SiliconANGLE article by Jason Bloomberg
Given the rapid growth that robotic process automation leader UiPath Inc. has shown over the last few years, it’s no wonder that the small robotics process automation pond isn’t enough for the company to swim in. Instead, it wants to be the big fish in the expanding enterprise automation lake.
I covered last year’s Forward IV conference, where UiPath cemented its leadership position in RPA, while looking to expand into the platform-centric enterprise automation space. At that time, its vision was ahead of its product execution in a clear example of growing pains for the recently public company.
In spite of UiPath’s slowing growth (a common phenomenon as companies mature), this year’s Forward 5 conference doubled in size from last year’s pandemic-constrained Forward IV – and the increased excitement among customers, partners and UiPath employees was palpable.
Continued growth for UiPath requires it to expand past its RPA roots. In spite of RPA’s limitations – bots can be brittle and add to an organization’s technical debt – RPA remains immensely popular for its cost savings, efficiency and productivity benefits.
By moving into the more strategic enterprise automation marketplace, however, we might wonder whether UiPath is somehow leaving behind its RPA roots.
The Forward 5 crowd quickly dispelled this notion. UiPath isn’t moving away from RPA. It is building a platform-based automation strategy with RPA at the center.
UiPath’s strategic roadmap
UiPath describes the value propositions of its new business automation platform as discover, automate and operate.
Discover leverages its task and process mining capabilities to identify opportunities for automation.
Such automation, in turn, becomes a new way of operating an enterprise – not simply operating its technology, but rethinking how the entire organization runs. This journey UiPath wants to take its customers on goes from RPA to enterprise automation to digital transformation.
RPA focuses on cost savings via efficiency and productivity improvements. RPA’s value proposition is thus largely tactical: Replace human activities with automated tasks.
Enterprise automation extends that value proposition with process transformation benefits. It leverages process mining, artificial intelligence and other technologies to change the way organizations do business.
Digital transformation, in turn, leverages automation to better align organizations with customer needs. Such transformation requires enterprises to rethink how they meet changing customer needs over time by adopting change as a core competency across the organization.
As a result, the role of automation shifts dramatically from the static, brittle bots of RPA to a dynamic vision for automation that supports ongoing change. Such change is the root of innovation, making the digital transformation goal a solidly strategic value proposition for UiPath.
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