Automation Anywhere, a provider of a robotic process automation (RPA) platform, announced this week at its Imagine Partner conference that with help from channel partners as well as Oracle and IBM it expects to deploy over three million bots by 2020.
To achieve that goal Automation Anywhere is inviting partners to leverage the company’s Intelligent Digital Workforce Platform to build bots that Automation Anywhere will then make available via an online marketplace. All told, Automation Anywhere estimates bots built using robotic process automation platform will soon become a $100 billion market.
As part of an effort to build a robust partner ecosystem, Automation Anywhere this week also announced an alliance with Oracle under which Automation Anywhere has become a member of the Oracle Partner Network (OPN). As part of that alliance, Automation Anywhere has developed connectors to the Oracle Cloud. At the same time, Automation Anywhere is extending an existing alliance with IBM to provide tighter integration with the IBM Automation Platform for Digital Business, a suite of business process management (BPM) tools and services. Those announcements come on the heels of a distribution agreement with Tech Data that was revealed earlier this month.
RPA is about to become one of those rare pervasively employed technologies that drive innovation for a decade or more, says Automation Anywhere CEO Mihir Shukla.
“It’s going to become an enduring technology like the Internet or the smartphone,” says Shukla.
The first generation of RPA technologies largely focused on automating repetitive tasks involving the processing of documents. But as the line between RPA and artificial intelligence (AI) continues to blur, the bots created using an RPA platform are leveraging machine and deep learning algorithms to make it possible for bots to continuously learn. In addition, as new data sources are incorporated into AI models, the rate at which those bots are either being updated or replaced is starting to increase.
Those bots are essentially becoming digital workers that organizations will either build or hire on a temporary basis. This week, for example, Toptal, a provider of labor services, announced will now make digital workers that can process tasks such as accounts receivables available alongside human workers on a contract basis.
Whether these bot platforms ultimately becomes known as RPA or AI may not be all that relevant at the end of the day, says Shukla. Most organizations are a lot more interested in the business outcome than they are in the technology employed to accomplish it. The opportunity for partners is to develop the technical and business acumen needed to build a new generation of digital workers that will soon take over most of the rote tasks most human workers would prefer not to have to do in the first place.
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