Microsoft gaining grounds on Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA), last year was the fastest growing segment of the global enterprise software market (the technology helps to automate repetitive and tedious processes). And as for this year, the momentum has accelerated. Because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the companies have scrambled to boost their automation efforts.

The dominant players in the RPA market include UiPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. But there is another tech operator that has been making dramatic gains: Microsoft.

The company definitely has many advantages: a massive customer base, thousands of talented engineers, a rich ecosystem of partners, a best-of-breed cloud infrastructure and many complementary apps. Microsoft has also been innovating at a rapid pace. Consider that more than 350,000 organizations use the Power Automate platform to streamline workflows with no-code and low-code approaches.

Today Microsoft made a major announcement regarding Power Automate-that is, the launch of a desktop version for RPA authoring. Note that this is the result of the acquisition of Softomotive.

With Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, one can easily automate processes and tasks that span both desktop and web applications. By using drag-and-drop, one can activate more than 370 actions on a desktop and there is access to cloud-based functions like API automation as well as modules for NLP (Natural Language Processing) and computer vision.

“We did a bunch of work to really streamline and simplify the experience,” said Charles Lamanna, who is the CVP of the Low Code Application Platform at Microsoft. “We believe that everybody should be able to build bots. So if you know how to use the Excel macro recorder, you can easily use Microsoft Power Automate Desktop to build very complex automations.”