>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching the Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five. We reach cruising altitude on day two. Christina Seacrest is here. She's the process Artificial intelligence and automation GPS automation leader at ey. And Bob PCIs, executive director for Intelligent Automation for the state of Tennessee. Folks, welcome to the cube. Thank you for Adam. >>Good >>To have you. Okay, I don't know if I messed up that title, Christina, but it's kind of interesting. You got process, you got ai, you got automation, you got gps. What's your role? >>I have a lot of rules, so thank you for that. Yeah, so my focus is first and foremost automation. So how do you get things like UI path into our clients, but also I focus specifically in our government and public sector clients. So sled specifically. So state local education. So that's why I'm here with the state of Tennessee. And then we also like to take it beyond automation. So how do you bring an artificial intelligence and all the technologies that come with that. So really full end to end spectrum of >>Automation. So Bob, when you think about the sort of the, the factors that are driving your organization of, how did you describe that, Those sort of external factors that inform your strategy. What, what's, what are the catalysts for how you determine to deploy technology? >>Well, it was primarily that we know tendency has a tendency to provide good customer service, but we want to get to a great status best in class, if you will. And we had an external advisory review where it said, Hey, you know, we could make automation to improve our customer experience. And so that was like a directive of the, the state leaders to go across the board and automate all processes statewide, starting with the 23 executive agencies. >>So where's the focus from that standpoint? Is it on just providing better interfaces to your constituents, your customers? Is it cutting costs or you actually have more budget to invest? Kind of a combination of >>Those? Yeah, so it's, it's really both qualitative and quantitative, right? So quantitative is where we're able to reduce hours and therefore we can redirect people to more less mundane work, if you will. And then qualitative is where we're able to reduce the errors, improve data quality, reduce cycle time for our citizens, you know, when they're making requests, et cetera. So it's, I think it's a combination of both of those quantitative and qualitative metrics that we are mandated in, in micromanaged, quite frankly to, to bring, make those >>Numbers. So I'm from Massachusetts, when I go to a a mass.gov website, I say, all this was done in the 1990s and you could just see where the different stovepipes were, were. But then every now and then you'll hit one and you'll say, Wow, okay, this is up to, it's such a great experience. And then the flip side of that is you want your employees to be happy and not have to do all this mundane work so you can retain the best people. You don't have to. So you're living that in, in state and, and local. So where did you start your automation journey? What role did EY play? Let's go. Yeah, >>Sure. So I, I, I think the thought for process automation was probably three or four years ago, but then we started the program about 18 months ago and there was a lot of, let's say behind the scenes work before we could bring EY in, you know, like what resources was I gonna have in, in the state that were gonna help me address all of the agency simultaneously, right? Cuz normally you'll see a project that'll do be more siloed across the state and say, we're gonna do this agency, we're gonna do this division. Well, you have 40 other agencies that are, you know, the momentum is it's just gonna fall, it wayside. So how we looked at it was let's blanket it and go across all 23 agencies at the same time, you know, identify common processes that are used across 40 divisions, for example, right? >>So, so what we basically did is we procured the software, you know, did the contracts, and then it was really about, I designed, I'm gonna say a multistream approach where they were, we could run multiple work streams, independent define all the architectures, required dev tests, production, the disaster recovery at the same time in parallel developed the center of excellence, the operation model, the processes, methodologies. And the third one was, let's go out to a few divisions, business administration, health, you know, health, human resources, and be able to do a process inventory to see what was there. And then based on that, there's all this theory of well let's do a proof of concept. Let's do a proof of technology, let's do apply. Well, the bottom line is rpa technology's been around for a long time. It's proven there's nothing to prove. But really what was important to prove before we decided to go, you know, full tilt was, you know, develop a proof of perceived business value. >>Are we gonna bring in the, the business value, the hours and the qu qualitative metrics that is expected by our ex executive team, The leadership, we were able to do that, you know, with the help of help of ey, we built out the prototypes and we got the green light to go forward, got ey to start, and then we just basically went pedal to the metal. We had our foundation already defined. We built up the architecture in less than one to two months. Now, in, in a public sector or private sector, it's just not heard of, right? But we have a tendency with EYs technical team, myself, we look around the, the road around the rock instead, the rock in the road, right? So we ended up coming up with a very unique, very easy to easy to handle architecture that was very scalable. And then were able to hit the ground running and deploy in production by December where head of >>Was EY involved in the whole, you know, dev test production, dr. Center of excellence, the, the process inventory or did you bring them in? Did you kind of do that internally then bring EY in for the proof of >>Value? EY was actually awarded the contract for soup to nuts, basically the first phase, which was those four work streams I told you about. And they worked with myself and the state of Tennessee infrastructure architecture teams. We needed to get these things defined and signed off the architecture so we could expedite getting them built out. And then they, and they basically ran all four work streams, you know, the process, inventory, the prototype, the, the proof of perceived business value, the building out the center of excellence, working with myself. And, and this wasn't just us in a, a vacuum, we ended up having to, I mean, I could do the strategy, I could do the technology and I could said the roadmap and all the good stuff, but we had to actually meet with a lot of the state or tendency organizations on change management. How do we end up putting this process or an automation in the middle of the, the normal traditional process, right? So there was a lot of interaction there and getting their feedback and then tweaking our operational model based on feedback from the state of Tennessee. So it was all very collective collaborative. I think that would be the keyword is collaborative and then building out everything. So then, and then we ended up going to the next way where they knew so much and we were, we had such a tight timeframe that we continued with ey. >>So Christina, Bob mentioned center of excellence a couple of times in the state of Tennessee, but then beyond state of Tennessee, other organizations you've worked with in this space, what's the relationship between center of excellence and this thing we've been hearing about over the last couple of days, the citizen developer has that been, has, has, has that been leveraged in the state of Tennessee? Bob, have you seen that leveraged in other places? Christina? What's that relationship look like? >>Yeah, so we don't leverage that, that model yet we have centralized model and there's reasons for that. So we don't end up having maverick's, runoff runoffs have one off, have, you know, have a a UI path version or down this division or have another RPA tool in another division, right? So then all of a sudden we're, we have a maintenance nightmare. Manageability nightmare. So we basically, you know, I I I negotiate an ELA with UI path, so therefore if anyone wants to go do another automation on another division, or they would basically follow our model, our design, our coe, our quality gates. We we're the gatekeepers to bring into production. >>Got it. Now, yeah. Now Christina, what's your perspective? Because I can imagine Nashville and Memphis might have very different ideas about a lot of things. Yeah. Little Tennessee reference there, but what, what, what about what, what about other places are you, are you seeing the citizen developer leveraged in, in some kinds of places more than others or >>What? Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of, because of the foundation we're building. Yeah. So we laid, you know, when, when Bob talks about the first phase of eight weeks, that was amazingly fast, even in that's ridiculous. Spoke about it to say you're gonna lay these four foundations. I was excited, like, I was like, wow, this, this is a very serious client. They wanna go fast and they wanna get that momentum, but the AUM was laid out so we could propel ourselves. So we are at 40 automations right now. We're in the works of creating 80 more automations in this next year. We'll be at 120 really quickly. The AUM is critical. And I will say at a client, I've, I've worked with over 50 clients on automation programs. The way state of Tennessee treats the aom and they abide by it, it is the living document of how you go and go fast. Got it. And the one thing I would say is it's also allowed us to have such immense quality. So I always talk about you put in forward, you put in another 80, we're at 98% uptime on all our automations, meaning they don't go down. And that's because of the AOM we set up. And the natural progression is going to be how do you take it to citizen developer? How do you take it to, we call, you know, process automation plus, >>But methodically, methodically, not just throwing it out at the beginning and, and hoping the chaos >>Works. Exactly. Exactly. And >>The ratio of of bots to automations, is that one to one or you have automation? Oh no, the single bot is doing multiple. So how many bots are you talking about? >>We're doing, Bob, you're gonna answer this better than I will, but the efficiency is amazing. We've been pushing that. >>So our ratio now, cause we have a high density architecture we put in is four bots, excuse me, four processes. The one bot and four bots, The one virtual machine EC two server. Right? So it's four to one, four to one. Now what we're going to get by next summer, we'll do more analysis. We'll probably get the six to one, six to one that's made serious shrinkage of our footprint from a machine, you know, management perspective from 60 down to seven right now we're gonna add the next chunk. We add another 80 automations in FIS gear 24. We're only gonna add two more bot, two more servers. Right? So that's only 10 running like close to 200 bucks. >>And, and is doing this on prem in the cloud? >>No, our, the architecture's fully >>Oh, cloud based >>Ct. Yeah. So we use UiPath SAS model. Yeah. Right. So that handles the orchestrator, the attended bots, all the other tooling you need automation hub, process minor et etc. Etc. Cetera. And then on the state side in aws we have, we use unattended bots, cert bots that have to go down into the legacy systems, et cetera. And they're sitting on EC two instances. >>Was there, was there a security not hole that you had to get through internally? What was that like? >>No, actually we, we, we were lock and step with the security team on this. I mean, there are some standards and templates and you know, what we had to follow, you know, but they're doing an assessment every single release, they do assessments on little bots, what systems it's activating or are accessing, et cetera. The data, because you have fedra data of FTI data, you know, in the public sector to make sure we're not touching it. >>Do you guys golf? >>I do, yeah. Not Well, yes, >>If you mean I I like golf but not don't golf well, but so you know what, what a mulligan is. If you had a Mulligan right, for the state of Tennessee, what'd you learn? What would you do differently? You know, what are some of the gotchas you see maybe Christina in, in other customers and then maybe specifically state of Tennessee, >>Right? I would say, you know, it is the intangibles. So when we talk about our clients that go fast and go big, like state of Tennessee, it's because that, that we call it phase zero that gets done that Bob did. It's about making sure you've got the sponsorship. So we've got executive sponsorship all the way up. You've got amazing stakeholder engagement. So you're communicating the value of what we're trying to do. And you're, you're showing them the value. We have been really focused on the return on investment and we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's how do you make sure that when you do, you know, states are different with those agencies, you have such an opportunity to maximize return on investment if you do it right, because you're not talking about automation in one agency, you're talking it across multiple agencies. We call that the multiplier effect. And that's huge. And if you understand that and how to actually apply that, the value you get is amazing. So I, I don't, I can't say there's a mulligan here, Bob, you may think of some, I know on other clients, if you don't line up your stakeholders and you don't set the expectations early on, you meander and you may get five, six automations in over the year. You know, when I go to clients and say, we're doing 40, we're doing 80, they're like, >>Wow, that's the, but that's the bottom line. Gotcha. Is if you, if you want to have an operational impact and have multiple zeros, you gotta go through that process that you said up front. >>Exactly. A >>Anything you do differently, Bob? >>Well, I I what I do differently, I mean, I think, I mean we, we did get executive sponsorship, you know, and in one area, but we still have to go out to all the 23 agencies and get, and bring awareness and kind of like set the hook to bring 'em in, right? Bring 'em to the, to the, to the lake. Right. And, and I think if, if it was more of a blanket top down, getting every agency to agree to, you know, in investigate automation, it would've been a lot easier. So we're, we're, we're getting it done. We've gone through 13 agencies already and less than a year, all of our releases are sprinkling across multiple agencies. So it's not like a silo. I'll look at that. Everyone at every agency is being impacted. So I think that's great. But I, I think our, our Mueller now is just trying to make sure we have enough backlog to do the next sprints. >>Is it, you know, the ROI on these initiatives is, is, is so clear and so fast. Is it self-funding? Is there gain sharing or do you just give business, give money back to the state and have to scramble for more? Do you get to, you know, get a lick off that cone? >>Unfortunately we don't, but I, I, I try to see if we could get some property like, nah, we don't do that. It's all cost, cost based. But, but our ROI is very attractive, I think for, for doing a whole state, you know, transformation. I think our ROI is three and a half to four years. Right. And that's pretty mind blowing. Even if you look at private sector or, I, I think some of the, the key things which people are noticing, even though we're in public sector, we're we are very nimble. This project is extremely nimble. We've had people come in, exactly, we need this, so we're gonna get penalized. Okay, knock it out in four hours, four days. Right? So it's that nimbleness that you just don't hear of even in private sector or public sector. And we're just able to do that for all the collaboration we do across ey, across myself and across all the other organizations that I, that I kind of drag along or what have, >>What do you, what do you, do you see any limits to the opportunities here? I mean, is this a decade long opportunity? Is you have that much runway >>Or that's just not my dna, so we're gonna, we're gonna probably do it like in four years, but Well, when >>You say do it, I mean, will you be done at that point? Or do you see the weight, >>Look at, you know, we could boil the ocean and I think this is one of the reasons why we're successful is we could boil the ocean and and be, it will be 10 attended 20 year program. Yeah. Okay. Or we looked at it, we had some of EY guys look at it and say, I said, what's the 25 80 rule? Meaning, you know, give me, So if we had 500 processes, tell me how many processes will gimme 80% of the hours. And it was 125, it was a 25 80 rule. I said, that's what we're doing it, we're doing, we're gonna do the 80% of the hours quantifiably. Now when we're done with that pass, then we'll have those other ones that are bringing 20% of the hours, that's when we might be bringing citizens in. That's what we're bringing state workers in. But at that same time, we will be going back in the wave and doing advanced ai. Right. Or advance ia, in other words. So right now we do rpa, ocr, icr, but you know, there's NL ml nps, there's virtual agents and stuff. So that's like the wave we're gonna do through the ones we've already gone through. Got it. Right. So it'll probably be a two or three wave or iterations. >>Cool. Guys, thanks so much for coming into the cube. Great story. Really appreciate you taking us through it. Thank you so much for having us. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson. The Dave ante. We back at UI path forward five from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for live from Las Vegas. We're here at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave a long time, very excited to have in-person events back ish. I'll say we're going to be talking about automation as a boardroom imperative. We have two guests joining us here, James Matras here consulting principal. America's intelligent automation leader at UI and Irv. Dennis retired EA partner, and former CFO of HUD gentlemen. Welcome to the program. Exciting topic automation as a boardroom imperative, James says COO and start with you. How do you discuss the value of automation as being a key component and driver of transformation? >>That's a great question. I think what we've seen in the last couple of years is the evolution of what automation used to be. Two is going nine. And we've seen the shift from what we call generation one, which is very RPA centric type automation to more generation two, which is the combined integration of multiple technologies. It can target an intern process and it's quite important that you understand the pivotal shift because it's not enabling us to move from a task micro top agenda to a macro agenda actually impacts an organization at a strategic level. The ability to be able to look at processes more deeply to automate them in an end to end process collectively and use these different technologies in a synergistic manner truly becomes powerful because it shifts the narrative from a micro process agenda into more systemic area. >>So gen zero is an Emmanuel gen one is RPA point tools that individual maybe getting their personal productivity out. And then now you're saying gen three is across the enterprise. Where are we in terms of, you know, take your experience from your practical experience? Where do you think the world is? It's like probably between zero and one still. Right. But the advanced folks of thinking about gen three, w what's your, >>Yeah, it's a great question. And, um, when you and I, I can do the comparison being private and public sector on this because I was 37 years with E Y then went into retirement and CFL at HUD CFO. Ed was, was a HUD was nowhere. They had to just do all the intelligence digitalization, um, throughout, uh, from scratch. The private sector is probably five or six years ahead of them. But when you think about James talks about the gen one, two and three, the private sector is probably somewhere between two and three. And I know we're talking about the board in this conversation. Um, boards probably have one and two on their radar. Some boards may have three, some may not, but that's where the real strategic focus for boards needs to be is looking forward and, and getting ahead. But I think from a public sector standpoint, lot to go private sector, more to go as well. But, uh, there's a, there's a bit of a gap, but the public sector is probably only about three or four years behind the private sector >>To be okay. Let's look at the numbers, look at, look at the progress for the quarter. And now it's like discussion on cyber discussion on digital discussion on automated issue. It really changed the narrative over the last decade. >>Yeah, I think when you think of boards today, the lots of conversation on cyber that that conversation has been around for a while. A lot of conversation on ESG today, that conversation is getting, getting very popular. But I think when you think of next three, a Jen talks that bear James talks about, um, that's got to start elevating itself if it's not within the boardroom right now, because that will be the future of the company. And the way I think of it from a board's conversation is if a company doesn't think of themselves as a technology company in all aspects, no matter what you do, you are a technology company or you need to be. And if you're not thinking along that way, you're gonna, you're gonna lose market share and you're going to start falling behind your competitors. >>Well, and how much acceleration did the pandemic bring to just that organizations that weren't digital forward last year are probably gone? >>I think it certainly has shifted quite a lot. There's been a drive, the relevance of technology and hard plays for us in the modern workforce in the modern workplace has fundamentally changed the pandemic. We reimagine how we do things. Technology has progressed in itself significantly, and that made a big difference for, for all the environments as a result of that. So certainly is one of the byproducts of the pandemic has been certainly a good thing for everybody. >>Where does automation fit in the board? Virginia? You've got compensation committee. You've probably, I mean, there's somebody in charge of cyber. You got ESG now there's automation part of a broader digital agenda. Where's what's the right word. >>You know, I, I would personally put it in a enterprise risk management from a standpoint that if you're not focused on it, it's going to be a risk to the enterprise. And, um, when you think of automation and intelligent automation and RPA, uh, I think boards have a pretty good sense of how you interface with your customers and your vendors. I think a big push ought to be looking internally at your own infrastructure. You know, what are you, what are you doing in the HR space? What are you doing in a financial statement, close process? What are you doing your procurement process? I suspect there's still a lot of very routine transactions and processing within those, that infrastructure that if you just apply some RPA artificial intelligence, that data extraction techniques, you can probably eliminate a lot of man hours from the routine stuff. And, and the many man hours is probably not the right way to think of it. You could elevate people's work from being pushing numbers around to being data analyzers. And that's where the excitement is for people to see. >>It's not how it's viewed at organizations. We're not eliminating hours. Well focusing folks on much more strategic down at a test. >>Yes. I would say that that's exactly right now in the private sector, you're always going to have the efficiency play and profitability. So there will be an element of that. I know when at HUD we're, we're focused, we were not focused on eliminating hours because we needed people and we focused on creating efficiencies within the space and having people convert from, again, being Trent routine transactions, to being data analyzers and made the jobs, I'm sure. Fund for them as well. I mean, this is a lot of fun stuff. And, and if, uh, uh, companies need to be pushing this down through their entire infrastructure, not just dealing with our customers and the third parties that they deal with >>Catalyst or have been public sector. So you mentioned they may be five or six years behind, but I've seen certain public sector organizations really lean in, they learn from, from the private sector. And then even when you think about some of the military, how advanced they are absolutely. You know, the private could learn from them and if they could open it up. But >>So, yeah, I think that's, that's well said I was in this, you know, the that's the civilian part with, with the housing and urban development. I think the catalyst is, uh, bringing the expertise in, uh, I know when I, when I came, I went to HUD to elevate their financial infrastructure. It was, it was probably the worst of the cabinet agency. The financials were a mess. There was no, there was a, uh, there was not a clean audit opinion for eight years. And I was there to fix that and we fixed it through digitalization and digital transformation, as well as a financial transformation. The catalyst is just creating the education, letting people know what is, what, what technology can do. You don't have to be a programmer, but it's like driving a car. Anybody can drive a car, but we can't mechanic, you know, work as a mechanic on it. >>So I think it's creating education, letting people know what it can do. And at HUD, for example, we did a very simple, I was telling James earlier, we did a very simple RPA project on an, an, a financial statement, close process. It was 2,600 hours, six months. Once we implemented the RPA, brought that down to 70 hours, two weeks, people's eyes exploded with it. And then all of a sudden, I said, I want everyone to go back and come back with, with any manual process, any routine process that can convert to an RPA. And I got a list of a hundred, then it came then became trying to slow everything down. We're not going to do it overnight. Yeah, exactly. >>So, but it was self-funding. It was >>Self-funded. Yes. >>And, and how do you take that message to customers that it could be self-funding how how's that resonating >>Very well. And I think it was important. I always like to say, it's a point of differentiation because you look at, uh, mentioned earlier that organizations are basically technology companies. That's what they are. But now if you look across that we no longer compete at the ERP level without got SAP, Oracle, it's not a point of differentiation. We don't compete the application layer where they've got service. Now, black line, how we use them is helpful. We competed the digital layer and with automation is a major component of that. That's where your differentiation takes place. Now, if you have a point of differentiation, that is self-funding, it fundamentally changes the game. And that's why it's so important for boards to understand this, because that risk management, if you've not doing it, somebody is getting ahead of the game much faster than you are. >>Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned ERP and it, and it triggered something in my mind. Cause I, I said this 10 years ago about data. If in the nineties, you, you couldn't have picked SAP necessarily as the winner of ERP. But if you could have picked the companies that were using ERP could have made a lot of money in the stock market because they outperform their peers. And the same thing was true with data. And I think the same thing is going to be true with automation in the coming decade. >>Couldn't agree more. And I think that's exactly the point that differential acceleration happening this. And it's harder because of the Europeans. Once you knew what it was, you can put the boundaries on it. Digital, the options are infinite. It's just continuous progress as are from there. >>I've got a question for you. You talked about some great stats about how dramatically faster things were took far less time. How does that help from an adoption perspective? I know how much cultural change is very difficult for folks in any organization, but that sort of self-serving how does that help fuel adoption? >>Well, it's interesting. Um, it's, it is a, we're actually going to talk about this tomorrow. It is a framework and it's got to start at the leadership has got to start with governance. It's got to start with a detailed plan. That's executable. And it's got to start with getting buy-in from not only your, the, the organization, but the people you're dealing with outside the organization. Um, it's, it's, uh, I think that's absolutely critical. And when you bring this back to the boardroom, they are the leaders of the companies. And, and I, James, I talked about this as we're getting ready for tomorrow's session. I think the number one thing a board can do today is an own personal self assessment. Do they understand automation? Do they understand what next generation three is? Do they understand what the different components can do? And do they understand how the companies are implementing it? And if I was a board member, uh, on our boards, I say, we need to understand that or else this is nothing's going to happen. We're going to be here at the reliance of the CEO and the CFO strategy, which may or may not include or be thinking about this next three. So leadership at the top is going to drive this. And it's so critical. >>We were talking about catalyst before. And you mentioned education and expertise. I'm always curious as to what drew you to public sector because it's, yeah, I mean, very successful, you know, you're, you're with one of the global SIS directly, you can make a lot more money and that side. So what was it did, was it a desire to it's a great country? Was it >>Take one for the team and I'm going to do a selfish plug here. I just actually wrote a book in this whole thing called transforming a federal agency. What's the name of the book transforming and federal agency. And it's, uh, I spent my time at E Y for 37 years, fully retired. I wanted to give back and do meaningful work. And we lived in Columbus, Ohio, as I was talking about earlier, I was going to go teach and I got a call from the president's personnel office to see if I wanted to come. And these, the CFO at HUD with secretary Carson and change turn the agency around, uh, that took me a little while to say yes, because I wasn't sure I wanted something full time. It was a, it was in DC. So I'd be in a commuting role back and forth. My family's in Columbus. >>Um, but it was, uh, I did it and I loved it. It was, uh, I would pray, I would ask anyone that's has the ability to go into public service at any point in their career to do it. It's it was very rewarding. It was one of my favorite three years of life. And to your point, I didn't have to do it, but, uh, if I wanted to do something and give back and that met the criteria and we were very successful in turning it around with the digital transformation and a lot of stuff that we're talking about today gave me the ability to talk about it because I helped lead it >>For sharing that and did it. So did it start with the CFO's office? Because the first time I ever even heard about our RPO RPA was at a CFO conference and I started talking to him like, oh, this is going to be game changing. Is that where it started? Is that where it lands today? >>From an infrastructure standpoint, the CFO has the wonderful ability to see most processes within a company and its entire lifestyle from beginning to end. So CFO has that visibility to understand where efficiencies can happen in the process. And so the CFO plays a dramatically important role in this. And you think about a CFO's role today versus 20 years ago, it's no longer this, the bean counter rolling up numbers that become a business advisors to the board, to the CEO and to the executive suite. Um, so the CFO, I think has probably the best visibility of all the processes on a global basis. And they can see where the, the efficiencies and the implementation of automation can happen. >>So they can be catalysts and really fueling the actual >>Redesign of work. Yes, they, they, they probably need to be the catalyst. And as a board member, you want to be asking what is the CFO's strategic imperative for the next year? And if it doesn't include this, it's just got to get on the agenda. >>Well, curve ball here is his CFO question and you know, three years or two years ago, you wouldn't have even thought, I mean, let me set it up better. One of the industries that is highly automated is crypto. Yeah. You wouldn't even thought about crypto in your balance sheet a couple of years ago, but I'm not sure it's a widespread board level discussion, but as a CFO, what do you make of the trend to put Bitcoin on balance sheets? >>Yeah, I'm probably not the right person to ask because I'm a conservative guy. >>If somebody supported me and he said, Hey, why don't we put crypto on the balance sheet? >>I would get much more educated. I wouldn't shut it down. I would put it into, let's get more educated. Let's get the experts in here. Let's understand what's really happening with it. Let's understand what the risks are, what the rewards are. And can we absorb any sort of risk or reward with it? And when you say put it on the balance sheet, you can put it on in a small way to test it out. I wouldn't put the whole, I wouldn't make the whole balance sheet for Dell on day one. So that's why I would think about it. Just tell, tell me more, get me educated. How did you think about it? How can it help our business? How can I help our shareholders? How does it grow the bottom line? And then, then you start making decisions. >>Cause CFOs, let me find nature often conservative and most CFOs that I talked to just say no way, not a chance, but you're, maybe you're not as conservative as you think. Well, >>No, but I will never say go away on anything. I mean, cause I want to learn. I want to know. I mean, um, if you like all this stuff, that's new, it's easy to say go away, right? Yeah. But all of a sudden, three years later, the go away, all your competitors are doing it at a competitive advantage. So never say go away, get yourself educated before you jump into it. >>That's good advice. Yeah. In any walk of life question for you, or have you talked about the education aspect there? I'm curious from a risk mitigation perspective, especially given the last 18, 19 months, so tumultuous, so scary for all those organizations that were very digital, they're either gone or they accelerated very quickly. How much of an education do you have to provide certain industries? And are you seeing certain industries? I think healthcare manufacturing, financial services as being leaders in the uptake? >>Well, I think the financial service industries, for sure, they, they, they get this and then they need to, uh, cause they, you know, they're, they're a transaction and based, uh, industry. Uh, so they get it completely. Um, you know, I think maybe some manufacturing distribution, some of the old line businesses are, you know, they may not be thinking of this as progressively as they should. Um, but they'll get there. They're going to have to get there eventually. Um, you know, when you think about the education, my, I thought you were gonna ask a question about the education of the workforce. And I think as a board member, I would be really focused on, uh, how am I educating my workforce of the future? And do I have the workforce of the future today? Do I have to educate them to have to bring in hiring for it? Do I have to bring third-party service providers to get us there? So as a board member really focus on, do I have the right workforce to get us to this next stage? And if not, what do I need to do to get there? Because >>We'll allocate a percentage of their budgets to training and education. And the question is where do they put it >>In? Is it the right training and education, right? >>Where do they focus though? Right now we hear you iPad talking about they're a horizontal play, but James, when you and Lisa, we were asking about industry, when you go to market, are you, are you more focused on verticals? Are you thinking, >>No, it's on two things. So which often find is regardless of the sector with some nuanced variation, the back office functions are regionally the procure to pay process as the same fundamentals, regardless of the sector where the differentiation comes in at a sector of service is when you start going to the middle of the front office, I mean a mining has only one customer. They sold their product to image the retailer has an endless number of them. So when you get to the middle and front office and really start engaging with a customer and external vendors, then a differentiation is very unique and you'd have a lot of sort of customers having sector specific nuances and variations in how you use the platform. And that's where the shift now is happening as well is the back office functions that are largely driven by the CFO. If now getting good, robust value out of it, there's pivot to make it a differentiator in the market, comes in the front and middle office. And that's where we starting to say, sector specific genres solutions, nuances really come to the fall >>Deep industry expertise. Do you think digital at all changes that the reason I ask it because I see Amazon as a retail and then they're in cloud and they're in grocery other in content Apple's in, in financial services and you're seeing these internet giants with a dual agenda, they're disrupting horizontal technology and then there's disruptive industries. And my premise is it's because of data and digital. Do you ever see that industry specialization changing that value chain >>Without a doubt? And I think it's happens initially. It starts off. When people have started looking at the process, they realize there's such key dependencies on the upstream and downstream components of the value chain that they want to control it. So they actually start bridging out of what the core practices or the core business to own a broader agenda. And with digital, you can do it. You can actively interact more systemically that installs triggering, well, maybe I have a different product offering. Maybe I can own this. Could I monetize the information I had at my disposal today in a completely new line. And that really what gets truly innovative and starts creating a revenue increase as opposed as the cost saving. And that's what they're really going after. It's how do I, >>The vertical integration is not new. The plenty of ended up Koch industries, Tyson foods, but now it's digital. So presumably you can do it faster with greater greater scale >>Without a doubt. And you don't have to move your big ERP and things like that. Cause that's the only way it takes five years to move my technology backbone with digital. I can do the interaction tomorrow and we can build up enough to be able to sustain that in the short term. >>Right. And speaking of speed, unfortunately, guys, we are out of time, but thank you. Fantastic conversation automation as a board imperative guys, that's been great James or >>Thank you for your time. Thank you so much >>For Dave a long day. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue. We are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at UI path forward for stick around Dave and I will be right back. Okay.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Sanjay Sadasivan, he is attended automation process lead at EY. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Sure, thank you for having us. >> Rebecca: And we have Goutham Goudgere, he is the attended automation lead at EY. >> Great to be here. >> Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> So, about a year ago, you embarked on an attended automation project within EY. EY, of course, is a company that helps other companies with their RPA transformations, but this is one you did on your own. I want to hear about the impetus for this project. Why did you start it? What was going on? >> Sure. >> Yeah, so I can take that one. So we started this project, like you mentioned, about a year ago. We both are from EY's SAP practice, and EY has been undergoing SAP transformation for the past few years, and so, we're kind of replacing a whole bunch of, almost 1,400 systems and moving to a single-instance SAP project, which covers everything that our client servers do in the market, entering client information, all the things that CRM does, project management, engagement economics, as well as the whole finance and procurement work. So I think we've got, right now, 100,000 users on the SAP single instance. And SAP is great at what it does, which is essentially entering transactions into the system efficiently at scale, but the feedback that we were getting from our end users, especially those end users that end up using the system maybe once a week to maybe once a quarter, was that it was sometimes too difficult for them to navigate into the system, try to remember all the things that they had to do in the SAP system. So we were at the Miami event last year, and so, we heard about attended automation from UiPath, and we kind of went back and did a POC to see, can we use attended bots on top of SAP system and help the user go through some of those usability challenges? So we started last year, and we are currently live as a pilot. EY is 250,000 users, so our pilot is huge, so it's got about 20,000 users as of this week. >> Why attended bots? What are attended bots? What's the motivation for attended bots? >> So, in fact, when we started the process, we had two options, to go through kind of the traditional unattended bot, which was have the user enter data in an Excel sheet or some sort of screen capture, email that information, and have the bot then enter it. We initially started with that, but that ran into several problems, like the data was already too old by the time it got into the transaction system. Then we had to rebuild the full front end of SAP, which has taken years to build. So that's why we started using attended bots, which was, can we just put a bot on the user's machine, so that when they want to enter a transaction, they just call the bot, and the bot does all the hard work for them? So that's how we've been-- >> Your question as to why attended bots, there's a certain level of intelligence, actually, the user puts in when entering these transactions, so an attended bot actually just takes some information and then plugs it in. But that's not the way EY works. For example, if you're entering an opportunity, there's a lot of thought processes the clients are actually going through. "What's the pursuit going to be?" "Who are my likely sales leads?" "What's the percentage of what I'm "winning this transaction?" So we needed the user to actually enter that information in the system. But using our normal SAP system, especially when you're on a sales lead and you're meeting with a client, entering all that information was getting a bit cumbersome. The attended automation process actually cuts down those steps. For example, if SAP requires you to enter, say, 20 fields, this actually cuts it down to five fields or five screens, and they can enter that information to the attended bot, it guides them through each process, it's a streamlined process, and they can exit out of it, that's it, they're done with the system, focus on the lead, actually. >> So you came to the conference last year, had this eureka moment, "Hey, could we do this "and help our people who are suffocating "under these dreary, tedious tasks?" So, was it a hard sell? I mean, were they easily brought along, of, "Yeah, we want to try this"? Or was there any anxiety on their part, of, "Ooh,"-- >> Sure. >> "What are we doing here?" >> We had that. >> So I think we had a great sponsor within the firm, and we are trying this out for the first time. >> Sanjay: Yeah. >> In fact, from talking with UiPath, the experts here, not a lot of other companies have tried this. So we did go through a step-by-step approach to kind of de-risk as we went through this. We started with a small POC, learned from that. We then put those bots in front of real users, got feedback, kind of Agile approach and built it over time. >> Yeah, I think one of the key points was really doing a business "let's go" definition, so we went to our partner community and asked them, you know, "What are the most frequently used processes "that we should automate with an attended "automation process? "What are the pain points? "What are the current challenges? "We want you to alleviate us." So, basically, we actually used the feedback from the partnership to focus on those particular steps to automate. So, and then change management, obviously, you have to engage with the user community all the time to make sure that, you know, getting the right feedback, maybe adjust our process or how we're building the bots accordingly as you're going through the process, I think that is key as well. >> So, the user experience now, so walk us through what it's like now for the human worker who had these tedious tasks, and now, what's it like with this attended bot? >> So, the attended bot is an application which is on the end user's laptop. So as soon as they open the laptop, it's right there as an icon on their bottom right corner. So they go there, click on that, and it lists about 15 SAP processes that they can run. So they know what they want to do in the system, they want to create a new client, they want to create a new engagement, or a project, and so, they would go there, call that, you know, just click play, and essentially sit back and watch the bot then take over their screen, navigate to the right SAP transaction. And, you know, navigating to this transaction seems easy, but when you have 15 processes that 200,000 users need to know, and it's not straightforward sometimes, the bot does three, four clicks, before they know it, brings them to the right screen, and then it also adds a message on top of every screen that says, "This is what you are supposed "to be doing on this screen. "So, before creating a new client, "first search within our MBM system, "first search within this DNB system, "to make sure you're not creating a duplicate." So we've got help messages added on top of the screens as well, so it kind of takes you through the process. >> So I think one of the main points, yeah. Yeah, I think (clears throat) a normal SAP system in a particular screen, you could always go to a help, maybe a portal, and get some help. But with attended automation, it gives an opportunity for each of those screens as well to give specific help, contextual help. So basically, if you're on a particular screen and you're having an issue with this particular screen, you don't have to pick up the phone and call, maybe, a user desk, or close the screen and look through some manuals. Right there, through the attended automation process, we gave a link where they can get actual information on that particular screen, so they can finish that step without actually closing out of the process itself. So that is one of the big-- >> So the way I explained this to internal audiences is, we have built the bot to be our best-trained employee in SAP. So instead of them calling a human to go through the SAP transactions, the bot is right there, guiding. And the bot is watching what they're doing, so if it gets a SAP error, then it can suggest to them, "Here's two ways that you can get around "this particular error." So it's doing things like it's having your friend sit next to you and tell you how to go through the process. >> Your smartest friend. >> You guys are in the SAP, sorry, you guys are in the SAP practice. >> We are, yeah. >> That's right. >> And, so it's been quite a run, the last 10 years, for Bill McDermott, and I believe they acquired an RPA company, a small, little tuck-in. >> Goutham: That's right. >> But you guys chose UiPath. (laughs) You know, I don't know what that says. >> Goutham: Yeah. >> But what are your thoughts on that? I mean, in terms of, we've been asking practitioners, best of breed, or full suite? Obviously, you went with best of breed. >> That's right, actually, we spoke with SAP before we started our journey. We actually did a POC with one of the smaller firms, an RPA firm, and we spoke with SAP as to what their capabilities were. But just looking at what's out there, in terms of the product suite and how it fits our processes, we just felt like UiPath went that step further, and really met our needs in terms of attended automation. And then, obviously, we looked at the Gartner surveys it's on, and it was right up there in the right-hand quadrant, so we felt like UiPath was the right answer for us. >> Rebecca: Great, well-- >> But we are working with SAP to actually help through this process. So, the bot has to watch the screen, like I mentioned, and kind of understand the screen layout, the screen fields, so, instead of that watching words and names on the field, it's actually using this thing called automation ID. So SAP is adding these IDs on every screen, which actually helps any RPA vendor sit on top of it. >> And that's one of the key learnings that we've been finding out, that SAP, as Goutham was mentioning, we have these automation IDs that the attended bot actually uses to transact with the system. And then we see that SAP CRM as this cloud release every quarter, and they basically push out some code to our systems, which is every quarter, and we see that more and more automation IDs are coming through the SAP systems as well. So we have our own challenges in terms of managing those quarterly releases and make sure that it doesn't break our attended bot. But UiPath so far has been good. >> Excellent. >> Yeah. >> Rebecca: Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great conversation. >> Great, thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. This is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage and we're here covering UiPathForward. Looking, unpacking... Software robots, robotic process automation, Jeff Aldridge is here. He's advisory principal for EY. Great to see you Jeff. Thanks for coming on. Stu Miniman, myself: Dave Vellante. We're excited to have you. Thanks for coming. >> Great. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> So I was at a chief data officer conference early this year, and the speaker asked, "How many of you are involved in robotic process automation projects?" I would say, two-thirds, maybe even three-quarters of the hands went up. So, these are guys in suits, right? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Kind of staid individuals. But, I've seen data that suggests that, while everybody's interested in, you know, kicking the tires, that there's not a lot of companies that are at scale. Single digits at scale. What are you seeing? Does that match and why do you think that is? >> Yeah, I think that's pretty consistent with what we see in the market. I think a lot of folks have bought a few licenses. They've done a few exploratory pilots, but very few companies have gone to production with more than 30 bots. We do think that's going to change dramatically in the next 12 to 24 months based on what we're seeing in the market. So it's an exciting period of time. >> What's the headwind to scale? And how do you... Reducing friction? >> Yeah, I think it varies, but I think change is just hard for organizations right? So I think they've started a little bit slow. Trying to figure out what's their purpose? Why are they doing this? Is is about headcount reduction? Is it about trying to scale? Is it about accuracy? So trying to define that common purpose and common metrics to measure success, I think, has been slow for some organizations, but I think once they have that purpose, and they can kind of see what the potential is, then I think it starts to pick up speed. So, we've certainly seen more and more companies going to scale. >> It's always something new. It's, right, how do I measure success? What was the outcome you're expecting? We talked to a number of customers today already and the answer's been different for every one of them. They are all very similar as to what they're doing, but what it means to their business, I thought I was going to reduce cost, but oh wait. I'm going to drive more revenue. >> Jeff: Right. >> I thought I was going to so this, oh wait. It's great ROI. It turned around really different. How do you deal with that in the field? >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think at some point, to do a few pilots, and kind of kick the tires, you don't have to know what the purpose is. So it's pretty easy to do that. But I think, once you start thinking, we're really going to do this, you got to coalesce around what our purpose is. And so we like to talk to people about different examples of what other companies have done and in particular, how do you measure success? For some companies, they're looking at the same goal. For example, cost reduction. They look at that differently so, we've had a very large client who said, "We're going to measure cost reduction based on next year's budget. So if we're able to not have to hire additional resources, we get to count that. If we're able to find hard dollar savings, we get to count that." So, for example, in peak periods of the year, when we hire a lot of contingent labor, if we automate something that keeps us from having to hire that amount of contingent labor, then we get to count that. Others will count against the prior year. So, I think even when you have similar goal, you can have different metrics of how you measure it. >> That next year's budget is actually quite interesting, cause if you could do more with the same, now you're getting operating leverage, that's almost as good as like dropping to the bottom line to a CFO. >> Yeah, and some would say it's better. Because you don't have a disruption of your current workforce. It's not about reducing heads that we have today, but it's how can we grow and how can we scale without having to add back office cost and other cost in the organization? So I think that's going to become pretty common for fast-growing companies. >> What's your interest, Jeff, in automation? Robotic process automation? How did you get here? Kind of, what's your background? >> Yeah, so I'm a CPA, finance person by background. Went to law school, but I've always been about process improvement and helping organizations improve. And so I think this is just the next step in that, right? Technology has taken a leap and now organizations can take a leap in terms of additional process improvement. And I think the best companies are looking at it as, how do I use my top resources to do more? And so I think that's another objective of some of the better companies is, you know, how do I free up my people to do what they were hired to do? >> Jeff, one thing I'm trying to understand, when I think about process, one of the challenges, I think back to outsourcing is. When I outsource something, it made me not be able to change as much as I might want to. I lost some skill set and therefore I had a disconnect between the business and keeping operations going. How is this different? How do I make sure that when I put a robot in place, that I'm not frozen into, kind of, the way things were before? >> Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, first of all, I think outsourcing is great in the right situation, but you're right. For a lot of organizations it was sort of, out of sight, out of mind. And once I off-shored cost, it just seemed to grow and never reduce right? And we never improved the process. >> I thought it would be my mess for less, but it turned out not to be the case. >> Yeah, I think this is fundamentally different because the bots are sort of part of your on-shore team. They're a virtual workforce and I think as companies see what they can do, it's actually the opposite. They find more things that the bot can do so that humans can focus on the higher value-added decision support. >> Do you think RPA will reverse some of the outsourcing trends and the pendulum will swing back? >> I think we're already seeing it. I do think it will do that. I think is allows you to in-source some of those things and reduce cost in the process. >> And then, just talking from a parochial US view, those software robots are global, presumably, but it reduces the need to ship jobs overseas, to use the pejorative. >> It does, which obviously is popular in the current, kind of current political environment. But you know, there's also entire industries like healthcare where because of HIPAA laws, they can't off-shore activities. So they by and large, have not been able to take advantage of outsourcing and so this is now an opportunity to reduce cost through bots. >> Yeah, I mean there's two sides to that coin, right? The political rhetoric says, oh outsourcing's bad, bad, bad, but you remember Jack Welsh, he's like, "Listen, this is actually really good, you know." And of course GE is going through some troubles now, but under his reign, their profitability was pretty substantial so, your point about healthcare is quite interesting because, first of all, that's an industry that's ripe for transformation. It really hasn't transformed. I think you'd agree, every industry is going to get digitally transformed in some way, shape, and form. Healthcare, financial services, defense haven't yet. Maybe cause they're high risk. But what are you seeing? >> Yeah, I think this is coming and it's not going to stop. I think you're going to see all industries taking advantage of automation. And frankly, I think RPA is just the beginning. I think that we all see this moving into artificial intelligence but for most organizations, they want to learn with RPA. They want to capture some low-hanging fruit, so they can move then to the next level. So it's about training employees. It's about setting up a governance structure and kind of preparing for that future. >> When I see companies like yours at an event like this, I say okay, there's big dollars in this event. And big dollars means that... Big dollars not just for you guys and not just for guys like UiPath, but for customers. Certainly ERP was that way. I mean, you hear all the jokes about SAP implementations, but if you could have bet on the companies that bet on ERP early, SAP specifically, you could have made some decent money in the stock market, cause those guys drove efficiencies. Are we seeing the same thing here? Is this kind of big dollar transformations? And my real question is, does it apply for all companies? Like Amazon, AWS. Lot of small companies can take advantage of that. Can smaller companies take advantage of RPA, or is it a big, giant enterprise trend? >> Yeah, I think they can. I think if you talk about a smaller company, you've got to activate multiple functional areas, so it's not going to be a single automation and a single function like finance, that's going to bring you the ROI that's big. So in a smaller company, I think you've got to activate other back office areas like HR and supply chain and procurement whereas a larger company, we worked with some very large companies, where even a single process area can generate significant savings. >> What does a successful... The profile of a successful customer look like? A couple that we've talked to, it's like, well I know I need the executive support and I usually have somebody that's operations, maybe six sigma, that focuses on that kind of environment, and they're like, "oh, this is a new tool that will help me accomplish what I've been trying to do for years." >> I think there's a few things. I think, number one, having that common purpose. We know why we're doing this and we have specific goals, but I think to your point, it's having that executive sponsor. When this gets hard, they push through it and everybody knows they're behind it. Be it a CEO or someone of that stature. And so, what I've seen is, when that's in place, you'll see multiple functions jumping on board. And one of the things we've used is media for example. So doing videos where the people that have been involved, kind of get highlighted for what they've done and that tends to spur efforts and now you want to be a part of it right? And you want to show that you're looking for improvement in your area. And so, we're definitely seeing some people have some pretty tremendous success. >> You said, when things get hard. What are some of the headwinds that you're seeing? Is that just the natural aversion to change inside of an organization or? >> Well I think there's, in addition to the natural aversion to change, I think there's this idea about, I don't want my team to lose their jobs right? And I'm worried about what that means. I don't want to get to a situation where I've reduced so many heads that I'm afraid I can't be effective in the future as we grow, right? And so there's naturally, people wondering why are we doing this? What's the purpose? What's it mean to me? And so, I do think it's important to do that strategy phase up front. Identify the opportunities. Identify the ROI so that we can all see why we're doing this and it really is pretty impactful. >> So we started this segment talking about how most companies aren't at scale with RPA. Are there any examples you can share with us that... Where your clients are either headed there or actually have scaled? >> Yeah, there are actually several now, right? And so, I always start with ourselves. I mean believe it or not, EY over three years ago started automation in our own back office and today, we're one of the largest users of RPA, robotics, as well as chatbots, machine learning, NLP. We think we've save two million hours a year, out of our own back office, which has been fantastic for us. And so we took those learnings, at scale, and have now started applying those to clients. But there are some big-name clients. I think... Like you mentioned a few industries like oil and gas, and consumer products. We have some big clients that have gone to scale in those areas. So you know, I think there's several examples that people can learn from. >> And that's primarily squeezing the back office lemon, or are there... >> You know, it's been more of that to begin with. I think now what's really next for this, is next generation use cases that include the front office, and how do we make our sales force more effective? How do we improve our supply chain? I think there's bigger opportunities for next generation RPA and first generation AI. >> Hey, I wonder. Jeff, you look at the market forecast, and they're like the classic market forecast. They're a straight line and you're looking at how many people will get replaced by robots. But it feels like there's this sort of blind spot, where you don't really know where the innovation is going to come from, but like you said, it could be sales. It could be marketing. It could be, you a customer in the field. But, it feels like there's a lot of revenue potential in other parts of the organization that are hard to forecast. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, we have really come up with a pretty exhaustive list of use cases from some of our clients and every day we're kind of thinking of new applications. And so, I think you're going to see a lot more front office applications that are going to drive revenue as opposed to just reducing cost. And then, of course, as you move into the AI realm, I think there's a lot more there in terms of revenue generation. But, I think we've just scratched the surface. There's a lot of opportunity out there. >> What's your relationship with these guys at UiPath? >> You know, we've had a tremendous relationship for quite a while with UiPath. Some of our largest clients... Two of our Fortune five companies have gone to scale with UiPath. As Bill just mentioned in the overall session, we've created some solutions with them around SAP migrations. We've also done some things around document recognition, where we've combined ABBYY with UiPath and some other tools from Microsoft. So we think that these guys... They are on the right track. They've gotten some investment dollars. They're partnering with the right people. And we like their strategy of knowing where they play and integrating with others who are better at other things as opposed to trying to build it themselves. So it's a great relationship and we look forward to continuing it. >> Well it's certainly attracting a lot of money. I think these guys have raised over 400 million. I think is the number. 225 was the latest round so the VCs are paying attention. Google's in there, throwing money at it and so Jeff, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Dave: Good luck with everything. >> Appreciate it. >> Alright take care. >> Thank you. >> Keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. We're live from Miami. UiPathForward. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan at the Automation Everywhere Imagine 2018. About 1,100 people talking about RPA, Robotics Process Automation, bots, really bringing automation to the crappy processes that none of us like to do in our day to day job. And, we're excited to have a practitioner. He's out in the field. He's talking to customers all the time. It's Weston Jones, and he's the global intelligent automation leader for EY. Weston, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you, good to be here. >> Absolutely, so it's funny, you said you've been with these guys for a number of years, so when did you get started, how did you see the vision when nobody else saw it, and here we are five years later, I think, since you first met 'em. >> Oh, I know, it's just funny. I mean, years ago I saw Automation Anywhere at conferences. They were one of the small booths, just like everybody else was, talking about automation. I watched them for several years, and then I decided one year when we were looking at some of our offerings to bring in RPA and talk to our leadership about it, and kinda the light bulbs went off. So, from five, six years ago 'til today we've been working with them, and it's really amazing to see kind of how things have changed, and how the adoption has taken place. >> You know, it's such a big moment in a startup, especially software company, when you get a big global integrator like you guys to jump in, you know, advisory service. It's really hard to do. I've been in that position myself, and you guys don't make the move unless you really see a big opportunity. So, what did you see in terms of the big opportunity that made you, you know, basically bet your career on this vertical? >> Well, so when I went to our leadership, in the meeting I had our global shared services leader. So, we have 7,000 plus people on our shared services, and he was very skeptical. We had to do 20 plus proof of concepts with him, and HR, IT, finance, et cetera, to get him excited about it. Now, he's our biggest fan, and actually we promoted him to run our global internal automation team where now we think we're one of the largest users of automation. We're one of the biggest users within tax. We use Automation Anywhere within tax. We have over 750 bots working, and we have a goal to have 10,000 plus by 2022. So, we're really pushing the bar in scaling. >> From 750 to 10,000, what are we, 2018, in four years. >> In four years. That's our goal. >> So, where did you find the early successes, what kind of bots specifically, what type of processes are kind of right for people that are interested, see the potential, but aren't really sure kinda how to get started, or to get that early success? >> Yeah, I mean, it's just almost like anything else, the quick wins, you know. Start with things that are very rules-based, that have a lot of people, FTs associated with them. You know, our thing wasn't that we were actually eliminating FTs, we were just developing capacity, 'cause we're a company that's growing, so instead of hiring more and more people, we took all that mundane work out of people's jobs and allowed them to focus on things that were more value-added. So, the block and tackle stuff-- >> Like what? Like, give me a couple of, you know, just simple stuff-- >> well, we have like HR onboarding, you know, we onboard 60,000 people a year. HR onboarding is something that's very repetitive activity, logging in and out of multiple systems. And, it was something where we were hiring HR professionals that knew how to do talent management, that knew how to do all these things we really wanted them to do, but we had 'em focused on doing a lot of very transactional type activities. So, we said why don't we use the technology for that. Let's free these people up so they can then focus on developing talent, career ladders, other things that we really wanted them to focus on. Other things like, you know, payments, matching, and payment application, things like that, password resets, you know, a lot of stuff that you, I mean, you can just think of in your head. A lot of stuff in finance, a lot of stuff in HR and IT. Even our supply chain, too. We're doing like T and Es, we're doing a lot of automation in our T and E area. But, that to say, I mean, I've mentioned all back office things. We're also doing a lot of front office. So, for example, in our tax department we use almost exclusively Automation Anywhere to do tax returns for clients. And, we have, I think, over a million plus hours that we've eliminated using Automation Anywhere. >> Now, how do you Automation Anywhere a tax return? >> Well, tax return is a very complex set of rules, and you basically, once you kind of load the rules in for certain activities, it's stuff like pulling data from one system into another, you know, doing multiple taxed jurisdictions. >> Is it just like particular steps within that, you just kinda pick off one little process at a time, one little process at a time? >> True, and then you can also put in, you can do a nice interface in the front, and you can have people giving you the data, and then you let the automation then get the data to the right parts within the tax return. >> So, I'm curious in terms of the people that create the bots. Who are they, kinda what skill sets do they have, and do you see that changing over time as you try to go from 750, whatever it is, a 20x multiple, over four years? Do you see kinda the population of people that are able to create and implement the bots growing? How do you, kinda, managing the supply side on on that? >> We have a philosophy that 70% of it's process, 30% of it's technology. We're fortunate that in our advisory area across all the major functional areas, supply chain, HR, finance, et cetera, we have process experts. So, we use those process experts to get the process down, and then what we do is we have core development teams around the world. We have a big team in India, a big team in Costa Rica. We have a team in China, and elsewhere. And, those are the developers. And, so our process people map out the process and then hand that off to the developer. So, developers, you know, we basically, I mean, with Automation Anywhere's help, we've trained them to do the work and they've made it more and more, as time goes on, they made it easier and easier for them to develop bots. And, so We've been able to take people almost right out of college. We've hired some high school students. We take people that, you know, two thirds of the American population doesn't have a college degree, so we hire non-college degrees and teach them how to do this. Not that it's easy, and to be really good you have to have time and experience, but we can teach them to do these types of activities for us. >> That's amazing. So, I wonder if you can share what are some of the biggest surprises, you know, kind of implementation surprises, or ROI types of surprises that you found in implementing these 750. >> Yeah, so one thing I tell people about is if you talk about the Gartner Hype Curve, you go up and you fall into the valley of disillusionment, and, you know, there's gonna be four or five of those valleys that are gonna happen, and you just need to power through them because the technology is so compelling, and the benefits are so compelling. I mean, there's over a dozen benefits whether it's cost savings, improved security, better accuracy, whatever. So, some of the surprises were scaling. Like, when I talk about the DIPSS, the D-I-P-S-S, DIPPS, the first one is gonna be data. People are gonna realize that their data isn't quite there in order to do the more intelligent activities. The integration, so integrating the RPA with the more intelligent pieces of the IQ bot, and other things, how do you do those integrations, how do you take other tools outside of that and integrate them. The third is penetration. I mean, penetration is very small right now. What happens is people tend to look at a whole process that needs to be automated when what you need to do is you need to think about breaking those processes apart. Like FPNA, for example, may have a couple dozen steps to it, but there are pockets of steps that are very automatable. For example, pulling data, structuring it, normalizing it, getting it into some kind of report, that can all be done by automation, then hand it off to someone to do more cognitive activities. So, the penetration is very small right now, but will continue to grow. The savings, you know, have realistic expectations on savings. When this first came out of the door a lot of people were talking very, very high numbers. I mean, you can get it every once in a while, but, the saving numbers, just be realistic about that. And, the last part is scaling. We found scaling to be something that, you know, at the time when we were doing it, very few people had done it. So, to figure out how do you scale, and how do you develop a bot control room, how do you manage the bots, how do you manage the bots interfacing with people, how do you manage the bots interfacing with other technologies. It's a lot more to it than just putting the bot up and letting it work, because they need care and feeding ongoing, because it's not related to the Automation Anywhere technology, it's more of the other things it touches, like website changes, like upgrades to different systems that the bot has to execute with. Those are gonna constantly change and you just need to make sure you're adjusting the bot to actually work in those environments. So, those are kinda the four or five things that we've seen. And, when we go from 750, to 1,000, to 10,000, I mean, we think we're gonna see much more orchestration type things. You know, how do you orchestrate in a more automated way across the bots, the people, and then the other technology. >> Right, it's funny on the scale issue 'cause they were talking about, you know, how do you go from 10 bots, you got 750 to 10,000, and there's been a concept under it that they are a digital workforce, implying that you have to manage 'em like a workforce. You gotta hire 'em, you gotta train 'em, you gotta put 'em in place, you gotta kinda keep an eye on 'em, you gotta review 'em every now and then, and really it's an active management process, it's not just set and forget. >> Yeah, we're hoping that we'll have, I mean, we have some of this already, but we'll have bots managing bots. Well, bots auditing bots. We'll have bots orchestrating bots. That's all gonna eventually happen. I think we can do some of it today, but it's gonna be more and more common. The orchestration piece is really the thing that is gonna be new, that is gonna drive a lot of people this hard to scale. >> The other two consistent themes that you just touched on that we talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, is Amara's Law, my favorite. You know, we overestimate the short term, which Gartner might call the Hype cycle, but we underestimate in the long term. Really, the other one is kinda just DevOps, and there's DevOps as a way to write code, but I think, more importantly, is DevOps as a culture, which is just look for little wins, little wins, little wins, little wins, little wins, and, before you know it, you've automated a lot and you're gonna start seeing massive returns on that effort versus the, oh, let's throw it in, we're gonna get this tremendous cost savings on day zero, day one, or day 10, or whatever it is. That's really not the strategy. >> Well, I think a lot of people maybe don't like to hear this, but it's a journey. I mean, you start out using the technology where you can. So, it's not a technology play, it's solving your biggest, most complicated problems, that's the key. And, whatever technology you need to do that, use that. So, you do the RPA, then you get more benefit when you add the IQ bots, and the intelligent stuff, and you get more benefit when you start adding, you know, technologies that are even ancillary, like Blockchain, IoT, and things like that. You'll get more and more kind of benefits from this technology. >> All right, Weston, well, thank you for sharing your stories. It's good to get it from the front lines. And, good luck on making 20,000 bots in four years. >> Thank you, thank you. >> He's Weston, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere Imagine 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat 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.

>>Hello. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in Seattle for the cubes coverage of AWS marketplace seller conference. Now part of really big move and news, Amazon partner network combines with AWS marketplace to form one organization, the Amazon partner organization, APO where the efficiencies, the next iteration, as they say in Amazon language, where they make things better, simpler, faster, and, and for customers is happening. We're here with Chris Cruz, who's the general manager, worldwide leader of ISV alliances and marketplace, which includes all the channel partners and the buyer and seller relationships all now under one partner organization, bringing together years of work. Yes. If you work with AWS and are a partner and, or sell with them, all kind of coming together, kind of in a new way for the next generation, Chris, congratulations on the new role and the reor. >>Thank you. Yeah, it's very exciting. We're we think it invent, simplifies the process on how we work with our partners and we're really optimistic so far. The feedback's been great. And I think it's just gonna get even better as we kind of work out the final details. >>This is huge news because one, we've been very close to the partner that we've been working with and we talking to, we cover them. We cover the news, the startups from startups, channel partners, big ISVs, big and small from the dorm room to the board room. You guys have great relationships. So check marketplace, the future of procurement, how software will be bought, implemented and deployed is also changed. So you've got the confluence of two worlds coming together, growth in the ecosystem. Yep. NextGen cloud on the horizon for AWS and the customers as digital transformation goes from lift and shift to refactoring businesses. Yep. This is really a seminal moment. Can you share what you talked about on the keynote stage here, around why this is happening now? Yeah. What's the guiding principle. What's the north star where, why what's what's the big news. >>Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of reasons on why we kind of, we pulled the two teams together, but you know, a lot of it kind gets centered around co-sell. And so if you take a look at marketplace where we started off, where it was really a machine image business, and it was a great self-service model and we were working with ISVs that wanted to have this new delivery mechanism on how to bring in at the time was Amazon machine images and you fast forward, we started adding more product types like SAS and containers. And the experience that we saw was that customers would use marketplace for kind of up to a certain limit on a self-service perspective. But then invariably, they wanted by a quantity discount, they wanted to get an enterprise discount and we couldn't do that through marketplace. And so they would exit us and go do a direct deal with a, an ISV. >>And, and so to remedy that we launched private offers, you know, four years ago. And private offers now allowed ISVs to do these larger deals, but do 'em all through marketplace. And so they could start off doing self-service business. And then as a customer graduated up to buying for a full department or an organization, they can now use private offers to execute that larger agreement. And it, we started to do more and more private offers, really kind of coincided with a lot of the initiatives that were going on within Amazon partner network at the time around co-sell. And, and so we started to launch programs like ISV accelerate that really kind of focused on our co-sell relationship with ISVs. And what we found was that marketplace private offers became this awesome way to automate how we co-sell with ISV. And so we kinda had these two organizations that were parallel. We said, you know what, this is gonna be better together. If we put together, it's gonna invent simplify and we can use marketplace private offers as part of that co-sell experience and really feed that automation layer for all of our ISVs as they interacted with native >>Discussions. Well, I gotta give you props, you and Mona work on stage. You guys did a great job and it reminds me of the humble nature of AWS and Amazon. I used to talk to Andy jazzy about this all the time. That reminds me of 2013 here right now, because you're in that mode where Amazon reinvent was in 2013. Yeah. Where you knew it was breaking out. Yeah. Everyone's it was kind of small, but we haven't made it yet. Yeah. But you guys are doing billions of vows in transactions. Yeah. But this event is really, I think the beginning of what we're seeing as the change over from securing and deploying applications in the cloud, because there's a lot of nuanced things I want to get your reaction on one. I heard making your part product as an ISV, more native to AWS's stack. That was one major call out. I heard the other one was, Hey, if you're a channel partner, you can play too. And by the way, there's more choice. There's a lot going on here. That's about to kind of explode in a good way for customers. Yeah. Buyers get more access to assemble their solutions. Yeah. And you got all kinds of like business logic, compensation, integration, and scale. Yeah. This is like unprecedented. >>Yeah. It's, it's exciting to see what's going on. I mean, I think we kind of saw the tipping point probably about two years ago, which, you know, prior to that, you know, we would be working with ISVs and customers and it was really much more of an evangelism role where we were just getting people to try it. Just, just list a product. We think this is gonna be a good idea. And if you're a buyer, it's like just try out a private offer, try out a self, you know, service subscription. And, and what's happened now is there's no longer a lot of that convincing that needs to happen. It's really become accepted. And so a lot of the conversations I have now with ISVs, it's not about, should I do marketplace it's how do I do it better? And how do I really leverage marketplace as part of my co-sell initiatives as, as part of my go to market strategy. >>And so you've, you've really kind of passed this tipping point where marketplaces are now becoming very accepted ways to buy third party software. And so that's really exciting. And, and we see that we, you know, we can really enhance that experience, you know, and what we saw on the machine image side is we had this awesome integrated experience where you would buy it. It was tied right into the EC two control plane. And you could go from buying to deploying in one single motion. SAS is a little bit different, you know, we can do all the buying in a very simple motion, but then deploying it. There's a whole bunch of other stuff that our customers have to do. And so we see all kinds of ways that we can simplify that. You know, recently we launched the ability to put third party solutions outta marketplace, into control tower, which is how we deploy all of our landing zones for AWS. And now it's like, instead of having to go wire that up as you're adding new AWS environments, why not just use that third party solution that you've already integrated to you and have it there as you're span those landing zones through >>Control towers, again, back to humble nature, you guys have dominated the infrastructure as a service layer. You kind of mentioned it. You didn't really kind of highlight it other than saying you're doing pretty good. Yeah. On the IAS or the technology partners as you call or infrastructure as you guys call it. Okay. I can see how the, the, the pan, the control panel is great for those customers. But outside that, when you get into like CRM, you mentioned E R P these business apps, these horizontal and verticals have data they're gonna have SageMaker, they're gonna have edge. They might have, you know, other services that are coming online from Amazon. How do I, as an ISV, get my stuff in there. Yeah. And how do I succeed? And what are you doing to make that better? Cause I know it's kind of new, but not new. Yeah, >>No, it's not. I mean, that's one of the things that we've really invested on is how do we make it really easy to list marketplace? And, you know, again, when we first start started, it was a big, huge spreadsheet that you had to fill out. It was very cumbersome and we've really automated all those aspects. So now we've exposed an API as an example. So you can go straight out of your own build process and you might have your own C I CD pipeline. And then you have a build step at the end. And now you can have that execute marketplace update from your build script, right across that API all the way over to AWS marketplace. So it's taking that effectively, a C CD pipeline from an ISV and extending it all the way to AWS and then eventually to a customer, because now it's just an automated supply chain for that software coming into their environment. And we see that being super powerful. There's nowhere manual steps >>Along. Yeah. I wanna dig into that because you made a comment and I want you to clarify it here in the cube. Some have said, even us on the cube. Oh, marketplace. Just the website's a catalog. Yeah. Feels old school. Yeah. Feels like 1995 database. I'm kind of just, you know, saying no offense sake. And now you're saying, you're now looking at this and, and implementing more of a API based. Why is that relevant? I'm I know the answer. You already set up with APIs, but explain the transition from the mindset of it's a website. Yeah. Buy stuff on a catalog to full blown API layer. Yeah. Services. >>Absolutely. Well, when you look at all AWS services, you know, our customers will interface, you know, they'll interface them through a console initially, but when they're using them in production, they're, it's all about APIs and marketplace, as you mentioned, did start off as a website. And so we've kind of taken the opposite approach. We've got this great website experience, which is great for demand gen and, you know, highlighting those listings. But what we want to do is really have this API service layer that you're interfacing with so that an ISV effectively is not even in our marketplace. They interfacing over APIs to do a variety of their high, you know, value functions, whether it's listing soy, private offers. We don't have that all available through APIs and the same thing on the buyer side. So it's integrating directly into their AWS environment and then they can view all their third party spend within things like our cost management suites. They can look at things like cost Explorer, see third party software, right next to first party software, and have that all integrated this nice as seamless >>For the customer. That's a nice cloud native kind of native experience. I think that's a huge advantage. I'm gonna track that closer. We're we're gonna follow that. I think that's gonna be the killer killer feature. All right. Now let's get to the killer feature and the business logic. Okay. Yeah. All partners all wanna know what's in it for me. Yeah. How do I make more cash? Yeah. How do I compensate my sales people? Yeah. What do you guys don't compete with me? Give me leads. Yeah. Can I get MDF market development funds? Yeah. So take me through the, how you're thinking about supporting the partners that are leaning in that, you know, the parachute will open when they jump outta the plane. Yeah. It's gonna be, they're gonna land safely with you. Yeah. MDF marketing to leads. What are you doing to support the partners to help them serve their >>Customers? It's interesting. Market marketplace has become much more of an accepted way to buy, you know, our customers are, are really defaulting to that as the way to go get that third party software. So we've had some industry analysts do some studies and in what they found, they interviewed a whole cohort of ISVs across various categories within marketplace, whether it was security or network or even line of business software. And what they've found is that on average, our ISVs will see a 24% increased close rate by using marketplace. Right. So when I go talk to a CRO and say, do you want to close, you know, more deals? Yes. Right. And we've got data to show that we're also finding that customers on average, when an ISV sales marketplace, they're seeing an 80% uplift in the actual deal size. And so if your ASP is a hundred K 180 K has a heck of a lot better, right? >>So we're seeing increased deal sizes by going through marketplace. And then the third thing that we've seen, that's a value prop for ISVs is speed of closure. And so on average, what we're finding is that our ISVs are closing deals 40% faster by using marketplace. So if you've got a 10 month sales cycle, shaving four months off of a sales cycle means you're bringing deals in, in an earlier calendar year, earlier quarter. And for ISVs getting that cash flow early is very important. So those are great metrics that we're seeing. And, and, you know, we think that they're only >>Gonna improve and from startups who also want, they don't have a lot of cash ISVs that are rich and doing well. Yeah. They have good, good, good, good, good to market funding. Yeah. You got the range of partners and you know, the next startup could be the next Figma could be in that batch startups. Exactly. Yeah. You don't know the game is changing. Yeah. The next brand could be one of those batch of startups. Yeah. What's the message to the startup community. Yeah. >>I mean, marketplace in a lot of ways becomes a level in effect, right. Because, you know, if, if you look at pre marketplace, if you were a startup, you were having to go generate sales, have a sales force, go compete, you know, kind of hand to hand with these largest ISVs marketplace is really kind of leveling that because now you can both list in marketplace. You have the same advantage of putting that directly in the AWS bill, taking advantage of all the management go features that we offer all the automation that we bring to the table. And so >>A lot of us joint selling >>And joint selling, right? When it goes through marketplace, you know, it's gonna feed into a number of our APN programs like ISV accelerate, our sales teams are gonna get recognized for those deals. And so, you know, it brings nice co-sell behavior to how we work with our, our field sales teams together. It brings nice automation that, you know, pre marketplaces, they would have to go build all that. And that was a heavy lift that really now becomes just kind of table stakes for any kind of ISV selling to an, any of >>Customer. Well, you know, I'm a big fan of the marketplace. I've always have been, even from the early days, I saw this as a procurement game changer. It makes total sense. It's so obvious. Yeah. Not obvious to everyone, but there's a lot of moving parts behind the scenes behind the curtain. So to speak that you're handling. Yeah. What's your message to the audience out there, both the buyers and the sellers. Yeah. About what your mission is, what you're you wake up every day thinking about. Yeah. And what's your promise to them and what you're gonna work on. Cause it's not easy. You're building a, an operating model. That's not a website. It's a full on cloud service. Yeah. What's your promise. And what's >>Your goals. No. And like, you know, ultimately we're trying to do from an Aus market perspective is, is provide that selection experience to the ABUS customer, right? There's the infamous flywheel that Jeff put together that had the concepts of why Amazon is successful. And one are the concepts he points to is the concept of selection. And, and what we mean by that is if you come to Amazon it's is effectively that everything stored. And when you come across, AWS marketplace becomes that selection experience. And so that's what we're trying to do is provide whatever our AWS customers wanna buy, whatever form factor, whatever software type, whatever data type it's gonna be available in AWS marketplace for consumption. And that ultimately helps our customers because now they can get whatever technologies that they need to use alongside Avis. >>And I want, wanna give you props too. You answered the hard question on stage. I've asked Andy EY this on the cube when he was the CEO, Adam Celski last year, I asked him the same question and the answer has been consistent. We have some solutions that people want a AWS end to end, but your ecosystem, you want people to compete yes. And build a product and mostly point to things like snowflake, new Relic. Yeah. Other people that compete with Amazon services. Yeah. You guys want that. You encourage that. Yeah. You're ratifying that same statement. >>Absolutely. Right. Again, it feeds into that selection experience. Right. If a customer wants something, we wanna make sure it's gonna be a great experience. Right. And so a lot of these ISVs are building on top of AWS. We wanna make sure that they're successful. And, you know, while we have a number of our first party services, we have a variety of third party technologies that run very well in a AWS. And ultimately the customer's gonna make their decision. We're customer obsessed. And if they want to go with a third party product, we're absolutely gonna support them in every way shape we can and make sure that's a successful experience for our customers. >>I, I know you referenced two studies check out the website's got buyer and seller surveys on there for Boer. Yeah. I don't want to get into that. I want to just end on one. Yeah. Kind of final note, you got a lot of successful buyers and a lot of successful sellers. The word billions, yes. With an S was and the slide. Can you say the number, how much, how many billions are sold yeah. Through the marketplace. Yeah. And the buyer experience future what's those two things. >>Yeah. So we went on record at reinvent last year, so it's approaching it birthday, but it was the first year that we've in our 10 year history announced how much was actually being sold to the marketplace. And, you know, we are now selling billions of dollars to our marketplace and that's with an S so you can assume, at least it's two, but it's, it's a, it's a large number and it's going >>Very quickly. Yeah. Can't disclose, you know, >>But it's a, it's been a very healthy part of our business. And you know, we look at this, the experience that we >>Saw, there's a lot of headroom. I mean, oh yeah, you have infrastructure nailed down. That's long, you get better, but you have basically growth up upside with these categor other categories. What's the hot categories. You >>Know, we, we started off with infrastructure related products and we've kind of hit critical mass there. Right? We've, there's very few ISVs left that are in that infrastructure related space that are not in our marketplace. And what's happened now is our customers are saying, well, I've been buying infrastructure products for years. I'm gonna buy everything. I wanna buy my line of business software. I wanna buy my vertical solutions. I wanna buy my data and I wanna buy all my services alongside of that. And so there's tons of upside. We're seeing all of these either horizontal business applications coming to our marketplace or vertical specific solutions. Yeah. Which, you know, when we first designed our marketplace, we weren't sure if that would ever happen. We're starting to see that actually really accelerate because customers are now just defaulting to buying everything through their marketplace. >>Chris, thanks for coming on the queue. I know we went a little extra long. There wanted to get that clarification on the new role. Yeah. New organization. Great, great reorg. It makes a lot of sense. Next level NextGen. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. >>Thank you for the opportunity. >>All right here, covering the new big news here of AWS marketplace and the AWS partner network coming together under one coherent organization, serving fires and sellers, billions sold the future of how people are gonna be buying software, deploying it, managing it, operating it. It's all happening in the marketplace. This is the big trend. It's the cue here in Seattle with more coverage here at Davis marketplace sellers conference. After the short break.

>>Mhm. Hey there. Welcome to the cubes coverage of Splunk dot com. 21. I'm lisa martin. I've got a new guest joining me on the cube for the first time please welcome 20 pierce the senior manager of cybersecurity at the Y 20. Welcome to the program. >>Hi, glad to be here. >>So your linked in profile. I wanted to ask you about this. It states that you are delivering an evidence based approach to cybersecurity. What does that mean? An evidence based approach? And how are you and spunk helping to deliver this approach? >>Yeah. And I'd like to call it like the out case outcome based the price basically you start with what you're trying to accomplish and work with backwards. A lot of people say I've got a problem and then they go try to buy a tool or whatever to go fix the problem. I go in and I'm like all right, I got a problem. Let me figure out what's realistically I can use in the environment. So it's just basically working back so you have, you know, a breach. What if I what are all the different things that I knew to leverage to meet the controls for that breach. Right? And so um think of mitre in a way as a layered way of looking things um and the full defense and depth. So that's kind of my approach, I go when I figure out what the problem is and I answer the question and I used to do that because funk is able to give me a big data to everything. Got a guy so I like to be able to pull in all the different data types that I need to answer our questions, um, to do that. Right. And so whether it's a vulnerability management, patching your networking a good, a good example of this, like most common hacks in the world go after known vulnerabilities, right? And we get kind of caught up in all that. Um, one of the things we like to do here do, why is like we like to combine what's happening in the network. So the threat landscape in which is the network guys, the vulnerability guys who are scanning the data and then actually the patching, who is, who is actually, you know, mitigating the problem putting all those into one screen has really helped people with their risk rating. >>Talk to me a little bit about some of the changes, we've seen massive changes in the threat landscape in cybersecurity in the last year and a half during the pandemic. We've seen massive increase in ransomware. DDoS attacks, ransomware becoming a household word, the executive order that just came down a few months ago. What are some of the things that you've seen? Have you seen the acceleration of organizations coming to help? We know that it's not a matter of if we get attacked. It's when how are you, how are you seeing the last 18 months influence what you're doing. >>Oh man, it's been quite a crazy, right? And so um, by trade, I'm a instant responder, you know, uh high level investigator and possible solutions architect. So I, I get called in a lot for those kind of things. It has been kind of nuts. But you know, one of the things I always tell them when it started understanding what your threat landscaping is, um, and identify your key cyber terrain. Unfortunately most, you know, most companies as they grow, they get really big, they don't really do that. So they don't, they miss the consolidation point, right? I always say, hey, you know, if you're, if you're going to do this, if you say you have a ransomware attack, the first thing you can do is, you know, there's so many different controls that you can do to stop that you really need to know where it is and ejecting and then you can isolate if you need to um, what we're seeing in the companies. They, because they don't all have full coverage, right? And they expect their endpoint protections to actually do its job, you know, and sometimes that's, you know, don't get me wrong, there are some amazing endpoint protections out there, but you really need to be able to log it, you need to know what it looks like and you need to know where it is. So if you need a in case of a ransomware attack as it spreads through the network, you're able to isolate it and rewrite it to like, I like to call it a black hole the land and just reroute it so I can isolate it and then I can go after it. Um instead of trying to try to do every endpoint at a time because you'll get you'll get whacked >>definitely. So talk to me about working and partnering with Splunk and it's full security stuff. How does that, how is that a differentiator for you and your rule? >>Okay. So one of the things that we do here any why is we can find simmons sores one combined offering. Right? So we we try to bring the data in, we operationalize it and then we try to do something with it, right? We we find that. And then if you really think about that in a situation where the spunk products, it's the spunk or funky s and then phantom, right? And so that's the automation play. So we try to combine all those into one combined offering. So that when when bad things happen where we make a decision, we say all right, So, hey, um what we're seeing in the industry is like a lot of times people spend so much time hunting the known to to forget about the unknown. Think about the target. Hack a couple of years ago. Um the oil and gas attack just recently, you know, they miss those core things. So we try to say all right, well let's automate a lot of that known stuff so that the incident responders can focus on the unknown. And so when you combine all three of those products, you get a pretty good security staff >>when you say automating The known, is that at all in any way like helping companies get back to basics. I've been hearing a lot in the last 18 months that some from a data protection perspective and from a ransomware attack perspective. So it's it's when not if but are you saying that companies are are sort of skipping past the basics where security is concerned? Yeah, >>Well, it's I don't say it's skipping past the basics. Right? I think that sometimes people get caught up in the definitions of what it is. Right? So there's there's so many, there's so many fair more shop there. Right? So like I'm a big fan of your trust. Um a lot of instant responded to using minor, I use minor for that as as it retains the instant response. Some people like to use high trust and I think a lot of what happens is they get lost in the confusion of all these different frameworks. Right? I like to go back to basics. I've been doing cyber for Oh, oh my oh my gosh, about 20 plus years. Right. Um I'm an active hacker. I like this is what I do. I like to call a defense in depth. Right? So when you're when you're doing that, if you follow the defense and depth Satur, it doesn't matter what framework you have, you can actually go back and you can Fix that problem. Right? So going back in the automation of unknown to an unknown, we know, and IOC is 100% now, you can say IOC it's like a hash, right? So when a bad thing happens like an exploit, first thing we try to do is we try to grab that hash and then we try to build a roll around it to stop that hash from spreading and going anywhere else. That's a We know 100% of it's bad. Now can exploits change their hash. Absolute. And it happens all the time, but for that Moment in time that hash is 100%. And so we try to say, hey look, you know, we got an endpoint protection but also why don't we use automation to block it at the boundary or why don't we keep it from doing lateral movement? Why don't we why don't we activate it from a defense and depth. So you have your network. Um I like to say, hey look you have your egress ingress and your lateral movement. So if you understand all those three fact factors, you can automate the control so that it doesn't spread, you know, you had mentioned ransomware, it's been really huge, right? And everybody goes, oh well, you know, if we do zero try zero trust, talks about, you know, segmentation a whole lot and then a segmentation is usually important. It won't stop everything but it will do a good job being able to you'll ever swung we actually pull that in and we say hey you know from and why are we take all that network? And we try to put it in a single pane of glass so that we can see everything. And then once we're able to see it, once we get a good robust data set and understand that operations were able to go in and automate it and so if I can go in and say hey look all these hashes are bad. Yeah I'm not going to rely on my end point, I'm going to put another control in place. So at the end point misses it, I have another control that will actually layer it and prevent it from spreading. >>Which is absolutely critical. Talk to me about some of the outcomes that Ey and Splunk are delivering to the end user customers. Everyone's always talking about it's all about outcomes. What are some of those? >>Yeah so we have um we really embraced like the data to everything right? So I I kind of have this opinion of like uh you know everything's data so everything needs to be secured right? Uh the people who missed that tend to get whacked pretty quickly. Um So what I like to do is I'm like all right so you know like IOT is huge out there right now O. T. Is doing it. So some of the things that we've done is like from a health care perspective um We've done we've combined I. O. T. And I. T. Into a commonality solution leveraging like network simple things like pulling in from the wind, pulling in um understanding what those Mac addresses are so that you can actually do like a workplace analytics around um say R. F. I. D. Tagging right? So you know where your people are at? Um Here we also do like a call a sock in a box where we put that put everything together that every like a from a tiered perspective like a tier one tier two analysts. You know what is that they need to do to mitigate mitigate observe something, What is the investigator need? Right? So we try to simplify those conversations so that you know exactly around like a threat hunting as well like threat hunter an investigator, they're totally different roles, right? So they need to be separated. We also like tie in like the um what is it? I really hate uh like power point. I'm not a big power point guy right? So I really like to be able to give the says oh he needs to understand what risk is, right? So we try to automated so we can get to that too. He can pull up his phone and pull up his punk app and he knows at any given time what his risk rating of his company, right? So we try to combine all those in. Like again, you know there is um we do stuff around Blockchain supply chain. You know, it doesn't really matter if it's a data analytics tool. You know a lot of people look at Funk as a sim. I don't just like look at it that way. I look at as a data analytics tool that does sim. It's just one of the functions this does. If you start understanding data and all the different things that data can do, then you need to go in and you can use Funk to basically answer those questions so that you can start putting in a control set. >>What what's the differentiated value that Ey and Splunk bring together to customers. What really sets this partnership and what it delivers apart. >>Well I'm I'm I'm biased on that right? Because I run the North America 17 for you like for consulting. So I would say that those two things is innovation and time to value. Right? So for let's start with innovation for a minute because Funk is so customizable right? Because it pretty much can integrate with just two. Anything we're able to go very fast, take data in and do something with it and operationalize. It doesn't matter who the customer is is they're going to give us a question. We'll break it all the way down and we'll understand what you're going to answer A good example that is like we were doing stuff around P. C. I. Compliance. The checklist. You know the financial sector, they get a huge amount of audits, right? Especially around PC. I. So we took all the Pc. I checklist and we said harry, what can we, what can we answer those questions? And so we built a dashboard that actually sends out a report to internal audit and we call it compliance over time, right? It's looking at data in a different perspective to answer a question. Now the other thing is that we like, we try to do here is, you know, with the, as we do is Funk and funk helps us with this, right? We have a great relationship with them is um, basically, oh I have a, I lost my train of thought there for me. So uh, innovations time to value, right? So from time to value what we do is we used to say, hey look, we have a lot of stuff in our lab. But one of the things I don't like to do is I don't like to um, go to clients and say, hey look, we were going to build this for the first time. I like to say, hey look, here's these questions in the industry. Get ahead of the question and go build in our labs so that when we when we actually get on site, our time to value is not in months. You know, we can begin weeks because we already have a huge repository of um use cases now those every use case is actually tied into an automation play. And so when we say that we say hey look here's everything is flowing, let's do this, let's go answer that question and let's go automate it and you let's make a decision where where we want to automate and where do we want a human interaction. Mhm. >>Talk to me about what's next for the partnership in terms of the future, what what can you tell us where E Y. And Splunk are going together? >>So we've been partying around um I think our next things that we're really looking at is A I um we're really getting kind of into that as well as A R. And D. R. Technology. Right? So um especially around like I'm looking at like the energy companies in the financial banking and one of the things I would love to do is like um go into you know a bank A. T. M. Right? And right now it takes somebody actually has to plug into that and to do a diagnostic on it. I would love to be able to get to a point where you can just take your camera scan the QR code on the on the device and then pull up an A. R. And it runs all the diagnostics on the device as its there. Another one is like the infrastructure um instead of actually going out, plugging into like say a solar panel going out pulling out of the tablet just scanning the solar panels and it tells you if it's good or bad and that's kind of the next step that we're trying to do. We're trying to really take that uh and dated everything and just kind of turn it on its end um like and you've got to remember everything is data nowadays, right? It's not the old days where you know, things are moving around and everything is in the file folders, it's gone right? Everything is data. So everything is security, right? And we know the first thing is we need to know what our threat landscape is. We need to know what that is and we need to apply that. All right. So if we can simplify answering questions, that's so much better. And one of the things I like about flunked is it scales really well, right? And I've looked at some of these fetters and don't get me wrong, I mean everybody has their place. The one thing I like about spunk is it doesn't mean it literally scales really well. So the more data you can get into it, it actually does better. Right? Um and how you do it now, that's just our approach. That's the next steps that we're really looking at from a technology standpoint, >>exciting stuff, Tony thank you for joining me sharing what ey and Splunk are doing together. Some of the unique use cases that you're helping to solve for customers and some of the things that you're excited about. We appreciate your time on your information. >>No, this is fun. You know, like I said, I'm a big fan. I even wore my spunk shirt just for this meeting. >>Fantastic. You're on brand well, Tony. Thank you. Again. We appreciate your time. >>All right. Thank you. You have a wonderful day. >>Thanks you as well for Tony Pierce. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of splunk.com 21. Thanks for watching, >>enjoy. Bye bye mm. Mm hmm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Hi, this is David Linton. You're watching the Cubes coverage of the Cube on Cloud, our own virtual event where we're trying to understand the future of cloud, where we've come from and where we're going. And we're bringing in visionaries to really have that detailed conversation. Daniel Jones is here. He's the CEO of automation specialist. You. I path Daniel. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights here. >>Thank you so much for inviting me. They've appreciated. >>That's always a pleasure to get together with folks that have started companies with a seed of a vision and have exploded in tow. You know, great success. And when I wanna go back to the the the founding days of you, I path 2005. It was a pre cloud. There's certainly pre cloud as we know it today. A w s came out in 2006. Aw, and then we saw the clouds Ascendancy. But but your original founding premise there was no cloud, you know, it wasn't like a startup could just spend up stuff in the cloud. But what you've seen that evolution. So when you first started to see cloud evolved, What did you think? Did you think Oh, well, we'll see what happens. Or did you? Did you know at the time that this was gonna be a bigas? It actually has become. What were your thoughts back then? >>Well, I honestly, I thought that we are kind of agent. And maybe it's stupid to not to pie foot in tow, The new trends in technology like Cloud Mobile social and I we kept, you know, working on this computer vision technology that 15 years ago, war was not really hot. But with the evolution of self driving cars and the latest development in AI, we we've been able to capture our investments in the domain that was not hot. But suddenly, you know, became the word the of the greatest minds in I t. And we definitely we specialize Our computer vision toe a narrow use case, but still, it's the It's the key of what we've done in, uh, in the end, the robots are powered by computer vision technology. This kind of a robot emulate how human user work. So obviously we use vision a lot in our day by day work and having the best technology that allows our robots to interact with the computer screen more like human user is quintessential and, uh, making our business reliable and easy to use. So we were lucky. But I always felt that maybe I should change it. And we were feeling I remember you know, many discussions with my, you know, initial developers because we like what you're doing. What we felt a bit left outside my door. What way? Got lucky in the end. >>So So I have a premise here and that when you go back to the early days of cloud, what they got right was they were attacking the human labor problem and they automate it was storage. It was it was networking. It was compute. But really the automation that they brought toe i t. And the quality that that drove and the flexibility was, you know, a game changer. Of course, we know that now. And you know, many of us at the time were very excited about Cloud. I'm not sure we predicted the impact that it had, but my premise is that there's a parallel in your business with the automation that you're driving into the business. We've talked toe people, for instance, that some of your customers have said, You know I can't do Six Sigma. I can't afford to do six Sigma before things like R P. A. For business process. I do that for Mission critical things, but now I can apply six Sigma thinking across my entire business that drives quality. It takes costs out of my business. So what do you think about that premise? That there's a parallel between the early days of cloud taking human labor out of the equation and driving quality and flexibility, cost saving speed and revenue, etcetera and what you're doing on the business side, >>it is clearly a parallel. I can tell that the cloud was built by looking at ICTY Automation use cases first of all, because this is all software engineers understand the most software engineers. Let's be you little on this. They don't understand the business work. They don't understand all how the rial work is performing a big enterprise and they don't care. Sometimes when in my own discussions with our CFO, he is surprised that I don't know all the use cases in the world. Yes, of course. I don't know exactly how an insurance company work All the processes in a health care, all the banking processes. I have intellectual curiosity how they were. But what interests me the most is our computer vision technology that works uniformly well across different. That was the same from the cloud. So initially they built and they build a cow cloud one toe, help them when what they know the best. And now, for we were put in the face of having great technology, this computer region technology, but without having a great use case in the I t world that we understood. And when we when I'm speaking about our early days like 12, 13, 14, I believe this technology has a lot less applicable bility in the real world. Because again, we were thinking of some sorts of small I T automation gigs that were not possible just doing the AP ice. But when I discovered the messy world of business processes and how important is to emulate people when you think automation, that was a big ah ha moment. So I believe that we can do for business processes what the cloud has done for I t processes on. We are really patient now about this business processes on helping people toe eliminate all the repetitive work that is their delegate. This work two robots and have the people that are required to do this work do do better. A smaller number of tasks every day. Everyone has own, as on her or him played today like, let's say, 10, 20 different activities. Some of them can be completely delegated to rob to robots, and they are the low value type of activities, while they can focus on the high value activities like interaction with people, creativity, decision making and this type of human like things that we as humans really love. >>I love that you shared that story, but you thought it was a very narrow, sort of set of use cases when you first started and then, you know, that's that's just an awesome founders, you know, really ization. I love it when we've often said in the Cube that, you know, for decades we've marched to the tune of Moore's Law. That was the innovation engine. No longer is that case. It's a combination of of data, applied machine intelligence and cloud for scale. And I guess the computer vision pieces How you in just the data you've you've made some investments in a I and there's many more to come the industry in general and the cloud is sort of the piece of that equation that we see for scale. So I wonder how you see those pieces fitting to your business. Uh, and how important is the cloud for your scale? At last? Uh, at last year, I path forward. There was a lot of talk amongst your customers about scaling. Is the cloud critical for that scale? >>Yeah, I believe so. And we are thinking of clouds in tow. Distinct ways number one. We're offering Onda manage automation service in our own close, using where we host everything by ourselves, including our orchestrator, and then be next to have the plans to include our the robots that execute the automation And people simply can't connect to our cloud building automation and just scheduled to run without any maintainers. And they will have access to oh, great analytics, Everything integrated. So this is a major force to us, and the way we launching G a. This cloud offering in April this year, and I can tell you that until now, 20% of our customers already are in a shape or another in this type of offering, not 20% dollar amount, but 20% of our customers. And it's clear that at this point this has mawr applicability into the long tail, a smaller customers than in the on our biggest customers. But the second, this thing type of cloud offering that we focus on is toe have best in class support and best in class multi cloud support for the cloud of choice of our customers. For instance, if you go in if you go in a w, g, c, p usher and you buy a subscription there, you wear buildings. Specialized editions were with one click. You will be able to install our technology in those clouds and you'll be ableto scale up and down your robots. You can connect your robots to our many service were within your tenant, but basically the angle is toe lesson. Ah lot the administration, the maintainers footprint of your installation, either on our own cloud, even on your cloud of choice. I'm a strong believer that we will see an accelerated transition from the completely on Prem Workloads into these two source of cloud workloads. >>I wanna ask you, is a a technologist if you see. So you mentioned that you're gonna take your products and your support. Multiple clouds will run on any cloud in A lot of companies are talking about that, you know, for their respective whether it's a database or, you know, whatever storage device, etcetera. Do you see the day where you'll actually start? You're collaborating across clouds. Where the user, uh, maybe maybe the user today doesn't know, but maybe a developer does know which cloud it's running on. But do you see any value in actual, you know, connecting across clouds where the data and one cloud is relevant for the data? Another cloud is I know there are latent see issues. Is that you know, technically feasible. And is it it? Will it drive business value? What do you think about that cross cloud connection? >>I believe it is already happening. There is a mesh between between various services and who knows in which cloud they are awful. Already. I feel the Leighton see is less and less of a problem as much as the biggest cloud provider have have a very distributed geographically president. So as long as I can playing AWS in East Coast, on on Asia in East Coast, it's not such a big Leighton see issue. Uh huh. Frankly, in the past, our customers at least start telling us they seen how it is to be completely looking toe one technology on people would like Toa have optionality. It's not necessarily that I will use three clothes, but I would like to use the vendor that gives me optionally even. And this is what we're trying to offer. >>Do you, when you think about the future of work? I mean, e said before the cloud one dato was infrastructure storage, networking, computing Uh, it seems like to Dato we're bringing in more ai new workloads. We're seeing, you know, analytics and machine intelligence applied to the data and then, you know, distributed at scale self serve to the business. How do you see the future of work specifically as it relates toe automation affecting that, uh on you know what role does cloud play there? What's your vision? >>So as the workloads will move to cloud. It's absolutely critical that the processes will move to cloud, so there is no way back. I think, that moving in tow, moving from home for and software into cloud will make even easier toe automate this type of workloads into the cloud. It's gonna be less maintain us. You will deal less with legacy applications that require some special care. It's kind of a bit more easier to automate modern Onley, Web based type of application so that Z we'll see an acceleration on the moving to cloud. But again, there will be different sorts of cloud from a completely manage automation service from us toe managing yourself the automation in your cloud tenant, but not on prayer. I'm not a big believer that we will accept unless very few critical sectors I don't think that we will see home Primor roads in the past five years. >>I mean, I agree in this case, the business case for on Prem just gets, you know, less and less. I mean, it'll be a certain applications for sure. My last question is, when thinking about from a software developer standpoint, you obviously you're gonna wanna run in a W S and G, C P and Azure. Uh, perhaps Alibaba, Uh, do you look at other clouds? Whether their regional clouds, of course. You got your own cloud. Maybe Oracle. IBM. How do you think about those? Do you just sort of evaluated on a case by case basis? You let customers, you know, tell you where you need to be. >>Yeah, way focus on the on the three big clouds today, but we're building on the top off Q Burnett is most of our way. We have a big shift in tow building que Burnett is micro services. And my guess is that all mother clouds would offer fantastic support for kubernetes. So what What it takes when you create a new edition for another cloud is toe is toe have the underlying services. Like if we plan to use snowflake, for instance in our analytics offering, you better have snowflake in another cloud. Otherwise, probably the the analytics will will have toe be delayed or use a less of one part technology. So it's not only about what we are building, but it's also, you know, the vast availability of other set of technologies that we try toe use when you choose a technology. Now, first of all, we are looking. We need to choose something that is multi cloud. There's who's dedicated from one cloud vendor. That's that's our first priority. This is why I've mentioned snowflake and then when when we moved into a cloud. We are limited by the offerings that are there, but I my belief is in the main clouds, probably in the US I don't know one of the region's what's gonna happen, but in the main crowds in the U. S. In I believe that they will. In the end, they will catch up in terms off offering and convincing of other defenders toe have kind of kind of similar offering on their own. I don't know if, besides, the Big Three, or you'll see someone and that is able to compete could be too much fragmented. Maybe they will be dedicated clouds for certain services. But for General Cloud, I think three is more than enough. >>Yeah, and so, you know, in the early days of cloud, people talked about dial tone, and essentially, that's what's becoming. It's the it's the value that's running on top of the cloud from software companies like ey Path and others that is really driving. So the cloud to Dato the next generation Daniel Dennett is thanks so much for sharing your vision on participating in the Cuban cloud. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure, Dave. Thank you so much for inviting. >>You're welcome. You always great to talk to you. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right into this short break. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Yeah.

>> From the KIPP studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> IBM's new CEO has an opportunity to reset the direction of the company. Outgoing CEO Ginni Rometty, inherited a strategy that was put in place over two decades. It became fossilized in a lower-margin services-led model that she helped architect. Ginni spent a large portion of her tenure, shrinking the company so it could grow. But unfortunately, she ran out of time. For decades, IBM has missed opportunities to aggressively invest in the key waves that are now powering the tech economy. Instead, IBM really tried to balance investing innovation with placating Wall Street. We believe IBM has an opportunity to return to the Big Blue status that set the standard for the tech industry. But several things have to change, some quite dramatically. So we're going to talk about what it's going to take for IBM to succeed in this endeavor. Welcome to this special Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to address our view of the future of IBM and try to accomplish three things. First, I want to review IBM's most recent earnings, the very first one under new CEO Arvind Krishna, and we'll discuss IBM's near-term prospects. Next, we'll look at how IBM got to where we are today. We want to review some of the epic decisions that it has made over the past several years and even decades. Finally, we'll look at some of the opportunities that we see for IBM to essentially remake itself and return to that tech titan that was revered by customers and feared by competitors. First, I want to look at the comments from new CEO Arvind Krishna. And let's try to decode them a bit. Arvind in the first earnings call that he held, and in interviews as well, and also internal memos, he's given some clues as to how he's thinking. This slide addresses a few of the key points. Arvind has clearly stated that he's committed to growing the IBM company, and of course, increasing its value. This is no surprise, as you know, every IBM CEO has been under pressure to do the same. And we'll look at that further a little later on in the segment. Arvind, also stated that he wants the company, he said it this way, "To lead with a technical approach." Now as we reported in January when Krishna was appointed to CEO. We're actually very encouraged that the IBM board chose a technical visionary to lead the company. Arvind's predecessors did not have the technical vision needed to make the bold decisions that we believe are now needed to power the company's future. As a technologist, we believe his decisions will be more focused on bigger tactical bets that can pay bigger returns, potentially with more risk. Now, as a point of just tactical commentary, I want to point out that IBM noted that it was doing well coming into the March month, but software deals especially came to a halt as customers focused on managing the pandemic and other parts of the business were okay. Now, this chart pulls some of the data from IBM's quarter. And let me make a few comments here. Now, what was weird here, IBM cited modest revenue growth on this chart, this was pulled from their slides. But revenue was down 2% for the quarter relative to last year. So I guess that's modest growth. Cloud revenue for the past 12 months, the trailing 12 months, was 22 billion and grew 23%. We're going to unpack that in a minute. Red Hat showed good growth, Stu Miniman and I talked about this last week. And IBM continues to generate a solid free cash flow. Now IBM, like many companies, they prudently suspended forward guidance. Some investors bristled at that, but I really have no problem with it. I mean, just way too much uncertainty right now. So I think that was a smart move by IBM. And basically, everybody's doing it. Now, let's take a look at IBM's business segments and break those down and make a few comments there. As you can see, in this graph, IBM's 17 plus billion dollar quarter comprises their four reporting segments. Cloud and cognitive software, which is, of course, its highest margin and highest growth business at 7%. You can see its gross margin is really, really nice. But it only comprises 30% of the pie. Services, the Global Business Services and GTS global technology services are low-growth or no growth businesses that are relatively low margin operations. But together they comprise more than 60% of IBM's revenue in the quarter and consistently throughout the last several years. Systems, by the way, grew nicely on the strength of the Z15 product cycles, it was up by 60% and dragged storage with it. But unfortunately power had a terrible quarter and hence the 4% growth. But decent margins compared to services of 50%. IBM's balance sheet looks pretty good. It took an advantage of some low rates recently and took out another $4 billion in corporate debt. So it's okay, I'm not too concerned about its debt related to the Red Hat acquisition. Now, welcome back to cloud at 22 billion for the past 12 months and growing at 23%. What, you say? That sounds very large, I don't understand. It's understandable that you don't understand. But let me explain with this next graphic. What this shows is the breakdown of IBM's cloud revenue by segment from fiscal year 19. As you can see, the cloud and cognitive segments, or segment which includes Red Hat comprises only 20% of IBM's cloud business. I know, kind of strange. Professional services accounts for 2/3 of IBM's Cloud revenue with systems at 14%. So look, IBM is defining cloud differently than most people. I mean, actually, that's 1% of the cloud business of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud come from professional services and on-prem hardware. This just doesn't have real meaning. And I think frankly, it hurts IBM's credibility as it hides the ball on cloud. Nobody really believes this number. So, I mean, it's really not much else I can say there. But look, why don't we bring in the customer angle, and let's look at some ETR data. So what this chart shows is the results of an ETR survey. That survey ran, we've been reporting on this, ran from mid March to early April. And more than 1200 respondents and almost 800 IBM customers are in there. If this chart shows the percentage of customers spending more on IBM products by various product segments that we chose with three survey samples April last year, January 2020, and the most recent April 2020 survey. So the good news here is the container platforms, OpenShift, Ansible, the Staples of Red Hat are showing strength, even though they're notably down from previous surveys. But that's the part of IBM's business that really is promising. AI and machine learning and cloud, they're right there in the mix, and even outsourcing and consulting and really across the board, you can see a pretty meaningful and respectable number or percent of customers are actually planning on spending more. So that's good, especially considering that the survey was taken right during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, if you look at the next chart, the net scores across IBM's portfolio, they're not so rosy. Remember, net score is a measure of spending momentum. It's derived by essentially subtracting the percent of customers that are spending less from those that are spending more. It's a nice simple metric. Kind of like NPS and ETR surveys, every quarter with the exact same methodology for consistency so we can do some comparisons over time series, it's quite nice. And you can see here that Red Hat remains the strongest part of IBM's portfolio. But generally in my experience as net scores starts to dip below 25% and kind of get into the red zone, that so called danger zone. And you can see many parts of IBM's portfolio are showing softness as we measure in net score. And even though you see here, the outsourcing and consulting businesses are up relative to last year, if you slice the data by large companies, as we showed you with Sagar Kadakia last week, that services business is showing deceleration, same thing we saw for Accenture, EY, Deloitte, etc. So here's the takeaway. Red Hat, of course, is where all the action is, and that's where IBM is going to invest in our opinion, and we'll talk a little bit more about that and drill into that kind of investment scenario a bit later. But what I want to do now is I want to come back to Arvind Krishna. Because he has a chance to pull off a Satya Nadella like move. Maybe it's different, but there are definite similarities. I mean, you have an iconic brand, a great company, that's in many technology sectors, and yes, there are differences, IBM doesn't have the recurring software revenue that Microsoft had, it didn't have the monopoly and PCs. But let's move on. Arvind has cited four enduring platforms for IBM, mainframes, services, middleware, and the newest hybrid cloud. He says that IBM must win the architectural battle for hybrid cloud. Now, I'm going to really share later what we think that means. There's a lot in that statement, including the role of AI in the edge. Both of which we'll address later on in this breaking analysis. But before we get there, I want to understand from a historical perspective where we think Arvind is going to take IBM. And to do that, we want to look back over the modern history of IBM, modern meaning of the post mainframe dominance era, which really started in 1993 when Louis Gerstner took over. Look, it's been well documented how Louis Gerstner pivoted into services. He wrote his own narrative with the book, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance". And you know, look, you can't argue with his results. The graphic here shows IBM's rank in the fortune 500, that's the green line over time. IBM was sixth under Gerstner, today it's number 38. The blue area chart on the Insert, it shows IBM's market cap. Now, look, Gerstner was a hero to Wall Street. And IBM's performance under his tenure was pretty stellar. But his decision to pivot to services set IBM on a path that to this day marks company's greatest strength, and in my view, its greatest vulnerability. Name a product under the mainframes in which IBM leads. Again, middleware, I guess WebSphere, okay. But you know, IBM used to be the leader in the all important database market, semiconductors, storage servers, even PCs back in the day. So, I don't want to beat on this too much, I can say it's been well documented. And I said earlier, Ginni essentially inherited a portfolio that she had to unwind, and hence the steep revenue declines as you see here, and it's 'cause she had to jettison the so called non-strategic businesses. But the real issue is R&D, and how IBM has used it's free cash. And this chart shows IBM's breakdown of cash use between 2007 and 2019. Blue is cash return to shareholders, orange is research and development, and gray is CapEx. Now I chose these years because I think we can all agree that this was the period of tech defined by cloud. And you can see, during those critical early formative years, IBM consistently returned well over 50%, and often 60% plus of its free cash flow to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks. Now, while the orange appears to grow, it's because of what you see in this chart. The point is the absolute R&D spend really didn't change too much. It pretty much hovered, if you look back around 5 1/2 to $6 billion annually, the percentage grew because IBM's revenue declined. Meanwhile, IBM's competitors were spending on R&D and CapEx, what were they doing? Well, they were building up the cloud. Now, let me give you some perspective on this. In 2007 IBM spent $6.2 billion on R&D, Microsoft spent 7 billion that same year, Intel 5.8 billion, Amazon spent 800 million, that's it. Google spent 2.1 billion that year. And that same year, IBM returned nearly $21 billion to shareholders. In 2012 IBM spent $6.3 billion on R&D, Microsoft that year 9.8 billion, Intel 10 billion, Amazon 4.6 billion, less than IBM, Google 6.1 billion, about the same as IBM. That year IBM returned almost $16 billion to shareholders. Today, IBM spends about the same 6 billion on R&D, about the same as Cisco and Oracle. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Amazon are spending nearly $17 billion each. Sorry, Amazon 23 billion, and IBM could only return $7 billion to shareholders last year. So while IBM was returning cash to its shareholders, its competitors were investing in the future and are now reaping the rewards. Now IBM suspended its stock buybacks after the Red Hat deal, which is good, in my opinion. Buybacks have been a poor use of cash for IBM, in my view. Recently, IBM raised its dividend by a penny. It did this so it could say that it has increased its dividend 25 years in a row. Okay, great, not expensive. So I'm glad that that investors were disappointed with that move. But since 2007, IBM has returned more than $175 billion to shareholders. And somehow Arvind has to figure out how to tell Wall Street to expect less while he invests in the future. So let's talk about that a little bit. Now, as I've reported before, here is the opportunity. This chart shows data from ETR. It plots cloud landscape and is a proxy for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. It plots net score or spending momentum on the y-axis, and market share, which really isn't market share, as we've talked about, it's a measure of pervasiveness in the data set, that's plotted on the x-axis. So, the point is, IBM has presence, it's pervasive in the marketplace, Red Hat and OpenShift, they have relevance, they have momentum with higher net scores. Arvind's opportunity is to really plug OpenShift into IBM's, large install base, and increase Red Hat's pervasiveness, while at the same time lifting IBM momentum. This, in my view, as Stu Miniman and I reported last week at the Red Hat Summit, puts IBM in a leading position to go after multi and hybrid cloud and the edge. So let's break that down a little bit further. When Arvind talks about winning the architectural battle for hybrid cloud, what does he mean by that? Here's our interpretation. We think IBM can create the de facto standard for cloud and hybrid cloud. And this includes on-prem, public cloud, cross clouds, or multi cloud, and importantly, the edge. Here's the opportunity, is to have OpenShift run natively, natively everywhere, on-premises in the AWS cloud, in the Azure Cloud, GCP, Alibaba, and the IBM Cloud and the Oracle Cloud, everywhere natively, so we can take advantage of the respective services within all those clouds. Same thing for on-prem, same thing for edge opportunities. Now I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But what we're talking about here is the entire IT stack running natively, if I haven't made that point on OpenShift. The control plane, the security plane, the transport, the data management plane, the network plane, the recovery plane, every plane, a Red Hat lead stack with a management of resources is 100% identical, everywhere the same cloud experience. That's how IBM is defining cloud. Okay, I'll give them a mulligan on that one. IBM can be the independent broker of this open source standard covering as many use cases and workloads as possible. Here's the rub, this is going to require an enormous amount of R&D. Just think about all the startups that are building cloud native services and imagine IBM building or buying to fill out that IT stack. Now I don't have enough time to go in too deep to all other areas, but I do want to address the edge, the opportunity there and weave in AI. Beyond what I said above, which I want to stress, the points I made above about hybrid, multi-cloud include edge, the edge is a huge opportunity. But IBM and in many other, if not most other traditional players, we think are kind of missing the boat on that. I'll talk about that in a minute. Here's the opportunity, AI inference is going to run at the edge in real-time. This is going to be incredibly challenging. We think about this, a car running inference AI generates a billion pixels per second today, in five years, it'll be 15 times that. The pressure for real-time analysis at the edge is going to be enormous, and will require a new architecture with new processing models that are likely going to be ARM-based in our opinion. IBM has the opportunity to build end-to-end solutions powered by Red Hat to automate the data pipeline from factory to data center to cloud and everywhere. Anywhere there's instruments, IBM has an opportunity to automate them. Now rather than toss traditional Intel-based IT hardware over the fence to the edge, which is what IBM and most people are doing right now, IBM can develop specialized systems and make new silicon investments that can power the edge with very low cost and efficient systems that process data in real-time. Hey look, I'm out of time, but some other things I want you to consider, IBM transitioning to a recurring revenue model. Interestingly, Back to the Future, right? IBM used to have a massive rental revenue stream before it converted that base to sales. But if Arvind can recreate a culture of innovation and win the day with developers via its Red Hat relationships, as I said recently, he will be CEO of the decade. But he has to transform the portfolio by investing more in R&D. He's got to convince the board to stop pouring money back to investors for a number of years, not just a couple of quarters and do Whatever they have to do to protect the company from corporate raiders. This is not easy, but with the right leader, IBM, a company that has shown resilience through the decades, I think it can be done. All right, well, thanks for watching this episode of the Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante. And don't forget, these episodes are available as podcasts, wherever you listen, I publish weekly on siliconangle.com, where you'll find all the news, I publish on wikibon.com which is our research site. Please comment on my LinkedIn posts, check out etr.plus, that's where all the data lives. And thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for Breaking Analysis, we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath Forward III, hashtag UiPathForward. Elena Christopher is here. She's the senior vice president at HFS Research, and Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. >> Co-host! >> On this power panel. Jean Youngers here, CUBE alum, VP, a Six Sigma Leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Dave: And Amy Chandler, who is the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls, also from Security Benefit. >> Hello. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Alright Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know HFS is sort of anointed as formulating this market place, right? >> Elena: We like to think of ourselves as the voice-- >> You guys were early on. >> The voice of the automation industry. >> So, what are you seeing? I mean, process automation has been around forever, RPA is a hot recent trend, but what are you seeing the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the market place? >> I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA's come on to the scene. I like how you phrase it Dave, because you refer to it as, rightly so, automation is not new, and so we sort of say the big question out there is, "Is RPA just flavor of the month?" RPA is definitely not, and I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called "RPA is dead. Long live automation." And that's because, when we look at RPA, and when we think about what it's impact is in the market place, to us the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old old school BPM, whatever it may be, it's mission is to drive transformation, and so the HFS perspective, and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards, is to get to that transformation. And so, the reason we put out that piece, the "RPA is dead. Long live integrated automation platforms" is to make the point that if you're not- 'cause what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation so, if you're not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say, "What can I change, what processes are just bad, "and we've been doing them, I'm not even sure why, "for so long. What can we transform, "what can we optimize, what can we invent?" If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say, RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the market place today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important, but a single tool in it's own right will never be the holistic answer. >> So Jean, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stew Bennett and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times, where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive Six Sigma into business processes; you couldn't get the return. >> Jean: Right. >> Now you can do it very cheaply. And for Six Sigma or better, is what you use for airplane engines, right? >> Right. >> So, now you're bringing up the business process. So, you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? >> It's been wonderful. It has been the best, it's been probably the most fun I've had in the last fifteen years of work. I have enjoyed, partly because I get to work with this great person here, and she's my COE, and helps stand up the whole RPA solution, but you know, we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations, you know we've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be fourteen thousand hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved, and it's going to touch our customer directly, that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so, you know, it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year, it really has. >> And so okay Amy, your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here right? >> Amy: That's right. >> You run the COE. Tell us more about your role, and I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team, or is it kind of this top-down approach? >> Yeah, this last year, we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much, we implemented our infrastructure, we had a nice solid change management process, we built in logical access, we built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year, which kind of sets us up for next year, and everything that we want to accomplish then. >> So Elena, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about you know, RPA, in many ways, I called it cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes, you're not changing things, but in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? >> I love that you use that phrase, "paving the cow path." As a New Englander, as you know the roads in Boston are in fact paved cow paths, so we know that can lead to some dodgy roads, and that's part of, and I say it because that's part of what the answer is, because the reinvention, and honestly the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments, you're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation if you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's just essentially deadwood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this, you don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process if it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI. It's a bit of a continuum, so one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about, is this idea of, well what's the, obviously, what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, you tend to think of your user as, it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner, but trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, hopping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but-- >> We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take into consideration. But you've also got to, you have a continuum right? If it's a simple process and we can put it up very quickly, we do, but we've also got ones where one process'll come into us, and a perfect example is our rate changes. >> Amy: Rate changes. >> It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight-- >> Yeah. >> Different areas-- >> Areas. >> Of the business, and once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into what, sixty? >> Amy: Yeah, sixty plus. Yeah. >> Dave: Sixty plus what? >> Bot processes from one entry. >> Yeah. >> And so, right now, we've got 189 to 200 processes in the back log. And so if you take that, and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually 1,000 to 2,000 more processes, at minimum, that we can hit for the company, and we need to look at those. >> Yeah, and I will say, the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along. So if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. >> So, internal controls is in your title, so talking about scale, it's a big theme here at UiPath, and these days, things scale really fast, and boo-boos can happen really fast. So how are you ensuring, you know that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance? Is that part of your role? >> Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls, and in fact, our external auditors, EY. We've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access. When we built our whole process from beginning to end they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. >> And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment, because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found as an emerging best practice, and in all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers, is because if you do things, I mean it applies on multiple levels, because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective, but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made Amy, about looking at the processes end to end, because you've got the necessary constituents involved so you know the context, and then, I believe, I mean I think you guys shared this with me, that particularly when audit's involved, you're perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. >> Right. >> That is true, and from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls, cause if you're automating your controls, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much, just from an associate process owner paying attention to their process to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either, and then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. >> You lower your auditing bill? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Well we'll see right? >> Yeah. (laughter) >> That's always the hope. >> Don't tell EY. (laughter) So I got to ask you, so you're in a little over a year So I don't know if you golf, but you know a mulligan in golf. If you had a mulligan, a do over, what would you do over? >> The first process we put in place. At least for me, it breaks a lot, and we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything, and so we kind of slammed it in, and we pay for that every quarter, and so actually it's on our list to redo. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> That's a really good point. >> So we pay for it in maintenance every quarter, we pay for it, cause it breaks inevitably. >> Yes. >> Okay so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process, to Elena's? >> Yes, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place, and in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed, and you know there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mart. That's where all our data goes, they won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth so they created us a bot mart, and anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us and then that's where our bot can hit, and our bot can hit it at anytime of the day or night when we need the data, and so it's worked out really well for us, and so the bot mart kind of came out of that project of there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade and then we run the bot and its working one day and the next day, somebody has gone in and tweaked something, and when all's I really need out of that system is data, that's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that, cause the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data, and so that's what we're starting to do. >> How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marts and warehouses, is that a problem? >> Not yet. >> No not yet! (laughter) >> I'm wondering cause I was thinking the exact same question Dave, because on one hand its a nice I think step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whomever your data curators are, they're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to, but then there is that potential for synchronization issues, cause that whole concept of golden source implies one copy if you will. >> Well, and it is. It's all coming through, we have a central data repository that the data's going to come through, and it's all sitting there, and then it'll move over, and to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement once, okay, I get my data in, is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in, when will it be into our bot mart, so when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those, so you know, the timing is critical, and so that's why I said not yet. >> Dave: (chuckle) >> But you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. >> Haha all right. I love that. >> I saw a stat the other day. I don't know where it was, on Twitter or maybe it was your data, that more money by whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chat bots than mobile development. >> Jean: I can imagine, yes. >> What are you doing with chat bots? And how are you using them? >> Do you want to answer that one or do you want me to? >> Go ahead. >> Okay so, part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chat bot or personal assistant or anything, is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance, and you know, finance you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that, but in some instances, they forget to do things, so things aren't there and we get the phone call the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot, and I'm going to put a chat bot in front of it, and then all's they have to do is type in "run my bot" and it'll come up if they have more than one bot, it'll say "which one do you want to run?" They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do, and in the chat I can also send them a little message, "Did you run your other reports? Did you do this?" You know, so, I can use it for the end user, to make that experience for them better. And plus, we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that, and then RPA all in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. >> I mean you've child proofed the bot. >> Exactly! There you go. There you go. >> Exactly. Exactly. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for HR for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer frequently every day. So that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. >> And if I may, Dave, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. At HFS it's our "Triple-A Trifecta", but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI, and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots. At HFS we don't use the term chat bot, just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality, so we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistant. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it the power of and if you will. Are you going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it? What best solves your business problems? Just a very practical approach I think. >> So Elena, Guy has a session tomorrow on predictions. So we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, (chuckle) will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and big data is not living up to the hype. Will RPA? >> It's got a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. So, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all. But unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation, and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from Security Benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology. That's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there and cannot be underestimated, is the change that your organization has to go through. Cause think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? It's literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that and that it would be A, fast or B, not take a lot of change management, is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective, continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean honestly, we're here at a UiPath event, they had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things. Supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. >> Jean: Yes. >> These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day. But they're also extending functionality, adding in their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction-wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid, and it's honestly going to look a lot like that Triple-A Trifecta I mentioned. >> Well, and UiPath, and I presume other suppliers as well, are expanding their markets. They're reaching, you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long-run way for RPA. >> Jean: Yeah, we do. >> I'll give you the last word. >> It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the CAB, and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of 'em today, and I've got a pocketful of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really, truly believe this is the future and we can do so much. Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody, I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? >> It's back to the user experience, right? We can make this wildly functional to meet the need. >> Right, right. And I don't think RPA is the end all solution, I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. >> Right. All right we'll have to leave it there. Thanks ladies for coming on, it was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas, right after this short break. (technical music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath Forward III, hashtag UiPathForward. Elena Christopher is here. She's the senior vice president at HFS Research, and Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. >> Co-host! >> On this power panel. Jean Youngers here, CUBE alum, VP, a Six Sigma Leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Dave: And Amy Chandler, who is the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls, also from Security Benefit. >> Hello. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Alright Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know HFS is sort of anointed as formulating this market place, right? >> Elena: We like to think of ourselves as the voice-- >> You guys were early on. >> The voice of the automation industry. >> So, what are you seeing? I mean, process automation has been around forever, RPA is a hot recent trend, but what are you seeing the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the market place? >> I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA's come on to the scene. I like how you phrase it Dave, because you refer to it as, rightly so, automation is not new, and so we sort of say the big question out there is, "Is RPA just flavor of the month?" RPA is definitely not, and I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called "RPA is dead. Long live automation." And that's because, when we look at RPA, and when we think about what it's impact is in the market place, to us the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old old school BPM, whatever it may be, it's mission is to drive transformation, and so the HFS perspective, and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards, is to get to that transformation. And so, the reason we put out that piece, the "RPA is dead. Long live integrated automation platforms" is to make the point that if you're not- 'cause what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation so, if you're not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say, "What can I change, what processes are just bad, "and we've been doing them, I'm not even sure why, "for so long. What can we transform, "what can we optimize, what can we invent?" If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say, RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the market place today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important, but a single tool in it's own right will never be the holistic answer. >> So Jean, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stew Bennett and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times, where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive Six Sigma into business processes; you couldn't get the return. >> Jean: Right. >> Now you can do it very cheaply. And for Six Sigma or better, is what you use for airplane engines, right? >> Right. >> So, now you're bringing up the business process. So, you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? >> It's been wonderful. It has been the best, it's been probably the most fun I've had in the last fifteen years of work. I have enjoyed, partly because I get to work with this great person here, and she's my COE, and helps stand up the whole RPA solution, but you know, we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations, you know we've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be fourteen thousand hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved, and it's going to touch our customer directly, that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so, you know, it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year, it really has. >> And so okay Amy, your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here right? >> Amy: That's right. >> You run the COE. Tell us more about your role, and I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team, or is it kind of this top-down approach? >> Yeah, this last year, we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much, we implemented our infrastructure, we had a nice solid change management process, we built in logical access, we built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year, which kind of sets us up for next year, and everything that we want to accomplish then. >> So Elena, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about you know, RPA, in many ways, I called it cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes, you're not changing things, but in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? >> I love that you use that phrase, "paving the cow path." As a New Englander, as you know the roads in Boston are in fact paved cow paths, so we know that can lead to some dodgy roads, and that's part of, and I say it because that's part of what the answer is, because the reinvention, and honestly the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments, you're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation if you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's just essentially deadwood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this, you don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process if it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI. It's a bit of a continuum, so one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about, is this idea of, well what's the, obviously, what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, you tend to think of your user as, it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner, but trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, hopping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but-- >> We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take into consideration. But you've also got to, you have a continuum right? If it's a simple process and we can put it up very quickly, we do, but we've also got ones where one process'll come into us, and a perfect example is our rate changes. >> Amy: Rate changes. >> It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight-- >> Yeah. >> Different areas-- >> Areas. >> Of the business, and once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into what, sixty? >> Amy: Yeah, sixty plus. Yeah. >> Dave: Sixty plus what? >> Bot processes from one entry. >> Yeah. >> And so, right now, we've got 189 to 200 processes in the back log. And so if you take that, and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually 1,000 to 2,000 more processes, at minimum, that we can hit for the company, and we need to look at those. >> Yeah, and I will say, the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along. So if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. >> So, internal controls is in your title, so talking about scale, it's a big theme here at UiPath, and these days, things scale really fast, and boo-boos can happen really fast. So how are you ensuring, you know that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance? Is that part of your role? >> Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls, and in fact, our external auditors, EY. We've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access. When we built our whole process from beginning to end they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. >> And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment, because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found as an emerging best practice, and in all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers, is because if you do things, I mean it applies on multiple levels, because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective, but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made Amy, about looking at the processes end to end, because you've got the necessary constituents involved so you know the context, and then, I believe, I mean I think you guys shared this with me, that particularly when audit's involved, you're perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. >> Right. >> That is true, and from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls, cause if you're automating your controls, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much, just from an associate process owner paying attention to their process to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either, and then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. >> You lower your auditing bill? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Well we'll see right? >> Yeah. (laughter) >> That's always the hope. >> Don't tell EY. (laughter) So I got to ask you, so you're in a little over a year So I don't know if you golf, but you know a mulligan in golf. If you had a mulligan, a do over, what would you do over? >> The first process we put in place. At least for me, it breaks a lot, and we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything, and so we kind of slammed it in, and we pay for that every quarter, and so actually it's on our list to redo. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> That's a really good point. >> So we pay for it in maintenance every quarter, we pay for it, cause it breaks inevitably. >> Yes. >> Okay so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process, to Elena's? >> Yes, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place, and in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed, and you know there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mart. That's where all our data goes, they won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth so they created us a bot mart, and anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us and then that's where our bot can hit, and our bot can hit it at anytime of the day or night when we need the data, and so it's worked out really well for us, and so the bot mart kind of came out of that project of there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade and then we run the bot and its working one day and the next day, somebody has gone in and tweaked something, and when all's I really need out of that system is data, that's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that, cause the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data, and so that's what we're starting to do. >> How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marts and warehouses, is that a problem? >> Not yet. >> No not yet! (laughter) >> I'm wondering cause I was thinking the exact same question Dave, because on one hand its a nice I think step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whomever your data curators are, they're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to, but then there is that potential for synchronization issues, cause that whole concept of golden source implies one copy if you will. >> Well, and it is. It's all coming through, we have a central data repository that the data's going to come through, and it's all sitting there, and then it'll move over, and to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement once, okay, I get my data in, is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in, when will it be into our bot mart, so when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those, so you know, the timing is critical, and so that's why I said not yet. >> Dave: (chuckle) >> But you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. >> Haha all right. I love that. >> I saw a stat the other day. I don't know where it was, on Twitter or maybe it was your data, that more money by whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chat bots than mobile development. >> Jean: I can imagine, yes. >> What are you doing with chat bots? And how are you using them? >> Do you want to answer that one or do you want me to? >> Go ahead. >> Okay so, part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chat bot or personal assistant or anything, is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance, and you know, finance you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that, but in some instances, they forget to do things, so things aren't there and we get the phone call the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot, and I'm going to put a chat bot in front of it, and then all's they have to do is type in "run my bot" and it'll come up if they have more than one bot, it'll say "which one do you want to run?" They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do, and in the chat I can also send them a little message, "Did you run your other reports? Did you do this?" You know, so, I can use it for the end user, to make that experience for them better. And plus, we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that, and then RPA all in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. >> I mean you've child proofed the bot. >> Exactly! There you go. There you go. >> Exactly. Exactly. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for HR for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer frequently every day. So that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. >> And if I may, Dave, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. At HFS it's our "Triple-A Trifecta", but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI, and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots. At HFS we don't use the term chat bot, just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality, so we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistant. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it the power of and if you will. Are you going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it? What best solves your business problems? Just a very practical approach I think. >> So Elena, Guy has a session tomorrow on predictions. So we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, (chuckle) will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and big data is not living up to the hype. Will RPA? >> It's got a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. So, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all. But unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation, and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from Security Benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology. That's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there and cannot be underestimated, is the change that your organization has to go through. Cause think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? It's literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that and that it would be A, fast or B, not take a lot of change management, is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective, continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean honestly, we're here at a UiPath event, they had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things. Supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. >> Jean: Yes. >> These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day. But they're also extending functionality, adding in their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction-wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid, and it's honestly going to look a lot like that Triple-A Trifecta I mentioned. >> Well, and UiPath, and I presume other suppliers as well, are expanding their markets. They're reaching, you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long-run way for RPA. >> Jean: Yeah, we do. >> I'll give you the last word. >> It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the CAB, and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of 'em today, and I've got a pocketful of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really, truly believe this is the future and we can do so much. Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody, I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? >> It's back to the user experience, right? We can make this wildly functional to meet the need. >> Right, right. And I don't think RPA is the end all solution, I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. >> Right. All right we'll have to leave it there. Thanks ladies for coming on, it was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas, right after this short break. (technical music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering UIPath FORWARD America's 2019. Brought to you by UIPath. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of UIPath FORWARD, here in Sin City, Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Dave Velante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Kurt Carlson, Associate Dean for faculty and academic affairs of the Mason School of Business at the college of William and Mary. Thanks for coming on the show. >> Thanks you for having me. >> Rebecca: And we have Tom Clancy, the SVP of learning at UIPath, thank you so much. >> Great to be here. >> You're a Cube alum, so thank you for coming back. >> I've been here a few times. >> A Cube veteran, I should say. >> I think 10 years or so >> So we're talking today about a robot for every student, this was just announced in August, William and Mary is the first university in the US to provide automation software to every undergraduate student, thanks to a four million dollar investment from UIPath. Tell us a little bit about this program, Kurt, how it works and what you're trying to do here. >> Yeah, so first of all, to Tom and the people at UIPath for making this happen. This is a bold and incredible initiative, one that, frankly, when we had it initially, we thought that maybe we could get a robot for every student, we weren't sure that other people would be willing to go along with that, but UIPath was, they see the vision, and so it was really a meeting of the minds on a common purpose. The idea was pretty simple, this technology is transforming the world in a way that students, we think it's going to transform the way that students actually are students. But it's certainly transforming the world that our students are going into. And so, we want to give them exposure to it. We wanted to try and be the first business school on the planet that actually prepares students not just for the way RPA's being used today, but the way that it's going to be used when AI starts to take hold, when it becomes the gateway to AI three, four, five years down the road. So, we talked to UIPath, they thought it was a really good idea, we went all in on it. Yeah, all of our starting juniors in the business school have robots right now, they've all been trained through the academy live session putting together a course, it's very exciting. >> So, Tom, you've always been an innovator when it comes to learning, here's my question. How come we didn't learn this school stuff when we were in college? We learned Fortran. >> I don't know, I only learned BASIC, so I can't speak to that. >> So you know last year we talked about how you're scaling, learning some of the open, sort of philosophy that you have. So, give us the update on how you're pushing learning FORWARD, and why the College of William and Mary. >> Okay, so if you buy into a bot for every worker, or a bot for every desktop, that's a lot of bots, that's a lot of desktops, right? There's studies out there from the research companies that say that there's somewhere a hundred and 200 million people that need to be educated on RPA, RPA/AI. So if you buy into that, which we do, then traditional learning isn't going to do it. We're going to miss the boat. So we have a multi-pronged approach. The first thing is to democratize RPA learning. Two and a half years ago we made, we created RPA Academy, UIPath academy, and 100% free. After two and a half years, we have 451,000 people go through the academy courses, that's huge. But we think there's a lot more. Over the next next three years we think we'll train at least two million people. But the challenge still is, if we train five million people, there's still a hundred million that need to know about it. So, the second biggest thing we're doing is, we went out, last year at this event, we announced our academic alliance program. We had one university, now we're approaching 400 universities. But what we're doing with William and Mary is a lot more than just providing a course, and I'll let Kurt talk to that, but there is so much more that we could be doing to educate our students, our youth, upscaling, rescaling the existing workforce. When you break down that hundred million people, they come from a lot of different backgrounds, and we're trying to touch as many people as we can. >> You guys are really out ahead of the curve. Oftentimes, I mean, you saw this a little bit with data science, saw some colleges leaning in. So what lead you guys to the decision to actually invest and prioritize RPA? >> Yeah, I think what we're trying to accomplish requires incredibly smart students. It requires students that can sit at the interface between what we would think of today as sort of an RPA developer and a decision maker who would be stroking the check or signing the contract. There's got to be somebody that sits in that space that understands enough about how you would actually execute this implementation. What's the right buildout of that, how we're going to build a portfolio of bots, how we're going to prioritize the different processes that we might automate, How we're going to balance some processes that might have a nice ROI but be harder for the individual who's process is being automated to absorb against processes that the individual would love to have automated, but might not have as great of an ROI. How do you balance that whole set of things? So what we've done is worked with UIPath to bring together the ideas of automation with the ideas of being a strategic thinker in process automation, and we're designing a course in collaboration to help train our students to hit the ground running. >> Rebecca, it's really visionary, isn't it? I mean it's not just about using the tooling, it's about how to apply the tooling to create competitive advantage or change lives. >> I used to cover business education for the Financial Times, so I completely agree that this really is a game changer for the students to have this kind of access to technology and ability to explore this leading edge of software robotics and really be, and graduate from college. This isn't even graduate school, they're graduating from college already having these skills. So tell me, Kurt, what are they doing? What is the course, what does it look like, how are they using this in the classroom? >> The course is called a one credit. It's 14 hours but it actually turns into about 42 when you add this stuff that's going on outside of class. They're learning about these large conceptual issues around how do you prioritize which processes, what's the process you should go through to make sure that you measure in advance of implementation so that you can do an audit on the backend to have proof points on the effectiveness, so you got to measure in advance, creating a portfolio of perspective processes and then scoring them, how do you do that, so they're learning all that sort of conceptual straight business slash strategy implementation stuff, so that's on the first half, and to keep them engaged with this software, we're giving them small skills, we're calling them skillets. Small skills in every one of those sessions that add up to having a fully automated and programmed robot. Then they're going to go into a series of days where every one of those days they're going to learn a big skill. And the big skills are ones that are going to be useful for the students in their lives as people, useful in lives as students, and useful in their lives as entrepreneurs using RPA to create new ventures, or in the organizations they go to. We've worked with UIPath and with our alums who've implement this, folks at EY, Booz. In fact, we went up to DC, we had a three hour meeting with these folks. So what are the skills students need to learn, and they told us, and so we build these three big classes, each around each one of those skills so that our students are going to come out with the ability to be business translators, not necessarily the hardcore programmers. We're not going to prevent them from doing that, but to be these business translators that sit between the programming and the decision makers. >> That's huge because, you know, like, my son's a senior in college. He and his friends, they all either want to work for Amazon, Google, an investment bank, or one of the big SIs, right? So this is a perfect role for a consultant to go in and advise. Tom, I wanted to ask you, and you and I have known each other for a long time, but one of the reasons I think you were successful at your previous company is because you weren't just focused on a narrow vendor, how to make metrics work, for instance. I presume you're taking the same philosophy here. It transcends UIPath and is really more about, you know, the category if you will, the potential. Can you talk about that? >> So we listen to our customers and now we listen to the universities too, and they're going to help guide us to where we need to go. Most companies in tech, you work with marketing, and you work with engineering, and you build product courses. And you also try to sell those courses, because it's a really good PNL when you sell training. We don't think that's right for the industry, for UIPath, or for our customers, or our partners. So when we democratize learning, everything else falls into place. So, as we go forward, we have a bunch of ideas. You know, as we get more into AI, you'll see more AI type courses. We'll team with 400 universities now, by end of next year, we'll probably have a thousand universities signed up. And so, there's a lot of subject matter expertise, and if they come to us with ideas, you mentioned a 14 hour course, we have a four hour course, and we also have a 60 hour course. So we want to be as flexible as possible, because different universities want to apply it in different ways. So we also heard about Lean Six Sigma. I mean, sorry, Lean RPA, so we might build a course on Lean RPA, because that's really important. Solution architect is one of the biggest gaps in the industry right now so, so we look to where these gaps are, we listen to everybody, and then we just execute. >> Well, it's interesting you said Six Sigma, we have Jean Younger coming on, she's a Six Sigma expert. I don't know if she's a black belt, but she's pretty sure. She talks about how to apply RPA to make business processes in Six Sigma, but you would never spend the time and money, I mean, if it's an airplane engine, for sure, but now, so that's kind of transformative. Kurt, I'm curious as to how you, as a college, market this. You know, you're very competitive industry, if you will. So how do you see this attracting students and separating you guys from the pack? >> Well, it's a two separate things. How do we actively try to take advantage of this, and what effects is it having already? Enrollments to the business school, well. Students at William and Mary get admitted to William and Mary, and they're fantastic, amazingly good undergraduate students. The best students at William and Mary come to the Raymond A. Mason school of business. If you take our undergraduate GPA of students in the business school, they're top five in the country. So what we've seen since we've announced this is that our applications to the business school are up. I don't know that it's a one to one correlation. >> Tom: I think it is. >> I believe it's a strong predictor, right? And part because it's such an easy sell. And so, when we talk to those alums and friends in DC and said, tell us why this is, why our students should do this, they said, well, if for no other reason, we are hiring students that have these skills into data science lines in the mid 90s. When I said that to my students, they fell out of their chairs. So there's incredible opportunity here for them, that's the easy way to market it internally, it aligns with things that are happening at William and Mary, trying to be innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial. We've been talking about being innovative, nimble, and entrepreneurial for longer than we've been doing it, we believe we're getting there, we believe this is the type of activity that would fit for that. As far as promoting it, we're telling everybody that will listen that this is interesting, and people are listening. You know, the standard sort of marketing strategy that goes around, and we are coordinating with UIPath on that. But internally, this sells actually pretty easy. This is something people are looking for, we're going to make it ready for the world the way that it's going to be now and in the future. >> Well, I imagine the big consultants are hovering as well. You know, you mentioned DC, Booz Allen, Hughes and DC, and Excensior, EY, Deloitte, PWC, IBM itself. I mean it's just, they all want the best and the brightest, and now you're going to have this skill set that is a sweet spot for their businesses. >> Kurt: That's the plan. >> I'm just thinking back to remembering who these people are, these are 19 and 20 year olds. They've never experienced the dreariness of work and the drudge tasks that we all know well. So, what are you, in terms of this whole business translator idea, that they're going to be the be people that sit in the middle and can sort of be these people who can speak both languages. What kind of skills are you trying to impart to them, because it is a whole different skill set. >> Our vision is that in two or three years, the nodes and the processes that are currently... That currently make implementing RPA complex and require significant programmer skills, these places where, right now, there's a human making a relatively mundane decision, but it's sill a model. There's a decision node there. We think AI is going to take over that. The simple, AI's going to simply put models into those decision nodes. We also think a lot of the programming that takes place, you're seeing it now with studio X, a lot of the programming is going to go away. And what that's going to do is it's going to elevate the business process from the mundane to the more human intelligent, what would currently be considered human intelligence process. When we get into that space, people skills are going to be really important, prioritizing is going to be really important, identifying organizations that are ripe for this, at this moment in time, which processes to automate. Those are the kind of skills we're trying to get students to develop, and what we're selling it partly as, this is going to make you ready of the world the way we think it's going to be, a bit of a guess. But we're also saying if you don't want to automate mundane processes, then come with us on a different magic carpet ride. And that magic carpet ride is, imagine all the processes that don't exist right now because nobody would ever conceive of them because they couldn't possibly be sustained, or they would be too mundane. Now think about those processes through a business lens, so take a business student and think about all the potential when you look at it that way. So this course that we're building has that, everything in the course is wrapped in that, and so, at the end of the course, they're going to be doing a project, and the project is to bring a new process to the world that doesn't currently exist. Don't program it, don't worry about whether or not you have a team that could actually execute it. Just conceive of a process that doesn't currently exist and let's imagine, with the potential of RPA, how we would make that happen. That's going to be, we think we're going to be able to bring a lot of students along through that innovative lens even though they are 19 and 20, because 19 and 20 year olds love innovation, while they've never submitted a procurement report. >> Exactly! >> A innovation presentation. >> We'll need to do a Cube follow up with that. >> What Kurt just said, is the reason why, Tom, I think this market is being way undercounted. I think it's hard for the IDCs and the forces, because they look back they say how big was it last year, how fast are these companies growing, but, to your point, there's so much unknown processes that could be attacked. The TAM on this could be enormous. >> We agree. >> Yeah, I know you do, but I think that it's a point worth mentioning because it touches so many different parts of every organization that I think people perhaps don't realize the impact that it could have. >> You know, when listening to you, Kurt, when you look at these young kids, at least compared to me, all the coding and setting up a robot, that's the easy part, they'll pick that up right away. It's really the thought process that goes into identifying new opportunities, and that's, I think, you're challenging them to do that. But learning how to do robots, I think, is going to be pretty easy for this new digital generation. >> Piece of cake. Tom and Kurt, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE with a really fascinating conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, you guys >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Velante, stay tuned for more of theCUBEs live coverage of UIPath FORWARD. (upbeat music)

(funky music) >> [Narrator voiceover] Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Hello from Orlando. I'm Lisa Martin on theCube with Stu Miniman, and we are in Five9's booth at Enterprise Connect 2019. Can you hear all of the attendees behind me? There's about 6,500 people here. In the expo hall, there's 140 exhibitors. I mentioned we are in Five9's booth, and we're pleased to welcome to theCube the president of Five9, Dan Burkland. Dan, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. It's great to be here. What an event. This is amazingly well attended, and, uh, can't wait. Let's get to it. >> It is, so let's do a little bit of by the numbers. Four years in a row that Five9 has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service. You have, I think we were talking with some of your guys yesterday, five billion recorded customer conversations. Oh the data and the opportunities in that. Couple thousand customers worldwide, and a big, strong finish to FY18. Lot of momentum. >> Right, and 2018 couldn't have been better. We had wonderful growth, capped off with a Q4 that showed 31% revenue growth year over year. We continue to increase our profitability as well, EBITDA being 23%. So for us it was a phenomenal year. The combination of revenue growth plus the EBITDA, put us over 50. Oftentimes companies are evaluated for the rule of 40. And we shattered that and came in over 50, so we're very excited. It's helping fuel the growth for us, which we believe is still ahead of us, for the most part. >> Dan, congratulations on the progress. We've been watching, there's some big-name hires that have happened in the company. Why I was excited to talk to you, is not only have you been with the company coming up on 10 years now, but you've got sales underneath what you're doing, and when you watch a company that is exceeding the industry growth rate by, like, 2 to 3X, you know hiring and culture is so important. Bring us inside a little bit. What's happening at Five9? How do you maintain the momentum? What is that, you know, Five9 employee that you look for? >> So, Stu, and you just touched on it. We've been an execution machine for many years, growing the top line of the business, while keeping an eye on bottom line profitability, and we believe doing that as well as anybody in our industry. And what's very powerful now is those new hires that you mentioned. Wouldn't have guess in my wildest dreams that we could attract somebody with Rowan's, uh, pedigree and really his reputation of being able to take companies, transform them, and take them to new heights. You know, with his reputation he was able to attract Jonathan Rosenberg, co-author of the SIP protocol, and really thought leader in the collaboration space for us. So, we see taking what we've done over the past several years and growing the business into what's now, you know a $250 million plus company and applying their thought leadership and expertise to an already highly executing machine. Really the sky's the limit for us, and I think what it now brings us is the ability to expand the product and really take the products into whole new areas, like artificial intelligence and being able to leverage those technologies and really change the way customers provide support and really evolve the customer experience as a whole. >> Yeah, it's been interesting. I've watched the cloud space in general for a number of years, and, you know the numbers sometimes bely what we're used to. It's like, oh well okay, you know, somewhere 40 to 90% growth for some of the public cloud providers. Oh well, when's that going to slow down? And sometimes it actually still accelerates, you know. And when I look at the cloud contact centers, you know, once again, you know, you're growing at a pretty good clip, but you've still got lots of head room there. So talk a little bit about that dynamic, you know, we're past the evangelization phase, and now, you know, generally Cloud it's here it's still growing massively. >> Well said, Stu, and not only is it still here, it's just the beginning. If you look at the Cloud penetration rate to date we now see that about 10 to 15% of companies have moved and transitioned to the Cloud for their contact center needs. We see that continuing for a decade or more as we move forward, and some of the drivers for that, if you look at it, are... Uh, you mentioned at the outset, Lisa the fact that we're recording five million minutes of conversations, and that is valuable, valuable data that we're sitting on. One of the true, uh, advents is when you look at AI and you look at artificial intelligence, lots of folks around this show are talking about how AI is going to revolutionize and change the way contact centers operate. And we know it's going to do that. Lots of us are experimenting and building out proofs of concepts in the areas like agent assistance. For the first time ever, we can get strong transcription tools that allow us to take speech and convert it into text at a very high rate. And be able to then apply natural language understanding tools to that same text to be able to derive what a customer's asking for in real time, and, therefore, it takes the responsibility away from the agent and not burden the agent with having to go hunt and search for the solutions, but actually let the system go hunt and search for that, while the agent can pay attention and focus on the client or the end user customer. And then have the system be able to give responses, so if the system's giving responses to, uh, the agent, the agent then has the ability to chose which response is accurate, and the system will learn over time and become smarter. The machine learning portion of that is it will get better and better at suggesting responses to the agent. It allows us to take a very junior or unseasoned agent and make them a very experienced agent very, very quickly. So, in the past, we've had to rely on scripts that were very form-driven, with a few variables being filled in. Now we can be very dynamic, with AI providing those responses. >> Let's talk about the impacts of the consumer. We are consumers, right? We're so empowered. We can make any decision, and we have these expectations on any business that we're dealing with, you're going to be able to... If it's an agent we're dealing with because we have a problem, you're going to be able to identify my problem right away, um, in whatever channel it is that I want to communicate with you, and I have this expectation that... That whatever... I want it to be as easy as, uh, you know, downloading something on Netflix. So, in terms of the consumer influence, what are some of the ways in which Five9 can help those agents really become empowered decision makers and help the businesses be able to have the content that they can, in real time, distribute through the appropriate channel? >> Right, well, that's a great question because there's nothing more important... I should say nothing more frustrating for a consumer who contacts a business and has to go through an IVR, which we've all done. It's not a pleasant experience. We're oftentimes trying to input information first so the company can identify who we are, second to derive intent. Why are we contacting them? And third, now that the company knows why we are contacting them, how they can find and locate and route us to the most appropriate resource to handle that transaction. And with AI coming, it can allow us to very quickly identify the caller, ask them why they're calling, and, through that natural language understanding, then we can derive why they're calling and not only distribute the call to the right agent, but as I mentioned earlier, be able to actually provide the pertinent data to help them interact with the consumer. So as consumer expectations continue to rise, and they expect to not have to give information more than once, regardless of the channel, it puts the onus on us as technology solution providers to build the solutions that will accomplish just that. >> Yeah, Dan, I wonder if you can help us peel the onion a little bit when you talk about the opportunity for growth. We know where Cloud adoption is still a little bit more heavy here in North America, so bring us, bring us global, you know, Five9 is a global company, but what's the international opportunity there? >> So, great, we've had small European teams and Latin America teams for several years now, in fact we set up our data centers in Europe with a fully geographic-redundant solution. And it's been hardened. We have over a hundred customers now on our European data centers, and so we're now in the mode of scale and execution. It's very critical in this space to establish presence, get reference ability within a region, and then scale it. That's the same we did here in the US, and we're doing the same thing now in Europe and Latin America. So that's a big area for our expansion needs for 2019. We're also seeing an area along, erhm... with the large systems intergrators, the global companies like Deloitte and also with PWC, EY, Accenture, IBM. Being able to really leverage what they have is a lot of account control, and they're look at as trusted advisors to come in and help companies go through that digital transformation, which includes so much more than just contact center, but we're a critical element. And so what we've done is we've worked very closely with them to make sure that we can participate in that transformation, and they've been wonderful about introducing us into domestic customers but many global customers in nature. >> I love that you brought up the digital transformation. When we talk to companies, data is so important to what they're doing, is at the center of that digital transformation. Data plays a pretty important role in the contact centers. We talked to Jonathan yesterday about some of the future of AI. That's there. When you talk about your field and your engagement with your customers, you know, where does contact center fit into some of those big themes and big transformations that they're doing? >> So, um, uh, data's critical because it's, A, how it was mentioned yesterday by Jonathan, it's really what's going to allow us to teach the machine learning to be so much more accurate, you've got to have millions of conversations in order to do that effectively. The other is for our customers and potential customers. Well, the time is now to move to the Cloud, so that when the application that we're doing PoCs with and we're testing the different use cases, when those become relevant and prevalent within production environments, the first step is you need to be in the Cloud already, and the next step is start recording your data today. So if you're recording calls and you're flushing those calls and you're not saving them, the key is that's valuable data and can create valuable insights to what conversations are happening between your agents and your customers. Today many of our customers record all their calls, and they put them in a vault, and about 1 to 2% get listened to again. And they're getting listened to, not for the content, but for training purposes. And we would argue that there's so much valuable content in there, that if it can be taken, transcribed, organized, filtered, and then brought back to the business, there's many insights that can be driven because of that. One example is if you take data from a conversation and you're able to transcribe it, the system can have the intelligence to go in and mine for topics. What are the key elements that this conversation just had? And take that information and disposition a call. So today many organizations have their agents do wrap up on their keyboard and type in notes about what occurred on a call. Sometimes those notes are accurate, sometimes they're not. Same with dispositioning. I may have a pull-down menu and disposition a call. It may be accurate, oftentimes it's not. Well, with the technology that available to us today, we can auto-disposition, if you will, or let the system disposition the call, let the system put in the relevant notes, and let the agent move on to their next call. The key there is, tomorrow, when I call back, if Lisa answers my call, Lisa can say, oh great. I see you talked to Stu yesterday for 20 minutes, and you talked about X, Y, and Z. Is that why you're calling? A much more personalized conversation. >> So since customers are going to these great lengths to record and store these conversations, and as you're saying, there's so much value there, way besides training, what are some of the barriers that you're finding that they need help getting over to actually start mining that data to dramatically improve their competitive advantage, reduce churn, increase CLV? How do you help them get over that, all right we have to invest here. >> Yeah, great. Some of the barriers historically have been just the sheer accuracy. There's been speech to text technology and algorithms available on the market for many years. They just haven't had the accuracy rate of that of a human. So we've always relied on the humans to extract the detail and be able to transcribe. The trouble is going from a active conversation to transcribing what I really just heard... a lot gets lost in that translation as well. And so with human levels of accuracy of the new technology coming from companies like Google and others, to be able to transcribe that information, then we need to then apply the NLU to that same text. And so those historically have been the challenges. Now that we're there with the technology, it becomes for companies like us to be able to apply that technology in a way that's fitting for the customer. >> Dan, I expect you're meeting with a lot of customers at a show like this, and just in your job you talk to a lot of customers. When we've been talking to many of your partners here at the show, we hear about, uh, you know, if only we could get greater adoption, we need to help people train up, we need to help them get over the barrier of learning something new. What, is that one of the main challenges you hear from your users or are there anything else that's kind of rising up as the, kind of, the biggest challenges that your customers face today? From a distribution standpoint, and channel perspective, we have lots of channels that are embracing Five9 and bringing for the first time in many cases a Cloud solution to their customers. Historically that's been met with mixed results because they felt like, hey, there's a large CAPX solution that I can sell, or I can go on a subscription basis, and I don't see that revenue for many years to come. And so we're finding that that channel is really opening up nicely for us. And that goes from everything from a regional VAR that may have been providing and selling the premises-based solutions to the large global CDWs of the world that have global reach and global scale. And then, of course, like I mentioned earlier, the SIs like Deloitte and Accenture and those that have strategic value that they bring to their clients. So we're seeing it hit on many different cylinders to help fuel our expansion, and that's what's really, what we're looking forward to go from, you know, the, the, the 250 million to 500 million to a billion. Those are the types of channels that will help us scale much more effectively. >> Yeah, the last thing I wanted to, to ask about is your Cloud-based solution, but my understanding is you still treat this, it's white glove, every customer, you're engaging there. It's not some hands-off relationship there. >> Right. Could you talk a little bit about that? That differentiation for Five9? >> Yes, that's an excellent point, and it's something that I brought over from my previous experience of selling into larger enterprises. We said, you know there's this misnomer about, oh if it's in the Cloud, it's off the shelf, and it's not as customizable. That's... Nothing could be further from the truth, for one. We have to... All of our enterprise customers have a different deployment and a different effective implementation of our solution. Uh, and having built out 300 REST-based APIs, we give tremendous flexibility and allow our customers to get very creative on how they customize it, whether that be for integrating to back-office data systems, building their own UIs or dashboards that are in the look and feel that the want, there's a variety of different ways that they can leverage and customize the product. So it's important for us to have a solution that has that flexibility, and um, it allows customers to move to the Cloud and yet still have that much greater flexibility than they had with premises systems. Um, and that's come about over the last several years. >> Okay, Dan, last question. Let's bring it home. You're on the road all the time. You talk with a ton of customers. Give us one by name, if you can, or industry that really epitomizes the breadth and the strength that Five9 and your channel partners can deliver. >> Yeah, so, getting back, and I'll touch on the channel partners first. The channel partners element of them being able to recognize, the first step we want for them is to leverage and empower them to recognize a Cloud offering or an application that might be a fit for Five9. And then we're now in the process of enabling them not only on the pre-sale side but on the post-sale side to be able to leverage their expertise from a services perspective. So when you look at customers that really want to take that and go to the next level, a lot of them have been brought to us by I'll us Deloitte as an example. When Deloitte first brought us in to Lili, they were able to bring us in and help Lili transform their global centers over to Five9. And they're taking out and migrating their premises-based solutions over the last three years, over to Five9. And it has to do with the program management and the strategic nature in which Deloitte helps them time those projects and the technology that Five9 brings to the table to allow us to eventually take on their entire enterprise, move it over. >> Wow. Dan, thank you so much for sharing all of this great excitement about what you're doing at Five9 and how you're really helping to move the business forward. Stu and I appreciate your time. >> Excellent. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Stu. Great to be here. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering .conf18. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Hello everybody, welcome to Orlando. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here at Splunk conf .conf 2018. The hashtag is #splunkconf18. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Stu it's great to be in Orlando again. Last year we were in D.C. This is our seventh year covering Splunk.conf and we've seen the company really move from essentially analyzing log files on PRAM in a perpetual license model, to now a company that is permeating all of IT into the lines of business. Security, IT performance, application performance, moving into IOT. Really becoming a mature company. It's a company with $1.7 billion in revenue forecasted for this year. They were talking about a $17 billion market cap, they're growing at 36%, and they're a company Stu, that is in the process of successfully going from a perpetual license model to a renewable model. Splunk set the goal of being 75% renewable by 2020. Sounds like renewable energy, but repeatable renewable from a subscription standpoint, they're already there. So you're seeing that in the execution. This is your first .conf, or conf as they like to say. We were at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Center, you saw what, what's the number, 8,000 people? >> Yeah I think 8,000 at the show this year, it's strong growth, and Dave I've been hearing from the team for years the excitement of the show, the passion of the show, saw like, right over near where we were sitting there's the whole group of that was the Splunk trust. They've got the fezzes on, a lot of them have superhero capes on, and it's what you'd expect from a passionate, technical maybe even geeky audience. Things like, we're announcing the S3 API-compatible storage. Everybody's like, yay we're so excited for this. It's hardcore techies. >> What was the other big clap? Screen? >> Yeah, that's right dark mode. We're going to go to dark mode, I don't have to play with the CSS. Anybody that's played with a website, changing these things is not trivial. I click a little button and the joke was this was the bright one for the executives, but when I'm down in the gamer center I don't want this glaring screen here, so I can switch it over to dark mode. And people were pretty excited about that. >> So again the roots of Splunk, they took log data and analyzed it. Doug Merritt the CEO, talked today talked about, making things happen with data. I thought he did a really good job of laying out the past, putting the past behind us in terms of he said, "I've been to I can't tell you "how many Master Data management classes "trying to optimize the database, "trying to codify business processes "and harden those business processes." The problem is data is messy. Data is growing so fast, business processes are changing so fast, the competition is moving so fast, customers are changing. So you have to be able to organize your data in the moment. So, the whole idea that, even go back to the early big data days and Hadoop, the whole idea was to bring five megabytes of compute to a petabyte of data. And no schema on write, or what some call schema on read. Splunk was really a part of that. Put the data, get the data organized in a way that you can look at in in a moment, but then let the data flow. So that has definite implications in terms of how you think about data. It's not trying to get the data all perfect so you can use it, it's trying to get the data into your data ocean, as we like to say, and then have the tooling to be able to analyze it very, very quickly. They announced Splunk 7.2 today which is a big deal. Some things, we'll talk about a few of the features, obviously focused on performance, but one of the things they talked about was basically being able to split storage and compute. So previously you had to add essentially a brick of storage and compute simultaneously. We've heard about these complaints for years in the conversion infrastructure space, it's obviously a problem in the software space as well. Now customers are able to add storage or compute in a granular fashion, and they're cozying up to Amazon doing S3 compatible store. >> Dave, I love that message that he put out there you said, "life is messy. "You can't try to control the chaos, "you want to be able to ride those waves of data "take advantage of them and not overly "make things rigid with structure." Because once you put things in place you're going to get new data or something else that's going to come along and your structure is going to be blown away. So when you need to search things you want to be able to look at them in that point in time but be able to ride those waves, flow with the data, live the way your data lives. That's definitely something that resonates in this community. Dave, something I've watching this space, as an infrastructure guy and watching the Cloud movement, there were a lot of reasons why traditional big data failed. I kind of never looked at Splunk like most of those other big data companies. Yes they had data, yes they're part of the movement of taking advantage of data, but they weren't, oh well we have this one tool that we're going to create to do it all, like some of the new players. They're playing with all the latest things. You want tentraflow, you want to do the A.I, the ML. Splunk is ready to take advantage of all of these new waves of technologies, and they've done a couple of acquisitions like VictorOps in the space that they keep growing and the goal is, you mentioned the revenue, but Splunk today has I think it's 16,000 customers. They have a short term goal of getting to 20,000 but with what they started talking about in the keynote today, Splunk Next, they really want to be able to do an order of magnitude of more customers and when you get great customer examples like Carnival Cruises. The CEO I thought, talked about the sea of data. Lots of good puns in the keynote there but mobile cities floating around and lots of data that they want to be able to get the customer experience and make sure the customer gets what they need and make sure that Carnival knows what they have to make sure that they're running better and optimizing their business too, so great example. Looking forward to talking to them on theCUBE. >> Well and they have many dozens, I think it's in last quarter, it was like 60 plus deals over a million dollars. They have many $10 million plus deals. That's an outcome of happy customers, it's not like they're trying to engineer those deals. I'm sure some of the sales guys would love to do that. But that's a metric that I think was popularized by the likes of Aneel Bhusri at Workday, certainly Frank Slootman at ServiceNow. It's one that Wall Street watches and Splunk it's an indicator. Splunk is doing some very very large deals that underscores the commitment that many customers are making to Splunk. Having said that, there are many more that are still smaller users of Splunk. There's a lot of upside here. And they're going into a serious TAM expansion that's something we're going to talk to Doug Merritt about. Making acquisitions of a company, VictorOps was their most recent acquisition sort of security orchestration and management. They're doing, the ecosystem is growing, they're doing bigger deals or partnerships with the likes of Accenture, Deloitte is here, EY. Accenture actually has a huge space at this event, and those are indicators. I want to go back to something you said earlier about the failure of big data. Certainly big data failed to live up to the hype in many ways. You didn't see a lot of wholesale replacement of traditional databases and EDWs. You did see a reduction in cost, that was the big deal. But clearly enterprise data warehouses and ETL, they're still a fundamental part of people's data strategies despite what Doug Merritt saying, hey, the data is messy and you've just got to let it flow, essentially what he's saying. There is still a need for structured data and mixing, sort of, interacting of structured and unstructured data. Bringing transaction data and systems of intelligence together, analytic data. But the one thing that big data did do and the Hadoop movement, it did a couple things: one is, architecturally it pushed data out and back in the day you had to get a big Unix box and stuff everything in there. It was your god box of data. And you had Oracle licenses and Sun Microsystems boxes and it was very expensive. And you had a couple of people who knew how to get the data out. So the goal of democratizing data, what it did is, it is messy. Data went out to the distributed nodes and now the edge. But it brought attention to the importance of data and the whole bromide of data driven companies. And so now we're in a position to make a new promise and that promise is A.I, machine learning, machine intelligence, which seems to be substantive. We talk a lot on theCUBE is this old wine, new bottle? And we had an event in New York last month and the consensus from a lot of practitioners and others in the room was: no there's something substantive, the data substrate is now in place. Now it's all about taking advantage of it. Tooling is still complex but emerging or evolving. And I think the cloud, to your point, is a huge part of that. By integrating data pipelines in the cloud it dramatically simplifies the deployment model and the complexity of managing big data. >> Yeah, Dave, as you said, there used to be these giant boxes and some of these initiatives I needed 18 months, you know, millions of dollars and a large time you either need to be a country or a multi-national company to be able to put this thing together. I remember one of the earliest case studies that David Floyer did when we were looking at big data it was how do I take that 18 month deployment and drive it down to more like a six week deployment, and when you talk about A.I, ML, and deep learning, the promise is that a business user should be able to get answers in a much much shorter window. So actionable on that data, being able to do things with it not just looking backwards but hear the team. So I want to be able to be proactive, I want to be able to be responsive. I want to even predict what my client is going to need and be ready for it. >> So as Doug Merritt said that digital and physical worlds they're coming together. They don't stop evolving. They're organic. Your data model has to be flexible. It's a sea of data. It's an ocean of data. It's not a confined data lake, as John Furrier and others like to say. And so I was happy to hear Doug Merritt talking about a sea. We use the term oceans because that's really what it is. And oceans are unpredictable, they're sometimes really harsh, they can sometimes be messy. But they're constantly evolving and so I think that kind of metaphor works in this world of Splunk. We've got two days here of coverage. A lot of customers coming on today, in fact, Splunk is one of those companies that puts many customers on theCUBE, which we love. We love to dig in to the case studies. We've got some ecosystem partners. Some of the big SIs are coming on and of course, we're going to hear from some of the product people at Splunk that go to market people. Doug Merritt will be on tomorrow. And a number of folks. I'm Dave Vellante, @DVellante on Twitter. He's @Stu. Stu Miniman. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching day one from Splunk conf18 in Orlando. Be right back. (soft bouncy music)