SiliconANGLE article by Jason Bloomberg
Robotic process automation, or RPA for short, burst onto the enterprise tech landscape a handful of years ago, promising to replace humans with robots or “bots” – scripts that automate human interactions with a user interface or application programming interface.
In spite of their futuristic name, however, bots are in fact little more than simple scripts, similar to the macros familiar to Excel users or Macintosh aficionados as far back as the 1980s.
Bots, in fact, have two fundamental shortcomings: They’re brittle, and they do nothing to lower organizations’ technical debt – and can even add to it.
Nevertheless, the RPA market has exploded. The unicorn among unicorns, UiPath Inc., went public earlier this year, and continues to experience dramatic growth. Clearly, the company is doing something right, in spite of the limitations of RPA.
To get to the bottom of this conundrum, I headed to Las Vegas to UiPath’s Forward IV conference, keynoted by Chief Executive Daniel Dines (pictured), to see what the fuss was about. Here’s what I learned:
Why customers love UiPath
The primary business benefit from RPA is improved efficiency. Employees can leverage bots to automate otherwise routine, repetitive tasks, allowing individuals to spend their time on more valuable, interesting work.
Calculating the ROI from such efficiency gains is straightforward and typically more than covers the costs associated with implementing and running UiPath’s platform. Add morale and retention benefits to the mix, and RPA becomes a no-brainer.
There are other RPA vendors in the market, but UiPath has rushed to the head of the pack. In part, we can attribute this success to the quality of its bots. Scripting interactions with the wide variety of user interfaces in enterprises today is a hard problem to solve that gives UiPath a barrier to entry in the marketplace.
Speaking with several UiPath customers, however, clarified the primary reasons UiPath has been so successful: its enterprise-class sales and support, as well as the support of its systems integrator and vendor partners.
Today, enterprises that have moved beyond small-scale RPA experiments to considering broader deployments have learned first-hand that the technology is brittle and has technical debt issues. UiPath customers are under no illusions about the fact that bots can break if something changes.
The solution: comprehensive, full lifecycle support and enterprise-grade governance, respectively – both from external sources as well as the information technology organization. “Engage IT,” advised Joe Bohnert, Intelligent Automation COE manager at Facebook Inc.. “At the end of the day this is technology.”
The support generally begins with UiPath and its SI partners, but in many cases, it includes the buildout of entirely new RPA divisions within IT organizations. UiPath’s RPA requires a team of developers, as well as every other role necessary for building and running enterprise software, including architects, testers, help desk and operations personnel, and more. In spite of this necessary investment, customers report solid return on investment – as long as they put the proper support and development resources in place.
