Microsoft Enters RPA Market

Just saw a hint of this earlier this week, and now more detail.   They should play well here, given what I saw developed using bots with Azure.    Microsoft, make sure it works well with real process in context, and look for extensions to machine learning and AI advances.   It makes lots of sense since MS has been gathering business data in Azure for some time.

Microsoft has entered the RPA market — what does that mean?
By Tom Shelton in Venturebeat
  
Microsoft officially entered the robotic process automation (RPA) marketplace this week with some major changes to its Power Platform. It’s not the first incumbent enterprise software vendors to feel the need to have a product in this category (SAP purchased French RPA vendor Contextor late last year), and it won’t be the last. We should expect to see a steady increase in RPA investment in from big enterprise vendors, with a mix of internally developed and acquired technologies. Watch this space for announcements over the next year from Salesforce, ServiceNow, and even perhaps Oracle, IBM, and others.

The fundamental challenge driving these investments is that RPA is the first step in a journey to reinvent how companies build the software they use to run their businesses (see my recent article on how UIPath is reinventing the RPA category). RPA lets companies record a series of computer-based processes done by a human so that the series can then be repeated automatically without human involvement. When companies change the way they use technology, incumbent enterprise software providers are often threatened. We’ve seen multiple waves of platform change over the past 25 years — web browsers, cloud computing, mobile. But this RPA wave may be even bigger than prior ones in that it changes the way we organize and manage work itself — introducing a hybrid workforce of people, rules-based automations, and increasingly smart algorithms (AI/machine learning).   .... " 

See previously on UiPath