Mergers & Acquisitions with James Dening, partner at Microsoft, ex-CEO of Minit Process Mining

This is the 40th episode of The Mining Your Business Podcast, a show all about Process Mining Data Science and Advanced Business Analytics. You know, we've done a lot of things in the previous 39 episodes, but you know what we've never done? Being a CEO of a company and being acquired by Microsoft. Luckily, our guest has done just that. James Denning, former CEO of Mining, now partner at Microsoft, is here to tell us all about Mining and the recent acquisition by Microsoft. Let's get into it. [MUSIC] When I was younger and read about these major tech acquisitions, I thought to myself, oh, wow, this tech world, this is just crazy. I wonder how it works behind the courtiers. Little did I know that I would have an amazing opportunity to discuss all of this with a CEO of such a company. Ladies and gentlemen, you're listening to the 40th episode of Patrick. 40th episode, that's crazy. That is pretty crazy. 40th episode of Mining Your Business Podcast, the only podcast focused on Process Mining out there. Joining us today is now a partner at Microsoft, former CEO of Mining, Process Mining, James Denning. James, welcome to our show. We are super excited to have you on. Guys, lovely to be here. Thank you for having me. James, is it true that once you get acquired by a major tech company, you can basically chill on the beach in the Caribbean, sipping on a cocktail at the Turing Club and enjoying your life for the rest of the days? So I'm sat here in East Anglia about 10 miles north of Cambridge in the UK. I'm looking out to cross wheat fields rather than a beach. I've checked my office and nobody in my family seems to have bought me any sort of cocktail this morning. So no, I can very honestly say that it's a different sort of fast, but yeah, you're not sat back on the beach. Certainly not working for one of the, you know, come to Microsoft. Microsoft, obviously, huge, you well known company. You know, in my opinion, one of the great tech companies, we've all used Microsoft products. I've been using them for quite a few decades since I started as a software engineer and even before that. There is that customer-centric attitude that I think companies like Microsoft enjoy. That takes work. It takes hard work. So no, no cocktails on the beach for me just yet. Not to mention that if we're talking about cocktails in the UK, we would probably set up or, you know, settle for a pint of beer. So, yeah, and I'll happily settle for a pint of beer. That makes two of us. Anyway, James, we will definitely talk more into the acquisition because this is something that we haven't discussed on the show yet. And frankly, this is just an amazing opportunity for both us, but also our listeners to div dive into this a little more. But first things first, how did you get into process mining? I mean, your journey is pretty, you know, you worked in automation anywhere, H2O AI. And now, see you of mine it. How did you get there? So, I've always been interested in how businesses work, you know, in that whole process piece. And I remember when I moved from being. I started as a software engineer. For the simple reason, I had a degree in computer science. I loved writing software, but you know, I hung out in the computer and at school for many years. I started writing software when I was kind of. I was part of that Sinclair ZX81 Spectrum BBC Model B generation. And I think if you talk to anyone, you know, I'm 51 years old, talk to anyone my age in the UK who's in technology, they will recount the same kind of technological journey of, you know, through the different personal computers. And when I moved from being a software engineer to being more of a management, the leadership role, I was fascinated by the science of how businesses work. How did those processes work? And I found that there was a whole field of process design and process management. And I've always been interested in how the universe works. My first group's in physics, because I was interested in how. What happens when you flick a light switch? Yeah, where do electrons go to? And how is the building blocks of the universe? And software was the same. You know, if you look at something that we take for granted now, you swipe, you know, something on a iPhone screen, that background and software to me kind of opened up all of the things that happen when you do that. That, you know, the layer upon layer upon layer of code and libraries and all those things down to some of the fundamentals of, you know, we're going to add these two numbers together and compare them. And if it's zero, we jump to a different, you know, point in the, in our executable codebase. And I got the opportunity back about six years ago to go to automation anywhere. And automation anywhere was all about processes. And before that, I'd been in various sales roles. But automation anywhere, for me, was a bit of an eye-opener. I stood outside King's Cross Station for about two hours, two and a quarter hours for having my first phone call with a guy called Mark Fletcher, that was the guy who hired me and I worked for for many years, still a really good friend of mine. And we talked about RPA. And to me, RPA, it was just such an obvious solution that was going to go big because I looked at my job. I was a sales marketing director at a telecoms company. And I looked at my job and kind of went, well, I could automate that and all of that bit, a bit of that, probably none of that. But all some of that bit. And I looked at my job and all the things, you know, the bits of the business that I had rebought into me and thought, wow, there's so much opportunity there. So for me, it was the bridge of being interested in processes and being interested in designing processes. And then going to a company where we had a product that was, you know, RPA automation that was directly related to those processes. So that was the first kind of step on the journey into actually being a vendor in that process insights, that process mining world. Right, right. So I'm imagining that when you saw the process mining, the process explorer, the entire graph and stuff, your mind went immediately to, well, how does that work? How do we go from just random data into this graph of a process of spanning millions and millions of cases with activities and things like that, right? Yeah, I think, you know, automation is one approach to improving your processes. You know, fundamentally, if you have a process, what you care about, what you care about as somebody in the business is how do I get the best outcomes of that process for the least cost? And I use cost in a very loose sense. You know, people time money. So, and there were two ways to do that really. A, you can find a way of decreasing the cost it takes to operate that process. Or you can make the process more efficient. Automation is very much about, you know, through, through cheaper resource, and I'm generalising a lot here, I appreciate. But, you know, through cheaper resource at the product at the process, and you'll get, you know, hopefully, just as good outcomes, but for a fraction of cost if you have people operating it. If you go to a management consultancy and say, we've got a process that will charge you lots of money. But, you know, hopefully they'll say, well, here's the way to make that process more efficient. But something that occurred me a, a, a while back is we're operating slightly in the dark. You know, we, we kind of have our suspicions about how world processes are working. But we, we haven't really got to a point yet. And this is where process mining comes in. Where we really understand, right? The reality of how well that process is working. We often understand the theory. We're going to, you know, some process analysis. We'll get consultants in. We'll do some task money. And we know the theory of how that process is meant to work. But in my experience, it's not the 80 or 90 or 95% of the time that a process, you know, an instance of the process that you start. It's not that 90% of the time that it goes through the happy path that causes you problems. It's the 10% or 5% or 1% whatever. Where it goes through a slightly weird path, you may not have predicted. You may not even know about. That's where the problems come in. That's where you get those outlines. And it's the outlines. I mean, we talk about the 80/20 rule. It's the 20% of outline. It's because you've 80% of the problems. Maybe it's the 1991 rule for processes. But the advantage of instrumenting your processes, and this is for me that the heart of the whole thing, is it gives you insight into the reality of how well any specific process is working. And that's really important. Because only if you understand that. Can you decide, do we need throw automation at it? Do we need to fundamentally re-engineer that process? Or is it fine? Can we leave the lane and go and focus our time, and money, and attention on something else? So, if you imagine the promises of process mining, savings in X amount of millions, and efficiency making your process so much more efficient, do you think process mining is delivering on these promises? I think it's starting to, yeah. There are use cases that I've seen. Real customers that I've seen, where people have had very big chunks of their business, and they've used process mining to guide them into the best way to improve or optimize those processes. And they have seen millions or tens of million dollars of improvement. You know, big businesses churn out lots and lots of output. You know, there are big numbers floating around. You know, we have billion dollar businesses. They turn over billions or tens of billions of dollars. Product comes in, or supplies come in, material comes in. Product goes out. You don't need to find a huge amount in percentage terms in way of optimisation on the process. For that to make a huge difference. If you're, I don't know, BMW. And you've got 20,000 invoices a week. If you can improve your, you know, 20,000 orders being placed on your week, by dealers, by whatever, if you can improve your order to cash by a couple of days, that has a massive financial effect on the business. So, no, I think given the times we live in now, where businesses need to be more efficient to survive and thrive, I think process mining is absolutely delivering on bringing that reality to us. And remember, process mining itself gives you insight into what's happening. The really important bit, the only important bit, is how that insight is then used to deliver a better business outcome. And it's something we've, you know, I wrote down some tenets the other day. And one of the core tenets is, insight is not enough. You must have actionable, you know, there must be action. There must be an outcome tied to those insights. Without that, what's the point? Right. So, James, what did you experience bring on the table when you became a CEO of mine? Because, I find it fascinating that the vision that you already had that you brought in, you know, working in automation anywhere and seeing the processes from, I would say a little different perspective. And then you basically come in and become this CEO of process mining, of process mining vendor company. First of all, how did it happen? And second of all, what did you bring on the table specifically? So, how it happened is quite a good story. I had a really good guy working for me at automation anywhere called Martin Afton. Martin's, yeah, he's a good guy, he's a good friend. He was running our partner business better then. And he came to me, I think it was Martin and one of his team came to me a while back and said, "Hey, if you heard of this company called mine it?" And I went, "No." And he goes, "Listen, they're process mining. You know, they're smaller than the product's fantastic. They're really going places." And I'm like, you know, keep an eye on them. And I thought, "Okay, so that's a good steer." And a year later or a year and a half later, I was just starting to think about leaving automation. I've been there for four years. We'd kind of built the email operation up in, I was one of the first couple of people on the ground. There's always a bit of a pub argument, whether it's me or my friend, I know, with the first person. But we'd built this business up into something quite significant. Yeah, we had a few hundred staff. And I've been there for four years, you know, fully vested, you know, all that good stuff. And kind of, you know, done everything I was going to do. And Europe didn't want to take the interest in moving to the US. And I'm like, "Contact's minor." I thought, "That was really interesting." And I'm like, "And they just hired a new CRO." And I went, "Oh, okay, I've missed the boat a bit here." And so I went, I did something else. I joined H2O, you know, great company, inspirational CEO there. But about eight months into that, I got a call from headhunters saying, you know, "Would you be interesting with a minute?" And I said, "Well, they've just filmed the CRO position." They said, "Well, no, we were looking at, maybe you come in as CEO." And I kind of went, "Oh, you know, super." And I hadn't really got to that point in my career where I was actively looking for CRO roles. You know, it was always something I knew I was going to want to do at some point. But I didn't think I was quite there yet. But I had a think, and I thought, listen, with the atmosphere that we had at this 18 months ago, being off the job as the CEO of Tech Company was like, being off the job as a Premature Footballer. You know, this was an amazing tutor. So I went and talked to them, I met the investors, met the founder, Rastau Klaverk, his great guy, really visionary, felt I could work with him. It was one of my key aims was to make sure that he stayed in the company. And he does, he's still reporting to me, Matt Microsoft. And thought, you know what, it's a great space. A really, you know, process mining felt like where we'd been five years previously in software automation and RPO. That it was right on the cusp of becoming a major category. It would deliver really, really cool outcomes for businesses. Why wouldn't I want to do it? And so with Regretta, think about H2O, and I joined the minute. Right, what were your goals coming into this position? Because first of all, I guess it's nobody really prepares you for a position of a CEO. It's not like you're learning this on school. It's usually come with a lot of experience. You kind of have to have this vision what you want to achieve. If you come to the company and we're thinking, wow, let's build it up in a way that somebody bigger eventually comes in and buys us in. Or how did you formulate this idea in your head that, well, what were you bringing there? What did you want to achieve once you were there as a CEO? So it's a great question. In some ways, there wasn't a specific tangible goal about being acquired or going to IPO or whatever. I wanted to build the company. I remember the phrase I used. I wanted to build the company into something significant. However you measure that. ARR is the obvious kind of measure because that's what gets you to an exit. I wanted to run a company well. I wanted to be in the light and CEO and be very collegiate. A lot of stuff I learned to my Amazon days. I wanted to take some of the great stuff I'd learned from previous leaders of mine. How we did hyper growth at automation anyway. It was something I wanted to take to the table. I learned a lot from Mark Fletcher about how to do that, how to build business structures and sales structures to do that really well. There were some soft skills I learned about. Team building that I really wanted to kind of bring from my time. It proved employers. There were some things I'd seen from previous leaders that I didn't want to bring along. There were things where I thought, no, I don't think I like that. I don't know what I want to do like that. So I wanted to kind of be a really good CEO. It sounds silly, but I wanted to kind of be somebody that people would want to go back and work for. I wanted to grow the company. If there was any tangible financial goal, it was on to be unicorn. Yeah, I wanted to get us to a billion dollar valuation. But it was just that feeling of doing something significant. So what did I bring? I think I brought the experience of how to grow an enterprise software business very rapidly. You know, I won't disclose the numbers. But we grew automation anywhere in the first three, four years. It was going like, wildfire. You know, we would just, you know, forget this kind of 20%, 40%, you know, growth a year. It was way bigger than that. And Amazon as well, I used to work for Amazon. Amazon as a massive company was growing at 40% a year. Which might not sound like a huge number. But that means you're doubling in size every two years. I remember having a great conversation with a guy called Alan Lyle. I think he's now at weighted like head of logistics for wafer. And we were talking over a beer in the garden in Luxembourg and he said, "You realize the implication of that, James? Right now I've got, wow, whatever. Ninety full film sets in Europe. The implication of that is, in the next two years, I need to build another Ninety full film set. So that's like one a week. And when you look at it like that, you've got to go, "Hey, that's a really big, that's a big hill to climb." It was very smart guy, you figure that out. But I think what I brought was, yeah, that ability to drive revenue. I think there was a lot of stuff about that the science behind leadership and bringing all of those experiences into the company. I did, I did a fair amount of preparation. I talked to other CEOs, the specific situation now of a new CEO being brought in to replace a founder CEO and that founder CEO being a business. There was an obvious failure mode there. There was almost a failure point there. And I talked to a couple of guys I knew had been in that situation. I got some great advice from some people, some senior leads I really respected. Wade Burgess used the automation anywhere. It was really good. Mehir Schuttler, to my CEO automation, it was great. Dr Charles Woodburn, who's the CEO of Bridge Aerospace. We went school together. We're really good friends. And Charlie gave me some great advice. He said, "James, three things. Get the best people you possibly can. Reward them as well as you possibly can. And then just stay the hell out of their way." And that's always kind of stuck in with that. Get great people and remove the obstacles from their path, enable them. Genuinely create a culture of empowerment rather than seek to manage them. And that makes total sense to me. If I'm hiring somebody to lead marketing or HR or sales or product, they should almost by definition be better than me at that job. They should be an expert in that job. So my goal needs to be to get the right people in the building, make sure those people give them the atmosphere and the culture. Remember, culture needs strategy for breakfast, yeah? Give them that environment where they can thrive and do their best work and remove the obstacles from their way. And then do the stuff that only CEOs can do. Make sure there's enough money in the bank. Yeah, deal with investors. All that stuff. Set the big goals. But fundamentally, I want that culture of empowerment. And I think I succeeded. That's great. I mean, it's really interesting to hear that journey from just being a software engineer and climbing to going through the ringer of all these different jobs, getting the exposure and all these things. And now being the CEO of Mined, what do you think are some of the key qualities that you need to have to do that job as a CEO? And do you think your experience in software engineering kind of played a key part in that or not at all? I think the key qualities are the main one. And I think many people struggle this. And I think I've certainly struggled with this in the past. One of them is humility. You know, you don't want to be the old adage of, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. I think a great CEO gets the best out of the people around them and they're comfortable with other people being better, brighter, sharper, whatever, you know, access you want to measure it on. They're comfortable with people exceeding them. And I think I've probably struggled with that, you know, maybe in my 20s and 30s. You know, I'm talking to you, you'll be back there. We'll be listening to this. You want the humblest almost. And I think that's probably very true. But I think as you, if you want to make that breakthrough to, you know, being a CEO after you're being a senior leader, you need to find the best people in and preferably those people are better than you. There were a few key moments in my career that helped with that. The first one was, well, a couple of them were at Amazon. So Amazon, you know, great company, really well managed. But, you know, a bit of a meat grinder, you know, it's a hard place to work. But there are some things I think they do very well. Hiring, I remember somebody saying to me, whenever you hire somebody, you should be looking to hire somebody who can teach you some, you know, grade A managers, high grade A staff, grade B managers, high grade C staff. And I've seen that to my career. I've seen people scared to hire somebody who was a brighter star than they were, because, you know, because job security, you know, they didn't want to be a clips by people working with them. I've never really had that, maybe innate confidence. I've never had that problem. You know, I've people work with me. I mentioned Rasto, early Rasto is brilliant. You know, you founded the company, man, he had all these great others. And he did that hard bit of taking it from an idea to actually being a real company with real staff and revenue and all that stuff. I haven't done that. Well, I happened in a much smaller way. But that's great. I've got my head of operations, and I'm going to give her a call out, because it'll make her blush. This is Alan Van Chover, super smart. Clever with me, you know, one of the sharpest people I've ever met. And having people of that caliber work for you is a massive boon. You know, I couldn't do what I do. I couldn't lead a business and now leading it with a Microsoft without those astonishing people. So the first learning is, be comfortable with people who are better than you and brighter than you working for you. Yeah, I think that's a really big thing. The second thing is, think about what the best thing you can do in any given situation around empowering the people around you. If I'm in a meeting, I try hard. I think, again, going back 20 years, I found it very easy to dominate meetings. You know, I'm quite big. Yeah, physically, I'm a big guy, I'm a former rugby player. I'm quite loud. I'm quite passionate about, you know, what I speak about. You know, I have lots of ideas. And it's very easy to let someone like me with those characteristics dominate a meeting. So being able to kind of manage a bit more from behind, being able to retreat into the background and let other people get some space in the room and to empower them to talk and have their ideas. And maybe the best thing for me to do in a meeting might be just going to make coffee for everybody because the right people are speaking. I think that's the other big learning. Make sure there are room for other people to bring their best to the table. And again, that is about creating that culture of empowerment. I'll give you one last one. Be a decent person. I'm being asked by my, I think she's about 10 years old. She's now 18 and my younger daughter Katie. I remember saying to me, you know, I'm a huge young. Did you do good things at work today? And I was able to look on you and say, yeah, yeah, I did. So I think having a certain, having a strong moral compass, being a decent person, I think that's so important. And in some ways that overrides any aims or thoughts or considerations you should have about profit and personal success and end and end and end. I think we all have an innate responsibility to be, you know, good people. I mean, I love what I'm hearing Patrick. I think we've got a lot to learn from James over here. Being the smartest person in the room, I think that goes long way for both of us. James, you already mentioned it. And I also found it very intriguing to discuss a little bit. How was this exchange of, let's say, the rain of the company? Because, you know, you basically replaced a founder CEO and became a new CEO. Was there ever a moment of friction or how does this cooperation go? How did you even work together and brought ideas together and agreed on the future heading and future of the company? Really? It was really interesting. It was really big worry for me. And, you know, Rasto really, really sharp guy had built up the company. And the investors made it clear that I was in charge. Yeah, there was no, you must keep, yeah, they were quite brutal in some ways about saying, listen, whatever you need to succeed. Hey, they're investors, you know, that's what they want is success. But I wrote down my kind of four key aims for what I wanted to achieve in the first year with, with, with minute. And one of them was keep Rasto in the building. For, for, for very selfish reasons, he's really bright. You know, he knows where all the bodies are buried. He knows the industry really well. He's a really, really well regarded industry spokesman. He's still handles all our analysts and relations. You know, he was such great asset that I remember thinking, I have to keep this guy. You know, that your success as a leader is the team you have around you. I have to keep this guy. And honestly, we've had a really harmonious relationship from day one. You know, when I first met him, we just got on really well. And throughout our time, there was, yeah, and I honestly, I can think of one moment of friction, which was in the acquisition process. There was some personal terms and, and I was a bit knackered and a bit crouched at this point after, you know, five months of a big satin room of lawyers. And there was one point where I said, I Rasto, just sign it, you know. But genuinely, in all the, you know, the 80 months we've been, you know, worked together, that's the only, literally, the only moment of friction. And I put that down almost entirely to Rasto, you know. It takes an enormous amount of humility and I suppose what's the, what's the right word? You know, personal strength to not only, you know, step sideways, step down from being the CEO, but to stay in the business, report to the new CEO, bring him your A game every day, publicly support him. And he did that nonstop. And for that, I am Rasto. If you have a list of this, thank you, mate. Jacquoyam, so at a very small amount of Slovakian, I can speak, it was quite astonishing. I talked last night to one of our investors and he said, yeah, tell me about how, how did you Rasto do that? I said, honestly, it was, it was Rasto. It's easy for me to be anonymous. Yeah, I'm the new CEO. It's much harder for him to give me all that sport, not only putting his best forward in terms of the output, but doing it with a good grace and doing it with a smile on his face and as a friend. So, you know, you talk about people you make, you know, making friends for life. You know, Rasto and I, we got there very quickly and I'm deeply, deeply grateful to him. So, James, at what point, I'll say that you are now the CEO, the company, at what point did it start? Was there this idea on the horizon that there could be this acquisition? Where are you brought in and there were already talks about that or did it come up later on when you entered? No, not at all. It's, you know, we always knew there would be an exit at some point. You know, we weren't just going to kind of carry on and yeah, we had investors. Yeah, at some point investors want that investment to be crystallized. And, you know, those funds have a limited lifespan. So, there's probably, I think if you put me on the spot back then, I would have said, I don't know, four years, you know, we need to get to where we're going to get to in three, four, five years and there'll be an exit of some sort. But there absolutely wasn't, you know, right, how quickly can we exit this company? So, no, there was never, there was never that plan. We had some inbound interest that we said no to from various places. We were, you know, we had a plan, you know, we had funding. We knew where we were going. We were confident in our business. And it took, you know, it took a company, the caliber of Microsoft, to come in and make a serious offer that got our attention. Now, is the the choice of the company that buys you is obviously an important choice. And did you have some sort of idea who you would like to sell to? Did you have some sort of preferred list or did you, as soon as Microsoft came through the door, knocked down the door and said, hey, we're interested. You started listening immediately or what did that actually look like? How did that initial contact come about? So, we'd always had, we'd had contacted Microsoft for years, I think, just through personal, you know, personal relationships. But there was no list, you know, there was no kind of, I mean, if you'd asked me, I probably could have, you know, said, well, you know, it's this sort of company. And we had, I probably had in my mind who the lightly candidates were based around the space we were operating in, the size of those companies. But no, there was, there was no list. On a, but slightly amusingly, I remember talking to Yara Zubak, you know, when this all happened and he said, you know, it's probably, it's a slightly funny story. I remember thinking like years ago, from an engineering point of view, if we were ever going to be acquired, I'd love it to be Microsoft. That would be like Microsoft. Like if I could complete, because this is the greatest software company in the history of the world, wouldn't it be amazing if that code base and that IP that me and my team have developed if it became part of Microsoft? That'd be real well, man. So, you know, so there you go. Yara, I'm glad we managed to tick that life achievement for you. But no, there was never a list. It, you know, things just happened. Now, James, how does such an acquisition look like? Do you just meet in a bar over the pint of beer and the guy from Microsoft just writes a sum of money on the paper? He just handed over to you and you're like, all right, you get a deal. So, I'll be a little bit coy, you know, we, you know, speaking as a as a partner of Microsoft, we don't discuss Yara acquisitions. But it's, it's, I won't tell you about the process, but the process is a fast-stranger in some ways and a far more mundane in other ways than you can possibly imagine. You know, you, you come out of it kind of going, wow, you know, I certainly learned an enormous amount. I mean, the whole process goes on for months. You know, if you look at really big acquisitions, they've gone for years, you know, of due diligence and regulatory inquiries and whatever. I've never done anything like it. There was stuff you learned, just stuff you go, really, is that a thing? The whole mechanics fit and the legal process and how definitive agreements, you know, the stock purchase agreements work and warranties and all this stuff. Yeah. And until you've actually done it, you kind of don't know this stuff, you know, so it was, it was really hard. I'll be clear about that. It was because as the CEO, you're in the middle of all of this and you're essentially negotiating between not just kind of your you and Microsoft in this case, but you've got all your different sellers, all the different funds. And whilst, you know, we have three major investors. We had a lot more minor investors. They all have, you know, and some of our minor investors were really big, big investment funds. They all have teams of lawyers say you're kind of negotiating a 15-way agreement. Plus, you've got, you know, due diligence, which is, it's massive. You know, you're literally turning out every single document that's ever passed through the company. Everyone is everywhere. All of this stuff. Yeah. And this isn't Microsoft specific. This is a general. So it's a really hard process. And at the same time, you're trying to keep the business running. Yeah. I think the last 17 days we were working 20, 21-hour days. 17 days, right. I mean, me, my COO, and the lawyers. But it's really interesting. You learn a lot. You know, it's just stuff that I don't need a leveler, unless you've actually been, been through it and done it. So I look back at it. For the first month, I didn't want to look back at it at all. It was ghastly. More than slightly bruised. I look back now and go, wow, that was a really interesting learning experience. What is happening inside of the company that is being acquired? Why this is all going on? How does the general wipes around the office are around this? How do you even prepare the company for that? And what is happening on the ongoing basis on, let's say, the day-to-day basis in such a company when you are expecting to be acquired within a couple of weeks or months? So the way it's against, there's no changes because you keep it quiet. If you're being acquired by a large company, keeping it secret is absolutely paramount. Because if news gets out for any publicly, so this isn't just any publicly traded company, you have to be very careful about anything that might influence stock price, share price, because you've got tens, hundreds of millions of dollars at stake and the regulator take a very dim view. So you keep it completely confidential until really right at the last minute because you don't want the news to leak out to the market. So it's a bit of a weird situation because you've got a few of us, so literally, you're not going to see me now for four months, and so you're trying to keep it going, but it becomes obvious, I think, after well, that something is happening. And that's something, for us, we had a fairly obvious cover story of, we're looking to raise investment and there's a huge amount of very similar work. But yeah, you've got a lot of paddling beneath the surface from a few people, a very small team, a leadership team, you after a while. And we actually did a really good job, I'm a very proud team. We did keep the whole thing pretty quiet. We had approach call for if the news got out and we never had to invoke it. But yeah, it's not something you publicize within the company. You can't. I think, A, for the reasons I've talked about about regulatory clients and especially U.S. companies. But also, you don't want people to stop doing a day job. You don't people go, "Oh, we're going to get quiet. I can take it easy for a few months." And you also don't want posting acquisition breaks, exposing it fails. You don't want people to go, and we haven't been acquired and now we need to care. Because people have stock options, there are implications for people in events from acquisition. So you don't want to build up people's hopes and then have a risk of dashing them. I think that again goes back to that. You've got to be a decent person. Yeah. And I think also just having that, having being at home, being stuck at home, working from home is probably easier to hide such an acquisition. If no one sees that you're spending 23-22 hours at the office in a team with lower ears in some meeting room. I'm assuming that's a lot easier. Now, I wanted to know, there's always talks about bigger companies coming in and then there's always a talk of how much control and a strategic focus that new company then has in the direction in which the company that's being bought is going. And I kind of wanted to ask, is there now a big influence there, or is there more like keep doing what you're doing, you're doing great, and you're just part of the new company now. Everyone gets Microsoft badges now instead of minded badges. And how does that new relationship look? So again, a little bit coy. I don't want to give away. We have a plan. We have many plans. I won't elaborate on what those are. But I think the answer is, the answer is, you know, somewhere in the middle. It's certainly not a, here you are now off you go and just count doing exactly that. You know, we are now part of a wider software ecosystem. Microsoft has some very strong IP around the whole process, in process insights business. I think the exciting thing for our customers, and I do view all this stuff through that prism of, what can we bring to our customer base? There are some obvious brilliant, brilliant synergies between what we have around, you know, Power BI and the Power Platform. Remember Microsoft, you know, acquired an RPA company. So we have Power Automate now. And I think process mining fits very, very well into that ecosystem of the other, you know, power products. The aim for us is always to bring, you know, delight to our customers. So having us continue as a completely standalone product, add in for an item, you know, I think is fairly obviously not an option. I think, as you, you'll see over the next, you know, over the months and years, you'll see our roadmap come out around how power, how process mining integrates into those other very successful and very good Microsoft technologies. Maybe I'm going to ask you if you could still unhide at least just a little sample or a little like a drop of where could you even incorporate this technology into? Because, you know, all we know are usually business processes. We work with process mining and business processes and so on and so forth. But seeing Microsoft stepping in, I could also see some other areas where process mining might not have been as prominent just yet. But the idea is the way that the data are being processed and the way that you're working with it could be interesting. And again, if you can share anything and it's just a small sample of what is going to be happening, I would love to hear it. So I think it's probably an elaboration on what I've said, you know, if you, as you understand your business better, so we use process mining use instrumentation to let you understand how well your processes are working, I think it tees up your use of those other technologies. You know, so for example, you know, take power automate, you know, great automation technology, you can apply it to, you know, all sorts of different processes around finance, you know, around logistics, HR, you know, IT, automation is, yeah, and this was my life at automation anywhere. Automation gives you a huge wealth of potential, there's huge wealth of potential processes in a business you can automate. Process mining can serve us as a search light for that, you know, can indicate where are those amazing automation candidates? Where should you be investing your time and effort around technologies like power automate within your business? So for me, there's one obvious thing there. How do we use process mining, you know, Microsoft process mining to guide businesses into where they can, they get the best out of their power automate deployments? Now James, if we look into the current process mining market, it's very interesting and we are basically witnessing a lot of acquisition over the last couple of years. One of the first ones we've seen a process gold from Erickand Wunderlin, who interestingly also had an hour podcast already, you know, 20 to 20 episodes ago, they were required by UI path. We saw sub-bying signal, now mine it, bought by Microsoft, my Invino, bought by IBM and I could go on because there's just so many things that are happening in the market. Could you find any silver lining or on when the market currently is and especially and more importantly, where is it heading and how are these strategic acquisitions impacting the market? So it's really good point and we've seen this, we've seen process mining and to maybe a lesser extent task mining businesses being snapped up. Customers don't just want process mining. That is an underpinning I think is a fundamental thing. Customers want lots of things. Yeah, the statement of record systems that we're talking about here that are the main repositories and executable platforms for process within business. We're talking ERP platforms, CRM platforms. What customers want is they want that soup to nuts ability to understand and improve their processes. So really what a customer wants is they want an ERP platform. Yeah, they want process mining to show them how well that's working. They want automation technologies to be able to automate the bits that they need to automate and then they need orchestration technologies to maybe make sure all those processes are working in lot step across their business. So there is that big move by the big vendors to be able to offer more of that complete ecosystem than you could if you were just offering process mining or just offering automation. So UI path buying process gold, for me there's a fairly obvious move. I think there's still missing a few pieces that IBM automation anywhere just made a small acquisition. That move to having big companies being able to offer ERP or CRM plus process mining plus automation plus orchestration, I think is a good thing for customers. And that's exactly where we're going. I think Microsoft in many ways has actually a bit of an advantage in the market because we have all of that stuff plus more. We've got dynamics. We've got the power platform. We've got power automate. And I think Microsoft has really shown the way by making some very bold acquisitions in the automation space, in the various bits around the ERP. Supplyery, very interesting company that we're acquired and mine it. So I'm pretty happy here that the ecosystem we have is probably the most comprehensive one around. And I think for customers, that's a narrative. They can really buy into. If you want to have a strong roadmap going forward, you want to vendor that is looking across all aspects of what you want. I'm not saying well, I've got this bit and it might integrate with the bits around it. You want to make sure you've got those tight integrations across all those parts of that value trade from that soup course through starters main course, you know, dessert nuts. And I think we're in a good position. Right. So it's adding that extra brick in the suite of software that they already offer, getting a more cohesive kind of experience for the end user. Yeah, I think so. You know, at the end of the day, none of these systems work in isolation and the tighter those systems are tied together and the more the easier it is for you to realize business value out of them. So with the acquisition now, what does the future of mine at all? What are you excited about? Where do you think the industry is going next now with this added capital or resources that Microsoft gives you? What do you think is going to be the next big thing here? So for me, there are two things that really exciting. One is what I've just talked about, the ability to offer complete solutions to customers, you know, instead of saying, hey, we've got great process mind technology that the fact we can now deliver that embedded, you know, with process advisor that we grew up, you know, with Power Automate, with Power BI, you know, people use Power BI across their whole businesses to give that visualization and understand what's going on, us being able to integrate really tightly that huge exciting. So that technical roadmap for me is absolutely mega, you know, really exciting about that. The second thing is access to customers. Every company in the world, pretty much, is Microsoft customer. And one of the hardest thing when you're a small vendor is is that it's the Camden Town pet shop experience. And that won't mean anything to you. It won't mean anything to anyone. I lived there, I lived there. It won't mean anything to anyone apart from two people in their 80s, my parents, when they were first together back in the late 60s before I was born. They went to a pet shop at Camden Town and they wanted my cat and they picked the cat that kind of, you know, every few seconds, it would, it would levitate over the top of the cage and kind of go, wow, you know, it would do the simply, and say, fine, you took the cat, the kind of, jumped the highest and yelled at us. And, and I think being a, a small vendor on up at your challenger, it can feel a bit like that. You know, you've got great technology, you can give great outcomes for customers, but just trying to get noticed can be really hard. You know, and you spend all this time and effort, a marketing budget, you know, you do trade shows, you need to, you know, above the line you do, below the line you do brands and you go at all this stuff. And, um, and that can be exhausting. And the, I'm super confident in our technology, it works really well, we've got this great narrative. For me, the fact I now have access to all those customers, I can go and see these CIOs and, and, and, and, and CFOs and educate them and say, hey, listen, this is what we can offer you. That's really exciting. I can cut out the kind of trudging through the sand trying to, you know, get those meetings. I can go to the cool and interesting bit, which is helping customers, which is giving them great technology to deliver great outcomes to them. And that, that's, you know, that's fabulous. Right. So it's, um, like trying to get your foot in the door before, but now you're in their living room. Yeah. Pretty, we're in the living room, we're in a kitchen, we're in a garage, you know, wherever, but it's, it's, it's really, it, I, I think the, the best part of, of being, you know, an executive in the technology business is, is delivering technologies, actually seeing real world outcomes. You know, I remember the first time, uh, we sold a deal when I was at automation genuine, um, we, we did a deal with, with Mesc, you know, the big shipping company. And I was half my house, I was waiting at the level crossing and a whole bunch of training might pass all these contains, and there was Mesc, and I was like, hey, we're helping get that trouble. And, you know, it was quite cool. You know, it's like, we've actually delivered this real tangible, and I'm seeing the containers on a training front of me. So I think delivering, you know, delivering real world benefit, I think is a, is a thrill. It's genuinely one of the reasons why I, I like doing what I do. Um, working for Microsoft gives me the ability to do that bigger, faster, wider, to scale, you know, what I can do there, what I and my team can do. Uh, and that's, that's, that's really exciting. Yeah, it does sound that you are very excited about what you're doing right now and where you are it. Um, James, where can people eventually find you, find out more about what you're doing, or, uh, where would you, where would you send them? Uh, if you're Google for, you know, uh, minute process, mining, Microsoft, uh, we're easy to find. Uh, for me personally, you can find me on LinkedIn, uh, James Denning, D N I N G, spelt slightly differently from normal, but I'm on LinkedIn, uh, easy to get a hold of. I don't, I don't hide my light under a bushel particular. Awesome. And James, I have one last question because, uh, unlike our listeners, I can see that you have a huge, a huge library just behind you. Uh, what are you currently reading? Oh, good question. Well, um, I've just finished the new rivers of London book by Ben, uh, Aranavitch, which is very good. And I'm just about to start, uh, reading, uh, the first, uh, rereading for, for about the fifth time, um, the first law trilogy by Joe Abacromby. Uh, my reading tends to be to relax and switch off. Um, uh, so it tends to be slightly crappy science fiction effect. Well, not slightly crappy, very good. Yeah, I think the Abacromby, the, his first trilogy is one of the best things, and I've read an awful lot. Um, on the business side, I've actually got, uh, there's a great book called Legacy that, uh, I've just finished. Um, it's the study of business from the point of view of, of the New Zealand All Blacks, uh, rugby team. I, I've played rugby all my life. Uh, one of my children plays rugby for England. Still don't get tired of saying that. Um, which is, which is cool. Yeah, massive big bruiser. Uh, I mentioned her earlier. She's called Katie. Um, uh, that, that Legacy is, is, is a great book. It's about how the All Blacks who are the most successful elite team of all time, uh, where, you know, they win six out of seven matches they play against other elite components, uh, uh, opponents. Right. Um, the next team, I think, is either Manchester United or Real Madrid. I think one of the American gridiron teams is, is up there as well, but they're at kind of 60%. The All Blacks are at 87%. And it's about humility. It's about, um, uh, leaving the shirt, you know, you, you, you borrowed the shirt and you leave that shirt in a better place, uh, than when you, you, you, you found it. And there's, I think one of the first chapters is called sweeping the sheds. And at the end of every test match, and this includes World Cup finals. Two of the senior players will take the, uh, two brums, two big brushes. And after everyone's left the change rooms, they will sweep out the change rooms, which we full of, you know, grass and mud and bits of bandage and, you know, bottles and stuff, but they will sweep them out. And the point is, never forget that humility. So, so legacy, um, uh, a brilliant book. I would thoroughly recommend it to, to everybody. All right, James, uh, very inspiring words. Uh, thank you very much for joining us in our podcast. It's been, I always say it's lovely. And I will just repeat it again. It's lovely to have you on. Uh, thank you for joining us. And, uh, I wish you went, uh, mind it. And now actually, Microsoft to have as much success with the process, mining and other technologies as possible. Thank you very much. All right. For the rest of you, dear listeners, thank you for listening and tuning in on mining your business podcast. We are happy to have you. Um, you know, if you have any question, just feel free to reach out. We are very active on LinkedIn. You can also write us an email on mining your business podcast at gmail.com. And if you have any questions, if you have some recommendations on who to invite next, just text up and we will be happy to serve you in this. So thank you very much. And, uh, I'll be looking forward to hear from you again in two weeks. Bye-bye.