For the third year running, Gartner has identified RPA(Robotic Process Automation) as one of the fastest growing technologies in the industry. And for the third year running, UiPath has been named by industry experts and analysts as the leading Intelligent Automation platform for enterprises. IDC shared that the Worldwide Economic Benefit of adopting RPA will be over 129B in the next 5 years, amazing numbers!
Miracle Software Systems is a proud UiPath Diamond Partner and our Intelligent Automation team had the opportunity to attend UiPath Forward IV in Las Vegas this week. In person event again, yeah!
So, with UiPath known as one of the industry innovators, what did they announce at Forward IV? Lots!
Note : The announcements in this post are not all generally available, some may be in preview, beta (or) for future releases.
TL;DR
- UiPath continues to evolve from a RPA product to an end-to-end Intelligent Automation Platform
- Automation Hub and Task Capture are now available on-premises while Process Mining is available as a SaaS(Cloud) offering – thus allowing the entire “Discover” offerings available on both cloud and on-premises
- UiPath has now added API Integrations and Server Side Events(Triggers) by incorporating their acquisition of CloudElements – this is UiPath Integration Service
- Forms AI has been added to UiPath’s Document Understanding along with more pre-built ML models for Intelligent Document Processing
- UiPath’s Automation Cloud(tenant) now also provides cloud-hosted robots so that you can completely be infrastructure free in your automation efforts
- UiPath has embraced multi-cloud deployments by announcing “Automation Suite” which is a kubernetes-based containerized version of the platform that you can deploy anywhere
- Cross Platform is now a reality for UiPath with Assistant on Mac and Linux based Robots now being launched
- Auto-Healing is entering into the robot foray as well, with configurable auto-healing checks now being added
- Microsoft Teams integration will allow for users to trigger processes right from their conversations; truly enabling human-robot collaboration
- UiPath has announced a new security alliance with CrowdStrike to provide better robot level security
Through this blog post, we will cover the different platform features of UiPath and what new and cool offerings they are launching in each of these spaces.
Discover
UiPath’s Discover suite of products includes Automation Hub, Task Capture, Process Mining and Task Mining. These tools are meant to help enterprises manage their automation pipeline within the CoE.
Updates from UiPath Forward IV 2021,
- Automation Hub, which was only a cloud offering till now, is now available to be installed on-premises
- Process Mining will be made available as a full SaaS offering on the cloud
- Task Mining will be made available as an on-premise offering also
- Process Mining now also boasts a new architecture for improved data ingestion, additional connectors for new LoB applications and configurable KPIs for measuring process improvements
UiPath also showed an exceptional demo for “DeskCorp”, a fictional enterprise, where they could mine data from SAP, evaluate their process bottlenecks and push automation ideas to Automation Hub – all in one simple workflow.
Build
UiPath launched UiPath’s Integration Service which evolved from their acquisition of Cloud Elements
* Developers can now use a combination of UI automation, ML algorithms and API integration
* More Machine Learning pre-built algorithms for classification and extraction in Document Understanding – they have now launched Forms AI in this release for DU
UiPath’s vision for “Build” is to enable developers to have access to build UI automation workflows, add API integrations and incorporate ML algorithms into their automations. This is exactly the direction they are headed in with their new announcements.
- UiPath launched UiPath’s Integration Service which is a part of their IPaaS acquisition – Cloud Elements
- The Integration Service now provides developers with an easy way to add new connections with secure credentials and then consume those connections in your Studio workflows
- These connections include over 70+ pre-built connectors with enterprise applications such as Office 365, Salesforce, Workday and more
- The service also adds an event-driven mechanism to Trigger bots in Orchestrator using Server Side Events
- UiPath is also adding more great capabilities to AI Fabric to enhance the pre-built models available for automation engineers to add “smarts” to their workflows
- They also announced a new Forms AI for Document Understanding
Manage and Run
- What if you could run your bots on a Linux machine?
- What if you could deploy an entire automation platform on Kubernetes?
- What if your robots can auto-heal their environments?
- What if you could consume robots in the cloud?
UiPath has made all of the above a reality.
- UiPath has announced Linux based robots which will allow RPA developers to build cross-platform automations in Studio – this continues to add to the deployment models that UiPath offer
- Cross Platform automations currently only support unattended automations that do not require UI interactions
- A new auto-healing feature was announced which will allow RPA CoEs to govern the state of their robots environment and thus have Orchestrator check for health metrics and self-heal your robot’s environments; It will be really interesting to see how this will scale for large RPA deployments
- Automation Cloud will now have cloud-based UiPath Robots as well in the near future, in the past the cloud option only provided the orchestration of your robots but not the actual runtime itself
- And finally, UiPath announced “Automation Suite” – an end to end automation platform that you can deploy and scale on the cloud of your choice and enabled by a containerized approach with Kubernetes
Engage
- UiPath has now announced UiPath Assistant for Mac – yes, you heard me right! Mac users can now trigger cross-platform robots from OS X
- A new native integration with Microsoft Teams is being launched which will allow users to configure and run automations right from your conversations
- UiPath Apps now has it’s complex Data Service while also allow you to embed data and actions right within Outlook with Apps
Govern
Last but not least, UiPath has formed a strategic alliance with CrowdStrike to enable enterprise-grade security for UiPath Robots. CrowdStrike is a cyber security and end point security leader in the industry with their Falcon platform. With this new alliance, UiPath will allow you to configure and secure data access and end point security for UiPath Robots while using the CrowdStrike platform
Miracle Software Systems is a UiPath Diamond Partner and an end-to-end implementation partner with UiPath’s RPA Platform. If you are looking to launch and scale your Intelligent Automation program, reach out to us today at rpa@miraclesoft.com.
