 Hi, and welcome to theCUBE, the leading source for insights into the world of technology and innovation. I'm your host, Donald Klein, and today's topic is the exploding software segment of robotic process automation, where Automation Anywhere is one of the leading providers. To have that conversation, today I'm joined by Riyad Triti, CMO of Automation Anywhere. Welcome to the show, Riyad. Thank you for having me. Great. Okay, so look, you're relatively new to Automation Anywhere, is that correct? Yes, I've been there for about six months now. Excellent. I want you to talk a little bit about your background and how you came to the world of RPA. Yeah, so I've been in the IT industry for about 20 years, been in the hardware space and the software space and the cloud space more recently. So when I heard about Automation Anywhere, the RPA space did my due diligence and find out how fast this technology was catching on in enterprises, I got really, really excited and then met the management team and I get even more excited and ended up taking the job. Well, congratulations. Thank you. It's an exploding segment for sure. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about what you see happening in this market and how fast it's growing? Yeah, so there are many studies out there and of course we have our own internal data but the market right now according to Gartner is growing at about 63% year over year is the fastest growing enterprise software market in the industry right now and is projected to continue to grow at that pace for the foreseeable future. Okay, and let's talk about sort of for people who are not that familiar with RPA, it's obviously an acronym that's being, tossed around a lot, but talk to us about robotic process automation and how you define that category. Right, so that was one of the challenge early on is to try to put the label on this segment which is really about automating processes and to end as much as possible. And so the RPA category is where some of the analysts decided to focus on and so what it does is really allow businesses to deploy software robots to business processes so that process can be handled by bots instead of humans. The mundane repetitive tasks that humans do as part of that end to end process whether it's an order to cash process or procure to pay process, any frankly business process there are things that humans should not be doing should be better suited to do more creative work. That's when bots come into play and the whole category was named robotic process automation because the robots are taking the place of the humans in that terms of process automation. Got it, okay, so everybody talks about the notion of bots, right? So creating bots and what's kind of fascinating about this world is that for customers that deploy this type of solution, they're growing a whole library of bots, which are doing things. Maybe just walk us through an example bot and what a bot does and why this technology is so unique. Right, so think about first of all the problem that those bots are solving, right? So today you have ERP applications, CRM applications any sort of applications in businesses to really automate a process like I said in order to cash process, procure to pay process that's why people have bought the technology but what the industry has realized is after 20 years or more of using the same technology humans were still doing parts of the process that should have been automated by the software. So when you look at the average enterprises only 20% of the steps that should be automated are automated, 80% of it is done by humans. Whether it's opening files, reading documents, cutting and pasting, filling out forms, you know, playing with Excel and kind of loading data into systems, data entry a lot of it is still done by humans. So what the bots do is going and take that work away from the humans so they can really focus on better tasks. That's really what it is. And so just so everybody's kind of clear so what's really so intelligent about these capabilities, right? Is it takes something sort of like invoices, right? Any company receiving lots and lots of invoices all these invoices are going to be formatted in different ways, correct? And historically it's been up to a human to kind of look through that invoice pull out the relative pieces of information, right? And enter that into the system so that the system can then issue the PO or pay the PO, et cetera, right? Exactly. But what your bots can do or the space as a whole, right? Is they can intelligently scan these documents and look for the kind of pieces of information and actually load those into the system. That's exactly right. So what the bots are doing now is with computer vision they're able to look into applications, they're able to assess the data, they're able to assess the information from that data and then processes like humans would do. So they're able to again get in, look at invoices or any type of frankly unstructured data or semi-structured data and take that data, analyze it and then manipulate it like a human would do. Excellent. Exception is that they're obviously doing it 24-7 much faster with less errors. Got it, great. So you're turning people who previously may have been focused on kind of a data entry task right into kind of managing a process, right? Exactly. So basically what we like to say is we're taking the robots out of humans and then giving it to the robots who are supposed to be doing the work. Excellent. And that's kind of phase one. And the phase two is obviously making those robots more intelligent so that they're not able to do this as simplest of simplest tasks but start to be a little bit more intelligent and use AI to the things that are a little bit more advanced and more complicated. Okay, excellent. So look, you guys have got some news, right? You've kind of just come out with a big new release of your platform. Why don't you just kind of talk us through what the news is and what you guys are having to do. Yeah, so if you think about what the space has done so far is taking a process that usually is a known process, like I said, in order to cash, even the simpler process, right? And taking a look at the different steps and tasks that people have to do and say, let's now automate those tasks and that particular process. A lot of the time is spent on trying to figure out the process. I don't know about your company, but I know in a lot of companies that I've been at, a lot of processes are not documented. So what we've announced yesterday is a bot, we call this Discovery Bot, that allows us to discover the processes that people work with. So if you are, again, an agent or a knowledge worker in an organization, you're going through a certain number of steps. The bot's going to basically analyze all those different steps, map the process, allows you to understand the flow you're going through and let you know that if you automate those repetitive tasks within your process, you're going to be able to save a certain amount of time and energy and have a better process in place. And then the cool thing about what we announced yesterday, and this is unique in the industry today, is the ability to create bots automatically from analyzing that process. So again, the industry has matured into analyzing processes manually or using certain tools, but then the work had to be done by a different platform to basically create the bots from these processes. We're the only provider today that can analyze processes with a tool and then create the bots automatically, shrinking the time for process automation end to end. Fantastic, okay, and now, but also part of this release too, right, is your kind of cloud capabilities. You've really kind of ramped up your ability to scale for the kind of largest customers. Talk a little bit about how the application functions in the cloud, how it functions on-prem, how does that all work and then? Right, so back in November, we announced a new platform called Enterprise A 2019. This was the first cloud native web-based platform in the industry. The reason why cloud native is important is because it's what gives you the benefits in terms of scaling, in terms of TCO, in terms of easy to use. And that platform is now the core platform for the company. And so the product announcement we had yesterday allows our customers to use the same platform, except now we add a discovery bot at the front end to discover the process, prioritize them, and then use the platform we've announced to automate these processes. What's very interesting about the platform is that customers can use it on-prem, can use it in the cloud. The customers obviously that decide to use it in the cloud will have the ability to learn more from the platform because it's going to tackle a lot more data in the cloud and we're going to be able to use lots of data analysis tools to be able to get the customers to extract knowledge from it and then innovate them much faster, right? The people who are going to be using it on-prem typically are regulated industries or customers who have systems of records that typically are on-prem and they would like the bots to run where the systems are. So the platform is available in the cloud, it's available on-prem. It's a customer's choice to decide how to use it, but the innovation that's backed into it is what's really exciting about it. So this is kind of a, I think it's kind of a fundamental point, maybe people should understand, right? So what's your, this is kind of a brave new world, right? You're saying we're kind of cloud native app, right? Which is now ready to be used on-prem, right? As opposed to maybe the older world where people develop applications that were primarily based for kind of a server architecture within the firewall, right? And then they tried to migrate it to the cloud. Exactly. In some sense, you've done the reverse. Exactly. So before to build an application today, knowing, you know, microservices architecture, knowing Java and knowing web-based, that's how you would build it. And so the fact that you build the architecture for a modern application and then offer the options to customers to use it either on-prem or in the cloud is what we've done. Got it, great. Okay, and so then what's the advantage of being able to use? So you've got this application we can scale with microservices, right? It can handle the volume that a Fortune 500 company might need. What's the advantage for them being able to do it on-prem? What does that help? So some customers, it's really about regulated industries. For example, if you're a bank of your healthcare institution, the data cannot travel to the cloud. So the systems of records, whether it's a CRM, whether it's HRM or some other systems of records or ERP usually will be on-prem and the data can travel to the cloud. So for these customers we're saying, use the product on-prem. You have the same benefit it's still the cloud architecture, microservices-based. It's still web-based as far as the client and interface is concerned. It's still lowest TCO you can get but you don't have to worry about getting to the cloud if that's what you decide to do. So in terms of enabling digital transformation really the requirement here is to be able to enable that both in the cloud and on-prem and do it simultaneously. Correct, correct, correct. And again, some customers will do a hybrid of both and they'll say for these workloads we'll have them in the cloud, for these we'll keep them on-prem. Some customers in regulated industries will say we don't want to do anything in the cloud. We want everything on-prem. They'll have the choice to do that. Understood, okay. Well look, final question here. Let's talk about kind of some of the upcoming events that Automation Anywhere has going on, right? You do events all across the globe. You're now a global company. Tell us what's happening on that front. Yeah, so we do lots of events, because our customers are global. We have customers in 90 countries. We have offices in 45 countries and so we have to go where our customers are. So we have four large conferences throughout the year. One of coming in London. We have it in Vegas in Tokyo and in Bangalore as well. And it's the largest gathering of RPA minds and experts in the industry today. So what's exciting about the one that's coming up is obviously Discovery Bot is going to be featured at that conference. People will be able to play with the product. They'll be able to understand, you know, the latest innovations from Automation Anywhere. We have sessions that are called Build the Bots, where people will be able to build their bots on site and that's always a popular thing for people to do. And then we're going to have some amazing speakers and thought leaders who will help customers understand, you know, what's happening in digital transformation and how intelligent automation can accelerate that transformation. Okay, great. And so just to understand the timing of it. So you've got a show coming up in London, very near future here. Yes, I believe it's in April and then we have another one in May in Las Vegas. Okay, and then there's a big one in North America where it's going to be Vegas this year. Correct, correct, it's in May. Yeah, okay, great. And then what about the international, so then you also talked about Bangalore. Talk about what's happening. Yeah, I think Bangalore, I don't have all the dates in my head, so I apologize, but I think Bangalore is, I believe, in August or September and then Tokyo, I believe it's in June, so I'll have to confirm all those dates. But one of the unique things, right, is that Bangalore show has actually been one of your larger shows of the year. It's been amazing, so I literally missed that show by one week when I joined the company. I was super excited about having the ability to go visit the customers and the partners who attended the show. I think last year they had 6,000 people, so it's an amazing opportunity this year to go see it firsthand. I don't know what the audience is going to be like. I'm assuming it's going to be more than 6,000, but feeling the energy and the excitement from attendees is what I'm really looking forward to. Well, that just shows, right, that the software industry, particularly cloud-enabled software industry, is now a global industry. It is, it is absolutely because, again, cloud allows those barriers to entry for companies, wherever they are, to be lowered and customers in different regions can have the latest, greatest directly from the cloud and be able to use the product when it comes out. And so that's obviously a super big advantage. The other thing I should be remiss if I didn't say is that because it's also available in the cloud and it's web-based, it's easy to use, easy to access, a lot of our first-time customers are business users. They're not even IT people. So they just go in, start playing with the product, automating a few processes, and then start to scale end-to-end. And then, of course, to build the CUE, IT gets involved. So being able to start your automation journey is small and then grow as you scale from any parts of the world is what really this opportunity gives us. Okay, well, thank you for your time today, Riyadh. Fascinating, everything you guys are doing. Super hot category for those folks out there that want to touch base with automation anywhere. Shows in London, Vegas, Bangalore, and then where was the fourth one? I think Tokyo and then Bangalore after that. Okay, fantastic, all right. Thanks for joining us today. This is Donald Klein, I'm the host of theCUBE. See you next time.