 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 1,500 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, they're a lot of partners here. They're loud, they're a lot of good energy. Anna Chinca 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 Anna, 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 UiPath Go, the marketplace, or constantly engaging the community of users, and so on. Okay, so you started the training program, correct? 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 in 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. Right, so you had to do it for yourself. Absolutely, yeah. So Stu, we heard today from Daniel, he kind of did the moonshot. He said, we're going to train a million people in three years, right? Yeah. 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, you know, not to storage, but new architectures as convergence broke through the silos, and then cloud architects, you know, really training kind of next generation of the workforce 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 got to scale a program like this, you have to have a bunch of different factors on your side. What Ian had 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, who was actually sort of an interview, he was, he talked about, you know, employee training, partner training, customer training, but his passion and 45 minutes of the hour was talking about educating the planet, right? And so we started with universities, which that was kind of a no-brainer. And then he went to youth in action, underrepresented groups, and so forth. The other factor that's really important is having the right team. So at UIPAT, 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 as 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 out 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 an upskilling, as part of this, we'll have an upskilling reskilling. So everybody, it doesn't matter who you are, we'll be able to leverage the academy and we'll be tweaking the academy courses. So if it's upskilling reskilling, 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 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 Anna, when we first heard about RPA and UiPath, we read the Forrester report, we said, okay, there's a few leaders out there. Let's play with it, let's download, 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? And it was like, 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 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 a core platform, that was the first RPA software that I had a trial version that was available for everyone. We had to do the same thing in learning and with our academy. So what we said, 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 manner that it's very easy to be followed yeah, 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 critically in an RPA COE setup. So it's interesting Tom here and you say 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 re-skilling. So I would think that these folks would be very receptive to that. Now you think about VMware admins, 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're 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 than that? Your thoughts? No, so I've been here for three months now. So I guess that makes me a veteran at UI path. 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 a robot, at least one robot on every desktop moving forward. This is going to be, when you had the flip phone before and everybody, well actually when people went from the big cell phones and people were saying, everybody's going to have a cell phone, everybody looked at it, 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 that they understand robots right from the get go. And then it'll be 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? Want to take that one up for scaling? So one of the things we did, well Anna, one of the things that Anna did before I got here was they built a 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 courses and certification. So today, because we had to go to a third party, we're charging $850 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. So what we want to do, and what we will do is democratize learning and certification for robotics. I think this is huge. Go, 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 UI path go and in October, end of October, the project space. All holistically wrapped up in the 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 UI path 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 through UI path 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 source sort of mindset. I could say one thing on community. If you just look at the education and the different audiences, let's say people that do robotics and they get certified all the way down to youth, we will have a community where all of these different organizations are talking to each other into professionals. So you might have a 10 year old in Bangladesh that is on the community asking questions and you might have an engineer in Romania at UI path answering those questions because they're part of the community or it could be a customer or partner 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. The no cost training is available roughly when? Yeah, right now. It's today. Well, no cost training is available. It has been available. That was a decision that animated 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% free and the certification for the next quarter is going to be 100% free. That's unbelievable because Mike, 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 saying, learn about RPA because it's going to change the world. Visualization is important and all that other stuff is important but that's I think a huge investment that you guys are making. And it 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. So thanks so much you guys for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Right there everybody, we're watching theCUBE live from the Fontainebleau in Miami. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching UiPath Forward Americas. We'll be right back.