to bring that up in another top track here, data as an asset now is at play, so I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in, but as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call microscale, Amazon for instance, and you got on-premises data center, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane, and then the control plane and the data plane are always seem to be like the battle ground, I want to control the data plane, will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning, so data plane control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware, what's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? >> Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently, or even our partner, SAP, when they talk about RISE, data center and how I host my application infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So, if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it and our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities and today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important, and at HPE, we have achieved it, there are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP, so all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place and they can drive their day to day business with that, but longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight comes from a integrated data platform, which I have control of, and you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databox, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive the data. >> So data's a crown jewel then, it's crown jewel not-- >> Can we double-click on that because, okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context that we've kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic, and so you, right, I think correctly noted Rashmi that, we are creating all these stove pipes. Now, think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stove pipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge I think for data. >> It is challenge and I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world but, I have dealt with data long enough, the value lies in how do I take control of all stove pipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles, that data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from, because they need a playground because all the answers they don't have, on the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right? It'll happen, but on the fore site side and deeper insight side based on driving the key metrics, two challenges; understanding what's the key metrics in KPI, but the second is, how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation and we need to drive towards that path. >> As a business, you know, line of business person putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure and I want to have access to the data that I need, I know what metrics I need to run my business so now I want the technology to be just a technical detail, you take care of that and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else and that maybe is your responsibility, so how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right, how do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then, that's why I say my sons are data scientist, by the way, I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge, and that's where the talent, which is very hard to find who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies and pushing businesses to, because, you know, business is messy, I've worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen and pricing or chargeback, rebates, all that things, if somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang I know it all, but finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word, governance, to make sure your source is right and then creating that conform layer then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics is extreme. >> And then bringing that to the ecosystem, now I just made it 10 times more complicated. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation, we on theCUBE interview one time we're talking about the old software days where shrink-wrap software be on the shelf, you wouldn't know if was successful until you looked at the sales data, well after the fact, now everything's instrumented, SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is, either people like it or they don't, the data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything, your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? >> Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as-a-service business, right? Infosite, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it it's all HPE GreenLake, but now this gives us the opportunity to really be a alongside customer. It's no more, I sold a box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh, now we are in touch with our customer real time through Telemetry data that's coming from our products and really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where, marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer360, right? Data is locked in Salesforce from opportunity, leads, codes perspective, and then real time orders are locked in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip whats the install base look like, how much business that we did and the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? >> Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to touch on machine learning, which basically feeds AI, machine learning, AI go together, it's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and earlier you said the data lake promise hasn't come back, is it data meshes? What is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? >> Yeah, so, machine learning and AI, I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So, the point is that, if we talk about federated data lake around one capability which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around, how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics, I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago, where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it, that's where we want to go. And I completely agree, it ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly. >> Last question, what's your number one challenge right now in this post isolation world? >> Talent, we haven't talked about that, right? >> Got to get that out there. >> All these promises, right, the entire end to end foundational transformation, as-a-service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics, we talked about governance and security, all that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have, and our ability to attract and retain them. So as CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, CEO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience and what we call everything is edge for us, so edge to office initiative where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities, people are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing, so, hybrid working capability, hiring the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose, and being honest about it means I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio, who opens up his keynote for this type of convention, with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. >> Awesome, Rashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face to face, such a clear thinker in bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. >> Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having-- >> All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett, from HPE discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE. 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>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to theCube's continuous coverage HPE Discover 2022 and from Las Vegas the formerly Sands Convention Center now Venetian, John Furrier and Dave Vellante here were excited to welcome in Jen Huffstetler. Who's the Chief product Sustainability Officer at Intel Jen, welcome to theCube thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> You're really welcome. So you dial back I don't know, the last decade and nobody really cared about it but some people gave it lip service but corporations generally weren't as in tune, what's changed? Why has it become so top of mind? >> I think in the last year we've noticed as we all were working from home that we had a greater appreciation for the balance in our lives and the impact that climate change was having on the world. So I think across the globe there's regulations industry and even personally, everyone is really starting to think about this a little more and corporations specifically are trying to figure out how are they going to continue to do business in these new regulated environments. >> And IT leaders generally weren't in tune cause they weren't paying the power bill for years it was the facilities people, but then they started to come together. How should leaders in technology, business tech leaders, IT leaders, CIOs, how should they be thinking about their sustainability goals? >> Yeah, I think for IT leaders specifically they really want to be looking at the footprint of their overall infrastructure. So whether that is their on-prem data center, their cloud instances, what can they do to maximize the resources and lower the footprint that they contribute to their company's overall footprint. So IT really has a critical role to play I think because as you'll find in IT, the carbon footprint of the data center of those products in use is actually it's fairly significant. So having a focus there will be key. >> You know compute has always been one of those things where, you know Intel's been makes chips so that, you know heat is important in compute. What is Intel's current goals? Give us an update on where you guys are at. What's the ideal goal in the long term? Where are you now? You guys always had a focus on this for a long, long time. Where are we now? Cause I won't say the goalpost of changed, they're changing the definitions of what this means. What's the current state of Intel's carbon footprint and overall goals? >> Yeah, no thanks for asking. As you mentioned, we've been invested in lowering our environmental footprint for decades in fact, without action otherwise, you know we've already lowered our carbon footprint by 75%. So we're really in that last mile. And that is why when we recently announced a very ambitious goal Net-Zero 2040 for our scope one and two for manufacturing operations, this is really an industry leading goal. And partly because the technology doesn't even exist, right? For the chemistries and for making the silicon into the sand into, you know, computer chips yet. And so by taking this bold goal, we're going to be able to lead the industry, partner with academia, partner with consortia, and that drive is going to have ripple effects across the industry and all of the components in semiconductors. >> Is there a changing definition of Net-Zero? What that means, cause some people say they're Net-Zero and maybe in one area they might be but maybe holistically across the company as it becomes more of a broader mandate society, employees, partners, Wall Street are all putting pressure on companies. Is the Net-Zero conversation changed a little bit or what's your view on that? >> I think we definitely see it changing with changing regulations like those coming forth from the SEC here in the US and in Europe. Net-Zero can't just be lip service anymore right? It really has to be real reductions on your footprint. And we say then otherwise and even including in our supply chain goals what we've taken new goals to reduce, but our operations are growing. So I think everybody is going through this realization that you know, with the growth, how do we keep it lower than it would've been otherwise, keep focusing on those reductions and have not just renewable credits that could have been bought in one location and applied to a different geographical location but real credible offsets for where the the products manufactured or the computes deployed. >> Jen, when you talk about you've reduced already by 75% you're on that last mile. We listened to Pat Gelsinger very closely up until recently he was the number one most frequently had on theCube guest. He's been busy I guess. But as you apply that discipline to where you've been, your existing business and now Pat's laid out this plan to increase the Foundry business how does that affect your... Are you able to carry through that reduction to, you know, the new foundries? Do you have to rethink that? How does that play in? >> Certainly, well, the Foundry expansion of our business with IBM 2.0 is going to include the existing factories that already have the benefit of those decades of investment and focus. And then, you know we have clear goals for our new factories in Ohio, in Europe to achieve goals as well. That's part of the overall plan for Net-Zero 2040. It's inclusive of our expansion into Foundry which means that many, many many more customers are going to be able to benefit from the leadership that Intel has here. And then as we onboard acquisitions as any company does we need to look at the footprint of the acquisition and see what we can do to align it with our overall goals. >> Yeah so sustainable IT I don't know for some reason was always an area of interest to me. And when we first started, even before I met you, John we worked with PG&E to help companies get rebates for installing technologies that would reduce their carbon footprint. >> Jen: Very forward thinking. >> And it was a hard thing to get, you know, but compute was the big deal. And there were technologies and I remember virtualization at the time was one and we would go in and explain to the PG&E engineers how that all worked. Cause they had metrics and that they wanted to see, but anyway, so virtualization was clearly one factor. What are the technologies today that people should be paying, flash storage was another one. >> John: AI's going to have a big impact. >> Reduce the spinning disk, but what are the ones today that are going to have an impact? >> Yeah, no, that's a great question. We like to think of the built in acceleration that we have including some of the early acceleration for virtualization technologies as foundational. So built in accelerated compute is green compute and it allows you to maximize the utilization of the transistors that you already have deployed in your data center. This compute is sitting there and it is ready to be used. What matters most is what you were talking about, John that real world workload performance. And it's not just you know, a lot of specsmanship around synthetic benchmarks, but AI performance with the built in acceleration that we have in Xeon processors with the Intel DL Boost, we're able to achieve four X, the AI performance per Watts without you know, doing that otherwise. You think about the consolidation you were talking about that happened with virtualization. You're basically effectively doing the same thing with these built in accelerators that we have continued to add over time and have even more coming in our Sapphire Generation. >> And you call that green compute? Or what does that mean, green compute? >> Well, you are greening your compute. >> John: Okay got it. >> By increasing utilization of your resources. If you're able to deploy AI, utilize the telemetry within the CPU that already exists. We have customers KDDI in Japan has a great Proofpoint that they already announced on their 5G data center, lowered their data center power by 20%. That is real bottom line impact as well as carbon footprint impact by utilizing all of those built in capabilities. So, yeah. >> We've heard some stories earlier in the event here at Discover where there was some cooling innovations that was powering moving the heat to power towns and cities. So you start to see, and you guys have been following this data center and been part of the whole, okay and hot climates, you have cold climates, but there's new ways to recycle energy where's that cause that sounds very Sci-Fi to me that oh yeah, the whole town runs on the data center exhaust. So there's now systems thinking around compute. What's your reaction to that? What's the current view on re-engineering a system to take advantage of that energy or recycling? >> I think when we look at our vision of sustainable compute over this horizon it's going to be required, right? We know that compute helps to solve society's challenges and the demand for it is not going away. So how do we take new innovations looking at a systems level as compute gets further deployed at the edge, how do we make it efficient? How do we ensure that that compute can be deployed where there is air pollution, right? So some of these technologies that you have they not only enable reuse but they also enable some you know, closing in of the solution to make it more robust for edge deployments. It'll allow you to place your data center wherever you need it. It no longer needs to reside in one place. And then that's going to allow you to have those energy reuse benefits either into district heating if you're in, you know Northern Europe or there's examples with folks putting greenhouses right next to a data center to start growing food in what we're previously food deserts. So I don't think it's science fiction. It is how we need to rethink as a society. To utilize everything we have, the tools at our hand. >> There's a commercial on the radio, on the East Coast anyway, I don't know if you guys have heard of it, it's like, "What's your one thing?" And the gentleman comes on, he talks about things that you can do to help the environment. And he says, "What's your one thing?" So what's the one thing or maybe it's not just one that IT managers should be doing to affect carbon footprint? >> The one thing to affect their carbon footprint, there are so many things. >> Dave: Two, three, tell me. >> I think if I was going to pick the one most impactful thing that they could do in their infrastructure is it's back to John's comment. It's imagine if the world deployed AI, all the benefits not only in business outcomes, you know the revenue, lowering the TCO, but also lowering the footprint. So I think that's the one thing they could do. If I could throw in a baby second, it would be really consider how you get renewable energy into your computing ecosystem. And then you know, at Intel, when we're 80% renewable power, our processors are inherently low carbon because of all the work that we've done others have less than 10% renewable energy. So you want to look for products that have low carbon by design, any Intel based system and where you can get renewables from your grid to ask for it, run your workload there. And even the next step to get to sustainable computing it's going to take everyone, including every enterprise to think differently and really you know, consider what would it look like to bring renewables onto my site? If I don't have access through my local utility and many customers are really starting to evaluate that. >> Well Jen its great to have you on theCube. Great insight into the current state of the art of sustainability and carbon footprint. My final question for you is more about the talent out there. The younger generation coming in I'll say the pressure, people want to work for a company that's mission driven we know that, the Wall Street impact is going to be financial business model and then save the planet kind of pressure. So there's a lot of talent coming in. Is there awareness at the university level? Is there a course where can, do people get degrees in sustainability? There's a lot of people who want to come into this field what are some of the talent backgrounds of people learning or who might want to be in this field? What would you recommend? How would you describe how to onboard into the career if they want to contribute? What are some of those factors? Cause it's not new, new, but it's going to be globally aware. >> Yeah well there certainly are degrees with focuses on sustainability maybe to look at holistically at the enterprise, but where I think the globe is really going to benefit, we didn't really talk about the software inefficiency. And as we delivered more and more compute over the last few decades, basically the programming languages got more inefficient. So there's at least 35% inefficiency in the software. So being a software engineer, even if you're not an AI engineer. So AI would probably be the highest impact being a software engineer to focus on building new applications that are going to be efficient applications that they're well utilizing the transistor that they're not leaving zombie you know, services running that aren't being utilized. So I actually think-- >> So we got a program in assembly? (all laughing) >> (indistinct), would get really offended. >> Get machine language. I have to throw that in sorry. >> Maybe not that bad. (all laughing) >> That's funny, just a joke. But the question is what's my career path. What's a hot career in this area? Sustainability, AI totally see that. Anything else, any other career opportunities you see or hot jobs or hot areas to work on? >> Yeah, I mean, just really, I think it takes every architect, every engineer to think differently about their design, whether it's the design of a building or the design of a processor or a motherboard we have a whole low carbon architecture, you know, set of actions that are we're underway that will take to the ecosystem. So it could really span from any engineering discipline I think. But it's a mindset with which you approach that customer problem. >> John: That system thinking, yeah. >> Yeah sustainability designed in. Jen thanks so much for coming back in theCube, coming on theCube. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> All right. Dave Vellante for John Furrier, we're sustaining theCube. We're winding down day three, HPE Discover 2022. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hello, everybody. Welcome to day three of the Cube's coverage of HPE discover 2022 we're live from Las Vegas and the Venetian convention center. This is I, I counted him up. I think this is the 14th HP HP slash HPE. Discover that we've done really excited to welcome in Alexia Clements. She's the vice president of go to market for HPE GreenLake cloud services. That's all the rage everybody's talking about. Green, all the wood behind the arrow, as the saying goes, welcome to the queue. Good to see >>You. Thank you so much for having me thrilled to be here. >>You walk up Janet Jackson last night, >>Epic. Wow. She killed it. She was awesome. >>I thought the band was super tight, but the other thing was the place was >>Packed. It was >>Nice. You know, what happens is a lot of time they put the band in the getaway day, you know, and nobody stays, but wow, the, the hall was jammed. >>It was great. It was, you could feel the momentum and the excitement. And it was just a great way to, to kind of end the, the HP discover. So it was great. >>Yeah. I mean, I, I mentioned that we've been to a lot of HP slash HPE discovers and, and this one was different in the sense that I think first of all, 8,000 people, yep. People are excited to get back together, but I think, you know, HPE has a spring in its step and the customers are kind of interested. It's much more focused than some of the past HPE discoverers, which was kind of hard to get my hands around. Sometimes the business was sort of an Antonio's pulled that together. So what's changed since the last time we were face to face. >>We're transforming and hope you all saw that on the, on the floor here. So, um, we're absolutely trans going through a transformation and, you know, I, I think we're, you know, we're shifting to an edge to cloud platform company. And with that, it's, it's how we approach our customers differently and our partners and, you know, we're hoping that, uh, we showed this week and that, that we're different and we're transforming. >>So how do you spend your time Mo mostly in front of customers having conversations about what, what their needs are and aligning is that right? >>Yeah. So, um, I, I lead the, the go to market for GreenLake. So that's everything around how we're driving our as a service go to market strategy, how we're driving programs, enablement, how we're really in the end, how we're executing on that as a service strategy from a sales perspective. >>So what do you hear? Of course, a lot of that involves partners. Yep. Right. I mean, that's kind of the route to market. Absolutely. The HPE prefers for obvious reasons, although others don't necessarily share that, but, but, so what are you hearing from the partner ecosystem and the customers that their biggest challenges are now that we're entering the let's call it the post isolation economy? <laugh> >>Yeah. I mean, the reality is, is digital transformations are hard and I think some customers, um, who haven't necessarily moved forward on it or, you know, maybe they move forward and they're realizing, Hey, I'm stuck and I'm not, I'm not getting to where I wanna be and really, you know, driving that end state. So, I mean, I, I would just say overall, I think things are like, customers are, are struggling if they didn't, you know, they're falling behind a little bit. And I think through the conversations that we're having and through HP green, like it gives customers choice. And so really, um, I mean, what, you know, I spend my time with, and, and when we're talking to customers and partners, it's about helping customers on that digital transformation journey and understanding what are they trying to drive? What business outcomes are they trying to drive and how we can help them get there. So >>I, I often call it the force March to digital yep. With the pandemic. Um, and, and I, I was looking at a survey recently, I think it was put on by couch base. And it was probably on a thousand respondents and it was a CIO survey and they asked who's, who's responsible for the digital transformation at the organization and overwhelmingly it was the it organization. And I said, uhoh, that's the problem now. But it made sense to me because when the economy shut down, everybody went to it and said help, right. Make this work somehow. Right. But, but what, that doesn't seem to me to be the right prescription for a successful digital transformation. Do you agree with that? And what do you see as a successful template for DX? >>Well, I think what, what we see is that really the lines of business are desperate to move fast and they're really looking for their it partners to help them in that journey and, and, and drive, you know, whether it be, you know, drive them, you know, drive orders, drive, you know, they need it to help them in that journey. And so really it's gotta be a partnership between the two organizations. And what we're trying to do with HP GreenLake is kind of abstract that almost. So, Hey, we're gonna give it to you in an, as a service and you're gonna get all of these components. And all you have to think about is where do I need to grow and what are the outcomes that I'm looking for? So that's what it's gotta be. There's gotta be tight alignment, I think between the lines of business and it, and sometimes those two don't know how to talk to each other. >>Mm-hmm <affirmative> so that's another way of, of really trying to speak to the business leaders and say, what are you trying to do? Where do you need to go? And what do you need to get? And, and a lot of times they don't even know what they need to get there. So that's where we need to have those different conversations with our customers to, and that's where we look for our partners to help us in that. So really having those different conversations to progress, um, what, you know, what customers are really looking to, to drive, >>How, how does GreenLake specifically accelerate that transformation? Where does it fit? Maybe you can kind of take us through, you know, a, a generic example of how that works. >>Yeah. I mean, a great example is, you know, especially with the pandemic is desktop, Hey, you now need to, you know, everybody's working from different locations. So, you know, desktop as a service VDI as a service, and, you know, you're putting it in a, you know, per whatever, you know, per you can, whatever variable pricing you want, but think about it, you have that one pay as you go. And so the it organization, all they have to think about is that's my, you know, per, per unit price there. So that's a great example of how we saw, like, especially during the pandemic, that was something that was, you know, a huge area of focus organizations. What's >>The spectrum that you see in terms of, you know, the maturity model, if you will, a digital transformation. I mean, if you weren't in a digital business during the pandemic, you were pretty much out of business. Yeah. And with very few exceptions. Um, and so, okay. So on the one end, you have folks that sort of were forced into it. You, my forced March scenario, others were actually moving quite a bit along before the pandemic, others were kind of given at lip service and maybe doing a few projects. What do you see as that spectrum? >>I think if you're not transforming, you're falling behind. And so everybody needs to be, you know, looking to the future and understanding, you know, really trying to get aggressive on that. And that's what we're seeing. We're seeing companies who, you know, aren't moving fast on that or falling behind. >>Do you see a bifurcation? I'm sure you do those that say, yeah, I want as a service and others that say, look, I I'm really well capitalized. I'm gonna gimme the, gimme the CapEx. I'm gonna put it in and run it myself. And is there a relationship between that approach and their digital transformation maturity, or is it kind of just really their preference? >>I, I mean, for us, we're meeting customers where they're at on their journey and their multi-cloud journey. So some, and, and what I'm seeing is that every customer today has multiple clouds, whether that be their, you know, their kind of, MultiGen it, the, the legacy stuff that they've gotta deal with. They've got stuff in public clouds, and they're trying to really transform and figure out how do I work all of that in like, how do I move forward with that new operating model? And so what I'm seeing is, you know, we're gonna meet customers where they're at on their journey. So some are gonna continue to go down that path in a, how they've always purchased their it. And others are really, you know, more often than not, we're seeing, they want that as a service cloudlike to have all the benefits of cloud, but yet still have it on their prem or in a colo or, you know, at the edge. So I do see some of those customers who are thinking differently, right. That, and they're the ones that are more apt to be a little bit more aggressive on their digital transformation. They're, they're open to the possibility if that makes sense. No, >>It does. It makes total sense. I, I, I think, you know, on the one hand they're a lot of customers are trying to build their own cloud. Yep. Um, so you mention multicloud, I'm not gonna go to Amazon to help me with my multicloud strategy. That's not, that's not gonna be my preferr. Yeah. I might talk to Microsoft about it a little bit. Google's got Antos and that's kind of interesting, but you know, Google's not enterprise, they got good data, but so, but there are other choices out there. Why HPE for my cloud hybrid multi-cloud strategy, give us the >>Sticker. It's, it's the best of both worlds for customers. So it enables them to have the security. It enables them to grow, to, to be in their data centers or in colos at the edge. It allows them to not over provision. It allows them to pay as they go and pay as they grow there's. Um, and then it also really is that ease factor. So it it's that thinking about it as I have, I already, I know what my pricing is. I know what that predictability is from a pricing perspective and what my costs are gonna be. So all of those things really re that all those messages resonate with customers, >>Right? L thanks so much for coming on. We got the trains are backing up super tight schedule today. This is wall to wall coverage of HPE. Discover. Thank you. Thank >>You so much for having me appreciate it. >>You're SU very welcome. All right. Keep it right there. Dave ante is here. John furrier, HPE discover 2022 from Las Vegas. We're live. We'll be right back.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hi buddy. We're back. This is the Cube's coverage of H P's discover a big discover event this year, 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the, what used to be called the sands convention center. Now the Venetian Dave Lotte for John furrier per deep Kumar is here. He is the senior vice president and general manager of HPE E's point next services where the rubber meets the road services is where it's at. That's that's where the value is. <laugh> right. >>It's absolutely >>Great to see you again, man. Thanks for coming on. Okay. >>Welcome John. Hopefully y'all are having a good time. >>Yeah, it's very nice to be. It was always great to be face to face. Right? It's nothing like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we, we slog through two years of virtual and >>It was packed in keynote. Antonio's keynote was jam packed overflow rooms. Yeah. Um, and it was a big room. It wasn't a small room. It was huge. So that's a sign. Yeah. >>People are here good times. Yeah. People love to be here. Yeah. So >>What's the update with, with point next >>It's, uh, lot's happening. Lot's happening, right? Uh, the transformation is underpinned by point next doing the right thing and just, uh, transforming and helping customers to transform themselves as well with the pandemic it just caught on. Right. Everybody wants to do things faster, digitize things faster. And uh, we really bring the technology and the expertise. I think that's this pretty crucial, >>You know, what, what are the, how do you think about success rates with transformations on the one hand? It, it kept the industry going all industries going on the other hand, I feel like a lot of the transformations were rushed. I call it the forced March to digital. Yeah. Yeah. What failures did you see in that? Forced March and, and how are companies course correcting? Yeah, >>Really good question. <laugh> Dave, um, more than half of the transformations fail, right? So there was a BCG study done over 3000 customers over three years around the world. And, um, 57% of the transformations failed. Right. In the sense when somebody start to transform, they, they set it out a set of goals, scope it. This is what it is. They either didn't meet the goal or they spent more money than they should have, or they overshot the timing. Right. Or all of this about, so it's a staggering number, uh, a large piece of them fail. Yeah. Right. So, um, to answer your second question, Dave, so what are we finding out? Why are they failing and what are they, how are they course-correcting I think there's sort of, you know, we speak to customers all the time. So we get an idea of, you know, what's working and what's not working and there's sort of three things that keep on coming up. >>Right. One is, uh, senior management, CEO, CIO, commitment to the north star. Yeah. Right. Hey, are we tied in, are we doing this? The second thing is the, um, the alignment between it and the business and the functions. Right. If you don't agree on the goal set, if you don't agree on the timeline, uh, then it just, you know, don't work. <laugh> the third is expertise. The people underestimate the expertise. You need the discipline, you need to get stuff done. Right. And so these are the three and none of them are technology related. Yeah. I mean, you're heard they're all people related stuff. >>Right. But di I want to get your thoughts on this is a really important point. I love that commentary because what we're seeing as well is that with COVID now we're kind of third year post COVID, if you will. Yeah. I was just getting out of COVID. It caught a lot of people flatfooted. So people who were on a digital transformation either got stuck and fell down or failed, or they had a tailwind going into it and had momentum. They had alignment and they were filling gaps. They kind of crossed over at the right point and could succeed during the pandemic. But many people failed. Yeah. Because they didn't prepare, they didn't have the technology. They had too many gaps. They had antiquated old stuff. What have you learned? Because this is now ignited the services business because no one wants to have that happen again. Yeah. Can you share your experiences with that? With the customers that are going through that learning pain? What are their core issues? Some projects got doubled down on some got killed. Hey, we don't need that anymore. So what, what are the learnings? Well, tell, share us your perspective, cuz this is important. >>Yeah. So people want to do transformation, right? Absolutely. Because it's a must with COVID faster, quickly you want to get, but they also have to run the business because otherwise you don't have the EPS to support the transformation. Right. So it's, it's transform and perform. So we call it within HP perform while you transform and people who got that balance right. Created that flywheel, John >>Don't run outta gas in other words, translation. >><laugh> exactly. So second thing is, so you have a set of people, you have expertise and COVID you started losing people. Great resignation. You heard everything. Then you are trying to balance your people between, do you put them on transformation or do you put them on operating this stuff? This is where companies then now are realizing, Hey, if I put my best guys on transformation, I need to make sure this operations work well. So people are coming to us and saying, Hey, could you operate this one? Well, right. I mean, today we had somebody on stage, in low medical. Right. They, um, they got a ransomware hit and they had been using us, um, to do all the operations. And when hit hit, we were like switched on. They're like, I mean, on stage they're like you guys were golden, took care of the situation. So if you didn't have any extra help of some expertise, then you are really suffering. Right? >>Yeah. We heard this too. From partners we heard during the pandemic, a lot of the partners stepped up the channel and ISV partners. Yeah. Because they could. Yeah. And that was another key point. Yeah. It all comes together. I love to perform and transform Dave, cuz this is about running the business. Cuz you have cyber security as a serious problem right now. Yeah. That's also part of the transformation. Yeah. Where's the overlap. What are the areas that you're seeing, where you gotta operate and transform? Where's the hot zone. So to speak with customers, is it cyber? Is it, is it, uh, data, data? >>I would say clearly data is number one, right? In anything. Now data, data modernization is the key. Otherwise you are not changing your company the way you do things. So we just announced four real big stuff, addressing, uh, data migration. Right. Um, one of the problems so people have is quality of data. Quality of data is not good. They exist in silos. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, it's not in a platform form where you can really take the data, get the insights and use it for your future. Right. I mean that's a key problem, right? Yeah. So you, you hire a few data scientists. They come in, they're doing, they're spending the time on housekeeping data rather than actually doing data science, >>Data engineering, not just wrangling, it's a lot of engineering going on. >>Absolutely. Okay. >>Absolutely. So that's a well known problem. Uh, but as you said before that it's not really a technology problem. I think it's an organizational issue and part of the problem. And I wonder if you're seeing this within your customer base, is this idea that we're gonna try to put everything into some kind of central repository. Yeah. And then we're gonna create a hyper specialized team. That is the goal between the data that you need <laugh> and the insights, right? Yeah. To get the insights. And we're seeing this dispersion of the expertise, which put, putting more responsibility into the line of business, a new data architecture, new organizational thinking. Are you seeing that? Are there particular industries where that's happening more, more quickly where the context which LA is lacking in the centralized team is actually going out to the lines of business where the data quality will be inherently improved. >>Yeah. I think it's like implementing ERP systems. I mean, people who try to create massive data lakes, I don't think it's going to work. Right. Because it's like, nobody has the time to wait for three years until you have structured data in a particular way. The other thing is some of the data companies were take people like that who came in are no more because things are changing at a rapid pace. So anything if you're doing, that's taking too long to get your act together, the market has moved on. You may not be even in that business. So what people are doing Dave is sort of microservices, they're cutting it into pieces and saying, let me get the best, vast, quick, and make it work. And then creating the fly wheel of changing other things that are priority for their. >>So they're getting tactical with their absolutely >>Getting >>Quick wins. Absolutely >>Inviting >>Off smaller. >>Well that's the data. The data thing is, is a cyber problem too. Cuz data is helping cyber, but machine learning feeds off data. Yes. So if you have gaps or blind spots, machine learning isn't as good. So machine learning is only as good in the eye is only as good as the data. Yeah. It can see. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>So that's means it's gotta be fast available, not siloed. So, but you, so this is a balance. What do I silo and protect for compliance. Yeah. And what can I address quickly? Low latency. >>Yeah. If I may add John, the other thing is because there's so many passwords used in the industry. Right. Um, and AIML is one of those, right? So everybody then businesses pick up an area for AI and ML. They do a little pilot, they do a POC and it works well and they're extremely happy <laugh> and then they try to scale it across the whole enterprise. Yeah. And it's a complete failure because most of the time it doesn't work. Right. >>But your data lake comment actually translates over your point there because you can spend, I had a quote on the last event I went to, the quote was we spend all of our time trying to figure out what the latest open source machine learning is. That's a full-time job. So the data lake is heavy lift. Just understand what's going on there. Tracking machine learning yeah. Is a full time job even and changes. >>Absolutely. So >>The change, what does that mean to the customer? That managed services are gonna be part of it? How do the customers tame that moving train that's happening around these really important areas? >>Yeah. So, um, I think, um, customers do need help. So I think they need to be open to ideas of, okay, what is the expertise we need for where we want to get to? And some may be available inside some, they need to go for help outside. I mean, that's a reality, right? So you need to open your eyes and say, I've got, let me put my best people, maybe on transformation. Let me take the people with some expertise, knowledge on different things, right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and shortsighted companies. What they do is John, they just automate what's their current. And that's not a transformation in the end, you look back and say, >>That's incremental. >>You didn't achieve anything. Right. Because you haven't transformed your processes. You haven't chained the theme, you just automated what the garbage and garbage out. It's the, the same crap that comes out. So >>How much of the work that point next does is, um, I'll, I'll say, you know, consultative in terms of be being that change agent. Right? Cause again, we back think about data. Yeah. A lot of it is, is thinking about the organization. Yeah. Decentralizing, you know, making that decision, uh, thinking in different terms, around data products, um, having the lines of business, maybe take more responsibility for, and, and those are internal decisions. Yeah. And they have customers have, certainly have a lot of expertise around, but they sometimes need a change agent. Do you play that role? Is that a, a GSI that plays that role? >>Yeah. So, uh, it's a mixed bag. Uh, we play the role in some places and then, uh, some SIS would also play, play that role. Okay. Um, more of the point next is if, if you take a customer engagement advisory, professional services, then actually maintaining their landscape and then manage services, which again, sort of you monitor, but you also provide some info on how to manage it. Right. In those three pieces, Dave, the top piece and the bottom piece are the big pieces. Customers want expertise on the middle piece is getting automated because systems are getting smarter. They are self-healing. And in the middle piece, what people want is knowledge. So say for example, you have an enterprise it's not working well. They want it knowledge up front, tell me where it's broken or what do we need to do? And that's it. Right. Um, and they want to fix it themselves. It's just like consumer. Right. So, um, that's the way it's working. >>So the reason I ask that is we we're having a data discussion here. Yeah. And, and I think that a big role that you can play in the data transformation is to provide self-service infrastructure. Yes. Uh, right where the, the technical pieces or an operational detail. Absolutely. Okay. And then the, the second is that you just touched on it is, is, is automated, automated governance and security. So that when I share data, I know that it's going to the right place. That individual has the proper access to it. So those are two sort of white spaces I think. And a lot of organizations where they need help big >>Wide spaces >>Actually. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And that, that middle please is a complete cloud experience. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. Everything is going to be digitalized. Everything's going to be automated. And um, so you know, people can use it any way they want, >>Do you see hybrid as a steady state? I mean, know, we gotta wrap up. We don't a lot of time left. Yeah. The real quick hybrid we've been saying here in the cube, it's it's gonna be a steady state for a long, long >>Time. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it would be, you know, OnPrem off Preem multi-cloud but it's going to be hybrid world >><laugh> all right. Hybrid world. >>Thank you so much. Hybrid >>Cube cube hybrid cube >>Was great to have you on you're so articulate and, and it's just wonderful to see you. Thanks. Thanks. >>Thank you. Thanks Dave. >>Thank you, John. And thank you for watching John furry, Dave Valante, we'll be back with the cubes coverage of HPE. Discover 2022 in Las Vegas. Right after this short break we're live.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HPE. Discover 2022 from the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand convention center in Las Vegas, Dave ante, with John furrier. We're here with Brad parks. Who's the chief product officer at morphia data and Brian Thompson. Who's the vice president of GreenLake cloud product management at Hewlett Packard enterprise gentlemen. Great to see you first time on the queue first time. Wow. I just assumed we've known each other for, so >>We've been around a long time now. I'm happy to be here and thanks for, thanks for making the >>Time. Yeah, you've put a lot of people on the queue, but Morpheus data, when we, you know, we first met, I mean, with your new role here several years ago, tell, give us the update what's Morpheus do, why are you, so why does people, why do people need Morpheus? Think >>People need Morpheus, cuz it is messy, right? Technology promise, you know, simple, better, faster, but it's only gotten more complex, more heterogeneous over the last decade. We are a unified orchestration and automation platform that makes kind of the, the messy labyrinth that is enterprise. It kind of simpler to navigate primary use case. Self-service for developers who wanna push a button, get a database and an abstract deployed into their on-prem or their public cloud without having to wait on it. >>So you've, you've, you've been through the hyper-converged world. You've seen all that hardware come together. The VMware Nutanix of the world's kind of hardware. Now you got this software abstraction where you got operations, you've got AI, you got all kinds of ops AI ops dev ops data ops ops machine, >>You >>Know, they're all there. And so you got developer environments, you got operating environments. It's just getting more complicated at scale. Yep. This is a huge challenge. You guys are tackling this and then by the way, throw in automation in there too. Right? So, so all that's kind of coming together. How does self-service work put all that complication? >>Well, so I was just talking about Robert Christiansen. I know he's probably think he's been on the Q he's on S team and the ven diagram that we see in hundreds of enterprises we talk to is there's a need for central platform engineering at an enterprise to enable developers, to hit a button, get their database, run an I API line, you know, get their app stack deployed. They also wanna do the same thing with Kubernetes, right? Micro clusters deployed, you know, at a service, same thing with Terraform and Ansible. And they're just there aren't enough skilled operators who have moved up that stack. So you have to automate and canonize that knowledge and, and make it easy. >>Brian, one of the sort of pillars of GreenLake is, and as a service is data and we see a change in the way data is data platforms are being architected, data organizations. And one of the things that is a critical principle of sort of what we see as the new data era is self-service infrastructure where the operation of the technical details are an operational detail, not the be all end, all, you have to go beg and get data out. Okay. So you guys are building out, I think, consistent with that principle self-service infrastructure. That's right. So where does Morpheus fit in, in terms of that objective, what's your relationship like and, and help us understand >>That. Yeah. Within GreenLake, specifically think of this as a broad portfolio of different as a service offerings. Part of that key is meeting customers where they are and where they want to be. So we have that array of things which are fully self-service if you will, but serving an it admin type of persona. So it's where as a enterprise, I still have those resources. I want that granular of control all the way through, how do we deliver some of our more advanced cloud services, really trying to serve the end user to your point, how do I empower application owners, developers to, to bring in and, and work with those services? This is key in, in some of those cloud services, we're delivering more of VSC is a key component that we work as we bring to again, provide those interfaces. How do I provide everything from API CLI through a gooey experience that can span across multiple form factors, bring together that more of a homogenous experience? >>What, what options are out there to solve this problem today? I mean, what are the best practices? Is it do it yourself? Is it, you know, a little bit of VMware here, a little bit of, you know, other tooling there, what, what do you see out there in the marketplace? >>I'll give kinda my perspective kind of yeah. Outside the, the tools that we see when we walk into an enterprise, you've got a company that's got a lot of VMware, maybe a little Nutanix, we've got some AWS, they wanna use OpenShift for their clusters. They got Terraform Ansible, and they got service now. And there's a, there's a poor it ops team in the middle, trying to wire all that together. And each of those domains have tried to go up this hill, right. VMware's done with vRealize automation, you know? Yeah. OpenShift will say no where the way, and you use cube vert to >>Do your virtual service now will say the same thing. Right? >>So our goal is, you know, we started in the middle right. Middle out, right. We started unifying that for self-service for developers and finance teams. And we're we're agnostic. We don't have a dog in the fight, right. We don't have a hypervisor business, a hardware business, an ITSM business. We're all about bringing the pieces together. But that said, we work with partners like HP, you have a footprint of thousands of customers who are solving that same problem and need to need to move up stack. So it's been a good win-win. So >>You're not trying to be the cloud operating system per se. I mean, right. The way, the way a VMware wants to be, or you could even argue, well, I guess open, you >>Got, you got the hyperscalers coming down, you got VMware moving up. But again, they all at the end of the day are trying to control their cash cow, right. Their hardcore business. We wanna make them all transparent. So >>Your bet is it's gonna be all of the above. Yeah. That's not gonna change. Right. That's the complexity is, is that right? Or do you think they're gonna consolidate? >>No, I think there's definitely something to that. I also think there's enough. Disparate. Technology's not gonna be one size fits all or one to rule them all. In fact, I think that's part of the examples in the past, like private cloud is we announced yesterday private cloud for enterprise. It's not a new term. People are doing that for quite a while now, but they are typically fairly brittle hand rolled disparate technologies, some poor it team trying to hold it together. So where we can provide that kind of life cycle management in a cloud operating model, remove that complexity and provide that stability. And in that experience across what will be interchangeable parts at times, I think that's really that direction in, >>Yeah. You guys talk about this whole starting in the middle. I like that because there's a skills gap as well. Right. Not only is there for a challenge on it that transforms, there's not enough. People actually know how to manage a Kubernetes cluster spin one up. Yeah. So there's been a rise of managed services. We're seeing come outta the woodwork almost in all areas where it's complex. Yeah. How does that fit into the makeup of as customers, engineer or rearchitect or, or just evolve to edge on premises and public cloud? Yeah. In a cloud operating way, because if I got managed service, do they just plug in, I mean, new orchestrating services, managed services all the above, take us through this dynamic because we're seeing more and more customers saying, just gimme the service. Yeah. >>I, I know manage perspective. This, this kinda goes back to that portfolio of meeting customers where they are. There are some that, that have that expertise in house they're opinionated. They just want a different consumption model. But on the other side of that, it's difficult to attract and retain that type of talent. And if I have limited resources, am I gonna focus on the care and feeding of that underlying infrastructure? Or am I gonna try to up level and focus on things more strategic to the business? So that's where we've certainly been focusing. And I think this type of management capability is what feeds into that. Right? >>Talk about the trust aspect, because if I'm gonna go manage service, it better work. I need to trust it. It's not a zero trust environment. It's actually a trust and verified, but you're seeing the software supply chain is a big discussion point. Developers don't wanna have to get back off their CDC pipeline to go in and manage stuff. So a managed service has to be verified. Yeah. There's a huge trust factor in there. How does what's the status of this now? Is it real? >>I think one of the, one of the pieces we see in terms of trust organizationally, I mean, people in process is always harder than the tech usually. And, and a lot of the trust is just internal. You get, you know, developers don't trust the ops team, right? Security doesn't trust anybody, you know, finance doesn't trust, you know, who's billing them. Part of what we do as a stack is we give each of those stakeholder groups, the ability to get their core needs met without getting each other's way. And from a delivery perspective where we partner with HPE is we are, you know, we're a platform framework, we're a technology provider we're inside, you know, products like the private cloud. We work their GMs team, the manage services team. If they wanna take on more of that operational concern, right. They use us or if the customer wants to manage it themselves. So we we're all about enabling them at the end of the day. And, and HP brings >>And how hard bread is it to unify? UN unification is a great word. I love let's unify everybody. Right. So how, how hard is that? Can you scope that problem statement for us? What does that mean? >>I'll separate it from a technology perspective and then the people process. So a lot of the traditional people that have played in that space that do it yourself, you mention right. Scripting it all together is hard, right? And if you change from cloud a to cloud B, you're set back six months, like why we exist is we wanna very quickly pull the pieces together. We can usually get a POC up and running in about two hours, right? That's a, self-service VMware private cloud, right? That doesn't mean you've solved the organizational inertia. You know, that's, that takes time, weeks, months. And that's where people are like Accenture GreenLake, other SI other channel partners bring that together to, to help make that change happen. >>How mature is the platform? Where are you in terms of determining product market fit? Are you, are you scaling at this point? >>Well, the, the great part about our origin story, right? We got our start as an internal tool set inside a two and a half billion dollar private equity firm that was transforming it at dozens of companies. So we were built for the use case product market fit happened, cuz a bunch of guys needed to get their jobs done. So we've been an outbound since 2015, right? We were top of the stack ranking, you know, all the MQs, all the quadrants, all the analysis. So we think we're their product market fit. The nice thing is customers have actually moved to where we are. Right? Five years ago, cloud management meant cleaning up the lift and shift mess. Now it's automation platform engineering. So it it's a fun time. >>It's it's operational. Yeah. It's they're operationalizing it. >>What's your go to market model. Maybe you could double click on those through >>Partners. So honestly through HP is a big one. We're small, right? We want to be the best unified platform we can be. Our go to market is via technology partners like HPE, right? The other systems integrators, other channel partners globally. So, so yeah. It's >>So then you've got kind of a tiger team overly. Yep. Salesforce is that, that >>Yeah, we've got teams globally. So we've got about 700,000 workloads under management around the world. About 70% of those are OnPrem VMware Nutanix. The rest are up in the public cloud. So we work with partners, solution providers, services, engines to, to help deliver that to >>Customers. What do you make of the 61 billion acquisition of VMware from Broadcom? >>We're, you know, I think your analysis was spot on. It is gonna be a, a war of, you know, what is the, the most profitable to that new Broadcom business and things like vRealize automation, some of these fringe products that are core at a customer use cases, but may not be driving a lot of bottom revenue for VMware, I think are gonna be gonna be on the bubble. And we've seen more interest in the last few weeks from people who just want to hedge their bets. Right. They want to be able to switch from hypervisor a to hypervisor B or cloud a to cloud B without being locked into anyone's stack. And that is, that is why we exist. Mm. >>You wanna comment on that? >>I mean, it's, you know, for HP and from a GreenLake and even just historically, right. It's about customer choice. Mm. We have a strong relationship with VMware. Sure. We have, I don't know how many bajillions of servers out there running VMware that we, we support with. So, you know, it's, it's, it's all just looking at that ecosystem and helping deliver those customer solutions and outcomes is our focus. Yeah. >>Thank >>You. Brian. Talk about the GreenLake success with partners. We're seeing ecosystem is a big part of that and we know the formula for ecosystems create value. What is the pitch that green lakes making to the marketplace right now to attract more folks to build and or integrate into the >>Platform? Yeah. I mean, GreenLake started with a, a vehicle of how do I start to deliver an OPEX model, a consumption model for traditional infrastructure that we've been providing more and more as the services and solutions really have emerged and evolved. It's gone from, how do I just give you kit and a consumption model for it to now looking at embedded solutions with third party ISV software building or wrapping those services around it, really delivering outcomes and solutions you're seeing. And hopefully you'll solve just from announcement more and more of that, where we have kind of turnkey solutions with key partners, how do we bring a marketplace ecosystem together? How do we help enable those kind of full solutions? Because we're not gonna build it all ourselves, right. We wanna make sure that we can deliver those outcomes. >>So marketing is often and should be ahead of the actual product, early days of GreenLake. It was really a, you know, financial model. Sure. Right. Where do, where do you see GreenLake today? How far is it matured? We saw some of the, the announcements yesterday. We saw some demos. Where are we at? >>Yeah. So this actually, I think really the exciting part is you might have heard Antonio refer to as that journey to one each of our different businesses within green or within HPE, they've all been building these cloud services in GreenLake enabled services. But as you saw Alma share the path to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform that really is bringing these services together into a functional platform, right? Common identity, common telemetry services, bringing these together as now, integrable interoperable services. Like you're starting to see that come together and you can really see the Chrome trail of, of where we're going with a very powerful hybrid cloud experience, right? Spanning private public on-prem colo and a, and a full solution set within there. So it that's, that's the exciting part >>For me and Brad Morpheus will be a capability inside of GreenLake that a customer can consume. Do you have to write to GreenLake APIs to enable that? Or is it, is it more just certify that you work inside a GreenLake? What has to get done? I'll say a lot >>Of what they've done is actually written into, into our APIs. Like we've normalized hybrid it. We have a, a database model of every load balance or a cloud endpoint automation tool. So we are, we're all about making it easier to consume it. And the vision that Alma and HP has around GreenLake fits very well with why we exist. So they're able to extract metering data from our, you know, from our API, we know who provisioned what, where how much they spent. So we're a good repository and platform partner for them to, to build on. It's >>Great for that console that you guys have. Yeah. >>You got the, you got the open APIs, you publish those, you guys take advantage of 'em and then sure. Boom. Then you can consume. Got it. All right, guys. Hey, great to see you again, red. Thanks for, for >>Coming on. Thanks. Thanks for having us on >>Our pleasure. Great stuff. Congratulations. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Valante for John furrier. Are you watching the cubes coverage of HPE discover 2022 from Las Vegas? We'll be right back.

>> TheCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022. We're here at the Venetian convention center in Las Vegas Dave Vellante for John Furrier. Cam Amirs here is the director of technical alliances at Cribl'. Cam, good to see you. >> Good to see you too. >> Cribl'. Cool name. Tell us about it. >> So let's see. Cribl' has been around now for about five years selling products for the last two years. Fantastic company, lots of growth, started there 2020 and we're roughly 400 employees now. >> And what do you do? Tell us more. >> Yeah, sure. So I run the technical alliances team and what we do is we basically look to build integrations into platforms such as HPE GreenLake and Ezmeral. And we also work with a lot of other companies to help get data from various sources into their destinations or, you know other enrichments of data in that data pipeline. >> You know, you guys have been on theCUBE. Clint's been on many times, Ed Bailey was on our startup showcase. You guys are successful in this overfunded observability space. So, so you guys have a unique approach. Tell us about why you guys are successful in the product and some of the things you've been doing there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So our product is very complimentary to a lot of the technologies that already exist. And I used to joke around that everyone has these like pretty dashboards and reports but they completely glaze over the fact that it's not easy to get the data from those sources to their destinations. So for us, it's this capability with Cribl' Stream to get that data easily and repeatably into these destinations. >> Yeah. You know, Cam, you and I are both at the Snowflake Summit to John's point. They were like a dozen observability companies there. >> Oh yeah. >> And really beginning to be a crowded space. So explain what value you bring to that ecosystem. >> Yeah, sure. So the ecosystem that we see there is there are a lot of people that are kind of sticking to like effectively getting data and showing you dashboards reports about monitoring and things of that sort. For us, the value is how can we help customers kind of accelerate their adoption of these platforms, how to go from like your legacy SIM or your legacy monitoring solution to like the next-gen observability platform or next-gen security platform >> and what you do really well is the integration and bringing those other toolings to, to do that? >> Correct, correct. And we make it repeatable. >> How'd you end up here? >> HP? So we actually had a customer that actually deployed our software on the HPS world platform. And it was kind of a light bulb moment that, okay this is actually a different approach than going to your traditional, you know, AWS, Google, et cetera. So we decided to kind of hunt this down and figure out how we could be a bigger player in this space. >> You saw the data fabric announcement? I'm not crazy about the term, data fabric is an old NetApp term, and then Gartner kind of twisted it. I like data mesh, but anyway, it doesn't matter. We kind of know what it is, but but when you see an announcement like that how do you look at it? You know, what does it mean to to Cribl' and your customers? >> Yeah. So what we've seen is that, so we work with the data fabric team and we're able to kind of route our data to their, as a data lake, so we can actually route the data from, again all these very sources into this data lake and then have it available for whatever customers want to do with it. So one of the big things that I know Clint talks about is we give customers this, we sell choice. So we give them the ability to choose where they want to send their data, whether that's, you know HP's data lake and data fabric or some other object store or some other destination. They have that choice to do so. >> So you're saying that you can stream with any destination the customer wants? What are some examples? What are the popular destinations? >> Yeah so a lot of the popular destinations are your typical object stores. So any of your cloud object stores, whether it be AWS three, Google cloud storage or Azure blob storage. >> Okay. And so, and you can pull data from any source? >> Laughter: I'd be very careful, but absolutely. What we've seen is that a lot of people like to kind of look at traditional data sources like Syslog and they want to get it to us, a next-gen SIM, but to do so it needs to be converted to like a web hook or some sort of API call. And so, or vice versa, they have this brand new Zscaler for example, and they want to get that data into their SIM but there's no way to do it 'cause a SIM only accepts it as a Syslog event. So what we can do is we actually transform the data and make it so that it lands into that SIM in the format that it needs to be and easily make that a repeatable process >> So, okay. So wait, so not as a Syslog event but in whatever format the destination requires? >> Correct, correct. >> Okay. What are the limits on that? I mean, is this- >> Yeah. So what we've seen is that customers will be able to take, for example they'll take this Syslog event, it's unstructured data but they need to put it into say common information model for Splunk or Elastic common schema for Elastic search or just JSON format for Elastic. And so what we can do is we can actually convert those events so that they land in that transformed state, but we can also route a copy of that event in unharmed fashion, to like an S3 bucket for object store for that long term compliance user >> You can route it to any, basically any object store. Is that right? Is that always the sort of target? >> Correct, correct. >> So on the message here at HPE, first of all I'll get to the marketplace point in a second, but it's cloud to edge is kind of their theme. So data streaming sounds expensive. I mean, you know so how do you guys deal with the streaming egress issue? What does that mean to customers? You guys claim that you can save money on that piece. It's a hotly contested discussion point. >> Laughter: So one of the things that we actually just announced in our 350 release yesterday is the capability of getting data from Windows events, or from Windows hosts, I'm sorry. So a product that we also have is called Cribl' Edge. So our capability of being able to collect data from the edge and then transit it out to whether it be an on-prem, or self-hosted deployment of Cribl', or or maybe some sort of other destination object store. What we do is we actually take the data in in transit and reduce the volume of events. So we can do things like remove white space or remove events that are not really needed and compress or optimize that data so that the egress cost to your point are actually lowered. >> And your data reduction approach is, is compression? It's a compression algorithm? >> So it is a combination, yeah, so it's a combination. So there's some people what they'll do is they'll aggregate the events. So sometimes for example, VPC flow logs are very chatty and you don't need to have all those events. So instead you convert those to metrics. So suddenly you reduced those events from, you know high volume events to metrics that are so small and you still get the same value 'cause you still see the trends and everything. And if later on down the road, you need to reinvestigate those events, you can rehydrate that data with Cribl' replay >> And you'll do the streaming in real time, is that right? >> Yeah. >> So Kafka, is that what you would use? Or other tooling? >> Laughter: So we are complimentary to a Kafka deployment. Customer's already deployed and they've invested in Kafka, We can read off of Kafka and feed back into Kafka. >> If not, you can use your tooling? >> If not, we can be replacing that. >> Okay talk about your observations in the multi-cloud hybrid world because hybrid obviously everyone knows it's a steady state now. On public cloud, on premise edge all one thing, cloud operations, DevOps, data as code all the things we talk about. What's the customer view? You guys have a unique position. What's going on in the customer base? How are they looking at hybrid and specifically multi-cloud, is it stitching together multiple hybrids? Or how do you guys work across those landscapes? >> So what we've seen is a lot of customers are in multiple clouds. That's, you know, that's going to happen. But what we've seen is that if they want to egress data from say one cloud to another the way that we've architected our solution is that we have these worker nodes that reside within these hybrid, these other cloud event these other clouds, I should say so that transmitting data, first egress costs are lowered, but being able to have this kind of, easy way to collect the data and also stitch it back together, join it back together, to a single place or single location is one option that we offer customers. Another solution that we've kind of announced recently is Search. So not having to move the data from all these disparate data sources and data lakes and actually just search the data in place. That's another capability that we think is kind of popular in this hybrid approach. >> And talk about now your relationship with HPE you guys obviously had customers that drove you to Greenlake, obviously what's your experience with them and also talk about the marketplace presence. Is that new? How long has that been going on? Have you seen any results? >> Yeah, so we've actually just started our, our journey into this HPE world. So the first thing was obviously the customer's bringing us into this ecosystem and now our capabilities of, I guess getting ready to be on the marketplace. So having a presence on the marketplace has been huge giving us kind of access to just people that don't even know who we are, being that we're, you know a five year old company. So it's really good to have that exposure. >> So you're going to get customers out of this? >> That's the idea. [Laughter] >> Bring in new market, that's the idea of their GreenLake is that partners fill in. What's your impression so far of GreenLake? Because there seems to be great momentum around HP and opening up their channel their sales force, their customer base. >> Yeah. So it's been very beneficial for us, again being a smaller company and we are a channel first company so that obviously helps, you know bring out the word with other channel partners. But HP has been very, you know open arm kind of getting us into the system into the ecosystem and obviously talking, or giving the good word about Cribl' to their customers. >> So, so you'll be monetizing on GreenLake, right? That's the, the goal. >> That's the goal. >> What do you have to do to get into a position? Obviously, you got a relationship you're in the marketplace. Do you have to, you know, write to their API's or do you just have to, is that a checkbox? Describe what you have to do to monetize. >> Sure. So we have to first get validated on the platform. So the validation process validates that we can work on the Ezmeral GreenLake platform. Once that's been completed, then the idea is to have our logo show up on the marketplace. So customers say, Hey, look, I need to have a way to get transit data or do stuff with data specifically around logs, metrics, and traces into my logging solution or my SIM. And then what we do with them on the back end is we'll see this transaction occur right to their API to basically say who this customer is. 'Cause again, the idea is to have almost a zero touch kind of involvement, but we will actually have that information given to us. And then we can actually monetize on top of it. >> And the visualization component will come from the observability vendor. Is that right? Or is that somewhat, do you guys do some of that? >> So the visualization is right now we're basically just the glue that gets the data to the visualization engine. As we kind of grow and progress our search product that's what will probably have more of a visualization component. >> Do you think your customers are going to predominantly use an observability platform for that visualization? I mean, obviously you're going to get there. Are they going to use Grafana? Or some other tool? >> Or yeah, I think a lot of customers, obviously, depending on what data and what they're trying to accomplish they will have that choice now to choose, you know Grafana for their metrics, logs, et cetera or some sort of security product for their security events but same data, two different kind of use cases. And we can help enable that. >> Cam, I want to ask you a question. You mentioned you were at Splunk and Clint, the CEO and co-founder, was at Splunk too. That brings up the question I want to get your perspective on, we're seeing a modern network here with HPE, with Aruba, obviously clouds kind of going next level you got on premises, edge, all one thing, distributed computing basically, cyber security, a data problem that's solved a lot by you guys and people in this business, making sure data available machine learnings are growing and powering AI like you read about. What's changed in this business? Because you know, Splunking logs is kind of old hat you know, and now you got observability. Unification is a big topic. What's changed now? What's different about the market today around data and these platforms and, and tools? What's your perspective on that? >> I think one of the biggest things is people have seen the amount of volume of data that's coming in. When I was at Splunk, when we hit like a one terabyte deal that was a big deal. Now it's kind of standard. You're going to do a terabyte of data per day. So one of the big things I've seen is just the explosion of data growth, but getting value out of that data is very difficult. And that's kind of why we exist because getting all that volume of data is one thing. But being able to actually assert value from it, that's- >> And that's the streaming core product? That's the whole? >> Correct. >> Get data to where it needs to be for whatever application needs whether it's cyber or something else. >> Correct, correct. >> What's the customer uptake? What's the customer base like for you guys now? How many, how many customers you guys have? What are they doing with the data? What are some of the common things you're seeing? >> Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the basic blocking and tackling, we've significantly grown our customer base and they all have the same problem. They come to us and say, look, I just need to get data from here to there. And literally the routing use case is our biggest use case because it's simple and you take someone that's a an expensive engineer and operations engineer instead of having them going and doing the plumbing of data of just getting logs from one source to another, we come in and actually make that a repeatable process and make that easy. And so that's kind of just our very basic value add right from the get go. >> You can automate that, automate that, make it repeatable. Say what's in the name? Where'd the name come from? >> So Cribl', if you look it up, it's actually kind of an old shiv to get to siphon dirt from gold, right? So basically you just, that's kind of what we do. We filter out all the dirt and leave you the gold bits so you can get value. >> It's kind of what we do on theCUBE. >> It's kind of the gold nuggets. Get all these highlights, hitting Twitter, the golden, the gold nuggets. Great to have you on. >> Cam, thanks for, for coming on, explaining that sort of you guys are filling that gap between, Hey all the observability claims, which are all wonderful but then you got to get there. They got to have a route to get there. That's what got to do. Cribl' rhymes with tribble. Dave Vellante for John Furrier covering HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.