 theCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Hi everybody, welcome to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center, covering UiPath Forward 5. This is the fourth time theCUBE has covered forward, not counting the years during COVID, but UiPath was one of the first companies last year to bring back physical events. We did it at the Bellagio last year, Lisa Martin and myself. Today, my co-host is David Nicholson coming off of last week's awesome CrowdStrike show. Back here in Vegas, David, talking about UiPath. UiPath is a company that had a very strange path, as I wrote one time to IPO. This company was founded in 2005 and it was basically a development shop. And then they realized they got lightning in a bottle with this RPA thing. And Daniel Dinez, the founder of the company, just really drove it hard. And they really didn't do any big kind of VC raise for several years. And all of a sudden, boom, the rocket ship took off, kind of really got out over their skis a little bit, but then got to IPO and has had a very successful sort of penetration into the market. The IPO obviously has not gone as well. We can talk about that, but they've hit a billion dollars in ARR. There aren't a lot of companies that, you know, have hit a billion dollars in ARR that quickly. These guys had massive valuations that were cut back, obviously, with the downturn, but also some execution miscues. But the one thing about UiPath, Dave, is they've been very successful at penetrating customers. And that's the thing you always get at forward, customer stories. And the other thing I'll add is that it started out with the narrative was, oh, automation, software robots, they're going to take away jobs. The opposite has happened. There's zero unemployment now, basically. We're heading into a recession. We're actually probably in a recession. And so, how do you combat a recession? You put automation to work and gain, if inflation is five to seven percent and you can get 20% from automation, well, it's a good ROI. But you sat in the keynotes. It was really your first exposure to the company. What were your thoughts? Yeah, I think the whole subject is interesting. I think if you've been involved in tech for a while, the first thing you think of is, well, hold on a second, isn't this just high tech scripting? Aren't you essentially just automating stuff? How cool could that possibly be? Well, it kind of was in the beginning. Yeah, yeah. But when you dig into it, to your point about the concern about displacing human beings, the first things that get automated are the mundane and the repetitive tasks, which then freeze individuals up, frontline individuals who are doing those tasks to do more strategic things for the business. So, one of the things that was talked about in the keynote was this idea of an army of citizen developers within an organization, not just folks who are innovating and automating at the core of enterprise applications, but also folks out on the front line automating the tasks that are interfering with their productivity. So it seems like it's a win-win for everybody throughout the enterprise. Yeah, so let's take folks through the keynotes. Basically, we learned there are 3,500 people here, roughly, we're in the Venetian and we do a lot of shows at the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center. The one thing about UiPath, they are a cool company. Yeah, they are. Orange colors, kind of like Pure Storage, but they got the robots moving around. The setup is very nice. It's very welcoming and very cool, but 3,500 attendees, including partners and UiPath employees, 250 sessions. They've got a CIO Automation Council and a Pickleball Court inside this hall, which Pickleball is all the rage. So Bobby Patrick and Mary Tetlow kicked it off. Bobby's the CMO, Mary's the head of branding. And Bobby raised four themes. RPA is going from a tool to a way of operating and innovating. The second thing is, the big news here is the UiPath business platform, something like that, they're coming, but they're talking about platform and they're really super gluing that to digital transformation. The third is really outcomes shifting from tactical. I have a robot, a software robot on my desk doing mimicking what I do with the script to something that's transformative. We're seeing this operationalized very deeply. We'll go into some examples. And then the fourth theme is automation is being featured as a strategic line item in annual reports. Bobby Patrick, as he left the stage, I think he was commenting on my piece where I said that RPA automation is more discretionary than some other things. He said, this is not discretionary, it's strategic. You know, unfortunately, when you're heading into a recession, you can put off some of the more strategic items. However, the flip side of that Dave is as I was saying before, if you're looking at five to 7% inflation, maybe a way to attack that is with automation. Yeah, there's no question. There's no question that automation is a way to attack that. There's no question that automation is critical moving forward. There's no question that we have moved, we're still in the age of cloud but automation is going to be absolutely critical. The question is, what will UiPath's role be in that market? And when you hear UiPath talk about platform versus tool sets and things like that, that's a critical differentiator because if they are just a tool, then why wouldn't someone exploit a tool that is within an application environment instead of exploiting a platform? So what I'm going to be looking for in terms of the folks we talked to over the next few days is this question of, you know, make the case that this is actually a platform that extends across all kinds of application environments. If they can't seize that high ground moving forward, it's going to be tough for them. Well, they're betting the company on that. That's Rob Enslin coming in. That's why he's part of the equation. But that platform play is they are betting the company and the reason is, so the history here is in the early days of the sort of RPA craze, Automation Anywhere and UiPath went out. They both raised a ton of money. UiPath rocketed out to the lead. They had a much easier to install. You know, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, some of the old legacy business process folks, you know, kind of had on-prem, big stacks. UiPath came in a really simple self-serve platform and took off and really got a foothold in the market and then started building or making some of these acquisitions like Process Gold, like Cloud Elements, which is API automation, more recently, ReInfer, which is natural language processing. We heard them up on the stage today. And they've been putting that together to do not just RPA, but process mining, task mining, you know, document automation, et cetera. And so Rob Enslin was brought in from Google, formerly Google and SAP, to really provide that sort of financial and go-to-market expertise, as well as Shimgupta, who's the CFO. So they, and they were kind of late with that. They sort of did all this post-IPO. I wish they had done it, you know, somewhat beforehand, but they're sort of bringing in that adult supervision that's necessary. Rob Enslin, I thought, was very cogent. He was assertive on stage. He was really clear. He was energetic. He talked about the phases, ERP, internet, cloud, and then now automation is a new S-curve. He quoted a Forrester analyst talking about that. He also had a great quote. He said, you know, the old adage, better, faster, cheaper, pick two. Said you don't have to do that anymore with automation. He cited reports from analysts, 50% efficiency improvement, 40% productivity improvement, 40% improvement in customer satisfaction. And then, what I always, again, love about UiPath is there are no shortage of customers. They do as good a job as anybody. And I think I would say the best of getting customers to talk about their experiences. You'll see that on theCUBE all this week. Talked about Changi Airport from Singapore. They're adding 50, able to serve as 50 million new customers, new travelers with no new headcount company called Vital or Vital. And I say that 100,000 employees having access to it. Uber, 150% ROI in one year. New York state getting 1.2 million relief checks out in two weeks and identifying potentially $12 billion in fraud. They also talk about 25% of the UiPath finance team is digital and they've only incremented headcount, you know, very slightly one and a half times their revenues grown to about a 10x. And really, he talked about how to turn automation into a force multiplier for growth. And to your point, I think that's their challenge. What were your thoughts on Rob Enslin's keynote? First of all, in addition to his background, Rob brings a brand with him. Rob Enslin is a brand. And that brand is enterprise overarching platform. Someone you go to for that platform play, not for a tool set. And again, I'll say it again, it's critically important that they demonstrate this to the marketplace. That they are a platform worth embracing as opposed to simply a tool set. Because the large enterprise software providers are going to provide their own tool sets within their platforms. And if you can't convince someone that it's worth doing two things instead of one thing, you're never going to make it. So I've had experiences with Rob when he was at Google. He's the right person for the job. And I buy into his strategy and narrative about where we are in the critical nature of automation. Question remains, will UiPath be able to benefit from that trend? So a couple things on that. So your point about SAP is right on, EY was up on stage. EY is a huge SAP customer. And they chose UiPath to automate their SAP installation. And they're going all in with UiPath as a partner. Of course, I often like to say that the global system integrators, they like to eat at the trough. When you see GSIs like EY and others coming into the ecosystem, that means there's business being done. We saw Orange up on stage, which was really interesting. Pop the air from Spain. Yep, talking about, he had this really cool dashboard and then Ted Coomert was talking about the business automation platform and all the different chapters and the evolution. They've got to get to a platform play because the thing I failed to mention is Microsoft a couple of years ago made a token acquisition and got it to this market. Really providing individual automations. And making it, you know, it's Microsoft. They're going to make it really easy to add it really cheaply. SAP would tell you that they have the same thing. And then just grow from that. So UiPath has to pivot to a platform play. They started this back in 2019. But as you know, it takes a long time to integrate stuff, okay? So they're working through that. But this is, you know, Rob Enzlin put up on the slide. Go big, I tweeted. Took a page out of Michael Dell. Go big or go home. Final thoughts before we break. I think go big or go home is pretty much sums it up. I mean, this is an existential mission that UiPath is on right now, starting this day forward. They need to seize that high ground of platform versus tool set. Otherwise, they will never get beyond where they are now. I do want to mention too to folks in the audience, there's a huge difference between a billion dollar valuation and a billion dollars in revenue every year. So, you know, these guys have reached a milestone. There's no question about that. But to get to that next level, platform, platform, platform. And I know we'll be probing our guests on that question over the next couple of weeks. Yeah, and the key is obviously going to be keep servicing the customers. You know, all the financial machinations and, you know, they reduced yesterday their guidance from the high end being 25% error growth down to roughly 20% when you factor out currency conversions. UiPath has a lot of business overseas. They're taking that overseas revenue and converting it back to dollars. The dollars are appreciated, so there are less of them. I know this is kind of the inside baseball, but we're going to get into that over the next two days. Dave Vellante and Dave Nickson. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back right after this short break.