Blue Prism has unveiled its connected-RPA vision, which it says will help organisations stay competitive, while accelerating time to market for new services and products; by exploiting leading-edge cloud, AI and cognitive capabilities.
The organisation says that an enhanced RPA offering will catalyse the creativity and innovation of digital savvy employees, who they call “the makers”, by giving them the power to invent, design and develop new disruptive services.
RPA will free up IT
Despite all the productive innovations being unleashed in the enterprise, IT departments are still spending most of their budget on maintaining and updating processes and systems — a problem that Desktop-as-a-Service can solve, as we found out on a recent trip to Munich for IGEL’s DISRUPT conference. In the meantime, this is a creating a digital divide within organisations, leaving them vulnerable to a disruptive market.
Blue Prism says that it’s connected-RPA offering closes this gap, by enabling an intelligent digital workforce capable of self-learning and continuous improvement. It’s vision, the intelligent automation company claims, will empower users to automate billions of transactions, while returning hundreds of millions of hours of work back into the business — freeing up employees to create, build and share their innovations.
“The connected-RPA vision that Blue Prism has outlined highlights the evolving power of automation,” says Dave Mayer, principal sector analyst for AI, RPA and blockchain at NelsonHall.
“It extends beyond the limits of traditional RPA, giving users a compelling all-in-one, complete automation platform which includes AI and cognitive features already built-in. The new roadmap, capabilities and features being introduced today nicely leverage and enable Blue Prism’s growing community of developers, customers, channel partners and technology alliances.”
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Digital empowerment
Connected-RPA enables powerful digital transformation, according to Blue Prism, which will lead to a more connected, entrepreneurial enterprise (every big business needs to think as if it were a start-up to survive in the age of disruption). Why? The operational agility gained from thinking like a start-up will allows organisations to maintain a competitive edge, while being less vulnerable to the disruptors waiting in the wings.
“Our vision for connected-RPA is about giving the power of creativity to an organisation’s people, while maintaining control and connecting innovations together, so individual work adds up to a far more powerful whole,” says Alastair Bathgate, CEO and co-founder at Blue Prism.
“With an array of reusable, intelligent automation skills available through our Digital Exchange app store, connected-RPA lets an organisation unleash its entrepreneurs and innovators, giving them the freedom to focus on creative work that drives business forward.”
Supporting this connected-RPA vision, Blue Prism has announced a range of new and enhanced platform features, capabilities, extensions and community enhancements — all designed to deliver intelligent automation with just a few clicks, according to organisation.
These include:
• Blue Prism Digital Exchange (DX) 2.0: A growing online community that provides business leaders with drag and drop access to AI, machine learning, cognitive and disruptive technologies. Since launching late last year, the DX has managed more than 1,000 registered users, 300 registered companies and more than 1,000 downloads of top assets enabling access to the technologies of strategic partners IBM, Microsoft and Google. The DX has new search capabilities as well as giving users the ability to rate and comment on assets.
• Process Discovery Tool: A new web-based tool available through company’s portal, reduces the time to prepare for an RPA deployment from weeks to hours, through features that help assess, qualify and prioritise processes for automation readiness, ease of automation and potential business value.
• Blue Prism Labs: A trust of PhD level research scientists and engineers across multiple AI fields, who inform and spearhead developments on the company’s embedded AI capabilities.
• Blue Prism Community: A new central hub for sharing knowledge, best practices and building a network of business executives and developers looking to collaborate.
The result from all this, says Blue Prism, gives users completely automated end-to-end processes, while maximising AI functionality quickly and easily. It provides enterprises with a single scalable platform that enables business-led automation in an IT-endorsed and controlled environment.
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Coming soon
Blue Prism also disclosed plans to introduce the following capabilities within the next 90 days:
• Intelligent document processing adds AI-powered document processing directly built into the Blue Prism platform, enabling smarter, end-to-end processing of document workflows with a built-in document processing engine. This provides off the shelf document processing capabilities and acts as an OCR system that can classify documents, extract key value pairs and encode verification steps into the digitisation process.
• Blue Prism v6.5, the latest RPA software will include full Japanese and simplified Chinese language capabilities, IPv6 support, and data gateways, offering more data control while reducing the amount of storage being used.
• Success Accelerator: A program that provides customers with unparalleled access to our RPA deployment experts to work alongside their trusted partners to help ensure RPA projects are a success.
• eCommerce/vending machine capability enables users to buy and sell solutions and services on the Digital Exchange (DX) making it a true eCommerce site. Technology partners, developers and anyone who has a best of breed AI or cognitive solution can join the Blue Prism DX community to market and sell on it.
• Easier Blue Prism software accessibility: By way of the eCommerce capability, Blue Prism plans to open-up access to the company’s leading RPA software making it easy for people to get started, learn more and explore what’s possible with an intelligent digital workforce. This access will be made available through DX and supports the company’s academia program launched last April, which encourages innovation and entrepreneurship.
