Robotics Process Automation has been the recent buzzword in the market and though it has been around for quite some time, it has started to make noise now in software industry. People frequently ask me questions regarding what RPA is all about, whether it’s a good choice to be make a career move to RPA from .net and other technologies and how will it stand out in competition with other hot skills in market like Machine learning, IOT, Big Data etc.
Well my answer is, RPA is not here to compete with any of the existing or upcoming technology It would rather work in conjunction with these technologies to provide automated solutions to clients who have been burdened in past with too much manual effort.

We need to first understand what can be automated and what Robots are. These are not physical robots but software programs that automated our tasks thus removing the need for manual monitoring either completely or partially. As a software programmer, me and my team has been delivering automation solutions since last 6 years and we have used existing technologies like .Net, PHP, Adobe air etc. to provide browser based automation/headless automations using low level Http requests as well as used selenium and Auto-It to script windows based automation simulating user actions. The only thing that differentiates RPA from these approached is that all RPA provides readymade components that you can pull together to create a workflow simulating manual user actions.

Since this post is just a starting point towards RPA, I have just made you aware about it. More will be coming in my future posts but before moving forward lets see what all solutions we have available as RPA tools. we will be doing a detailed analysis of each one of these tools in future posts.

Below is a list of current RPA software vendors :

1.) Pega

2.) Automation Anywhere

3.) BlackLine

4.) Blue Prism

5.) Datamatics

6.) EdgeVerve

7.) HelpSystems

8.) Kofax

9.) NICE

10.)Workfusion

11.) UIPath