>> Announcer: Live, from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to events, we extract the signal from the noise. The signal here is all about automation, robotic process automation, software robots, we're seeing the ascendancy of that market space. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPath's Forward conference, big user conference, UiPath Forward Americas, about 1500 people here, Stu. They have conferences all over the world, I think I heard 14,000 people in the last year have attended such shows. They're intimate, there are a lot of partners here, they're loud, they're a lot of good energy. Ana Cinca is here, she's the Vice President of Enabling Technologies, and she's joined by old friend Tom Clancy, who's the Senior Vice President of UiPath Learning, both folks from UiPath, welcome. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Ana, let's start with you. VP of Enabling Technologies. What does that mean, what's that role? >> Well, my role in the organization is to generate a set of non-core products and programs that are creating an ecosystem that is actually contributing actively into accelerating the adoption of the core platform. And that would be through learning, through generating new products like the UiPath Go!, the Marketplace, or constantly engaging the community of users and so on. >> Okay, so you started the training program, correct? >> Ana: Yeah. >> How did that get started? What was your kind of mission, how'd you do it? >> Well it started from a very simple need. Back then, about two years ago, we were, a bunch of my team members were a bunch of RPA developers, who were losing their time only delivering training, so, two years ago about 500 trainings, five days per week, per year. That were a lot of training, so we said, we need to automate this, we need to do something about it. And the only thing that could come into our mind was to, we got inspired by the Udemy, by Coursera, by all the right courses out there, like platforms out there, which were very democratic in sharing the knowledge. So we said, how about we actually create a set of online courses that are really, really good, RPA focused, UiPath focused, courses, and put it out there? That's how it all started, we just wanted to get rid of these repetitive trainings, ultimately. >> Alright, so you had to do it for yourselves and then. >> Ana: Absolutely, yeah. >> So Stu, we heard today from Daniel, he kind of did the moon shot. He said we are going to train a million people in three years, right? >> Well, Tom, it seems like you've got a challenge in front of you to really scale this business. We've talked with you for years, back in your EMC days, your not just storage but new architectures, this convergent approach to the silos, and then cloud architects, really training kind of next generation of the work force in IT, give us a little bit, what's the same, what's different between what you did back at EMC and what you're doing now here with RPA? >> So the biggest difference between EMC and UiPath is EMC had a technology that a lot of people thought was kind of commodity, right? So, the excitement wasn't there when you started going outside of your partners and customers, right? This technology, there is passion about this throughout the entire globe. This is the next big wave, and so, if you're going to scale a program like this, you have to have a bunch of different factors on your side. What Ana just talked about is the academy, you have to bring value somehow, and that starts with having the right courses. If you don't have the courses built up, then you're starting from zero, right, from scratch. But, the other thing that's even more important, is the passion from the CEO. You know, when I first met with Daniel, it was actually sort of an interview, he was, he talked about, you know, employee training, partner training, customer training, but his passion and forty-five minutes of the hour was talking about educating the planet, right? And so he started with universities, which that was kind of a no brainer. And then he went to Youth in Action, under-represented groups, and so forth. The other factor that's really important is having the right team, so, at UiPath, the team is the company, everybody wants to do this. If you're the leader in India, Japan, China, the US, they're all coming to us saying "We need this program." Not just universities but all the way down to the youths. And then, you need a good academic alliance team. So the team that we're building is going to leverage academy, but we are bringing in some of those EMC academic alliance people, we're bringing in a person from Salesforce.com that was running a big piece of it, starts today. We're bringing in a VMware person, a Cisco person, so we're getting all the best. Those are the best programs in the industry. >> Tom, there's one underlying thing, that I saw, a similarity, is back when you talked about convergence or cloud, there was an underlying fear of "Oh my gosh, I'm not going to have the skills, I'm going to be out of a job." Automation's always been that thing "Oh wait, if I automate it, what's that mean for me?" How do you address that? >> Well, first of all, there's a report all that says by 2030, 1.5 billion jobs will be impacted. It doesn't say negative, it just says impacted. So, everybody is going to have to understand that this is coming, and how does it impact me? We're going to put together, as part of this, we'll have an upscaling rescaling, so everybody, it doesn't matter who you are, will be able to leverage the academy, and we'll be tweaking the academy courses, so if it's upscaling rescaling, they will take the courses in a different way, in a different format, than the university students, than the Youth in Action, so we'll target those different audiences, and the other, one other thing is marketing is hugely important, because you can't rely on the training group to get the word out. So, Bobby Patrick and his team, are working hand-in-hand with us to drive the awareness across the globe. >> So Ana, when we first heard about RPA and UiPath, we read the Forrester report, and said "Okay, there's a few leaders out there, let's "play with it, let's go download the software "and see how hard it is to do." Turned out, we could only get our hands on UiPath software, it was very easy to get our hands on the software, it was very open. Some of the other guys were like, "Why do you want to use it?" Forget it. But then we built some automations, and it was kind of, you know, it took a little, there was a little bit of a learning curve, but it was not a developer who did it, so it was relatively low code, or even no code. So, when you started this program and as you scale it, who are you targeting? Is it the hardcore developer, is it the, you know, RPA developer, is it the citizen developer, both? And how do you adjust the training correspondingly? >> Yeah, so, first of all, the way we set up the trainings, were, we wanted to make sure that, exactly like we did with the core platform, that was the first RPA software that had a trial version that was available for everyone, right? We had to do the same thing in learning and we're an academy, so what we said were we're launching courses which are free of charge, online, for everyone to use. But, moreover than that, what we wanted to do, is to, have courses that take someone from a very basic foundation level, of basic programming, and actually guide him or her through a learning curve that will get them to an expert level. So, the way we built the courses, are in such a matter that it is very easy to be followed by anyone, actually. And now, that's the reason why, now we're having not only courses for the RPA developers, the techie guys, or solution architects, or infrastructure engineers, but, moreover than that, we're tackling into the space of non-technical people who are equally very important in the RPA journey. Like business analysts, the RPA project managers, and so on. So we're trying to cover all the personas that are critical in an RPA COE set up. >> So it's interesting, Tom, hearing you say you're recruiting people from Cisco, Vmware, some EMC folks, a lot of the traditional, some would say legacy, enterprise companies, who are constantly in the process of reskilling, so I would think that these folks would be very receptive to that. Now you think about Vmware admin, Cisco certified engineers, Microsoft certifications, they sort of led to full employment for at least some period of time. Do you think RPA skills are going to be similar, in that they are going to be in such demand, if young people start to get trained in RPA they're going to essentially have full employment for life, or do you think it's more fleeting that that? You're thoughts? >> So I've been here for three months now, so I guess that makes me a veteran at UiPath, but robotics is going to be in everybody's job. So one of the things that it took me a while to kind of grasp when I was talking to Daniel the first time, the first meeting I mentioned, is he said that there will be at least one robot on every desktop moving forward. This is going to be, you know, when you had the flip phone before, well actually, when people went from the big cell phones and people were saying everybody's going to have a cell phone, you know, everybody looked like "That's kind of crazy," but then, next thing you know, you have a computer on your phone, and everybody has at least one phone. This is going to be the same way with robots. It's going to be ubiquitous across the entire industry. So, people will grow up understanding what robots are. That's why we're going after the youth, so they understand robots right from the get go. And then, it will integrated into everybody's job across the globe, so it's not fleeting at all, it's actually the complete opposite. >> How do you guys measure success? Obviously, you got to get to a million in three years, that's a lot of training. How else do you measure success? What kind of parameters do you set? Tests you take, how do you measure it? >> Want to take that one up for scaling? >> So, one of the things we did, well Ana, one of the things that Ana did before I got here, was they built certification. Certification is going to continue to get more and more important for us. You know, so, think Microsoft, Cisco, certification, and so forth, and so, we believe we will have the industry standard certification program, period. But one of the things we did, was we built our own certification platform, high stakes certification. So what that does is, we do not have to charge, or charge much, any of the people going through our courses and certification. So, today, because we had to go through a third party, we're charging 850 dollars per test. This quarter, through the end of the year, it's going to be zero, just to bring more people in. And then, going forward, it would be significantly lower than 150. What we want to do, and what we will do, is democratize learning and certification for robots. >> I think this is huge, go on you want to add something? >> Yeah, I really want to add one more thing, because what we're doing together, is actually, through the way we're approaching community, and through the spaces that we have already built so far like the academy, the forum, we're bringing now the UiPath Go! in October, the end of October, the project space, all holistically wrapped up in a new version of the community. What we're trying to get out there is an RPA developer getting trained on the academy, being certified, but then practicing within the UiPath universe. Ultimately, where we want to get to, is to measure success also through the number of community users, of end-users, who are not only certified, but we will be able to see what is their activity status, like reputation, and recognition, within the community itself. And, hence, ultimately, reaching up to a stage, where we will be able to pinpoint to a true UiPath expert elite of people throughout the world. >> I love that it's a community driven measurement. >> Everything goes into building up a holistic and global community. >> Very open-- >> If I could just say one thing on community if you just look at the education and the different audiences, you know, let's say, you know, people that do robotics and they get certified, all the way down to youth, we will have a community, where all these different organizations are talking to each other, and to professionals. So, you might have a ten year old in Bangladesh, that is on the community asking questions, and you might have an engineer in Romania at UiPath answering those questions because they're part of the community. Or, it could be a customer or partner, you know, in Philadelphia, but they're all part of the community, we're bringing all these people together. So, things like STEM, Women in Coding, one person came up to me last night, he was so excited, he said "I represent a lot of the black community when "it comes to education and I really want to get my teams "across the country involved in this." >> Phenomenal, now, the no cost training is available roughly when? >> Yeah, right now. >> It's today? >> Well no cost training has been available-- >> Since the beginning. >> That was a decision that Ana made 18 months ago. If somebody, if a customer wants to have a seminar, or something like that, we have third-party training companies that will go in, and they'll charge, but if you go online to the academy, 100 percent free. And the certification for the next quarter is going to be 100 percent free. >> That's unbelievable, because, you know, I got three kids in college and one of them is he's doing Python, he's doing R, he's doing Tableau and he's texting me, "Hey, these Tableau courses "are really expensive, can you pay for it?" And I'm like well, what's the ROI? And I'm sayin' learn about RPA, because it's going to change the world, you know, visualizations important and all that stuff's important, but that's, I think, a huge investment that you guys are making, and then also, helps me understand how you guys plan on staying ahead. So congratulations on getting this started, Tom, you basically came out of retirement, you know, quasi-retirement so it had to be pretty alluring. Extremely successful career at EMC, so great to have you back in the game. >> Thanks, it's great to be here. >> Thanks so much, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. >> Okay, thank you. >> Right there, everybody, you're watching theCUBE, live, from the Fontainebleau in Miami. We'll be right back, right after this short break, you're watching UiPathForward Americas, we'll be right back.

>> Male voiceover: Live from San Jose California, it's the Cube, covering Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Western Digital World Headquarters It's the Almaden Campus in San Jose. If you know anything about the tech world, you know there's a lot of innovation that's been happening on this campus for years and years and years. Big announcement today called Innovating to Fuel the Next Generation of Big Data. Lot of exciting announcements and here to join us to tell us all about it is Brendan Collins. He's the Vice President of Product Marketing Devices for Western Digital. Brendan, great to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Absolutely so, really exciting announcement. You know, I've talked to Kim Stevenson at Intel, we had an interview talking about Moore's law. And one thing she really reinforced is that Moore's law is really more of an attitude than it is specifically physics, and whether you want to argue the physics is one thing, but the attitude for innovation, to continue to deliver a lot more for less, just continues, continues, and continues, and you guys announced a huge step in that direction today. >> Yeah, we have a challenge that storage is growing at a rate of about 40 percent per year. And budgets from the data centers are not growing, right? So the challenge is for us to develop new technologies that allow us to stay on the technology curve, and cut costs and do that efficiently. >> Then this is a big one, so let's jump in. So actually it was years ago I was actually at the event when you guys introduced the Helium drives, and that was a big deal there, and you've continued to kind of move that innovation but then you can see a plateau. And the density of this data, so you guys had to come up with something new. >> Yeah, what we've seen is that our PMR technology that we use currently is slowly running out of steam, right? So in order to come down the cost curve, we needed to boost areal density. And luckily we were able to come up with a new breakthrough in MAMR technology that will allow us to do that for the next decade. >> It's interesting in the talk, you talked about you guys could see this kind of coming and you actually put a lot of bets on the table, you didn't just bet on MAMR, you bet on HAMR, and you continued along a number of multiple tracks, and you've been at this for a while. What was kind of the innovation that finally gave you a breakthrough moment that got us to where we are today? >> Well, there were multiple technologies that we could have invested in, and we decided to continue on the two major ones which were HAMR and MAMR but we made a decision to invest in a process called, a head fabrication process called damascene that allowed us to extend the life of PMR for the last five to six years, and it's been in all the products we've been shipping since 2013. >> And you talked the areal density, so that's basically the amount of information we can put on the square inch of surface area And you've really, you attacked it on two vectors. One is how many tracks, just think of a record, how many tracks can you get on an album, in terms of the number of lines, and then how much density then you can have on each of those tracks. >> That's right, that's right. And you're now seeing major improvements on both of those factors. >> Well if you look at, we've had three enabling technologies in our products for the past three to four years, right. One is helium, one is micro actuation, and the other is the damascene process. Damascene and micro actuation actually push track density which enables higher capacity. But the newer technology that we're talking about, MAMR, addresses both factors. So we push the track density even tighter together, But we also boost the linear density at the same time, and we do that without adding cost. >> Right. The other thing you talked about, and I think it's a really important piece, right it's not only the technology breakthrough, but it's also how does that fit within the existing ecosystem of your customers, and obviously big giant data centers and big giant cloud providers, we actually have a show going on at a big cloud show right now, and this technology was innovative in that you've got a breakthrough on density, but not so crazy that you introduced a whole bunch of new factors into the ecosystem that would then have to be incorporated into all these systems, because you guys not only make your own systems, but you make the media that feeds a whole host of ecosystems, and that was a pretty important piece. >> If you look at some previous technologies we've introduced whether it be even 4K sectors in the industry, or shingled magnetic reporting, both of those require whole side modifications. Any time you have whole side modifications, it generally slows down the adoption, right? With HAMR, one of the challenges that we had was because of the concerns with thermals on the media, we needed a process called wear leveling, and that required whole software changes. In contrast, when we go to MAMR, everything is seamless, everything is transparent, and it's great. >> Right. I thought it was much simpler than that. I thought just heat is bad, HAMR is heat, and MAMR is microwave, and you know, heat and efficiency and data centers and all those, kind of again, system-level concerns; heat's never a good thing in electronics. >> Well, and in the case of MAMR versus HAMR, there's like an order of magnitude difference in the temperature on the disk, which is the key concern. >> And then of course as you mentioned in the key note, this is real, you've got sample units going on, correct me if I'm wrong, as early as next year >> That's right. >> you're hoping you'd be in scale production in 2020. Where some of these other competing technologies, there's really still no forecasted ship date on the horizon. >> Yeah, you can generate samples, you can build lower quantities of these HAMR drives, but you still have that big concern out there in front of you, how do I address the reliability, how do I address the complexity of all these new materials, and then if I got all of that to work, how do I do it commercially because of the cost additives. >> Right; so I just want to get your perspective before we let you go, you're busy, there's a high demand for your time, as you kind of think back and look at these increasing demands for storage, this increasing demand for computers, and I think one of the data points given is, you know, the data required for humans and machines and IOT is growing way way way way faster than business focused data which has been the driver of a lot of this stuff, if you just kind of sit back and take a look, you know, what are some of your thoughts because I'm sure not that long ago you could have never imagined that there would be the demand for the types of capacities that we're talking about now and we both know that when we sit down five years from now, ten years ago, you know, ten years from now, we're going to look back at today and think, you know, that was zero. >> Yeah, way back in the day there were just PCs and servers and there was traditional IT with rate, today with autonomous cars and IOT and AI and machine learning, it's just going to continue, so that exponential growth that you saw, there's no sign of that slowing down, which is good news for us. >> Yeah, good job security for you for sure. >> You bet! >> Alright Brendan, well, again, thanks for taking a few minutes to sit down and congratulations on the great event and the launch of these new products. >> Thank you, thank you. >> He's Brendan Collins, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the Cube from the Western Digital Headquarters in San Jose California. Thanks for watching.