 Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome back to another CUBE Conversation, this one from BMC's Helix Immersion Day at the Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. Once again, we've got a great set of topics for today. Today, right now, what we're going to talk about is everybody talks about the explosion and the amount of data, but nobody talks about the resulting or associated explosion in software. And that may in fact be an even bigger issue than the explosion in data because ultimately we want to apply that data and get work done. Now that's going to require that we rethink services, rethink service management, rethink operations and rethink operations management in the context of how all this new software is going to create new work but also can perform new classes of work. So to have that conversation, we've got a couple of great guests. Nyakineer is the BMC president of Digital Services and Operations Management Division to BMC, welcome back to the CUBE. Thank you, look forward to it. And Mahir Shukla is the CEO of Automation Anywhere. Mahir, welcome to the CUBE. Thank you, nice to be here. So Nyakineer, I want to start with you. A year ago, we started on this journey of how this new digital services is going to evolve to do more types of work for people. How has BMC's Helix platform evolved in that time? Yeah, so if you remember last time, this was almost a year back when we launched Helix, which was all around taking the service management capability that we had on-prem. Made it available in cloud, containerized so customers can run in cloud of their choice and provide that experience through various channels, bots as a channel of that customer experience. This is what we had released last time. We call it the three Cs for Helix. Everything in cloud containerized with cognitive capabilities so customers can transform that experience. In this version, what we are extending Helix is with the operation side. So all the item capabilities that we have in our platform are now a part of Helix. So we have one end-to-end platform so that customers can discover every asset that they have on-prem and cloud, monitor those assets, detect any anomalies, service both for lines of business and for IT, remediate any issues that happen, vulnerabilities that are there in the system and automatically optimize capacity and cost on this whole closed loop of operations and service coming together is what this next wave of innovation is that we are launching with the MC Helix. So here, Nyaki's talked about very successfully and Helix has been a very successful platform for improving user experience. But up front I noted that we're not just talking about human beings as users anymore. We're not talking about software as users. RPA, Robotic Process Automation, is a central feature of some of these new trends. Tell us a little bit about how Robotic Process Automation is driving an increased need for this kind of digital service and operations management capability. Sure, I think at a high level you have to think of the new organization as augmented organization that are human and bots working side by side, each doing what they're best at. And so in a specific example of a service organization where the BMC Helix is taking this is think of this as a utility where the way you plug it into an electricity outlet and switch on the light and you get the electricity, you plug into the BMC Helix and behind it you have augmented workforce of chat bots, RPA bots, human beings, each doing what they're best at and giving a far superior customer experience unlike any other that is happening now and that's the future of service industry. But when you plug a human, so to speak, metaphorically into that system, there's a certain amount of time, there's a certain amount of training, there's a certain, and as a consequence you can have a little bit more predictable scale. That doesn't mean that you don't end up with a lot of complexity. But RPA seems that the potential of RPA seems that you're going to increase the rate which these users, in this case digital users, are going to enter into the system. You don't have a training regimen you can attach to them. They have to be tested, they have to be discovered, they have to be put into operation with reliability. How is that ultimately driving the need for some of these new capabilities? I think if you think of this bots as digital workers, you almost have to go through the same process that you would go through human beings. You onboard them in terms of you configure them, you train them with cognitive capabilities and then the one difference is they monitor themselves without any bias, they can give their own performance rating card. But the beauty of this is when human and bots work together because there are some functions that bots can do well and then at some point they can hand off to the human beings and human beings do some of the more interesting work that is based on judgment call, customer service, all of that. So that combination is the end goal for everybody. And to add to what we have said, right, that customer experience, whether you're providing the experience to employees or consumers and customers, that is the ultimate goal, that's the ultimate result of what you want to get and the speed at which you provide that experience, the accuracy at which you provide the experience and the cost at which you provide that experience becomes a competitive sensation, which is where all this automation, this augmentation that we are doing with humans and bots is what enables us to do that, right? For all large enterprise customers, major service organizations trying to transform into that future world. But increasingly it seems as though the things that we have to do to orchestrate and administrate more users, digital and human, undertaking more complex tasks where each is best applied is really driving a lot of new data, as mentioned up front, an enormous amount of new software and you said new experiences, but those experiences have to be reliable, have to be secure, they have to be predictable. So that suggests this overwhelming impact of all of these capabilities. You talk about a digital tsunami. What are some of the key things that you think enterprises are going to have to do to start engaging that? Yeah, I mean whether we call it fourth industrial revolution, whether we call it digital transformation, I think what we all are experiencing is this tsunami, tech tsunami, right? Tsunami of clouds where you have production clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, managed clouds. Tsunami of devices, not just the mobile devices but also as everything alone is getting connected, IoT devices. Tsunami of channels, I mean as an end user, I want to experience that in the channel of my preference, Slack as a channel, SMS as a channel. Tsunami of bots, of conversational bots and RPA bots. So in this tsunami, I think what everyone is trying to figure out is how do they manage this explosion? It's humanly impossible to do it all manually. You have to augment it with of course, intelligence, AIML, but then of course bots become a big part of that augmentation to orchestrate all of that back to back processes. I would say that this is no longer nice to have because if you look at from our consumers perspective, last 20 years of digital technologies from Amazons and Googles of the world, Netflix and others, they have created this mindset of instant customer gratification. And we have all been trained for it. So what was acceptable five years ago is no longer acceptable in our own lives, right? And so this new standard of instant result, instant outcome, instant response, instant delivery, we just expect it, right? Once your end consumer begins to do that, we as a business is no longer have a choice that's writing on the wall. And so what this new platforms are doing, like with BMC Helix and Automation Anywhere is delivering that instant gratification, right? And when you think about it more and more of the new customers that are millennials, they don't know any other way. So for them, this is the only experience they will relate to. So again, this is not nice to have. It's not nice to have. It is the only way the world will operate, right? Well, what we're trying to do is take on new classes of customer experience, new operational opportunities to improve our profitability, innovate and find new value propositions. But you mentioned time. The arrival rate of transaction is no longer predictable. It's going to be defined by the market, not by your employees. We could go on and on and on with that. What is, tell us a little bit about Automation Anywhere and what Automation Anywhere is doing to try to ensure that as businesses go off to attend to the complexity that creates new value, they at the same time can introduce simplicity where they can get scale and more automation. Sure. You earlier mentioned that with explosion of data came the explosion of applications. And so let me focus on what problem Automation Anywhere solved. So if you look at large organizations, they have vast amount of applications, sometimes 400, 800, few thousand. And what we have been doing historically is using people as a human bridges between these applications. And we have operated that way for too long and that's the world today. So humans are the interface. They're just the interface. Humans are the bridges between applications and often called as a swell chair operations. That's an easiest way to describe it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what Automation Anywhere does is it offers this technology platform, robotic process automation, AI and analytics platform that integrates all of it together into a seamless automation bot that can go across. And with AI it can make intelligent choices. And so now take that combined with the BMC Helix and you have a seamless service platform that can deliver superior experience. So we've got now the swivel chair users now being software which means that we can discover them more easily, we can monitor them more easily, and that feeds Helix. Absolutely, so you know in our consumer world, in our day to day life we are used to a certain experience of how we consume data or consume experiences with our TVs and all the channels. That experience that we have in our day to day life is what people expect when they walk into the company, right? Walk into the enterprise, which every IT organization is trying to figure out how do they get to that level of maturity. So this is what the combination of what we are doing with Helix and Automation Anywhere brings that consumer great experiences into an enterprise world. So Meher, when we think about RPA we're applying it in interesting and innovative ways, no question about it. But there are certain patterns of success. Give us some visibility into what you are seeing leads to success and then what's the future of RPA? How's that going to evolve over the next few years? Sure, so RPA has been deployed across virtually every industry and virtually every department. So there are many ways to get started and all of them are right. But often we find is that you can either start in a central organization where entire organization is doing everything centrally. It is a great way to get started but eventually we learn that the federated way is a best way to end. Where hundreds of offices all over the world if you are especially a large organization each business unit is doing it with IT providing governance and central security and policies and actual bots running and being implemented all over the world. Eventually for a large scale transformation that is a common pattern we have seen among successful customers. And where do you think this is how's this pattern going to evolve? As enterprises gain more familiarity with it, innovate in new and interesting ways and as automation anywhere and others advance the state of the art. Where do you think it's going to end up? The way it is going is I define it as an app store experience or a Google Play experience. So if you think about how we operate our mobile devices today, if you want something on your device you would look for an app that does that. We are getting to a point where there is bot for everything and a digital worker for everything. So if you need certain job done you first go to a bot store that is an automation anywhere website. Look for a bot that does something, hire or download that bot, get a work done and it comes pre-built like many that are works with BMC Helix and many others. So that is your first way you will look for getting your work done in a new bot economy. And if there's no bot available then you look for other options. It will transform how we work and how we think of work. In many respects it's the gig economy with perfect contractor. That's right, that's right. And it leads to some very interesting challenges ultimately when we start thinking about services. So Niyaki based on what Mihira just talked about where does digital services go as RPA joins other classes of users in creating those new experiences at new profit points and new value propositions. It becomes a competitive, how you provide that service can become a big competitive sensation for financial institutions, for telcos, which is a service industry, right? You're providing that service and like to Mihira's point when the user hits that switch they expect the light to come on. So if I'm an end user, the consumer wanting a service from my telco provider or from my financial institution I expect that service to be instantaneous. And the highest accuracy, accuracy at which you provide is going to start driving competitive for financial institutions or financial institutions, telco to telco. And that's how I see companies differentiating and really surviving or thriving in the long term. Yeah, it's no longer becoming something that's nice to have. It's jacks are better in business today. Right, and the demo, the live demo that we saw today was really impressive because it showed that what would have taken few days to happen now happens in three minutes, right? Yeah, exactly. Which is almost the time it takes to call an Uber. You know, when enterprises begin to do work at a pace that you call an Uber, that's the future, and it's here. Yeah, so the demo that we do the entire end to end demo to request additional storage and being able to provision it, remediate any issues that we see predict cost and make it available to the end user to whoever it is is asking for it in minutes, right? Which used to take days and days, not to mention sometimes in weeks also, right? And it's typically done faster at scale with greater reliability, greater security, certainly greater predictability, et cetera. All right, Meheer Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere. Niyaki Niyar, president of the Digital Services and Operations Management Division at BMC. Thanks both of you for being on the queue. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. And once again, I'm Peter Burris, and I want to thank you for participating in this CUBE conversation from the Santa Clara Marriott at BMC's Helix Immersion Days. Until next time.