Micro Focus has brought together two of its existing technology platforms to create a new robotic process automation (RPA) application that channel partners can now leverage to help their customers build and scale automated business processes within their operations.

The RPA application allows companies to automate repetitive, human-based user interface actions within legacy apps and modern applications, and replace them with robotic automation, saving human labor, increasing productivity and helping companies to improve workflows and processes. The RPA application includes the ability to built software robots that can be scaled up or down as needed as workloads change. It also includes a centralized dashboard to manage the robots using unique IDs and encrypted, role-based credentials.

Micro Focus’s Archie Roboostoff

“RPA is a hot topic right now,” Archie Roboostoff, the functional and performance portfolio director of Micro Focus’ application delivery management (ADM) platform, told Channel Futures. “There are projections of it being a market with $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue by 2021 to 2022.”

RPA can help businesses by simplifying and automating a wide range of human tasks, such as helping knowledge workers who need to get information for multiple customers by using several different IT systems to bring all the information together. Said Roboostoff. “These people are having to jump through a lot of hoops and organizations are figuring out that’s not the most efficient thing to be doing.”

Instead, customers can use RPA to automate the process and allow robots to perform that task for employees using one click, he said. “RPA helps humans and augments procedures. It’s being able to replicate things humans don’t need to be doing anymore and increasing that productivity.”

Micro Focus saw the work being done in the marketplace by other vendors and realized that the company already had its own ADM portfolio and an IT operations management line that could be paired together to offer Micro Focus’ own robotics automation application, he said.

“We were able to take technologies, capabilities and experiences from those two portfolios and come to market very quickly with this product,” said Roboostoff.

Micro Focus’s Phil Rayment

Phil Rayment, Micro Focus’ vice president of channel sales for the Americas, said the new product is channel ready because the company’s channel partners are already familiar with the products that RPA is built upon.

Since the product is new, the company will work with its partners and see where they help take RPA to help their customers, he said. “I personally feel that the channel will help us define who the proper customers are and where it fits in the marketplace. We rely on the channel to get to those markets.”

The RPA application includes an intuitive design interface that allows users to record screen actions and design sophisticated end-to-end RPA workflows using code or through visual assistance. It combines UI automation with API and other integration methods to connect business processes across old and new applications.

Jeff Jamieson, president of Whitlock Infrastructure Solutions, a Micro Focus partner, said his company sees the potential of RPA in helping to solve a wide range of problems for customers.

Whitlock Infrastructure’s Jeff Jamieson

“Customers want automation, but they can’t always define it,” said Jamieson. “But they know they want it. The pace they are being asked to meet has increased so much that businesses look for more things to automate.”

To do that, orchestration is also needed to help put things into workflows, he said. “Micro Focus is taking this up a level” into a business process that is borne of some of its other products, he said. “This is simpler and more integrated and affordable because it reduces the amount of human intervention to actually create this stuff. It can help companies take their processes and do RPA on them. At the pace businesses are moving today, this is a massive differentiator.”

Jamieson said his teams are already talking to customers about Micro Focus RPA and are selling it.