 From New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Automation Anywhere, Imagine. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. We're in Midtown Manhattan at Automation Anywhere, Imagine 2019, it's about 1,500 people talking about RPA, which is part of the story, but it's really a much broader story than RPA. It's about the ecosystem, it's about new ways to work and really RPA is an enabler, but that's not the story in and of itself. It's really about helping people do their jobs better, like a whole bunch of other tools that have come out over the years to help us out. We're excited to have a return guest who was here with us last year. He's Alkar Kothari, co-founder, another co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Automation Anywhere. Great to see you again. Good to see you, Jeff. So it's been quite a year since last we spoke in June. Yeah, it was very less on ground a lot on the flight. Yeah, and it brought in a bunch of money. You've got a lot of resources really to support you now, so how has that kind of changed? You guys have grown a lot. You put $500 million in the bank. How's that changing what you're working on now? We are deploying that capital in three major ways. One is global expansion. We have now grown into, we have offices now in more than 30, 35 countries, 30 plus countries. So we are getting closer to all our customers worldwide in all top 30 economies and major business hubs where we are now, we have opened offices. So that's one. We are using this capital to build our ecosystem with our partners and all the developers. And obviously we have invested a lot in our product, taking the product stack more and more broader, which allows us to automate any process that can be automated. Yeah, I mean it's great. It's a great resource that you have at your disposal now. And Mahir talked about a lot of kind of higher level topics, which I found really good in the keynote, really reframing RPA and personal digital assistance, if you will, around, it's just another tool to help people get their job better. And he had some ridiculously sad stats about how much time that people are being asked to do robotic tasks, which they really shouldn't be doing those tasks. It's much higher value stuff. It's not really rip and replace. It's really augment and help people do better. Yes, absolutely. Generally, most of these journeys start with this goal of productivity. And rightly so. There's nothing wrong with that. But as you scale in this journey and you start working as you onboard more digital workers, these digital colleagues, as we like to call it, you find that the conversation in your organization changes from productivity to progress. Because that's what any technology led transformation is about. It's not just about productivity. It's truly about progressing your team, your company, your industry, your customers forward. Right. That's what you face. And the second big prize on that front is it allows you to make work human. The moment you start automating every process that can be automated, we start using computers what they were designed for to process things and not just to be used as system of records. So we can do what we are good at, solving complex problems using our creativity and empathy. Right. One of the things I thought was really interesting was the launch of the community edition, which is free. Free for small businesses, free for developers. I can't remember if there's an academic component or not. But you're the guy who's putting money in the cash register. I'm sure there were some interesting conversations about having a free community edition. I wonder if you can share some insight because it's taking money out of the bank but obviously there's a much larger strategic goal. There's a strategic goal. The problem that we have fallen in love with is that what would it take for us to accelerate the journey of every company to become a digital enterprise? How do we assure in this new body economy? And in order to do that, we have to have every person participate in this whole phenomenon. An idea as big as this cannot be one company or few individuals' ideas. So we have opened up that whole thing for everyone to participate. The community edition allows students, developers, small businesses, everyone to download. They go to our automation university and they can get freely trained and certified. And they can work with a bot and they can build a bot and form their own opinion. And have their own point of view. And the belief behind that is that a good idea can come from anywhere or anyone. And those ideas, once they use our product, they can monetize it in our marketplace which is the bot store. So it allows everyone to form an opinion and contribute to this new body economy. It's pretty interesting. One of the topics here touched on on the keynote was that we often think of applying new technology to today's world. But we often miss, as he said, that now is not the station, it's the train and it's moving. And by opening it up to developers now, as you said, you're expanding the width, the breadth and the potential applications of your technology to problems that you guys have never even thought about before. That's the real thing. We are automating processes that we are doing now but generally it's about automating what we have not even seen. These processes were designed for people to do. How would a process look when bots are performing that? I live in Silicon Valley and pretty much a computer science guy working on cutting edge. If you asked me 10 years ago, would I let any of my family member live in a stranger's house? I would say, no way. Airbnb is one of the largest hotels in the world right now. What that tells you is that human brain thinks linearly. Unless you give them something that allows humans to think exponentially. And that's the whole idea of beauty of technology. It allows us to think exponentially and once our brain's stretched there, then it's not possible to go back. Well the other thing I think is really smart on your play is the competition for developers' attention. Developers these days have a lot of power and they can choose of a myriad of technologies on which to apply themselves. So by having this community addition and opening it up is one part but the other piece that I think is interesting is the whole bot economy. I think you opened up the store last time we were here last year. Now you're putting money behind it so people can sell. In fact, we had a customer on earlier who's developing some stuff but they can augment that investment by actually selling those bots into the store. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about how that is evolving. Is it kind of matching your vision? Is it accelerated faster vision? It is accelerating much faster than what we imagined first. So one year ago we launched our marketplace that is Bot Store. We opened up our university for everyone to get freely trained online. Then we started our community online which is A People and with this community addition everyone is now participating in it. What that is doing is we believe that more the one thing that all developers want is to contribute. Their work to be used by others. And then in a Bot Store it allows them to even monetize it. It allows them to productize it. So that personal satisfaction of solving a problem is what a developers get. And such new creative ideas we are getting once we did that. Yesterday we had Bot Games and more than 250 to 300 developers participated in different games and they were building these bots on fly and they were competing. And we believe that when we bring all these people together and we give them a problem, genius comes out and it has been true. So the ecosystem is huge and that's part of why you have your own show and we go to a lot of shows. We were in Google Cloud a couple of weeks ago. So there's really kind of two components of the ecosystem, traditional ecosystem. We've got the devs we talked about. There's the system integrators and you've got them all here in force and they don't come out unless they really see a big opportunity. And the other part is the ISVs, right? To add all these different components. So how is that evolving? Where do you see it going over the next year or two? It's interesting. You saw today that there was IBM, Microsoft and Oracle all went on stage with software partnerships, you know, Workday. So we are forming large partnership with software in how our product works with theirs and the digital workers are part of that whole equation. And all our service providers and SIs and advisories, they've been on this journey with us for the last five to six years and they are ramping up their entire practices to get their customers to become a digital enterprise. So you see these two different worlds coming together and all the three worlds are working together for the customer to become a digital enterprise, right? And that's the best part. The digital native companies like Amazon, Airbnb, they have got this right. But what about the companies who have been there for 50 years, 100 years? How do they become digital? And that's a more interesting problem. And if you look at the software vendors and all the service partners and we are working together to solve that problem. So it's a very interesting mix and interesting time. And add to that this whole body economy. You have developers bringing all these new digital workers. We are seeing the consumption of bot going in an exponential way. We're growing multi-force in a few months. So it's in a great right. Well, I want to close on that in the last question because you are one of the co-founders. I think there was four founders if I'm correct. And you guys did it a very different way. You basically funded it the best way to fund a company which is with revenue and customer funded. And you didn't go out and get outside money. And now you've got this huge round which is actually an A round. So how does that change the game? I mean, it puts you in a very good spot because you don't have to take that money because you were operating fine. But how does it, from a co-founder point of view, kind of change the trajectory of your journey? There is obviously a value that capital brings that that kind of capital brings because you can grow asymmetrically as well. But the real value for me is the five investors who are such tier A top tier investors who are the right partners we've got on this journey. If you think about Goldman Sachs and NEA and SoftBank and General Atlantic which is one of the largest growth equity. Pretty good roster. Right? So you get that expertise and you get those partnerships that allows you to think exponentially and grow very fast. So that's the real value for me in addition to the capital. Well, Uncle, thanks for sharing your journey with us. It's really been fun to watch. And you know, we're just at another inflection point. I think. Always great to see you and again next year we have to do this every year. All right, very good. Bigger and bigger. Absolutely. Thanks again. Thanks Uncle. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Automation Anywhere in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.