 Live from Miami Beach, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back, welcome to Miami everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering the UiPath Forward Americas Conference. UiPath is a company that has come out of nowhere really and is a leader in robotic process automation, RPA. It really is about software robots. I'm Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman. We have one day of coverage here, Stu. We are all over the place this week, aren't we? Stu and I were in Orlando earlier, flew down, quick flight to Miami, and we're getting the Kool-Aid injection from the RPA crowd. We're at the Fontainebleau in Miami, kind of cool hotel. Stu, you might remember, I'm sure you do. Several years ago we did the very first dot next from Nutanix at this event, about the same size, maybe a little smaller, this is a little bigger, I'd say. Dave, this is probably twice the size, about 1,500 people here. I remember about a year ago you were started buzzing about RPA, big growth in the market, really enjoyed getting into the keynote here. You said we were at Splunk, and data was at the center of everything, and the CEO here for UiPath really talked, it's automation first. We talked about mobile first, cloud first, automation first. I know we've got a lot of things we want to talk about, because I think back through my career, and I know you do too, automation is something we've been talking about for years, we struggle with it, there's challenges there, but there's a lot of things coming together, and that's why we have this new era that RPA is striking at to really explode this market. Yeah, so I made a little prediction that I put out on Twitter, I'll share with folks. I said there's a widening gap between the number of jobs available worldwide, and the number of people to fill them, that's something that we know, and there's a productivity gap, and the numbers aren't showing up, we're not seeing bump ups in productivity, even though spending on technology is kind of through the roof. Robotic process automation is going to become a fundamental component of closing that gap, because companies, as part of the digital transformation, they want to automate. The market today is around a billion, you know, we see it growing 10X over the next five to seven years. We're going to have some analysts on today from Forrester, we'll dig into that a little bit, they cover this market really, really closely. So we're hearing a lot more about RPA, we heard it last week at Infor, Charles Phillips was a sort of big proponent of this. UiPath has been in this business now for a few years, it came out of Romania, Daniel Dinez, former Microsoft executive, very interesting fellow, first time I've seen him speak, we're going to meet him today. He's a techie, comes on stage with a T-shirt, you know, he's very sort of thoughtful, talking about open, about culture, about having fun, really dedicated to listening to customers and growing this business. He said, he gave us a data point that they went from nothing, just a couple million dollars two years ago, they'll do 140 million, they're doing 140 million now in annual recurring revenue, on their way to 200. I would estimate they'll probably get there, if not by the end of the year, it's probably by first quarter next year. So let's take a look at some of the things that we heard in the keynote, we heard from customers, a lot of partners here, seen a lot of the big SIs, diving in, that's always a sign of big markets. What did you learn today at the keynotes? Yeah, Dave, the first thing is, there is definitely one of the pushbacks about automation is, oh wait, what's that going to do for jobs? You touched on it, there's a lot of stats they threw out and said that RPA can really bring, you know, a 75% productivity improvement, because we know productivity improvement kind of stalled out overall in the market, and what we want to do is get rid of mundane tasks. Dave, you know, I spent, you know, a long time of my career helping to get, you know, how do we get infrastructure simpler? How do we get rid of those routine things? You know, in the storage world we said if you were configuring LUNs, you know, you need to go find other jobs. If you were networking certain basic things, we're going to automate that with software, but you know, there are things that the automation are going to be able to do so that you can be more creative, you can spend more time doing some higher level functions, and that's where we have a skills gap. I'm excited we're going to have Tom Clancy, who you and I know, I've got his book on the shelf, and not Tom Clancy, the, you know, fiction author, but Tom Clancy who's done certifications and education through storage and cloud, and now how do we get people ready for this next wave of how you can do people and machines? One of my favorite events, Dave, that we ever did was the second machine age with MIT in London. Talking about it's really people plus machines is really where you're going to get that boom. You know, you've interviewed Garakasparov on this topic, and it's just fascinating, and you know, really excites me as someone that, you know, I mean, I've lived with my computers my whole life, and just as a technologist I'm optimistic at how the two sides together can be much more powerful than either alone. Well, it's an important topic Stu. A lot of the shows that we go to, the vendors don't want to talk about that. Oh, we don't want to talk about displacing humans. UiPath's perspective on that, and we'll poke them a little bit on it is, you know, that's old news. People are happy because they're replacing their mundane tasks. And while that's true, there's some action on Twitter, Sarbjit Johal just tweeted out, replying to some of the stuff that we were talking about here in the hashtag, which is UiPath Forward, hashtag UiPath Forward. Automation displaces unskilled workers, that's the crux of the problem. We need best algorithms to automate retraining and re-skilling of workers. That's what we need the most for best socio-economic outcomes in parallel to automation through algorithm driven machines. He's right, that gap, and we talked about this at 2MA, is there going to be a creativity gap? It's an education issue, it's an education challenge. You just don't want to displace unskilled workers, we want to retrain people. Right, absolutely, you could have this hollowing out of the marketplace otherwise, where you have really low-paid workers on the one end, and you have really high-end creative workers, but the middle class workers could be displaced if they're not retrained and not put forward. The World Economic Forum actually said that this automation is going to create 60 million net new jobs. Now, 60 million, it sounds like a big number, but it is a large global workforce. And actually, David, one of the things that really struck me is, not only do you have a Romanian founder, but up on stage, we had a Japanese customer giving a video in Japanese with the subtitles in English. It's not something that you typically see at a US show, very global in their reach. You talked about the community and very open source focus, something we've seen. This is how software grows really fast as you get those people working. So that's something I want to understand, is they've got, the UI path has 2,000 customers, but what was it? They've got 114,000 certified RPA developers. So I'm like, okay, wait, those numbers don't make sense to me yet, but I'm sure our guests are going to be able to explain. Well, they get you, man. And so you're right about the need for education. I was impressed that UI path is actually spending some of it to the money that it raised. This company just did a monster raise, 225 million. We had Carl Eschenbach on in theCUBE Studios to talk about that. Jeff Frick interviewed him last week. You can find that interview on our YouTube playlist and I think on our website as well. But they invested, I think it was $10 million with the goal of training a million students in the next three years. They've hired Tom Clancy, who we know from the old EMC education world, right? EMC training and education world. So they got a pro in here who knows how to scale training, so that's huge. They've also started a $20 million investment fund investing in startups and ecosystem companies. So they're putting their money where their mouth is. The company's raised over $400 million to date. They got a $3 billion valuation. Some of the other things we heard from the keynote today, they've got 1400 employees, which is way up. They were just 270, I believe, last year. And the claiming, and I think it's probably true that they're the fastest growing enterprise software company in history, which is kind of astounding. Like you said, given that they came out of Romania, this global company, maybe that's part of the reason why. Yeah, I mean, Dave, they said that his goal is they're going to have 4,000 employees by 2019 and one of those, wait, they're software company, they've raised huge amounts of money. As you said, they're triple unicorn with a $3 billion valuation. Why does the software company need so many employees and at least 3,000 of those are going to be technical because this is intricate. This is not push-button simplicity. There's training that needs to happen. How much do they need to engage? How much of this is vertical knowledge that they need to get? I was at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago. Microsoft's going really deep vertically because AI requires specialized knowledge in each vertical, so how much of that's needed from RPA? You've got a little booklet that they have of some basic 101 of the RPA skills. Yeah, I don't know if you can see this, but is that the right camera? So it's this kind of robot pack. It's kind of fun to go through. It says you got a reliable friend. You can automate sending him a little birthday wish. They got QR codes in the back. You can download it, waiter, so you can order online food. There's something called Tackle for you fantasy football players. It'll help you sort of automate your fantasy football picks, which is kind of cool. So that's fun. There's fun culture here, but really it's about digital transformation and driving it to the heart of process automation. Daniel Dinez talked about taking things from hours to minutes, from sort of accurate to perfectly accurate, slow to fast, from very time consuming to automated. So he put forth this vision of automation first. He sort of talked about the waves, mainframe, the traditional waves, client server, internet, et cetera. And then I really want to poke at this and dig into it a little bit. He talked about computer vision, and that seemed to be a technical enabler. So I'm envisioning this sort of computer vision, this ability to visualize a robot to visualize what's happening on the screen, and then a studio to be able to program these things. I think those are a couple of the components that I discern, but it's really about a cultural shift, a mind shift is what Daniel talked about toward an automation first opportunity. Yeah, and Dave, one of the things he said right, there are three things, the convergence of computer vision, the summer of AI, and what he meant by that is we've lived through a bunch of winters, and we've been talking about this, and then the business process automation, together those put together, and we can create that automation first era. And he talked about, we've been talking about automation since the creation of the first computer, so it's not a new idea, just like, we've been talking on theCUBE for a year, data science isn't a new thing, we sometimes give these things new terms, like RPA, but I love digging into why these are real, and just as we've seen some real indicators, that intelligence, whether you're called AI or ML, are doing things in various environments that we could not do in the past, just orders of magnitude, more processing, data is more important, we can do more there. Are we on the cusp of really automation being able to deliver on the things that we've been trying to talk about for a couple of generations? So a couple of other stats that I thought were interesting, Daniel put forth a vision of one robot for every person, he used a computer for every person, a chicken for every pot kind of thing, that was kind of cool. Yeah, PC for every person, Bill Gates. Right, an open and free mindset. So he talked about, Daniel talked about an era of openness, and UiPath has a marketplace where all the automations, and you can put automations in there, they're all free to use, so they're making money on the software, not on the automation, so they really have this, he said, we're making our competitors better, they're copying what we're doing, and we think that's a good thing, because it's going to help change the world, it's about affecting society, so the rising tides lift all points. They've reminds me a lot, you look at GitHub, you look at the Docker Hub, there's lots of places, this is where code lives in these open market places, you know, not quite like the AWS or IBM market places where you can just buy software, but the question is how many developers get in there? They say they've got 250,000 community members already there, so, and already, what's it, they have, it's already, you know, I think hundreds of processes that are built in there, so that'll be a good metric we can see to how fast that scales. We heard from a couple customers, and Wells Fargo was up there, UnitedHealth, Mr. Yamamoto from SMBC, they have 1,000 robots, so they're really completely transforming their organization. We heard from a partner, data robot, Jeremy Atchin, somebody's been on the queue before, data robot, they showed an automated loan processing where you could go in, talk to a chat bot, and within minutes get qualified for a loan, I don't know if you noticed the loan amount was 7,000 and the interest rate was 13.6%, so the applicant really must not have had great credit history, because that's kind of loan shark rates, but anyway, it was kind of a cool demo, with the back end data robot munging all the data, doing whatever they had to do, transferring through a CSV into the software robot and then making that decision, so that was kind of cool, those integrations seemed to be pretty key, I want to learn more about that. I mean, it reminds me, chat bots have been hot in a lot of areas lately as to how we can improve customer support and automate things on infrastructure and the like, so we'll see how those intersections meet. Yeah, so we're going to be covering this all day, we've got technologists coming on, customers, partners, Stu and I will be jamming, he's at Stu, I'm at DeValante, shoot us any questions, comments, thanks for the ones we've had so far, we're here at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, pretty crazy hotel, a lot of history here, a lot of pictures of Frank Sinatra on the wall, keep it right there, buddy, you're watching theCUBE right back after this short break.