 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of UiPath Live, the release show. Brought to you by UiPath. Hi everybody, welcome back to the special RPA drill down with support from UiPath. You're watching theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante and Bobby Patrick CMO of UiPath. Bobby, good to see you again. Hope you're doing well, thanks for coming on. Hi Dave, it's great to see you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE and then even in the virtual format, this is really exciting. So you know, last year at forward, we talked about the possibility of a downturn. Now nobody expected this kind of downturn, but we talked about that automation was likely something that was going to stay strong, even in a downturn, we were thinking about a potential recession or an economic downturn, stock market drop, but nothing like this. How are you guys holding up in this COVID-19 pandemic? What are you seeing in the marketplace? Yeah, we certainly were not thinking of a black swan or gray rhino or whatever we call this, but it's been in them a pretty crazy couple of months for everybody. When this first started, we were like everybody else, not sure how it impact our business. The interesting thing has been that during COVID, it actually brought a reality check to a lot of companies and organizations that realized that they had very few tools to respond quickly, right? To respond quickly to cost pressures that were urgent or preserving revenue perhaps or responding to strained resources in call centers or the ability to support the surge in the healthcare community. And so RPA became one of those tools that quickly was knowledge and adopted. And so we went out two months ago to go find those first use cases, talk about them, but then first 30 days, we had 50 in production, right? Companies, great organizations like Cleveland Clinic, right? They used their parking lot to give the first tests, the swab tests, right, of well, who might have COVID, right? They had a line of eight hours by putting a robot in place within two days. They got that line down by 80 or 90%, right? It gave a huge hit. And so we see that kind of benefit all across right now the world right now. We were featured in the Wall Street Journal recently with nurses and in a largest hospital system in Ireland called Matter Hospital. The nurses said in the interview that they were able to free up time to be with patients, right? Which is what they're there for anyway, thanks to robots during this emergency. So I think it's definitely raised the awareness that this technology provides an amazing time to value. And it's pretty unprecedented in the world of B2B software. I want to share some data with you in our communities. This is the first time we've shown this. Guys would bring up the data slide. And so this is a chart that ETR produced. ETR is Enterprise Technology Research. They go out every quarter. They survey over 1200 CIOs and IT practitioners and they survey on different segments and they use a methodology called NetScore. And this is sort of how NetScore is derived. And so what this chart shows is the percent of customers that responded, there were about 125 UI path customers that responded, are you adopting new UI path? Are you increasing spending in 2020? Are you planning on flat spending or decreasing spending? Are you replacing the platform? And so basically we take the green, subtract the red from the green and that gives us NetScore. But the point is that Bobby, about 80% of your customers are planning to spend more in 2020 than they spent in 2019. And only about 6% are planning on spending less, which is fairly astounding. I mean, we've been reporting on this for a while, the heatness in the automation market, generally an RPA specifically. But are you seeing this in the marketplace and maybe you could talk about why? Well, we've just finished our first fiscal quarter and at the end of April, and we're still privately held so we can provide some insights for the public company. But yeah, the pace of our business picked up actually in the March, April timeframe, customer adoption, large customer adoption. The number of new companies and new logos were at a record high and we're entering into this quarter now and we have some 20 plus million dollar deals that are likely to close, right? I mean, that's probably a 30% increase versus how many we have today alone, right? So our business is now well over 400 million in ARR. We ended last year at 360 and the growth rate continues fast. I think what's interesting is if the pace of the pre COVID world was already fast, right? The luxury of time has kind of disappeared. And so people are thinking about, they can't wait now, months and years for digital transformation. They have to do things in days and weeks and that's where our technology really comes into play, right? And actually it's also coming to play well in the world, the remote workforce reality too, the ability for remote workers to get trained while they're at home on automation to build automation pipelines, to build automations. You know, now with our latest release, you can download our UI path task capture and report what you're doing and it basically generates the process definition document and the sample files which allow for faster implementation by an RPA center of excellence. So what's really happening here, we see is a sense of urgency coming out of this crisis or coming down the curve, hopefully now the sense of urgency that our customers are facing in terms of how they respond, you know, and respond digitally to helping their business out and it varies a lot by industry, our state and local business, which I was really thinking was not going to be, was going to be the biggest flagrant of any industry picked up in a significant way in the last couple of months, New York state with Governor Cuomo became a big customer of ours. There's a quote from LA County CIO that I've got here that they just deployed us as public, this quote, who said, the deputy CIO said, crisis is always the mother of invention. We can always carry forward the good things that are coming out of this crisis situation. And he's referring to RPA as being a lesson they learned during this that they're going to carry forward. And so we see this state of Oklahoma became a customer and others. So I think that's what we're seeing kind of a broad base and it's worldwide. Yeah, you really, organizations can't put it off anymore. I think you're right. It's sort of brought forward the future into the present. Now, you mentioned 360 million last year, we had forecast 350 million, so that was pretty good right before you guys released. So I was happy about that. But so obviously still a strong trajectory, you know, it might have been higher without COVID, we'll never know, but sort of underscores the strength of the space. And in February, you guys, there was an article that talked about, you know, your potential IPO, Daniel Deneze was quoted. Is that on hold now? Are you guys still sort of thinking about pressing forward or too early to say, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the reality is we have a very, very strong business. We've raised significant money from great investors, some of which are the leading VCs in the world and also the top kind of public company investors. And, you know, we have an aggressive plan. We have an aggressive plan to build out our platform for hyper automation to continue the growth. The UI path is now becoming the center of companies of IT and digital strategies, not on the side, right? And so to do that, you know, we're going to want capital to help fuel our ambitions and fuel our ability to serve our customers. And public markets is probably a very logical one, as Daniel mentioned in a recent piece on Bloomberg that he definitely sees that as maybe accelerating that. You know, late last year, we started focusing on sustainable growth as a company and operational rigor. These are important things, in addition to having strong growth that, you know, a long-term company has to have in place. And I can tell you, I'm really excited about the fact that we, you know, we operate very much like a public company now internally. We, you know, we do draft earnings releases that aren't public yet. And we do mock earnings calls. And we have hired, you know, Thomas Hansen who runs our Keep Revenue Officer with a huge background to head to Coomert who you're going to interview as well. These are the best of the best, right? They're joining this company. They're joining alongside, you know, the param kalans of the world that are part of this company. And so I think, yeah, I think it's likely and we're here to be a long-term leader in this decade of automation. Well, and one of the other things that we've forecast in our breaking analysis, we took a look at the total available market and kind of likened it to the early days of service now is, you know, people were really not fully understanding the market potential and see it as quite large. So if, so when we look at the competition, you know, you guys, if I showed you the same wheel with automation anywhere, it would also look strong. You know, some of the others may be not as strong but still stronger than many of the segments. I mean, for instance, you know, on-prem hardware, you know, compare it to that. And, you know, the automation space in general across the board is very, very strong. So I wonder, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you guys differentiate from the competition, how you see that. Yeah, I think, you know, we've come a long way in the last three years, right? In terms of becoming the market leader, having the highest market share, we're very open and transparent about our numbers. We've long had the vision of a robot every person and we've been delivering on that vision and building out a platform that can help companies, you know, transform digitally, enterprise-wide, right? So, you know, I don't see any of our competitors with a platform for hyper-automation like us. We have an incredible focus on the ability to help people actually find the ideas, build the pipelines, score the pipelines, and integrate those with the Automation Center of Excellence, right? We have the ability now, with our latest release, to help test automation and testers now, not only in the world of RPA, but actually take robots and our architecture into doing test automation, the traditional test automation market in a much better and faster way. So, you know, we're innovating at a pace that is, I think, much faster than our competitors. I don't know, automation anywhere won't share any of their numbers. You know, who knows what their numbers are. We have guesses, but I'm fairly certain that we continue to gain share on them. But, you know, what's most important is, you know, customer adoption. And we've also seen a number of customers switch from some of our competitors to us. Some of our competitors are under-capitalized, haven't been able to invest in R&D. This is an investment area to really build a platform out. Some of our competitors have architectures that are hard to upgrade, right? This has been a big source of pain for companies that have been on our competitors, where, you know, upgrades are difficult, requires them to retest every time. Where our upgrades are very rolling, you know, are very smooth. We have an insider program, which, you know, I don't think any of our competitors have it. If you go to insider.uipath.com, you're a customer, every single bit, every single preview bit and private preview, public preview and general availability, you can provide feedback on and the customers can score up new ideas. They drive our roadmap, right? And this is, so I think we operate differently. I think our growth is a good indication of that. And, you know, and there are new competitors, like Microsoft, that I think, you know, you know, medium or long-term, you know, they're going to make an effort around RPA. And, you know, they're behind, you know, UI automation is really hard. The barrier to entry here is not easy. And we're going to keep building that platform play out. And I think that's what makes us so different. And, you know, we have the renewal numbers, retention numbers, expansion numbers and the revenue numbers to prove that, you know, we're number one. Well, and so, I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat and you're right. You guys are really focused, you know, you automation anywhere really focused on this space and you sort of shared with us how you differentiate there. But as you point out, Microsoft, they sort of added on. I had talked to Alan Treffel the other day from Pega. You know, those guys don't position themselves as RPA, but they have RPA. I talked to, you know, our mutual friend, Robert Young-Johns the other day, right there, trying to pile it on to this trend, right? So why not, right? It's hot. But so, you know, clearly you guys are innovating there. I want to talk about your vision before we get into the latest product release. Two things that I call out, the term hyper automation, I think it's a Gartner term and then it'll probably stick. And then this idea of a robot for every person, how would you describe your vision? Yeah, I mean, we think that robots can improve, you know, the lives of workers everywhere, right? We think in every function, every role. And we see that already, the job satisfaction and you know, people don't want to do the mundane repetitive work, right? The new hires coming out of college, you know, they're going to be, you know, Excel and SQL Server are no longer the tools of productivity for them. It's UiPath. We have business schools that have committed, top tier business schools that have committed to deploying UiPath or to putting UiPath into every course in their school. These students are graduating with UiPath as their most important skill going into companies. And they're going to expect to be able to use robots within their companies, in their daily lives as well. So, you know, we have customers today that are rolling out a robot for every person. You know, we had a Conoco Phillips on just earlier in our launch, talking about, you know, citizen developers, enabling citizen developer armies and citizen developers and going enterprise-wide. SingTel was on as well from Singapore, the large telco. They're doing the exact same thing. And so I think, you know, I think this is about broad-based digital transformation. It's like everybody participating. And what happens is the leading companies that do this, you know, they're going to get the productivity benefits out of it. They can reinvest that productivity benefits in data science and in analytics and in serving customers and in, you know, and new product ideas. And so, you know, this is, you know, automation's going to fuel now the ability for companies to really differentiate and serve their customers better. And it's only going to take an enterprise-wide view on it that you really maximize it. You know, take Amazon, for example, a great customer. During this crisis, you know, they're trying to hire hundreds of thousands of people, right? To help in their fact, in their distribution centers and elsewhere to solve, you know, serve demand, to help people who like you and I at home are ordering things that we need, right? Well, they use UiPath robots all throughout their HR, HR onboarding, HR recruiting, HR administration. And so helping them has been a big, you know, during this crisis, surge of robots is helping them actually hire workers. You know, another example of Schneider Electric, an amazing customer of ours, you know, they're bringing their plants, their manufacturing facilities and plants back online faster by using robots to help manage the PPE, the personal protective equipment that are in the plant that allow people, workers, to get back to work faster, right? So what's happening is, you know, in those cases, these are different examples of robots in different functions, right? In all cases, it's about helping grow a company faster. It's about helping protect workers. It's about helping, you know, getting revenue machines back up and running after COVID is going to be critical, you know, and get people back to work faster. So I'm really excited about the fact that as people think about automation across their organization, that the number of ideas and opportunities for improvement are, you know, we're just starting to tap that potential. Well, this is why I think the vision is so important because you're talking about things that are transformative. Now, as you well know, one of the criticisms of RPA is, oh yeah, people, the suppliers are just sort of re, you know, looking at mundane tasks, just automating mundane tasks, I sometimes call it paving the cow path. And as I say, you're very much aware of that criticism, but if I look at the recent announcements, you're really starting to build out that vision that you just talked about. There are really four takeaways. You're sort of extending the core platform, injecting AI in, so more and more automation, end-to-end automation, really taking that full life-cycle systems view. And the last one is sort of putting, you know, it talks to the robot for every person, that sort of citizen automation, if you will, that sort of encompasses your product announcement. So it wasn't just sort of a point announcement, really is a underscores the platform. I wonder if you could just, what do we need to know about what you guys just announced? So we think about the roles back to the vision of a robot for a person, how automation can help different roles. And so this product launch, 20.4, this large-scale launch that you just articulated, impacts and affects and helps many different kinds of new roles, certainly process analysts now, who examine processes and look for processes, performance improvements. You know, they're a user of our process mining solution and our task mining solution that helps feed an RPA engine. You know, testers and quality engineers now, they can actually use Studio Pro and actually use test robots for brand new. And our new test manager, which provides sort of the orchestration and the management of test executions. Now they can participate in and leverage the power of robots and what they do as well. And we kind of think about that, you know, kind of across the board in our organization and across the platform, they can use tools like UiPath Insights if you're an analyst or you're a BI business intelligence person to really know what's going on with the robots in terms of ROI for my organization and provide that up to the, you know, C levels in the board of directors in real time. So I think that's the big part here is we're helping bring in many, many different kinds of roles, different kinds of people. Data scientists, you mentioned AI. You know, now a data scientist, you know, can build a model. The model is applied through AI fabric and orchestrator, straggled and dropped by an RPA developer in Studio. And now you can turn, you know, a mundane rules-based task, right? Into an experience-based ones where a robot can help make a decision, right? Based on experience and data. They can tweak and tune that model and data scientists now can interact, you know, with the automation's flowing straight through UiPath. So I think that's how we think about it, right? You know, one of the great new capabilities as well is the ability to engage line workers, dispatch out workers if you're a telco or retail store, retail store workers, you know, so robots can work with humans out in the field. We've got one real large manufacturer with, you know, 18,000 drivers in a DSD direct store delivery scenario. And, you know, the ability for them to interact with robots can help them do their job in the fields of customers better and have to do less data entry and data manipulation in multiple systems. So this makes us very unique in our vision and in our execution. And again, I have not heard of a single example by a competitor that has any kind of a vision or articulation to be able to help a company enterprise-wide and, you know, with the speed and the full vision that we have. Okay, so you're not worried about downturns. You can't control black swans anyway. You're not worried about the competition, it feels like. You know, you're worried about, what are you worried about? You're worried about growing too fast, efficiently deploying the capital that you've raised. What worries you? Yeah, you know, we're paranoid. We're a paranoid company, right? And when it comes to the market and trying to drive, I think we've done a lot to help actually kind of push the rock up the hill in terms of really, really driving our market, building the market. And we want to continue that, right? And not let up. So there's this kind of desire to never let up, right? Always remind ourselves, we must work harder, must work harder, we must work harder. And that's sort of this mentality, surround ourselves by the smartest people, hire the smartest people, you know, work with our customers. Our customers are a priority. Do that with really high excellence and real high sincerity, so that it comes through in everything that we do. You know, to build a world-class operation, to be, you know, Daniel Dines, when I first met him, he said, you know, I really want to be the epitome of the great new technology company that serves customers really well and it does amazing things for society. And, you know, we're on that track, but we got to, you know, we're in the early innings. So, you know, making sure that we also run our business in a way that, you know, is ready to be, you know, a publicly successful company and being able to raise new sources of capital to fund our ambitions and our ideas. I mean, you saw the number of announcements from our 20.4 release that reminded me of an AWS re-invent conference where it's just innovation after innovation after innovation after innovation. And these are very real, they're not made up mythical announcements that some of our competitors do about, you know, launching some kind of discovery bot that doesn't exist, right? These are very real with real customers behind them. And so, you know, just doing that with the same level of tenacity, but being, you know, bold, fast, immersed and humble, which are four core culture values along the way and not losing that as we grow. That's something we talk about, maintaining that culture. That's super critical to us. You know, everybody's talking about, okay, what's going to be permanent post COVID? I was just listening to Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture. And she was saying that, you know, prior to COVID, they had data that showed that the top 25% of kind of companies that had leaned in to digital transformation were outperforming, you know, the balance of their peers. And I have no question now that the rest of that, you know, base really is going to be focused on automation. Automation is really going to be one of those things that is high, high priority now and really for the next decade and beyond. So Bobby, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and supporting us in this RPA drill down. Really appreciate it. Dave, it's always a pleasure. It's always great to see you. Thank you. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with, right back, right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE.