 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome back to my ongoing coverage of CXOs in the mix of this pandemic. Robert Young-Johns is here. He's now the chairman of Abbey. Robert, great to see you again. Thank you, great to see you too. Hey, last time I think we talked when you were on theCUBE, you were kind of in the middle of going through, you know, quite an unwinding of HP. So, and you've been quite busy since then, but I got to ask you, kind of thinking about, you know, back a few years ago, what did you learn through that whole process? What did I learn through the whole process of coming out of HP or in HP? I mean, I thought- No, coming out, the unwinding. The unwinding. I think it was something that we talked about at the last time we were together actually, which is that the software industry is an incredible industry to be in. It's always been in churn. Few companies have been created, new ideas are coming to the fore, old ideas are dropping to one side, and you have to make choices either in the investment business, going to participate in that tremendous, you know, upswing, or you're going to say, I'm a legacy software company and seek to make as much money as possible out of the software you had. And I guess what I really learned in that transition was that it's a very, very disciplined space. Yeah, so it kind of brings me to this new role, you know, Abbey, not a lot of people may not know about them, but they're a large company, you know, billion dollars growing very nicely. What attracted you to come to Abbey? Well, after I left HP, I spent a little bit of time working with McKinsey, and then I did some consulting with a company called Automation Anywhere, which is a robotic process automation space. Yep. And I became very uncertain about that space. The automation of business processes, the concept of digital labor, digital workforce, and so on. And then I came across Abbey, and then Abbey is really specializing in some pieces of the robotic process automation puzzle. I don't think it'd be fully cracked yet. I mean, one is identification of the process that you need to automate. Sounds obvious, a lot of companies are still struggling over that. And secondly, you know, the provision of the data that actually feeds these robotic processes. Often that comes from unstructured data sources. It comes from documents, scans, PDFs, screen scrapes, and so on. You know, and Abbey fit extremely well into that part of the sort of RPA value proposition. So I've really enthused about them. There are Russian companies that are seeking to relocate the US, which I think will be very helpful to them. And they asked me to help in that relocation and help them make sure they participate fully in the growth of the robotic process automation space. Well, it's a hot space. And I think you're right. I mean, I think a lot of people are, I sometimes joke, they're sort of paving the cow path. They're taking mundane tasks. They're sort of automating it without really necessarily thinking through, you know, an entire transformation. But at the same time, you talk to customers, they're saving a lot of money. So what's your vision for sort of the automation future generally? And then specifically for Abbey? Well, I think it's fair to say that a lot of the early automation was about very, very simplistic process. And actually it's sort of almost frightening how many of those exist, how many people spend their days essentially shuffling data from one force to another and doing relatively mundane tasks that are wide open to automation. But I think automation gets more sophisticated. The one thing enterprises are going to absolutely need to do is get very, very clear on what are their high value processes? How do they actually operate in practice as opposed to how they were designed? And then how do they go about automating that? And I think to do that, you need tooling at the front end. You need process identification tooling. And then you've got to crack the biggest single problem of RPA, which is making sure all the data that the processors need to float is available to the process. As I said before, that could come from documents, scans, screen scrapes, you know, a screen scraper, PDF, but it's got to be gotten an intelligent way that recognizes the context in which the document existed and that can therefore extract the appropriate document and feed it into the right parts of the automation system. And I think those two front ends of automating are critical. And many of the existing vendors, I think, have been relatively slow to get into that space. And I think that's where Abby has differentiation, Abby has value. So you guys, you talk about a digital intelligence company. Is that what you mean by digital intelligence? Not just being able to sort of read forms and PDFs and documents, but actually putting them into context. Can you add some color to that? When it gets broader than that, obviously that's a critical part of it. And we sort of underestimate that because a lot of data in enterprise is not fully digital. You know, people still submit orders over facts or scans. And there's a lot of unstructured data out there. But I think the real digital culture that comes in the ability to understand the way business processes really happen within your enterprise, apply new analytic lens to that. Then one step may be simply to automate those processes. But a more interesting step may be to actually look at the detail of how those processes operate and find new way of linking processes together, which is a much more efficient for the enterprise. You know, historically, what companies have been doing with the classic ERP suite is they've been saying, well, someone else has cracked this. There's no value in creating new business processes. I'm just going to take whatever it is that SAP Oracle financials, whatever, defines and I'm going to build my business around it. I think in this new world, if you can really understand how processes actually operate within your enterprise and you can create analytics around that, you have the capability to innovate around new processes. And that innovation can prove real competitive advantage. And it's enabled by a combination of things. It's enabled by those of the tools to actually find out what's really happening. It's the ability to extract all that unstructured data and make sense of it. And then the ability to look by analytics to that to say, could we do this smarter? You know, if you're traditionally doing A goes to B goes to C, but your analytics show that in practice, A always goes to C, well, that should be your new business process. I mean, that's trivial, but it actually encapsulates what I think we can do, you know, around all this activity we're engaged in. That's I think what we think that the digital enterprise looks like. So what's the sweet spot for Abby? I mean, if you had to sort of look at the, you know, the ideal customer profile, where's their wheelhouse? I think it is process rich organizations that at the front end of those processes is high amounts of unstructured data. And unstructured data could be, as I said, anything from a PDF to a scan to a screen straight. All the things that, for example, your orders are coming in through, your insurance claims are coming in through, it's a paperwork heavy organization. And we use the word paper there in a very general and expansive sense. Those are the companies I think that most benefit from automation. And you know, at the same time, we both benefit from what Abby has to offer. Robert, you mentioned earlier that sometimes companies, and they struggle to even understand what processes should be automated. How do you do that? Is that where machine intelligence or AI or machine learning comes in? Yeah, I think that's the biggest single problem of the automation market. I mean, a lot of processes are sort of obvious. And it's not surprising that the first people into automation were the business process outsources because they had to define processes in order to be able to make beds. The clients to take over those functions. But as we move through that and we try to find out where are the high value processes, then it really is about analytics. Now, a lot of the traditional tools, whether it's SAP or Oracle or many of these, they throw out huge amounts of information. And you can actually track the way a process actually maps out in an enterprise. The ability to apply analytics to that is where the real value comes. And Abby has a product called TimelinePI, does exactly that, provides intelligence on the actual flow. An analyst may say A goes to B goes to C goes to D, but you're often finding that it's looping round from C to B, for example, because there's an error in the data coming into it. The ability to apply analytics to that and from that be able to say, okay, these are the processes we really should automate because these are ones of real value. And these are the ones where frankly are either so obvious or got relatively limited value because they're not that extensive in the enterprise. I don't need to bother or they can go to the back of the automation. I think it's a critical front end and it's enabled by, as I think we talked from very last time we were together about, we're not short of data. Data is being spun out of or may everything that happened, whether you're using an ERP system, whether you're placing an order, the number of data sets that just arise from a simple internet transaction. We're not short of data. It's having the tools and like to analyze that data, reduce them down to the business flows that drive them and then identify where you could make improvements for automation that the real value comes. You know, Robert, one of the things we also talked about was disruption. It's a topic of conversation always in the Cuban. But you know, a number of industries thus far haven't been disrupted. You know, we talked about the ones that have, but think about financial services, for example, healthcare. A lot of parts of government, particularly defense has not been disrupted. Do you think the COVID-19 pandemic is going to change that? Oh, I think absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things that it's forced, I'll give you a very true example. I mean, it's forced us to use remote technologies for meetings. And I think what some of us are beginning to realize that it's actually a massive productivity boost. I'll give you an example. You know, a couple of weeks ago, I would do to go visit a client company of a private equity company, which I'm working, and I was going to fly to Chicago, spend a day and a half at Chicago and then come back, you know, three days probably in total, together with a certain amount of time as time zone changes the song. I mean, the truth is we did that in six hours over Zoom. And I think the output was every bit as good. In fact, you could argue the output was better because everyone was prepared, everyone was thoughtful. There were no random interruptions and so on. You know, I'm running board meetings. I've seen the same thing happen. Board meetings are running into time. They're not getting distracted. They're not running up down tangents. I think the productivity lift that's coming out of those things is very substantial. And I think you can go and apply that to almost any industry. You know, my wife yesterday did a remote consultation with her doctor. You know, again, it was much more efficient of everybody's time than getting in a car and driving to the hospital, waiting in line, you know, for an appointment was bound to overrun. You know, the appointment was on time. It was to the point and it just happened. And I think almost every industry's going to have seen that. And it may never go back to what it was. It may never go back to that idea that if you want to meet with someone, you jumped on a plane, you cross three time zones, you spend seven hours on a plane, going to New York or wherever, when you can just do it quickly, efficiently, and with amazing productivity remotely. Yeah, your telehealth example is a good one, especially these days, you feel a lot safer doing it from your home. And I'm sure you can be very productive. I want to ask you, you have a, over your career, you've got quite an observation space, large companies, small companies, you're doing some investments now. Let me start with sort of the smaller companies, maybe the VC funded startups, you know, that you might be working with or observing. What do you see going on there? What are you advising them? What kind of companies do you think will emerge from this pandemic as strong ones? What do they look like? Well, I think there's two sets of answers. I mean, firstly, the companies that are succeeding, I think will be those that are in the remote working automation space. I think that's going to get a massive boost from what's happening right now. In terms of practical short-term advice, I think there are two factors. I mean, one is survival. And every company I'm working with is, you know, in cash preservation mode, just making sure that even against an incredibly pessimistic outlook for the rest of the year, they can still be in business at the end of the year. And that's meant some tough decisions. It's meant, you know, reducing staff, in some cases, reducing costs across all, or with that, if it's the workplace, then how do we make sure we're still in business at the end of the year? But much more importantly, I'm getting people to focus on where are they when they come out of, have they built competitive advantage between now and say the end of the year, or whenever the state starts to get back to normality? You know, are they reaching out to customers right now that are struggling and acknowledging that they're struggling and putting deals on the table that are going to win them and win their loyalty over a five to 10 year period, even at the expense of short-term revenue issues? And I think that's critically important. And keeping yourself in that mindset of where do we want to be when this is all over? You know, how have we increased our competitiveness? How have we improved our customer intimacy? How have we used remote technologies to make calls on customers that perhaps we wouldn't have made in the past? I was talking to a senior executive, I could focus as it happens, someone who used to work for me just a couple of days ago. Amazing example of remote technology. He's in Yehud Israel, I'm in the Bay Area, and he was chatting about his personal efficiency in terms of customer interaction and saying that three months ago, the way he would meet with customers, he'd get on a plane, he'd fly to a city, he'd work on the assumption that his local team would put together some meetings which were often highly dependent on the agendas they could lock into it and then he'd fly out of it. Right now, he's able to put meetings on an ad hoc basis, 10 minutes, 15 minutes of time across multiple time zones, multiple geographies, without going through that sort of impediment. And it's making him much more intimate with his customers, getting to know his customers much better and conversely, they're getting to know him much better and getting to understand what he does and the value he adds much better. And again, that's a massive difference where we were three months ago. We have to say, we love not being on planes on Sunday night, the guys in the studio are laughing about that. But so we've seen a real bifurcation in IT spending as a result of COVID-19. Some upstarts these days have half a billion dollars in the bank, but guys like Snowflake, you mentioned automation anywhere, security companies like CrowdStrike and Octa. I mean, these are companies that are, clearly this has been a tailwind for them. On the flip side, you're seeing some large companies that again, even within these big portfolios, take like a Cisco, for instance, some of the traditional networking stuff might be under buyer, but then the, you know, the WebEx stuff is rocking to new highs. So it's a complicated situation for a lot of folks. If you're running a large company right now, where would you be focused? You know, how would you be steering the ship? I actually don't think it's that different for a small company. I think the first thing you've got to do is just make sure you're using this as an opportunity to get your cash under control, getting your spending under control. And I'm pleasant though it is, it's actually a really good catalyst for asking yourself, did all that spending that I committed to it over the last couple of years in this boot time, did I really need to do it? Is this the time to go to a creative house? Make sure we're running efficiently. I think that's the good starting point. But again, just like I said about the smaller companies, it's also focused on getting out of the other end in a much more competitive position when you went into it. You know, using it to create customer intimacy, using it to create loyalty, you know, by doing things that acknowledge the difficulty that many of your clients are facing. I think it's things like that. It's not actually that different. You may have more of a profit and there may be a more inertia in the system, which means you're actually less likely to get the same sense of urgency that a startup has, but nevertheless, it's pretty important. But it's much the same with us otherwise. Do you see as a software executive, I'm interested if you're seeing sort of new pricing models emerge, maybe as a result of the pandemic or maybe just sort of another wave of disruption. And the reason I bring this up is, you know, a lot of so-called cloud companies and SaaS companies, you know, they'll charge you, you know, a one-year term or a two-year term or a three-year term. You're starting to see some emergence of companies who say, no, let's do real cloud, paid by the drink. You know, we're going to drive that intimacy that you were sort of referring to before. Do you see that changing or is it going to be sort of the more traditional, traditional in air quotes, SaaS models? I'm actually seeing a little bit differently. I think what's happening is that the subscription model cleaning is the right model. I mean, I look at companies that have subscription software revenues, they're doing a lot better, they're feeling a lot better about life than those that are running on perpetual licenses and having to close that deal every single quarter. But what I'm also seeing is companies responding to clients by saying, look, understand you may have cash flow issues now, understand that, for example, in the hospitality industry, your business has gone away and you're not going to go buy this stuff for the next three months. So rather than force my subscription contract down your throat, I'm actually going to give you a payment holiday. But in return, I'd like something back, you know, and I'd like something back and it could be as trivial as I want you to act as a reference. I want more access to executives, but it also could be I'm going to extend the terms on which this contract exists. So it was a yearly term, I'd like a three-yearly term. I'm seeing a lot of that going on. And it's a way of responding to the immediacy of the pressures that your clients face. But at the same time, acknowledging that it's a two-way street, something you want back from it. As I say, it could be as trivial as a reference or executive contact, or it could be as significant as signing up for a five-year term, your renewal rather than an annual renewal or a monthly renewal. I mean, I think in general, my observation isn't speaking to the CIOs and other practitioners that are buyers. This time around, this pandemic, the vendor community seems to be doing, I think a better job than 2008, 2009. You're coming out of that, you saw some audits and the like, whereas here maybe it's because we're all in this together, it's a global pandemic, there's maybe more sensitivity. But I think generally, with all this talk of, breaking up big tech and bad tech, but there's a lot of tech for good. So I just kind of wanted to throw that out. Last question, Robert. What should we be paying attention to with regard to your tenure at Abbey? What are you trying to accomplish in the sort of near-term, mid-term? What are those things that we should be watching as milestones or indicators? Well, I think the key is that we want Abbey to be participating in the growth of the FDA market. We think we have unique value add and I think we can bring that to market in unique ways. The Abbey team has been incredibly talented. We do development data for Moscow, very, very talented development team. We have great product managers and great product executives and massive experience of process management over many companies. And I think if we can bring those things together with all the sort of analytic layers and so on, it can make a real difference to the perceived value of RPA amongst our clients. And if we do that, RPA itself, it's a virtuous circle for us. If we do that, the RPA market doesn't get into that. I think what Gartner referred to as the Sauer despair. After the initial birth, everybody goes, well, this really wasn't as valuable as we thought. We can get through that into what I think really matters, which is the long-term sustainable growth of the sector. And we want to be part of that and I believe we can. Yes, definitely a hot sector. It's one of the highest spending momentum areas we've seen and even last fall, we were saying, in a downturn, many were predicting sort of an economic downturn not because of a pandemic, but we had said at the time, automation is just, that's a tailwind for automation. So Robert, congratulations on the new role. Really appreciate you coming back in theCUBE. Great to see you again. Thank you, thanks for inviting me. I really appreciate it. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante and we will see you next time on our CXO series.