 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas. theCUBE is live. I love saying that, I'm going to say it again and again. theCUBE is live. We are at UiPath Forward 4 at an in-person conference. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're going to be talking about the vision of the UiPath platform. We're very excited to welcome to the program Ted Cumbert, Executive Vice President of Products and Engineering at UiPath. Ted, welcome to the program. Thank you. It's great to be here with you and it is great to be live. It's been so fun over the last couple of days to spend time with our customers. It's just been so great for the team and everyone. I can imagine what it was like for you yesterday on main stage, looking out to a standing room only crowd for the first time in probably 20 months. Yeah, and that was actually quite fun as you know, speaking to a camera. You just don't get the same energy. You got to muster all of the energy yourself. And so it was so great just to be back in front of live people again, humans. Exactly. Well, from a customer perspective, I know that the number is now over 9,000. You guys have an incredibly high retention rate. We're talking 96 plus percent. A significant portion of revenue comes from those existing customers. We talked to a whole bunch of them yesterday. We've got more of them on today. We're hearing that validation from the voice of the customer on what UiPath has been doing. Talk to us about the vision that you unveiled yesterday, strategically, what some of the feedback has been from some of those folks that are here in person. Great. Well, so let's start the story by looking back first and talking about the phases of the market because I really see us entering phase three of the automation market. Phase one, I'd describe as the core RPA platform. And that was, you know, the elements of that are the runtime, the robot, the thing that knows how to execute these workflows. It knows how to do UI automation. It knows how to do API integration. It knows how to do long running workflows and interact with humans, developer experiences, low code visual developer experiences, plus the orchestration. And that gives the enterprises the manageability and the governance. I'd say that was phase one. Okay. Daniel and the team then at forward three, the last this community got together right here in the Bellagio, at the end of 2019, rolled out an expanded vision, which we talk about as the platform for the full automation lifecycle. And that added elements of, let's help end users engage more easily with their automations. They engage with them on their desktop. So they need to think of it like a start menu, like experience with the UI path assistant. They need rich user interfaces. So we introduced a low code application platform, UI path apps. They want to interact with natural language. So we integrate with chatbots. And then we find a lot of customers, when we initially start their journey, they have a lot of knowledge right away of opportunities. They see things in the call center, front office, back office, finance department. They see things to do. But then they say, help us find more opportunities to automate. So we have this old discovery area to help them find more opportunities to automate. So this vision is this end to end lifecycle that covers the core platform plus engagement and discovery. That's the journey we've been on over the last two years. And I think part of what we talked about yesterday was just how we're continuing to fulfill that vision. And then that set the stage for us to talk about a few innovation themes as we look forward to phase three. That I would emphasize we're still building out this end to end automation platform covering the full lifecycle. But we do see some pretty important themes going forward. Such as? Well, we'll start with four, kind of four key themes. One is enterprise grade platform. The second is platform expansion. You know, healthy platforms grow and expand what you're able to do with them, what developers are able to build for. The notion that discovery becomes more continuous. I liken it to a nervous system for the processes and the work of the enterprise. It's always there watching, helping you find opportunities. And then we talked about this last concept which is semantic automation. Which is, I'd say, the real big idea in the forward-looking vision. I wonder if we could, in your keynote yesterday, you talked about the fragmentation of the enterprise, software business, and of course, perpetuated by the SAS. Easy button, great. I got all these different SAS products. And you're sort of creating a layer across them. Sort of a couple questions there. Maybe you could just sort of describe that dynamic and how you guys think about it. And then I got a follow-up. Yeah, I think, if you're a historian, you look back and say, in the past, a lot of business process centered around the deployment of a few monolithic applications. Your ERP, your CRM system. And then if somebody in another department wanted something different, another part of the process, you might customize or deploy an add-on. Now, what's great about the SAS era is we have a lot more solutions that are now purpose-built toward a lot more functions, a lot more processes are being automated, and that's fantastic. But what's that done is it's expanded the landscape of applications now that enterprises hold typically. And that's where you get to the issue of fragmentation. And the reality is, is that the real work in the enterprise, the real work people do every day, and the process, it spans all of that stuff. And I think as an end-user, you resonate with this, because you will work with desktop apps, you'll work with these SAS apps, you'll work with these line-of-business apps, you'll have to navigate to this one, cut some data, copy it, paste it over here, you'll work in Excel, you'll send an email. And that type of work, nobody really wants to do that. And especially if it's something you have to do all the time. So automation, we are in fact not the first platform to walk in the enterprise's door and say, hey, we can help you integrate your systems, we can help you automate business process. This is, this goes back to the early 2000s and the arrival of the first-generation integration products. So what's so different about RPA and these automation platforms in our automation platform? The difference is really being centered on UI automation. It's got three key attributes that I think are super important to understanding why this is such a different phenomenon. The first is because it automates via the UI, it can capture the actual work people are doing so we can emulate the actual work people are doing. That's number one and that's critically important. The second thing is it can reach anything. If you've got an integration problem, you don't want connectivity to 82% of your systems, you actually want to cover everything you need to cover. And UI automation can reach anything that has a user interface. And then the third thing is because it's emulating the work people do, it's very intuitive to develop for. And as such, the developer experiences are very easy to use. Don't require traditional coding skills. Customers tell us that unleashes more capacity and they get really fast time to value. And that's kind of a win-win-win. And the interesting thing then is if you think about it, the business wants to move forward at a certain rate, but that application's estate is only going to move forward. It's going to move forward kind of at its own pace as well. And this automation layer can really deal with the sheer between that. It can help you move forward quickly up here while you're waiting for this layer to evolve as well. I wonder if you've mentioned kind of history if you look back. And you're somebody who spent two decades plus at one of the great software companies. If you think about the great software companies, Microsoft, we know how they got there with the PC ascendancy and then took it to new levels. Oracle, SAP, Salesforce is vying to become a next great software company. Bill McDermott wants to take service now in that realm. And I have a sense that with your vision of a fully automated enterprise, you guys could aspire to be a next great software company. I think you're humble, but you're bold. So with somebody who has a historical perspective on great software companies, what does it take architecturally specifically to be that next great software company? Well, it's a great question. You know, I said yesterday to the audience that the reason I came to UiPath is because I do believe this is one of the most significant platforms of this time. And I do believe, as we just talked about, it's UI automation is the central element that's really making it different. Now, all these other technologies and capabilities are super important. We announced yesterday a new service in our platform called the UiPath Integration Service. We acquired a company named Cloud Elements six months ago, an API integration company, and that is now landing in the UiPath Integration Service. We've always had API integration as a part of our platform, but now we've got this richer catalog, we've got new services for developers, and that only expands what they're able to do. And as we talked about the future themes of innovation, we talked about this platform expansion, and I assert as a historian, healthy, vital platforms grow and they grow on their own, just naturally, because there's always some adjacency where if I bring that in, I can enable my community to do something different. They can build something different. And so that was why, for instance, let's embrace more API integration surface area. Why did we enter low code application space? It's because we thought there was a lot of power for our community to now be able to build rich user experiences. Why did we bring AI and ML in as a first class citizen with an MLOps platform? We're not trying to be a general hosting of models, but we want to make it easy for those skills to be used. So there is a thing just about just continuing to expand what you're able to do, but there's an important thing you got to do as well is you got to stay true to your personas and your user community. So anytime we do this, we think, yes, we're bringing in API integration, but we're not trying to be an I-Pass. We're trying to serve our RPA developer community, and we have to be true to that developer experience and the thing that's made us special. So we really focus on landing it in an integrated way that really helps our community do more and more with the platform. Do you feel like you're seeding a new breed of developer or maybe your ascendancy is coinciding with a new breed of developer? Let's say there's a general trend and we label the general trend now low code, no code, which I frankly think as a historian is just a new way we're talking about the idea that you want to continue to simplify developer experiences. And if you do that, everybody likes it and it does enable you to grow the pool of developers that you have. And in our case, there is a new, this is a large and growing discipline if you looked on LinkedIn, community of RPA developers. There are new personas, new jobs being built around this platform today. We're blessed with a very, very large community of developers. This is a new discipline. Over a million, I believe? Yeah, I think those are the range we're talking about. Yes. And it's amazing asset for us as well as we do new things. We've got community ways they can engage with community builds and previews. It gives us a lot of expertise to tap into as we're deciding to do new things. I was going to ask how influential that large community is and the product direction roadmap, the vision execution. How influential is that community? They're immensely influential and that goes from when we're early on and we're ideating and we're talking to our customer advisory boards or customers one-to-one or as features are starting to come out in community previews, customers are an instrumental part of that journey. I think this is one of the things if you spend any time with Daniel at all, you'll understand how important customer centricity and true customer centricity is to him. And I think that's a, I only joined the company 18 months ago, but I walked into a company that I really understood, knew what that meant. The words are easy to say, but really being that and having customers shape who you became, I think that's something that the company has done actually quite well. The CrowdStrike announcement was notable. I'm interested in how you're integrating that. I know that's endpoint security. I know you've done a lot of work historically in identity access with Auth0 and doing some deep integration there. How should we be thinking about the CrowdStrike? It's more than just a press release. It's engineering going on there. What can you tell us? Yeah, that's a very important thing for us. I talked about another one of the key innovation themes is enterprise grade platform. And that one might seem like, well, of course he's going to say that, but we do want our customers to understand we know this is a mission critical platform. And it's now integral to the work people do. It's integral to the process. If it ever fails them, that's a mission critical failure. And so we're making deep investments like this. This partnership at CrowdStrike is about delivering a solution that, an endpoint protection solution that understands robots. And they are not unique in that, unfortunately, they are subject to a lot of the same forms of attacks that humans can be subject to. And, but they're also unique and then need unique protection. And so as we came together with CrowdStrike, one of the important elements for us was let's enable there, in this case, Falcon platform to understand robots. And let's do it as a seamless part of that experience. And so there's a few elements we deliver together. They have a lightweight agent that gets deployed with a robot. And then most importantly, we provide metadata. We provide data back to log information back to CrowdStrike. So now a security analyst sitting in the Falcon console knows when there's an activity that's related to a robot versus related to a human. And then there's also specific mitigation actions that are relative to a robot. You may want to just block that instance of that automation from running again or you might want to block all instances from running again. And so there's specific mitigation, there's specific visibility we're providing to the security analyst. But then it's all done in a seamless way. The customer, when they have 2110, they have the latest Falcon release, there's no extra licensing. They just have those two products and it just works. How much was that accelerated? The last year, 18 months, we've seen the tremendous change in the security landscape. Ransomware has become a household word. Everybody knows about Colonial Pipeline. We're seeing so much activity there that it's a matter of when customers get hit, not if. How much of the events of the last year have accelerated that partnership with CrowdStory? And how you're enabling RPA to be that protected asset that the organization needs to ensure is protected? It'd be fantastic if we ever got to a point where we felt like security was a solved problem and it won't ever be. And this is why we felt like we needed a world-class company to partner with who's an expert in this landscape and they do their part and we do our part. That was why we took this approach because we know we're not going to have and build that expertise. We know about robots. We know about that side of thing. They understand security. And by working together, we can connect the dots and we can hear everything they understand that we're never able to replicate. How unique is that sort of robot optimized so the security? It's as far as I know, it's the industry's first solution. It's important to know that endpoint protection does provide protection for robots today. And all of them do, but it doesn't know about them. It can't tell the security analyst that was an action a robot took versus a human. And it doesn't know how to take specific mitigation steps. And that's the exciting thing we've done here. So to my knowledge, it's the first endpoint security offering built for, as we say, the robot workforce. And so you bring engineering resources to create that value and collaborate with CrowdStrike? Yeah, yeah, we both did work on both sides. It's been a really fantastic partnership and it was great. We had a video from their Chief Product Officer as a part of our discussion yesterday. It's been a fantastic relationship and partnership. So it's one of those tricky things. That's IP that you're developing with CrowdStrike. At the same time, you nailed it, right? It's never going to be solved, but one of the ways in which we can counteract the adversaries who are extremely capable is sharing. So is that IP that gets shared, or is that IP that you keep for yourself? We're both doing what we do. They're IPs, they're IP, our IPs are IP. And so it's all good there. Focusing on your core competencies. Yep, exactly. Well, Ted, thank you for joining Dave and me today talking about the vision, where things are going, the excitement, the partnership expansion. A lot of activity since the IPO. We appreciate your time today. Very exciting times. And as I said at the open, it's great to be here with you. Great to be live. Isn't it great to be live? It's great to be live. Really is. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. We're live in Las Vegas with UI Path Forward 4 at the Bellagio. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.