 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special CUBE conversation from our Boston area studio. I'm happy to welcome back to the program, Bobby Patrick, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of UiPath. Bobby, great to see you. Thank you, Stu. Thank you, Stu, it's great to be here. All right, so Bobby, you know, we've known you for many years. There were a couple of jobs. You know, you and I have talked at many cloud shows over the year. And especially companies that were at the lead of that wave. They talked about cloud first. And so now, you know, not surprising at UiPath, who is one of the leaders in robotic process automation. The tagline I'm hearing is automation first at UiPath. So a bunch of news, a lot of updates. We had the CUBE at UiPath forward in Miami last year. We're going to have it back in Las Vegas, so a lot of ground to cover. But I guess, set the stage for us. RPA might not be an acronym that comes off of everybody's tongue just yet, but boy, there's a lot of buzz in the marketplace. Companies growing like wildfires. So, you know, give us kind of the dynamics of set things. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, people have spent the last five, 10 years trying to go digital, right? Digital transformation has been really hard. It's largely been IT led and IT swamped and has a million things to do. And along comes the technology that actually, you know, business users and business analysts and subject matter experts can use and go digital quite quickly, get real outcomes fast and have complete payback on all the entire projects in less than six months or nine months. It's kind of unheard of in IT. And so, you know, RPA has now established itself now as really the best path to digital, going digital. It's actually the best path to using AI as well. That's coming together quickly. But I think what's, if you step back and zoom out a bit, you know, the cloud first era brought incredible agility to organizations, right? And in the very beginning of cloud, if you recall, Stu, right, you know, IT was kind of against cloud, right? We're never going to go out of our data center, right? We're never going to go off Siebel and Salesforce, all those kind of things, right? And, but cloud, the business saw cloud as a mechanism to drive fast agility and to, you know, drive new economics for the business and so on. Well, you know, the cloud era is kind of behind us now and it's obvious, right? Today, the automation first era has a very similar view to it, right? It is about rapid agility, mass productivity, competitive, or complete company transformation. And in that era, we, you know, we call it the automation first era. So it's less a tagline for us. We want our competitors to use it. We want the market to use it. We want our partners to use it. We want people to talk about this automation first era and we think it's a C level conversation. It's a board level conversation and it's going to completely change the landscape of how companies work over the next 20 years. Yeah, it definitely reminds me much about, you know, that stealth IT and then IT, as we said, IT needs to respond to this because if they don't, the business will just go elsewhere. So absolutely this wave of automation is something that we see in the, you know, so many aspects of the market. Intelligence and automation is something that we talked about for decades, but is real today. And in our industry, there's no better proof point that something has reached a certain stage of the market than, you know, the venerable Gartner has come out with a magic quadrant. First of all, congratulations. We're going to put the graphic and talk a little bit about it up here. The Gartner magic came up and in the leadership quadrant, UiPath, you know, is up in front. Yeah, it's terrific. I think, you know, Gartner magic quadrant, much like the Forester waves, Forester in the last two years has had several waves on the RPA. Prior to that, Horses for Sources and Everest and others had kind of uncovered and discovered RPA. I think what the Gartner magic quadrant does is it is a, one, I think it's a great articulation of the state of the market today. I think it's helpful to IT and to businesses to see and understand the market is legitimate. It's long-term. Several years ago, many people said RPA was sort of short-term, it was a band-aid. That's not the case at all. RPA is becoming a platform. And so we're excited because the quadrant really, I think accurately shows the state, you know, we're obviously happy to be number one. You know, Blue Prism, number two in automation anywhere, number three in the leader's quadrant. I think the three of us, you know, really are the vast majority of the market. There's a few other players in there that are traditional, you know, Pega sort of tries to have an RPA product, but they're still focused on cloud, I think. And, you know, there's a number of other players that have kind of niche focuses around certain parts of RPA, like nice systems around attended. But really, the leader quadrant, I think, does accurately show the market. Yeah, it reminds me of some of the software-defined products in traditional IT, is that today, relatively speaking, the dollars are small compared to the overall IT. But Gartner said this is the fastest software group of anything that it tracks and, you know, billions of dollars forecasted in kind of the next five years. This is really important, right? Because Gartner's size to the 890 million, I think next year, or this year, foresters at 1.9 billion. You know, we'll have 20% market share this year, 30, 35% market share next year. Either way, the numbers are accelerating. And every time a forecast comes out, they raise guidance. And that's going to happen again this year because RPA is becoming more critical and core to enabling technologies like blockchain even and like Internet of Things and AI, obviously. And so, I think you're going to see the TAM grow considerably. But I think, look, it's the fastest growing market. We're the fastest growing enterprise software company in history. We went from one to 100 million ARR in about 20 months. You know, no other company has done that. We're considerably larger right now. And, but we say that, you know, kind of in a humble way as an example of, as a fact, we actually put our numbers out even though we're a private company because we do want to show the market, hey, this is really exciting what's going on here. We add eight new enterprise customers a day. We have eight of the Fortune 10 as customers today, right? We have companies rolling robots out to 100,000 employees, right? So it's very exciting what's going on here. And the enthusiasm, I mean, there's not many technologies to do where employees show extreme excitement when they realize these robots will take this kind of mundane task from you. And that, I think that is just fantastic. It's definitely something I saw when I attended your conference. I know some of the employees from previous jobs, some that I'd worked with at other vendors as well as the customers are all super excited in sharing their stories. Let's get in. You talked about, you know, that customer growth obviously is one of the execution arms of Gartner. If you've got revenue, you've got customers, you're executing there. The completeness of vision, you know, looked like there's still room for everybody in that space. Gartner had some ways that they think the market needs to mature in there. But what are some of the key factors that led to UI performance, you know, from Gartner's standpoint? So I think, you know, one thing our company's done right and our founder, Daniel Dinez, is absolutely amazing is we've built a company people love to work at. Our culture is one where we've won dozens of awards from Inc. Magazine comparably. Recently, Daniel Dinez was voted by employees as a best workplace for women. Right next to Satya Nadella, right? None of our competitors are anywhere on these cultural landscapes. Culture is extremely important. We want to build a company that is the epitome of the next generation of businesses, right? I think the next would be the product then. We built a product that's open. We built a product that is extensible, open APIs. We embed and best of breed components. We don't build our, a lot of our competitors have proprietary components like proprietary AI or others. No, we're very open in our architecture. And we've made that product easily available through our community. And that's been a big difference between us and our competitors. Community is not just a free download though. Community is how you embrace your users. How you give them, you know, a whole experience training and the ability to share their skills and best practices, as well as obviously access to software. And then finally, I think our customer success. One of the best things about this last year is we've watched hundreds of customers begin to really scale. We're talking hundreds, thousands and even hundreds of thousands of robots, right? And as they go from into HR and they work on robots to help with HR admin and HR recruiting, right? Or they go into legal or contact centers. Call centers are really popular right now. A lot of our airline customers, you know, they really want to help improve the experience not only for their customers, but their employees. Their employees don't want to be on a phone for 25 minutes either to a disgruntled person. But they have to check, you know, an employee goes and looks at like 10 different systems sometimes to go solve a problem. Robots can do all that work and cut the entire call center experience down by 60%. Everybody benefits. So we're seeing, you know, we're seeing, you know, again, you know, great company, great product and amazing customers scaling. All right, we always know Gartner does a very kind of point in time look at what they're doing. You know, you mentioned kind of the open environment there. One of the things they were tracking is the ecosystem because obviously there's a lot of softwares that you need to integrate with. And software is always changing. So how does the technology deal with those changes? You know, we all would complain. It's like, oh geez, I went into Gmail and my interface looks totally different today than it did before. How does that impact stuff? So what, you know, what's changing is are there things in the last kind of six to 12 months that maybe the report doesn't catch? Or, you know, what should people be looking for? One of the challenges with the report is that it took a long time to complete. We started, they started this, I think it was last October. So for us, it's multiple versions to go, right? But we still had a great spot. One of our competitors I think decided that, you know, they didn't like their result. And hence, MQ took a little longer than it should have. So yes, from a product perspective, we've gone a long way since in October. I think a number of things are important. One is, you know, we embed AI into the product and use different components around helping with document understanding, visual understanding, conversational understanding. And so there's a lot of advancements on the ability for a robot, robots learn new skills is a phrase we often use, for a robot to do more and more, you know, with every release. That, a lot of those can be, you know, our components or our partners. We have 700 companies today that are in our ecosystem, right, so maybe a natural language processing company like Core AI, right, or an AI, ML company like Element AI or SkyMind, right, DataRobot. These are all amazing companies that have great algorithms, but they don't have access to the data, right? Well, the customer's data's flowing through our platform and in these automations. We've made it very easy to drag and drop AI, you know, to drag and drop in Watson, for example, to apply to an automation flowing through our platform, right? So, you know, with every release, you know, robots gain new skills. We make the product easier and easier to use. We're making it easier for more people who have even less technical skills to be able to automate. Almost Excel users will be able to automate from within Excel with a new version that's coming up, right? So, you know, all axes, you know, we're a 3,000 person company now, right? So we've got a lot of developers. So, you know, all axes, ease of use, scalability, they're all growing fast. Yeah, I want to unpack that, what you just brought up there a little bit. This is not necessarily IT rolling out these environments. We know it's going to be fast and, you know, tied to the business. Oftentimes it will start in the business. How is that dynamic working? You know, your customers that you've been with for a while, you know, how do they work through that dynamic? There are four phases in the maturity of kind of an RPA program, right? The first phase is citizen development led. It's often led within a business, like within finance or within HR, within call center. The second phase, IT gets involved and the CIO gets involved. This is where they say, okay, I've got to govern this. You know, robots are like human workers. They have to have credentials and log in passwords and things. So, to manage them and robots actually bring a lot of compliance and auditability, right? Everything a robot does is tracked and stored and so CIOs get involved in phase two. That's when they build out what we call the rock, a robotic operation center, right? And this is where they scale using hundreds of robots, lots of automations, and they're really building a pipeline to serve their company. Phase three is when the CEO gets involved. This is where around our vision of a robot for every person. This is when CEO, the board began to think about automation and its impact across the entire enterprise. And then the kind of, I would say the aspirational phase of which we see some today is what we call phase four, which is the gigabot economy. These robots are working up and down a value chain and a supply chain shared amongst companies in a way that the entire chain benefits, right? And this is actually where we see some blockchain use cases coming in where blockchain becomes the immutable source of truth for the actions a robot does between a customer and say a manufacturer. So, those four phases, that maturity model is absolutely critical, but I think it's important to note in phase two, serving the IT, providing a platform that they can, that they know is secure, that they can, that has good auditing, that they can scale efficiently and effectively. It's really important. So, we often say, you know, we're built for both business and for IT. All right. October, you've got a UI path forward coming to the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Give us a little bit of a sneak peek as to what people can be expecting when they come to your big event. Yeah, forward's going to be amazing this year. And as you know, we host events all around the world. This year we'll host 23,000 people at our own UI path events, which is absolutely incredible. This will be our kind of flagship signature event where we will unveil a stream of new products. We have made some acquisitions that we have not announced that are part of that. We will be taking the platform and making it much more kind of easy to implement on one side to higher scalability on the other side. It will show a lot of innovations around that. We're going to also show some disruption in some other markets. RPA can really extend itself into other technologies, into other markets that exist today as a new way of doing things. And so we're excited to unveil what I think will be some pretty strategic directions for RPA. And finally, the real focus of this event will be about customer stories, particularly customers that have scale. We'll have about two dozen customers who will talk about how they've scaled their operations, how they're adding, they're doubling their automations every month, hundreds or thousands of robots, how they manage that, how they deploy that, how they market internally even. How do they, one of the challenges they have is how do I educate within my own company, right? One of my favorite stories last week on our two weeks ago on LinkedIn was a CEO of Singtel out of Singapore. He put out a post showing a hackathon that they ran where, and he said, we're now a believer in a robot for every Singtel employee. And the employee that won the hackathon had been there 46 years. The robot solved the problem that drove her nuts every week of her career. And she was thrilled. So, this is going to be an event to celebrate also. Celebrate the community, celebrate success, celebrate automation. Yeah, final question I have for you, Bobby. I love talking to CMOs about how technology is impacting your job. So, what's new about the digital transformation, RPA, automation first, cloud first, era for CMO like yourself? So, we have a dozen robots in marketing. I have my favorite one. I think I did a post on this one. My favorite one was I would, I'd wake up every morning and I would go to my device, I'd go look up Google Trends, how are we doing? You know, I'd go to Alexa.com or similar web.com, how are we doing these are competitors. And I'd, you know, take the screen, look in there, okay great, we're doing great. Well, that was 10 minutes of my day. Every day. Well, now we have a robot that does it every morning for me, and it takes the data, puts it into a Google Sheet and I can track it over time, right? You know, it's an easy example. But we actually use robots in a much more serious way where we move data between different systems, between event-bright systems or between our CRM systems and our lead. When we get leads that come in, our robots actually take the lead based on location and notify the right people in each region, right? So robots are, you know, kind of running, you know, throughout how we operate as a company. We have our own rock, our own robotic operations center in our business. We think about automations, you know, throughout our entire organization and it's exciting. We have interns this summer and there's an intern contest and they're building new robots. And we have fun robots too, robots that help with fantasy football, right? And if you forget to make your selections, it will go fix it for you so you don't miss out, you know, perhaps on moving a player, it's not playing out. So all kinds of, you know, fun with robots, whether it's marketing, HR or legal, it's exciting. All right, well, Bobby Patrick, thanks so much for all the updates. Congratulations on the momentum. The updates in the Gartner MQ and I know we look forward to UiPath forward in Las Vegas later this year. Thanks too. All right. As always, check out thecube.net to see all of the content we've done. If you go in the search and search UiPath, you can see Daniel, their CEO of the previous conversation with Bobby as well as who we'll have on at the show there. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCube.