 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting, Cube on Cloud, brought to you by Silicon Hangle. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the Cube on Cloud, our own virtual event, where we're trying to understand the future of cloud, where we've come from and where we're going, and we're bringing in visionaries to really have that detailed conversation. Daniel Dines is here. He's the CEO of Automation Specialist UI Path. Daniel, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights here. Thank you so much for inviting me, Dave, appreciate it. That's always a pleasure to get together with folks that have started companies with a seed of a vision and have exploded into great success. And what I want to go back to the founding days of UI Path 2005, it was pre-cloud. There's certainly pre-cloud as we know it today. AWS came out in 2006. And then we saw the cloud's ascendancy, but your original founding premise, there was no cloud. You know, it wasn't like a startup that could just spin up stuff in the cloud, but you've seen that evolution. So when you first started to see cloud evolve, what did you think? Did you think, oh, well, we'll see what happens or did you know at the time that this was going to be as big as it actually has become? What were your thoughts back then? Well, honestly, I thought that we are kind of ancient and maybe it's stupid to not to pivot into the new trends in technology, like cloud, mobile, social. But we kept working on this computer vision technology that 15 years ago was not really hot, but with the evolution of self-driving cars and the latest development in AI, we've been able to capture our investments in a domain that was not hot, but suddenly became the world of the great technology and the greatest minds in IT. And we specialize our computer vision to a narrow use case, but still it's the key of what we've done. In the end, the robots are powered by computer vision technology. This kind of a robot emulate how a human user work. So obviously we use vision a lot in our day-by-day work and having the best technology that allows our robots to interact with the computer screen, more like a human user is quintessential in making our business reliable and easy to use. So we were lucky, but I always felt that maybe I should change. And we were feeling, I remember many discussions with my initial developers, because we like what you're doing, but we felt a bit left outside by the world, but we got lucky in the end. So I have a premise here and that when you go back to the early days of cloud, what they got right was they were attacking the human labor problem and they automated. It was storage, it was networking, it was compute, but really the automation that they brought to IT and the quality that that drove and the flexibility was a game changer. Of course, we know that now and many of us at the time were very excited about cloud. I'm not sure we predicted the impact that it had, but my premise is that there's a parallel in your business with the automation that you're driving into the business. We've talked to people, for instance, some of your customers have said, I can't do Six Sigma, I can't afford to do Six Sigma before things like RPA for business process. I do that for mission critical things, but now I can apply Six Sigma thinking across my entire business that drives quality, it takes cost out of my business. So what do you think about that premise that there's a parallel between the early days of cloud taking human labor out of the equation and driving quality and flexibility, cost, saving speed and revenue, et cetera. And what you're doing on the business side? It is clearly a parallel. I can tell that the cloud was built by looking at IT automation use cases. First of all, because this is what software engineers understand the most. Software engineers, let's be honest, they don't understand the business world. They don't understand all how the real work is performed in a big enterprise and they don't care. Sometimes in my own discussions with our CFO, he is surprised that I don't know all the use cases in the world. Yes, of course I don't know exactly how an insurance company work, all the processes in the healthcare, all the banking processes. I have intellectual curiosity how they work, but what interests me the most is our computer vision technology that works uniformly well across different. That was the same from the cloud. So initially they built the cloud one to help them on what they know the best. And now for, we were put in the face of having a great technology, this computer vision technology, but without having a great use case in the IT world that we understood. And when I'm speaking about our early days, like 12, 13, 14, I believe this technology has a lot less applicability in the real world. Because again, we were thinking of some sorts of small IT automation gigs that were not possible just doing the APIs. But when I discovered the messy world of business processes and how important is to emulate people when you think automation, that was a big aha moment. So I believe that we can do for business processes what the cloud has done for IT processes. And we are really patient now about these business processes and helping people to eliminate all the repetitive work that is there, delegate this work to robots and have the people that are required to do this work do better a smaller number of tasks every day. Everyone has on her or him played today like let's say 10, 20 different activities. Some of them can be completely delegated to robots. They are the low value type of activities while they can focus on the high value activities like interaction with people, creativity, decision making and this type of human like things that we as humans really love. I love that you shared that story but you thought it was a very narrow set of use cases when you first started and then that's just an awesome founders realization. I love it when we've often said in the cube that for decades we've marched to the tune of Moore's law that was the innovation engine, no longer is the case. It's a combination of data, applied machine intelligence and cloud per scale. And I guess the computer vision piece is how you ingest the data. You've made some investments in AI and there's many more to come the industry in general and the cloud is sort of the piece of that equation that we see for scale. So I wonder how you see those pieces fitting to your business and how important is the cloud for your scale at last UI path forward. There was a lot of talk amongst your customers about scaling is the cloud critical for that scale? Yeah, I believe so. And we are thinking of cloud in two distinct ways. Number one, we are offering and manage automation service in our own cloud using where we host everything by ourselves, including our orchestrator. And then next we have the plans to include how the robots that execute the automation and people simply can connect to our cloud, build an automation and just schedule it to run without any maintenance and they will have access to great analytics, everything integrated. So this is a major focus to us. And the way we launching GA, this cloud offering in April of this year. And I can tell you that until now, 20% of our customers already are in a shape or another in this type of offering. Not 20% dollar amount, but 20% of our customers. And it's clear that at this point, this has more applicability into the long tail of smaller customers than on our biggest customers. But the second distinct type of cloud offering that we focus on is to have best in class support in best in class multi-cloud support for the cloud of choice of our customers. For instance, if you go in AWS, GCP, Azure, and you buy a subscription there, you, we are building specialized editions where with one click, you will be able to install our technology in those clouds and you'll be able to scale up and down your robots. You can connect your robots to our many service work within your tenant, but basically the end goal is to lessen a lot the administration, the maintenance footprint of your installation, either on our own cloud, even on your cloud of choice. I'm a strong believer that we will see an accelerated transition from the completely on-prem workloads into these two sorts of cloud workloads. I want to ask you as a technologist, if you see, so you mentioned that you're going to take your products and you support multiple clouds, they'll run on any cloud. And a lot of companies are talking about that, for their respective, whether it's a database or whatever, a storage device, et cetera. Do you see the day where you'll actually start collaborating across clouds where the user, maybe the user today doesn't know, but maybe a developer does know which cloud it's running on. But do you see any value in actual connecting across clouds where the data in one cloud is relevant for the data in another cloud? I know there are latency issues. Is that technically feasible and will it drive business value? What do you think about that cross-cloud connection? I believe it is already happening. There is a mesh between various services and who knows in which cloud they are offered already. I feel the latency is less and less of a problem as much as the biggest cloud provider have a very distributed geographically present. So as long as I can play in AWS in East Coast and on Azure in East Coast, it's not such a big latency issue. And frankly, in the past, our customers at least are telling us they've seen how it is to be completely locked into one technology. And people would like to have optionality. It's not necessarily that I will use three clouds, but I would like to use a vendor that gives me optionality even the, and this is what we are trying to offer. Do you, when you think about the future of work, I mean, as I said before, the cloud 1.0 is infrastructure, storage, networking, compute, and it seems like 2.0, we're bringing in more AI, new workloads, we're seeing analytics and machine intelligence applied to the data and then distributed at scale, self-serve to the business. How do you see the future of work, specifically as it relates to automation affecting that? And what role does cloud play there? What's your vision? So as the workloads will move to cloud, it's absolutely critical that the processes will move to cloud. So there is no way back. And I think that moving from home-print software into cloud will make even easier to automate this type of workloads into the cloud. It's gonna be less maintenance, you will deal less with legacy applications that require some special care. It's kind of a bit more easier to automate modern, only web-based type of application. So we will see an acceleration on the moving to cloud. And again, there will be different sorts of cloud from a completely managed automation service from us to managing yourself, the automation in your cloud tenant, but not on-prem. I'm not a big believer that we will, it's unless very few critical sectors. I don't think that we will see on-prem workloads in the past five years. I mean, I agree, the business case for on-prem just gets less and less. I mean, there's certain applications for sure. My last question is, when thinking about from a software developer standpoint, you obviously, you're going to want to run in AWS and GCP and Azure, perhaps Alibaba. Do you look at other clouds, whether they're regional clouds? Of course, you've got your own cloud, maybe Oracle, IBM, how do you think about those? Do you just sort of evaluate them on a case-by-case basis? You let customers tell you where you need to be? Yeah, we focus on the three big clouds today, but we are building on the top of Kubernetes. Most of our, we have a big shift into building Kubernetes, microservices, and my guess is that all modern clouds will offer fantastic support for Kubernetes. So what it takes when you create an addition for another cloud is to have the underlying services. Like if we plan to use Snowflake, for instance, in our analytics offering, you better have Snowflake in another cloud. Otherwise, probably the analytics will have to be delayed or use less of one-part technology. So it's not only about what we are building, but it's also the vast availability of other set of technologies that we try to use. When you choose a technology now, first of all, we are looking, we need to choose something that is multi-cloud versus dedicated from one cloud vendor. That's our first priority. This is why I've mentioned Snowflake. And then when we move into a cloud, we are limited by the offerings that are there. But my belief is in the main clouds, probably in the US, I don't know on other regions what's gonna happen, but in the main clouds in the US, and I believe that in the end they will catch up in terms of offering and convincing other vendors to have kind of similar offering on their own. I don't know if besides the big three, we will see someone that is able to compete could be too much fragmented. Maybe they will be dedicated clouds for certain services, but for general cloud, I think three is more than enough. Yeah, and so in the early days of cloud, people talked about dial tone and essentially that's what's becoming, it's the value that's running on top of the cloud from software companies like UI path and others that is really driving sort of the cloud 2.0, the next generation Daniel Dines. Thanks so much for sharing your vision and participating in theCUBE on cloud, really appreciate it. My pleasure Dave, thank you so much for inviting. You're welcome, it's always great to talk to you and thank you for watching everybody right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE.