 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Forward 4, UiPath, Forward 4, live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, it's great to be back sitting in an anchor dust next to you. Yeah, good to see you. This is my first show since June. We were at Mobile World Congress. And I've been doing a number of shows where the host, myself, would be there with some guests as a prerecord to some Simulive show. But this is real live. Awesome to be working with you again. So we did live last week at DC Public Sector Summit for AWS. Next week's CubeCon. So there's three in a row. So maybe it's a trend? You know, we'll see. Well, the thing that was really surprising was that we were in the keynote briefly this morning. It was standing room only. There are a lot of people at this conference. I think they were expecting about 2000. And to me, it looked like there were at least that, if not more. You know, it's funny at least as most companies, if virtually all of them, except for a handful, are canceling physical events. And because they're saying their customers aren't traveling. But I've talked over a dozen customers here. I just got here yesterday afternoon. I've talked about 10 or 12 customers who are here. They're flying, they're traveling. And we're going to dig into a lot of that today. We have Uber coming on the program. We have applied materials coming on, Blue Cross, Blue Shield. I'm really happy that UiPath decided to put a number of customers on theCUBE so we can test what we're hearing in the marketing. Well, one of the first things that they said in the keynote this morning was, we want to hear from our customers. What are we doing right? What are we not doing enough of? What do you want more of? They've got over 8,000 customers. You mentioned some of the ones that are going to be on the program this week, including Chevron and Merck who are on today. And 70% of their revenue comes from existing customers. This is a company that has, is really kind of a use case in land and expand. Yeah, and I think you're going to see this trend. You know what it's like with COVID. It's day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the right model? Clearly hybrid is the new abnormal, if you will. And I think what you're going to see is, is you're going to have VIP events. And this is kind of a VIP event. It's not, you know, 5,000 people. It's kind of 1,500, 2,000. But there are a lot of VIP customers here. Obviously the partners here. So what they did before the show was they had a partner summit, it's packed. You talk about standing room only, they had a healthcare summit, it was packed. And so they have these little VIP sections, events within the event, and then they broadcast it out to a wider audience. And I think that's going to be the normal one. I think you're going to see CIOs in a room, maybe in a hotel and wherever in Manhattan or San Francisco. And then they'll broadcast out to that wider audience. I think people are learning how to build better hybrid events. But by the way, this is all new. I said hybrid events, I'm at virtual events, and now they're going to learn how to build hybrid events. And that's a whole other new process. It is, but it's also exciting to see the traction, the momentum that is here from, you know, and the IPO about what, six months ago, you covered that, your breaking analysis that you did right before the IPO and the breaking analysis that you did last week, I believe. Really fascinating, interesting. Acceleration is a theme. We're going to talk about the acceleration of automation and the momentum. That the pandemic is driving. But this is a company that's accelerated everything. As you said in your breaking analysis, lightning in a bottle. This is a company that went global very quickly. We're seeing them as some of the leading companies, we can probably count on one hand, who are actually coming back to these hybrid events and say, we want to be with our customers again and learn from you what you're doing, what's going on, and we've got a lot of news to share. Yeah, we've been covering UiPath since 2015. And the piece we wrote back at IPO was, UiPath's a long, strange trip to IPO. And it was strange in that they kind of hung out as a software development shop for the better part of a decade. And then just listening and learning, writing code. They were kind of geeks writing code and loved it. And then they realized, wow, we have something here. We can, and the uniqueness is they have a computer vision technology. They have the ability to sort of infer what a form looks like and then actually populate it. And the thing that UiPath did that was different was they made, this sounds crazy, they made the product really simple to use. And we know simplicity works. We see that with the best example in storage. Storage is a complicated business, pure storage. They pop it in, kind of Veeam is another one, it just works. And so they created a freemium model that made it easy for departments to start small. Maybe for $15,000, $20,000, $25,000, you could get a software robot. And then it would do things like whatever. It would pull data out of one spreadsheet, put it into another, pull data out of one SAS, populate it and people then realize, wow, I am saving a ton of time. I can do some other things that are more productive and then other people looking over her shoulder would say, hey, what is that you're using? Can I get that? And then all of a sudden, like you said, lightning in a bottle and it exploded. Not a conventional Silicon Valley funded company, even though they got a lot of funding, they raised I think close to a billion dollars before they went public. And now they're public, when public in April, the stock has been sort of trending downward for the last four or five months, a little bit off on sympathy, but there's some concerns. Why do you think that is? They had such momentum going into it, they clearly have a lot of momentum here, 8,000 plus customers, they've got over 1200 customers with an ARR above 100,000. Why do you think the stock is trending downward? So I think a couple of things, Lisa, I think first of all, the street doesn't fully understand this company. Daniel Dinez has never been the CEO of a public company. He's not from Silicon Valley, he's from Eastern Europe, and they don't know him that well. They've got the CFO very, very capable, and so they're educating the street, so there's a comfort level there. They're looking at their growth and they're inferring from their billings that their growth is declining, the new growth from new customers in particular, but the ARR is still growing at 60% annually. They also guided a little bit conservatively for the street, and the other thing is they've been profitable on a cash flow basis, and then they guided that they would actually be somewhat unprofitable in the coming quarter. People didn't like that. They don't care about profits until you're somewhat profitable, and then you say, hey, we're going to be a little less profitable, but of course they get events like this. So that, I think it's just a matter of the street getting to understand them, and I will say this, and you know this, they're getting a lot of business from their existing customers. We saw this with Snowflake. Cleveland Research put out a note saying, oh, Snowflake's new customer growth is slowing. We published research from our friends at ETR that showed, well, they're getting a lot of business from existing customers. That sort of fat middle is really where they're starting to mine, and you can see this with UiPath. The lifetime value of the customers is just growing and growing and growing, and so I'm not as concerned. The stock's, we're not stock advisors, but the stock is just over 50 now. It was at 90 at one point, so it's got a valuation of somewhere around 26 billion, which was closer to 50 billion, so who knows, maybe this is a buying opportunity. There's not a lot of data, so the technical analysts are saying, well, we really don't know where it's going. It could go down to 30. It could go rock it up from here. I think the point, Lisa, is this is a marathon. It's not a sprint, it's a long-term play, and these guys are the leaders, and they're, I think, moving away from the pack, and the last thing is, there's concern about competition from Microsoft, who bought a company last year to really, in earnest, get into this business, and everybody's afraid of Microsoft. Well, one thing that we know that's growing considerably is the total addressable market. Pre-pandemic, it was about 30 billion. It's now north of 60 billion. We've seen the pandemic accelerate a lot of things. Talk to me a little bit about automation as its role in digital transformation from your friends. Yeah, I think, you know, this is, again, it's a really good question because when you look at these total available market numbers, the way that companies, virtually all companies, whether it's Dell or Cisco or UiPath or anybody, they take data from, like, Artner and IDC, and they say, okay, these are the markets that we kind of play in, and this is how it's growing. What's really happening, Lisa, is all these markets are converging because of digital. So to your question, what's a digital business? A digital business is a data business, and they differentiate by the way in which they use data. And if you're not a digital business during the pandemic, you're out of business. So all these markets, cloud, machine intelligence, AI, automation, container orchestration, container platforms, they're all coming together as one security, it's all being built in as one. So 60 billion, you know, up from 30 billion, I think it could be 100 billion. I think, you know, they threw out a stat today, that 2% of processes are automated. That says to me that, I mean, anything digital is going to be automated. So that is hundreds of billions of dollars of market opportunity. And so there's no shortage of market opportunity for this company, and that's why, by the way, everybody's entering it. We saw SAP make some acquisitions, we see Infor talking about it, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and these SaaS companies are all saying, hey, we can own the automation piece within our stack. What UiPath is doing, and the reason why I like their strategy better, is they're a specialist in automation horizontally. Across all these software stacks. And that's really why their TAM, I think, is so large. And that gives them quite a big differentiator of that horizontal play. It does, I think, I see, I don't see, I think there's a continuum. And I think you've got Microsoft over here with Azure and personal productivity in their cloud, and then you've got the pure plays, which are really focusing on a broader automation agenda. That's UiPath, that's automation anywhere. I would put Blue Prism in that category. Blue Prism, by the way, is getting acquired by Vista, who they're going to merge in with Tibco, company that you know quite a bit about. And that's an integration play. So that's kind of interesting. I would put them as more of a horizontal play. And then in the fat middle, you've got SAP and Infor, and IBM's getting into the game, although I think they OEM from a lot of different companies, and all those other companies I mentioned before, they're kind of the walled gardens. And so I think that UiPath is less of a head-to-head competitor with Microsoft today, anyway, than it is, for instance, with automation anywhere. And it's growing faster than automation anywhere from what we can tell. And it's the leader in that horizontal play. You never discount Microsoft, but I think just like, for instance, Okta is a specialist in identity access management and privileged access management and access government, they compete with Microsoft's single sign-on, right? But they're a horizontal play. So there's plenty of room for both, in my view, anyway. What are some of the things that you think that we're going to hear? It seemed to be at this inflection point where UiPath wants to move away from being an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform. They made some announcements about vision a couple of years ago at the last in-person event. What are some of the things you think that are going to be announced in the next couple of days? That's a really good question. I'm glad you picked up on that because they started as a point tool, essentially. And then they realized, wow, if we're really going to grow as a company, we have to expand, so they've been making acquisitions. One of the key acquisitions they made was a company called Process Gold. So it's funny, when we've done previous RPA events, I've said, RPA in its early days was kind of scripts paving the cowpath, meaning you're taking existing processes and saying, okay, we're just going to automate them. Where UiPath is headed in, others, is they're looking across the enterprise. How do we go end to end? How do we take a broader automation agenda and drive automation throughout the entire organization? I think that's a lot of what we're going to hear from today, we heard that from executives, Param Kalon and Ted Kumert, talked about their engineering and their product vision, and I think UiPath has to show that that's actually what's happening with customers and they have the portfolio to deliver. Well, those two executives that you just mentioned and a lot of others are going to be on the program, the next couple of days, jam-packed. Dave, I'm looking forward to unpacking what UiPath is doing, the acceleration in the automation markets. We're going to have a fun couple of days. We sure are, Lisa, thanks for coming on here. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. We're going to be back live from Las Vegas at UiPath Forward 4 in just a minute.