Microsoft’s entry disrupts fast-growing RPA marketplace

With robotic process automation (RPA) firmly established as the fastest-growing enterprise software market, it was only a matter of time before Microsoft got in on the action. By including Power Automate in Windows 10, Microsoft set off widespread industry speculation that it aggressively would corner the small to midsized business market, setting off greater competition and eventual consolidation among the leading RPA vendors.

And why not? Most enterprises already use Microsoft’s suite of products and services. Power Automate simply provides another opportunity to bundle robotic process automation within that ecosystem, making automating business processes that interact with existing Microsoft products such as Office, SharePoint and Azure that much more straightforward.

Furthermore, users recognize Microsoft as a proven brand with both the resources and the in-house talent to rapidly build a highly competitive RPA platform.

Power Automate, in fact, already offers several distinct advantages over the dominant players in the RPA market. From a pricing standpoint, for example, Power Automate enables business users to greatly reduce operating costs by replacing third-party BPM tools and automation technologies with a free tool that easily interacts with other Microsoft tools.

Power Automate also allows for more fluid automation opportunities and significant extensibility within the existing enterprise architecture. SharePoint’s online capabilities, for example, can be extended by using Azure Cognitive, machine learning and Microsoft’s AI services.

The capabilities offered by Power Automate become more pronounced when you consider how organizations can now take full advantage of the Office 365 ecosystem by enabling the citizen developer – the persona RPA originally targeted to build and drive automation across the enterprise. This simply hasn’t been the case to date due in large part to the way in which the ease of RPA implementation and execution was oversold. This could change dramatically, however, given Power Automate’s intuitive user interface (which boasts a user-friendly drag-and-drop experience that enables users to quickly build attended bots) and myriad supported connectors that allow simple automations to be built with an RPA and AI workflow solution.

Many Challenges Remain

While Power Automate offers definite benefits, numerous challenges that potentially could deter even the most determined RPA programs still exist. Despite Microsoft’s attempts to match functionality, bots must still be stitched together to get them converted from one RPA platform to another due to:

• A lack of code parity. There’s a significant catalog of commands, actions and parameters that are unsupported between RPA tools, rendering bots incompatible from one platform to the other.
• Lost credentials. System credentials associated with the bot aren’t passed on when switching vendors, creating a heavy user management effort to remedy upon migration.
• Absent versioning. Historical versions of bots can be lost when migrating, affecting compliance and impact analysis activities in the target RPA tool.
• Missing audit logs. Audit logs aren’t stored the same way between different RPA tools and may be lost altogether when migrations are attempted.
• Unavailable output compare. There is no effective and straightforward way to run output compares of bots migrating between different RPA tools, making it exceedingly difficult to test the completeness and quality of bots after the migration in order to ensure they still do what they were designed to do.

In addition, there is an argument to be made that Power Automate currently lacks the enterprise management and security features that are now standard in competing products. Given that, what will be the true impact of Microsoft’s entry into the RPA market?

Bottom line, you have to start somewhere, and Microsoft undoubtedly will benefit from engaging with the market now. Doing so will enable Microsoft to get a much clearer idea of what customers want versus what they need with respect to RPA capabilities, paving the way for future iterations of Power Automate.

While the RPA market will continue to be dominated by a relatively small group of specialized RPA vendors who concentrate on specific industries or specialized design needs, Microsoft’s focus on small and midsized businesses will pave the way for the majority of end-users who will employ RPA for the capabilities it provides within broader applications and development platform solutions.

Everybody Able to Build Bots

Power Automate also seems likely to open the door for the promised ease-of-use of RPA by citizen developers. To quote Microsoft Corporate Vice President Charles Lamanna, “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.”

Using Power Automate’s drag-and-drop function, for example, activates more than 370 actions on a desktop and provides access to cloud-based functions such as API automation and modules for language processing and computer vision. Power Automate will make it that much easier for users to access such tools and bring their business and IT into the Microsoft fold.

According to Lamanna, making RPA part of the low-code Power Platform is simply a natural progression of the conversation the industry is having around citizen developers and empowering business lines with automation technology. He concludes, “If you truly want to democratize RPA, you don’t talk about millions of users. You have to talk about a billion users. There’s no better way to do that than to tap into the Windows community.”

With that in mind, Power Automate has already served to disrupt the RPA marketplace. By offering what amounts to free RPA, Microsoft made RPA vendors sit up and take notice, opening the door for future integration of RPA offerings by larger RPA providers while simultaneously signaling a wave of likely market consolidations among smaller vendors.

Power Automate is already attracting interested suitors, drawn by Microsoft’s robust product roadmap and the potential for technology alignment, as well as the possibility of dropping the current RPA provider who is failing to deliver on promised return on investment because they are unable to scale effectively.

If it accomplishes nothing else, the introduction of Power Automate serves as an endorsement of the continuing importance of RPA. It also likely signals the beginning of a shift away from RPA being regarded as a stand-alone technology to RPA becoming a standard feature that will help enable organizations seeking to support business automation and transformation.