At its customer conference in Las Vegas yesterday, automation and robotic process automation (RPA) leader UiPath detailed product enhancements and several partnerships, including an expanded alliance with Microsoft aimed at improving end user productivity.
The new product functionality includes new developer productivity enhancements, process and task mining upgrades, and communications mining for document analysis (leveraging technology acquired with Re:infer).
Finally, officials, led by co-CEO Rob Enslin, laid out a number of noteworthy customer successes, including one user in Spain who said robots are doing work equivalent to that of 900 full-time employees.
Enslin explained to customers his decision to join UiPath after working at market-defining innovators SAP and, more recently, Google Cloud. “At UiPath I get to do it all again because like ERP in the 90s, Internet in the 2000s, cloud in the teens, automation is the game changer for this era,” he said. “And we believe UiPath is the defining technology for automation.”
Product Developments
The company disclosed several product enhancements, including:
- UiPath Studio Web, a browser-based automation development tool designed to simplify the building of public-facing processes and customer service apps, value chain, and other scenarios in the customer-experience realm.
- An enhancement to continuous discovery functionality that is used to drill into the as-is state of processes and tasks and identify actions to optimize them. These include upgrades to task mining and process mining functions, as well as “Automation Hub” with ROI comparisons between estimated benefits outcomes.
- Addition of “Communications Mining” via re:Infer technology that can be used to analyze emails, documents, social messages, chat logs, and more to create actionable business data. It also includes support for bank and financial statements and common supply chain documents including packing lists.
- Enterprise functionality in the company’s Automation Cloud platform that includes site-to-site VPN support to allow robots to automate systems and data that reside in private clouds. For customers that self-host, UiPath’s Automation suite includes new updates for Active-Active High Availability/Disaster Recovery support.
“Whether the desired business outcome is acceleration of profitable growth, cost savings, or improved employee and customer experiences, UiPath makes it easy to transform more processes into digital, automated workflows,” Ted Kummert, UiPath Executive Vice President, Products & Engineering, said.
Microsoft, Other Alliances
Under the expanded alliance between Microsoft and UiPath, the two companies said they will collaborate to bring automation powered by Microsoft Azure to market, targeting customers seeking to enhance productivity by using UiPath automation capabilities within Microsoft Office. Today, UiPath software is available to purchase directly in the Azure Marketplace and will integrate with Microsoft Power Platform by early 2023.
To date, UiPath and Microsoft have developed more than 80 integrations that are available to joint customers out-of-the-box, spanning Office 365 and Teams; Power Platform and Dynamics 365; and Cognitive Services and SQL Azure.
As part of the strategic partnership, Microsoft will help UiPath and joint customers expand upon existing integrations in the Microsoft platform and offerings. They will also publish UiPath products on the Azure Marketplace and jointly market industry-specific solutions.
In other partner ecosystem developments, UiPath did the following:
- Expanded its relationship with qBotica, a Phoenix-based RPA company, to introduce Automation Cube, qBotica’s go-to-market UiPath managed services practice that offers turnkey automation tailored to customers’ industries and operations with a goal of simplifying implementation.
- Partnered with OutSystems, which makes low-code application development software, to enable automation of core business processes and applications while leveraging a new connector that allows UiPath software robots to be managed from within OutSystems applications. For example, customers will be able to incorporate AI and ML into business processes to automate document understanding, image analysis, language analysis, and comprehension.
Voice of the Customer
Enslin kicked off the week with a review of high-profile customer successes, including customers who joined him during his opening keynote.
Orange Spain, a telecom provider, has 500 citizen developers certified in UiPath and has developed more than 900 robots, according to Orange Spain Head of Digital IT and Robot Factory Javier Castellanos. The company automated 300 processes last year, saving 100,000 internal hours, and Castellanos said robots are doing the work of 953 full-time-equivalent employees. Those latter two figures speak volumes about the potential for cost and time savings through smart use of automation.
“50 percent of the time, robots are working at night, holidays, weekends,” Castellanos said, an indicator that they are able to boost productivity even when human employees aren’t working.
EY, the global consulting and tax firm, now has 125,00 global robot users. According to its global vice chair for transformation, Hank Prybylski, automation “helps our tax professionals remove the robot from themselves so they can focus on higher order work.”
Finally, Enslin cited the work of the global insurer Generali, which has automated more than 1,000 processes across 40 business units and saved 80 million euros “on their way to a $125 million annualized run rate.”
These customer successes serve as a valuable proof point of the value customers are deriving from automation technology at a time of high economic turbulence.
More Automation and UiPath Insights:
- UiPath co-CEO Rob Enslin on Helping CIOs Drive Automation and Sustainability Outcomes
- Why Automation Is Key To Digital Transformation, ROI, and Industry Clouds
- UiPath Taps CIOs To Drive Expanded Automation Usage
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