 from New York City. It's theCUBE. Covering Automation Anywhere, Imagine. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in midtown Manhattan at the Automation Anywhere Imagine 2019 event. We're here last year. It's grown quite a bit and we're excited to be back. Our very first guest of the day is Kashif Mabou. He is the VP Product Marketing and Global Head of RPA at Automation Anywhere. Great to see you. Nice to be here. Yeah, so it was a year ago. It's June. I looked up the date and since June, you guys have had a very exciting year. You raised like a half a billion dollars. The RPA space is blowing up and this conference is, I think, outgrowing the venue. So it's been quite a year. It certainly has been quite a year. Yes, we did have the largest series A for an enterprise software company ever. We are still on the series A. It's quite significant in our industry at the moment. The growth has been phenomenal. Last year, when you and I met here, we had nine offices. We have 35 offices today. We are looking at exiting 2019 with about 3,000 employees. The numbers just speak for themselves. The RPA, the category itself, has been at a growth space that I certainly have never seen before. So Mahir had a great keynote a little bit earlier. He touched on a couple of really key topics and he did this last year too and he talked about truly transformational technology shifts. And he talked about mobile before and personal computing and some of these things. And he had three kind of things. It has to work for everyone. It must be available anywhere. And it must work for any size company. And you guys are making real concrete moves into that area. And one thing he talked about is this concept of community addition. I wonder if you can give us a little bit more flavor. What is community addition? Why is it important to automation anywhere? Absolutely. So the concept, the vision that we are driving towards is automation for all. For all types of users. By that we mean business user, IT user, developer. You don't have to be somebody who is proficient at coding. You don't have to be somebody who is doing just one part of the business. Anybody in the business should be able to pick up the software and start using it. So with that concept in mind, we then thought about all types of businesses. Because until not too long ago, RPA was a realm for the largest of the large companies. So last year, 1400, 1500 of our enterprises, that number has grown to about 2,800 now. Still some of the largest companies in the world. Now taking it further is also talking about the various channels through which we deliver our software. So not just on-premises, which is most of RPA today, but going forward enabling cloud delivery models. So with all that combined, what is the fastest way to get people started on it? And that is to remove all barriers, to remove all friction. And that's where Community Edition comes in. It's a free product. It is the entire digital workforce platform. So not just RPA, but RPA with AI and with analytics all combined with a mobile app-ready system. So when you sign up or download whichever way you want to call it, you're actually signing up into a very robust, very comprehensive, the most complete digital workforce platform that enables business users, students, educators, but perhaps most importantly developers to start developing their own bots, their own software robots. A Community Edition is just one piece of a larger ecosystem strategy that we have. That includes the Community Edition, so download the software or sign up into it and start building. But where do you learn how to bear bots? Where we have automation anywhere university. We have about 175,000 students signed up already. We're fast becoming the world's largest university as well. And then, so you have free courses available. You can get certifications as a trainer, as a developer, as a business user. Once you have that training, you can start developing bots. Let's say you have questions that you want answered or you feel like the expert who should be sharing his or her knowledge, for that we have the A People Community. It's again, RPA's largest community in the world, 75,000 plus users already. So that's piece number three. And last but not the least, you've downloaded the Community Edition, you've become proficient in building bots, you're sharing knowledge and your expertise. What's the next step? The next step is to build bots that the rest of the world can use. So we have bot stores that we launched last year. So you can actually upload your bots and you will start monetizing your bots. So it is a virtuous cycle. It's an ecosystem of free software, free education, free community in a marketplace that lets you share your knowledge, your expertise with the world. So that's our vision, that's what we are very much into it. And more than a vision, it's in practice today. It's an interesting play, right? Because we always hear about the democratization of data and the citizen developer. So you guys are really talking about the democratization of automation. And I'm sure there were some interesting conversations we're going to have the CFO on later about taking some revenue off the table to enable kind of this community outreach to go out and offer really a full stack. It's almost like a freemium, classic kind of freemium play to let people and as you said, developers, schools, small businesses get involved in this. But if you could talk about kind of the strategic reason that you're giving up some short-term revenue for obviously a much potential bigger gain down the road. So a great point. If you look at the vision, the vision is to automate any process that can be automated. Is to automate any process, any organization that should be automated. So what does that mean? That means an enormous workforce that is RPA ready, RPA educated, that has knowledge of RPA, not just RPA, but any automation per se, because AI is included in it. So the only way we can reach that goal of having millions and millions of users using not just our product, but any RPA product is to educate them, to get products in their hands. And so we can't think short-term in that way. Our vision is multi-decade vision. And it's enormous vision, as you heard our CEO mention. So it's automation for all, for any business size and through any delivery channel. And that's where the strategy is, that's why we launched Community Edition and you will see a lot more coming down the path. So the next big theme is cloud, right? We are both at the Google Cloud Show last week. There you got an announcement here about Oracle Cloud and then Mahir talked about your guys own cloud. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about kind of the cloud strategy and then some of these different options that you guys are enabling for a cloud-enabled version of automation anyway. Absolutely, so that's a big step. Just like freeing up our software through Community Edition, we need to open a channel through which anybody can have software available. So you don't have just the option of on-premise software but cloud-ready, web-ready software. So for that, we announced today the Intelligent Automation Cloud. The focus is simplicity, security, and scalability. Those three things are critical for any business. Should be simple enough for anybody to use the software without having to download and install and maintain. And so they're big huge costs, IT costs for maintaining and press software. So removing that cost, that's what we mean by a zero footprint software. It's simple but simple does not mean it's weak or it's anything like that. Simple means it's powerful, easy enough to use, intuitive enough to use for a business user who's expertise lies in the process, not necessarily in the coding and scripting environment. On the other hand, giving the developers a very robust and IDE development environment so that all users, the business user, the developer and the IT manager, they all get the capability. Security is built in. We cannot have robust security if we are dealing with was largest financial organization. Nine out of 10 largest banks are already in business with us. So security is paramount. Audit compliance is paramount. Audit ease is paramount. And last but not the least is the scalability. So cloud provides us and our customers infinite scale. So simplicity, security, scalability, delivered through cloud and an intelligent cloud, not just a cloud that is basic but cloud where AI is built in, where cognitive capabilities are built in. So that's the vision, that's the goal. Right, and even more of that is just choice, right? Depending on what the customer needs, what their particular application is, within a single customer, a single entity, if they pick a large bank, they may have some implementations behind the firewall on-prem. They might have some on your cloud. They might have some on some of these big public clouds. You're really offering now the choice. It's not necessarily a locked in delivery strategy. So we are certified with the five largest cloud platforms available to me, whether it's Google, Oracle, Amazon web services, Azure. You will see Microsoft talking here today. You will hear from IBM executives here today. Very close partnerships with these organizations. So not only that we are technology partners, but we are certified with their cloud platforms which gives our customers the peace of mind. That if we are certified, say, with AWS, Amazon web services, the security that's built into Amazon web services, the scalability that comes out of it, the 99.99% uptime and all of those amazing things that Amazon has invested in over the years are now available to our customers as well. That's an important factor. There's a lot going on since we last sat down a year ago. But let's look it forward again. And I think I asked you last year, what are we going to be talking about in 2019? So what's coming next? I mean, you guys have a huge war chest. You're in a very hot space. You have a lot of momentum. Like you said, you doubled your offices in a year, hiring like mad. So what's next? What are you working on in the near term and in the midterm? So we started with Community Edition a month ago. So in a month, we have about 12,000 sign-ups and downloads, which is very significant for our enterprise business. It's from throughout the world. But in a month's time, we are coming out with one of our most, the biggest releases, if you will, ever. And that's where we introduce the cloud. That's where we introduce for the business user a completely web-based interface, which is what we call Bot Sketch that gives you the ability to drag and drop and build your process. And in the back end, we will develop the bot, the software robot for you. So it's sort of a bridge between a business user and she might be on the accounting side or billing side, but she's the expert in knowing her own process. But she's not a scriptor. She's not a coder. She's not a developer. Her area of expertise is the process itself. It could be a logistics process. It could be an HR process. And she can sketch out that process just like building a workflow. And once she finishes her work and she's complete with her workflow or process end to end, the development side can take over and the code is already written for them. At that point, the developer can bring in their own Python code, can run it on Linux. And IT is the third user, of course, and they can see the entire environment. So we are launching an environment that is ready for business that's robust enough for the developer and secure and gives peace of mind to the IT. So that's a major release. It, of course, comes with our built-in security, cloud management, and all of that. So that's what we are rolling up to. And Community Edition is there and you will see more and more talk about Digital Worker. Earlier you saw me here describe the Digital Worker. Board Store is there. It's the first ever automation marketplace. So there are lots of firsts and there are lots of the biggest and the largest. So we are running out of superlatives to use here. I'm in marketing, of course, so I have to be careful what I come up with. That's right, there's people playing bingo probably, so we have to be careful so they don't fill up their card. I just want to give you the last take. When we talked a year ago, you talked about three things, about RPA by itself, kind of cognitive automation and incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence and then smart analytics. And as you're talking and I'm listening, I don't even necessarily need to build the bot. I mean, it's kind of built around the bot, but now I can get somebody else's bot. Now you're talking about actually building the bot for me. So you're leveraging a lot of these core technologies to power the compute and cloud to actually help me build the bot, taking me one step further where I just need to know my process to be able to start to implement my own digital assistance and add automation to my world. Absolutely, so the story is not the bot. The story is always the customer looking at the customer's pain point and what can we do to solve that pain point? How can we make the process more efficient, better, faster, cheaper, right? So the bot is a vehicle for us to really enable our customers to really simplify their lives so that as Mahir mentioned, we as humans can do more cognitive, more intelligent work. That's the vision, right? And everything that we are announcing today, everything that we have done in the past 15 years that we've been business, and our vision is all about a fanatical customer focus. We have a large partner base as well. We work with the largest advisories, over 700 partners. So if you look at the overall picture, it's again building an ecosystem for our customers where they are not tied to one thing. We are trying to open it up. It's an open platform. We work with best of breed. At the same time, we provide our customers readiness with AI and security right out of the box as well. If they already have a best of breed system in store, we will work with that. If they would like to work with our systems, we will work, they have capability there. So it's a very open approach. It's a very flexible approach because there's no way we, you cannot tie down your customer and expect them to stay with you. We want to enable them to automate their process in the most efficient way possible. Yep, well congratulations. It's quite a ride and I think the real fun stuff's just getting started. Yes, absolutely. All right, thanks again. All right, he's Kashif. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Automation Anywhere. Imagine 2019 in Midtown Manhattan. Thanks for watching. See you next time.