My RPA journey to Intelligent Automation

Last week, was the 15th anniversary of the founding date of OpenSpan (2/22/2005) here in Atlanta, Georgia. OpenSpan was the powerful RPA company that Pega acquired just about 4 years ago. In 2006, Gartner even awarded us their Cool Vendor award for our unique technology. Wow, where did all that time go?

From day one, we were selling our (attended RPA) product in collaboration with Microsoft and Accenture and deployed many joint customers together. We deployed 100's of 1000's of these Robotic Desktop bots all over the world. We also formed a go-to-market partnership with IBM and in 2007 delivered our first large scale unattended RPA solution to one of the UK's largest banks (we used to call our current Robot Manager, "Automation Broker").

We were proud to have some of the worlds leading investors believe in us early on. Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners, Globespan Capital Partners, FTV Capital and later from In-Q-Tel, all of whom supported us through the exit to Pega. They saw our unique patented designs for Deep Robotics and how it differed from the screen scraping RPA products you still see today! We went through some significant diligence with the investors but they saw what we saw. Its powerful resilience, built securely to scale, at about 10x to 50x the speed than any other RPA product on the market. Pega saw that too. Thank you guys.

When the term RPA hit the market in about 2012, and vendors started to change their existing product names to use this cool term, it seemed everyone wanted a Robot in their digital workforce. And so the rest is history.

I'm mega-excited about the future and cannot be more proud to be part of the Pega family on this 15 year anniversary of this journey, when we first started with "RPA" and UI automation. When we sold OpenSpan to Pega back in 2016, it was because we had the breadth and depth of experience with some of the worlds largest enterprises using RPA but recognizing that RPA must be part of something bigger in order to take these companies to the next level - way beyond just unattended and attended RPA. For me, Pega is that something bigger. It's Infinity platform supports everything Gartner refer to as Hyper Automation, Forrester calls Digital Process Automation (DPA) and HFS call Integrated Automation. There are many other terms but Pega leads in most magic quadrants and waves around these real "Intelligent Automation" strategies and you are seeing RPA vendors attempt to twist and turn their stories of "screen scraping" or "UI automation" into "Intelligent Automation". This would like taking a 15 year old car and trying to turn it into a fully autonomous vehicle. It doesn't work. Elon Musk knew that about cars and I know that about the enterprise processes and software. RPA has it's place but it's not the foundation for real Intelligent Automation.

At the core of Intelligent Automation is low-code and no-code (I'm not talking about the Visual drag and drop IDE's that RPA vendors are trying to claim as "low-code"). I am talking about using low-code to completely revamp legacy processes from the analog world to the digital world, "10 times faster and 10 times cheaper" than it has ever been possible. Whilst RPA has it's place, these band-aid technologies will continue the strangulation of legacy code if you don't have a plan to go beyond them.

RPA in fact, has driven a bigger wedge between IT and business at a time we needed more collaboration between these groups, not less. It was sold as a nirvana without the need for IT and now these RPA vendors are desperately trying to pivot again to bring IT to the table.

It is however, enterprises that need to pivot. To get real work done in a rapidly competitive digital world you need real Intelligent Automation, not a hodge podge of sticky plasters, band-aids and duct tape. Our enterprise customers, our Citizen Developer community and our drive to real IT and Business collaboration, underpinned by our wide breadth of technology is changing the game.

This week, we also released one of our biggest Intelligent Automation versions ever. Why don't you check out how some of the worlds largest brand-name companies see through the chaff and realize, the possibility for a real digital revolution is here now;

Enjoy ;

Implement solutions - 10x faster at 1/10th the cost at 10x the speed - infinitely scalable

https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/project/pega-express

https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/whats-new-pega-platform/low-code-application-development

https://www.pega.com/webinars/low-code-series?