{"id":4215,"date":"2021-03-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/rpa-is-alive_030321\/"},"modified":"2021-12-14T09:05:22","modified_gmt":"2021-12-14T09:05:22","slug":"rpa-is-alive_030321","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/rpa-is-alive_030321\/","title":{"rendered":"RPA is alive…With Super Marios to the rescue"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/strong><\/p>\n We’ve been pushing our concept of Native Automation<\/a> hard these past few weeks, where it’s imperative for organizations to embed an attitude<\/em> to automation workflows deep into their operations. So what better to promote this native adoption, than to get it for free<\/em> from the world’s juggernaut desktop software institution, Microsoft? And does this spell trouble for the likes of UiPath and AutomationAnywhere’s desire to IPO… now RPA is practically free for all? They now have little choice<\/em> but to prove their value beyond<\/em> RPA.<\/p>\n RPA is not dead, as previously stated. Thanks to Microsoft, it’s going mainstream.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n In line with day one of its annual Ignite events, Microsoft announced<\/a> that it would immediately offer a free version of its Power Automate Desktop robotic process automation (RPA) application. This is available for complimentary download starting today. Additionally, it will become a standard part of Windows 10 and subsequent versions on a go-forward basis. This seemingly modest announcement baked into a sea of other Ignite news has the potential to drive RPA mainstream through a bottom-up approach of democratized use.<\/p>\n Here’s a quick RPA history lesson on how we got here and why this announcement matters:<\/p>\n Based on the above timeline, Microsoft was decidedly late to the RPA market. By their own admission, this was entirely intentional as it waited to see how the hype played out. It first announced its entry into the RPA market in 2019 with Power Automate<\/a>, its Power Platform rebrand of Flow with newly added UI Flow for RPA. It hit general availability (GA) in April 2020. And then, suggesting it did not quite have what it needed, Microsoft acquired RPA firm Softomotive<\/a> in May 2020. Our view of the acquisition was that it would strengthen the legitimacy of the RPA industry and that if any vendor was going to achieve UiPath’s vision of a bot for every worker, it would be Microsoft. Perhaps the inherent RPA scale issue could be solved by making RPA the world’s next standard desktop application.<\/p>\n Softomotive integration ensued, and then in December 2020, Microsoft announced the general availability of Power Automate Desktop, the native integration of Softomotive’s WinAutomation technology into Power Automate. The GA announcement heralded the expansion of Microsoft’s RPA capabilities with added features such as a drag and dropped no-code visual designer, embedded web and desktop recorders (to record your work and automate automation builds), and a host of connectors to various systems. The resulting PowerAutomate product as it stands today is a hybrid of cloud-based API automation (flows in Microsoft vernacular) and on-premise user-interface (UI)-based Automation (aka RPA) with the availability of enterprise collaboration, governance, reporting, and integration capabilities – with the rest of the Power Platform (Power Apps, Power BI, and power Virtual Agents) as well as Teams at the top of the integration list. Its primary form is attended Automation – which is Automation triggered by a user. <\/p>\n The resulting impact has been a rapid uptake in enterprise tinkering with the Microsoft tools, as 23% of automation decision-makers now view them as one of their primary automation suppliers, which our recent survey across 400 of the Global 2000 demonstrates:<\/p>\n\n