The 80s and 90s saw a revolution in hardware verification, where automata theory played a prominent role, formalizing model-checking and establishing the basis of verification using the logic-automata connection. We shift focus to software verification and ask how exactly would automata theory be useful in program analysis. Drawing from work in recent years in software verification in my research group as well as in the field, I will identify several key areas, ranging from modeling, abstraction, model-checking, interface synthesis, testing, to logical reasoning with dynamic data-structures, where automata theory promises to provide the right abstractions and yield effective tools for program analysis.