 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward America's 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Hello, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio. I'm your host, hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. Dave, it's so great to be here with you. I'm so excited to get into this. Great to see you, Rebecca. So, we just came from the keynote. A lot of high profile UiPath executives and important customers were on there, too. But then this is the message, it's time to reboot work. It's time to reboot your business, transform the customer experience, transform the employee experience. I'm wondering, as someone who spends a lot of time at these kinds of conferences, who hears a lot of this kind of messaging, especially in this age of digital transformation, how compelling do you find this value proposition, this idea that RPA, robotic processing automation, can do these things? Well, the first thing I would mention, Rebecca, to me it's all about the customers. And it's rare that you see a tech show start with the customers actually doing the intro. I've seen it before, Nutanix actually does it at its shows, but it's quite rare. Because the vendors want to put their message out, they want to control everything, and so they're very, very cautious about that. But so we had three customers up on stage today doing the intro, which I thought was kind of cool. Tech shows, a lot of smoke, a lot of mirrors, and so forth, so you have to try to squint through that. I would say this, it's very clear that the age of automation is here. People have been always concerned about automation for good reason, they're afraid that automation is going to take away their jobs. Having said that, machines have always replaced humans. We've talked about this a lot on theCUBE. But this is the first time in history that machines are replacing humans with cognitive tasks. So that's got to be scaring people a little bit. But when you come back, answer your question, when you talk to customers, they're really happy about software robots because they're automating mundane tasks that these folks don't want to do on a day-to-day basis. And they want to do other things. They want to get their weekends back. They don't want to just manually enter data from spreadsheets into applications and back and forth. And so from that standpoint, I think it is real and it is unique. You know, the big question is, how much of this is transformational? And is it really a path to AI, something that UI path and others are really pointing towards? And we're going to explore that this week. Right, and what you were just saying too is that the company's pitch is that we are freeing people. We are liberating them from the mundane, from the drudgery, from the data entry. And as you pointed out rightfully, a lot of the customers are saying, oh no, it's giving our employees time back to focus on the higher level tasks, the more creative aspects of their job. But I wonder if it is in fact, what it really is doing to jobs. I mean, I think that there's a really telling line in that Forbes profile of Daniel Dinez, who is the CEO of this company, the founder of this company. The newly emitted billionaire. The first ever bought billionaire, exactly. Where it was an MIT professor quoted saying, you know, we always say to the companies, that we say give us your data and we'll tell you if it is in fact, having this job killing effect. And he said, the companies don't want to give that up. Right, so now just look at, now why is Daniel Dinez a billionaire? Well, here's why. Yeah, walk us through this. So UiPath is up to 3,400 employees, 3,450 is the actual number now. Back in 2017, two years ago, this company did $25 million in annual recurring revenue. Now ARR is a metric that's very important because even though you book, let's say you booked a $12,000 deal, you're recognized at $1,000 a month over a 12 month period. So ARR is a very, really important metric. So $25 million in 2017. My sources indicate that they'll do over 300 million this year in ARR. So we're talking about a 12x plus increase in a two year period. They've raised a billion dollars. One of their key competitors, Automation Anywhere, has raised, you know, similar amounts of money. So they're talking about a couple of billion dollars raised just in the last couple of years. UiPath's valuation in March was $7 billion. So at that kind of, you know, back in napkin, they were talking about a $10 billion valuation. Daniel obviously owns a lot of that. So... 20%. Yeah, so it's pretty substantial in terms of the market impact. Now, valuations as you all know, it's a fleeting metric, right? It comes and it goes. But the landscape is very strong right now. It's really interesting to see how much customers are glomming onto this automation tailwind. The other comment I would make is let's lay out the sort of competitive landscape. UiPath has gone from kind of a clear third in the marketplace to kind of a clear number one. I mean, they're kind of separating from the pack. But there are others, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism. And there are a number of legacy customers as well. Our companies as well. That's what I wanted to ask you too, is that we have seen a few, Microsoft and Google, of course, are partnered and they're customers, but they also are moving into this area themselves. So I mean, will UiPath be able to maintain its competitive position as these very established and frankly, very smart companies move into this area? SAP's another one. SAP bought an RPA company. It's a good question. But so if you look at, let me start with the sort of underlying trend. If you look at the spending data, so we have access to the enterprise technology research spending data, and it shows the entire space is gaining share relative to other technology initiatives. So when you look at the data for UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, even legacy process automation companies like Pegasystems, they're all actually from a spending standpoint attracting a lot of attention. So it's this rising tide lifts all ships. It's still somewhat early in terms of this next generation RPA, if you will. UiPath's advantage is its simplicity. They're totally focused on this. You see this all the time. Do we go best of breed or do we go with a suite? So if Oracle comes up with an RPA solution, they throw it in for free. You know, does the customer take that? I think it comes down to what the business value is and that's something we're going to explore. It's not uncommon in the tech industry that there's a first mover advantage, or maybe it's a second mover advantage. You know, Facebook wasn't really first mover, but the one who really gets it right is kind of a winner take most. And so that's where UiPath is going like crazy right now, trying to scale the company, raise a bunch of money. We saw this week a bunch of bankers sort of sniffing around. All the bankers are here because they want their business. So I would expect there's some kind of, you know, IPO in the horizon, which I think they need to do to your point to be able to compete with the big guys. So bottom line is they have to do it on a better product, more openness, moving faster and getting to scale. And I think they'll be able to reach escape velocity. I don't know if there's enough room for the big three. I would expect that, you know, given the spending climate is very good for everybody right now, I would expect within the next two to three years some consolidation in this space. Well, so one of the things that you had just talked about was this next generation RPA. And that is exactly where we're going because these bots have got to become more durable, more smarter and more capable of handling complex tasks. We saw a number of new product announcements today. I want to get your thoughts on what you think about them and just whether or not they will have this transformational effect. So yes, we have some new product announcements. Some that democratize automation building that all you have to do is know how to run an Excel spreadsheet. And you too can build an automation in your company. Yeah, maybe. Let's take a little bit of training though. I know I think a better idea for those demos is they should just pluck someone out of the audience and say, okay, you're going to do this. Yeah, well they would fail. I mean, let's face it, I mean, the first time you learned Excel, I'm old enough to remember slash, file, retrieve, you know, paste, copy, whatever. You had to go through some training and we went through classes back in the 80s. I think it's a similar here. I mean, it's not overly complex. It's sort of a low code theme, but you're right. UiPath announced a number of new products. You know, we looked at this a couple of years ago. We went out and we took the big three from the Forrester Wave, Blue Prism Automation anywhere in UiPath. And we said, all right, let's download them and start building some automations. Well, the only software we could get a hold of was UiPath because as they say, they had kind of a simpler, more open model. The other guys are like, well talk to a reseller, you know, spend some money and we're like, no, we just want to try it before we buy it. And we weren't able to get the other guy's software. Now I think Automation Anywhere has made some strides in that regard in terms of simplification. You know, it's a copycat industry like the NFL. But so, let's remember here, we're talking about automating mundane tasks, relatively simple automations. The customers are asking for things like more complex automations. How do we prioritize the automations? How do we figure out what's the best bang for the buck? How do we actually have attended bots because many of these are unattended, they'd like to have the human injected into the equation. And that's pretty interesting because it brings for this augmentation scenario that everybody's talking about in AI. And that starts to move us from sort of this tactical, I'm going to save some time on a use case specific or a technology specific automation to something that's more strategic that I can scale across my organization. But right now, people are saving money on this and it's a super hot space. As I say, all the bankers are trying to get in because they know some other IPOs are coming down the road. And the VCs I'm sure are going to want their exits. I want to talk to you about the leadership of this company. This is Daniel Dinez and you have interviewed him many times. I mean, Miniman has as well. He seems like a different kind of CEO. I mean, first of all, he's a Romanian. He grew up behind the Iron Curtain. He was a professional bridge player for a while, at least played competitive bridge player, played competitive bridge. And now here he is, company headquartered in New York City. He still spends a lot of time in Bucharest. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts about his leadership style and the kind of culture he's created at UiPath. And whether or not, because he's made some key hires from AWS, from Google, some of the more established tech players, whether or not he's, whether or not he'll be able to keep that startup culture, that startup mindset as the company becomes so much bigger. Well, I think it's a concern and something we want to ask him about. When you ask Daniel about, you know, how have you been able to do this? He'll talk about the mistakes that they made, how they sort of, they had to build it and they shall come mentality, which is kind of old thinking these days. And they sort of lucked into this RPA space. He also emphasized, emphasized it's humble and he's a very humble guy. I mean, you'll meet him. I think last year he came on and, you know, he's a developer. He had a t-shirt on, he's a coder, right? Now he's a billionaire coder. So maybe he'll dress up a little bit, right? But, you know, maybe a fancy t-shirt or maybe a collared shirt that says UiPath on it, we'll see. But so, and they want to move fast. They believe in openness. They believe in transparency. I think those things work in today's marketplace. People love the guy. I mean, the customers love him. The employees love him. As you said, they're pulling people in from the hottest companies, Google, AWS. I got a tap in the shoulder today from a gentleman that I know from Google. He was in sales at Google. Tap me this way. Oh ho, I'm day three in. So people want to be part of this rocket ship and I think it's going to move very, very fast. Like I say, I think you're going to see some moves in the marketplace. I think you're going to see some exits, some consolidations. We saw some M&A. Today, UiPath announced the acquisition of a company called Process Gold. That actually competes with a partner of UiPath. So it's, again, people are going to be on collision courses. And they recently made another acquisition of a company called Step Shot. So we're seeing some M&A, you know, relatively small M&A, but it's all about how can they transform from this little startup to this major player to your point that can compete with the Microsofts and the SAPs and the big whales of the world. And what do you think is its bigger selling point? Is it that it is transforming the employee experience, which as we know, but that should not be discounted because an employee who is doing less mundane task, able to focus on the more creative, interesting parts of his or her job, is a happier employee. A happier employee is more a productive employee. A more productive employee means a healthier bottom line. So that's not something to discount. Also the customer experience, as you said, which is clearly a huge top priority for this company. But I think the question is, is this technology now, is it transformative enough? You know, as you ask that question, it kind of reminds me in a different way of a company that we've followed for years, ServiceNow. When ServiceNow first came out, it was kind of doing what people saw as help desk, improving help desk, and they disrupted an industry and they made IT better, which is kind of boring. It's kind of mundane, but actually having good IT where you're not constantly down and you're not complaining and stuff's not falling through the cracks actually can be somewhat transformative. Kind of boring, but really important. And I see a similar sort of pattern here. Now the vision is a robot for every worker and the path to AI and we'll see. But right now the transformation is we're going to take away all this crap that you hate doing, all these crapplications or mundane tasks and we're going to make your life better. And people, workers want that and it's going to be a theory, a productivity boost as a result of that. That in and of itself, I think Rebecca can be transformative because it'll help with morale, it'll help with culture. It'll allow people to shift their emphasis on more strategic work and drive more value for the companies. And so I think companies that invest in RPA are seeing returns in terms of quality, just in terms of employee morale. You'll hear that from the customers that we talked to today. So I think in that sense it can be transformative like service now was. Now, can it take the next step? Or is this really just paving the cow path? Is it just taking mundane, known processes, automating them as opposed to really rethinking what process automation should look like? And that's some of the criticism of RPA and the RPA hype. And we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk to customers about that. We got analysts from HFS coming on, Cathy from Gartner's coming on. So excited to hear their perspectives as well. Exactly, and I want to reiterate that point that you're absolutely right. Their question is should we actually think about redesigning the process itself rather than automating the flawed process? Yeah, and I mean, I guess part of me says yes, strategically we should be doing that. But another part of me says, look it, I don't have to change anything. And I think that's the big advantage of UI path and these other players is you can basically automate what you have today. You don't have to redesign the process because process redesign is a heavy lift. And so if I don't have to do a heavy lift, if I can improve what I'm doing today and it works, you know, it's the old, if it ain't broke, why fix it, but just improve it, I think that's a very powerful. I think the big question I have is, is that like a big hit of a step function or is it really transformative? I feel like today's tech is a step function, which is important. You're going to get that step function, but I think you're going to absorb that benefit fast and people are going to say, okay, now what? Another good example is virtualization. When I first saw virtualization and the ability to spin up a server, my jaw dropped. I went, oh my God, I could spin up a server in five minutes. And it used to take weeks, months to spin up a server. That's game-changing. Nobody talks about virtualization anymore. It was a five-year absorption of productivity for IT and now it's like, yeah, I've been there, done that. That's yesterday's news. I think the same thing is going to happen with today's RPA and the big question is, can they cross that strategic chasm into what the gentleman from Pepsi, the executive from Pepsi was saying, this automation fabric across the enterprise as a platform for automation and artificial intelligence. That's a big leap. These guys got big plans. Daniel Dinez is a big thinker, go big or go home. So I don't have the crystal ball on that, but I think there's a decent opportunity given that there's enough attention on this business right now that it could be transformative. All right, well, hopefully we'll know more at the end of these two days. Dave, I'm looking forward to getting into it with you. Thanks Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more. You're watching theCUBE.