RPA or low-code?

Let's start off with a topic I feel strongly about. Agree or not? Join the debate!

RPA development is NOT low-code or no-code. There, I've said it.

I help found one of the worlds leading RPA companies back in 2005 which offered free downloads of our robot studio allowing business and IT to collaborate on to automate tasks and processes, without writing a single line of code. We, and everyone else for that matter did not refer to these tools as low-code or no-code. We all called them, "Visual IDE's" and/or "Drag and Drop" automation studios.

Automating OLD processes on OLD legacy systems with RPA in a visual IDE is a far cry from designing, building, deploying and managing entirely new digital applications and systems in LOW-CODE and NO-CODE platforms.

As you know, most major analyst firms track robotic automation in specific RPA reports. However no RPA only vendors even appear as a blip in any of these same analysts LOW-CODE reports. RPA is not low-code!

And if you like, do a quick search for RPA and then low-code on Wikipedia. You will find they are night and day in technical capabilities and comparison.

The other term now given to business people building "anything" using visual IDE's is "Citizen Developers". I'm actually OK with this, this is a career path opportunity and I encourage people to plan a path. I started building applications in 3GL languages and then 4GL languages and this was a great career path for me too. Business "Citizen Developers" can perhaps look to start their career doing simple automation like RPA but the real career builders are now moving quickly beyond basic RPA and automation, into learning how to write digital applications FOR the business using low-code platforms.

The RPA "term" got its legs on the promises of being easy to use and how business people can automate anything without IT. This is true for a lot of easy stuff but rarely does this get you beyond a few bots because, well basically, there's not much "easy to automate" stuff left. You see, hundreds if not thousands of people "learning RPA in a week" but RPA not scaling and leading many to "career stall". Ease of use myth is also why you see RPA vendors scrambling to add the next feature to support more and more complex desktop and IT environments. There are exceptions of course but there is actually a better way to solve business problems, not by using visual IDE's to automate all the old stuff with RPA but to use low-code, to rapidly replace the old with new digital applications. RPA can be a part or it, and that's why Pega brought OpenSpan 4 years ago. One of the worlds leading low-code Intelligent Automation platforms, fully integrated out-of-the-box with one of the worlds most powerful RPA technologies.

Whether you have been successful with RPA or not, your next chapter in your automation strategy, your next career (training) move or your next enterprise grade digital application, needs to start with a serious enterprise low-code platform, beyond just "low-code" visual IDE's. Build new applications in days and weeks, yes days. Build applications 10x faster and 10x cheaper than historic coding practices. Share and re-use everything you build or automate, big or small, in your secure and governed Enterprise low-code App factory. No more silo'd projects. Use our unique Hybrid RPA for what you need to automate and/or plug holes, we bundle it with all your Pega licenses. Use our inbuilt native AI/ML and NLP (or anyone else's if you prefer). Automate 100's of 1000's of emails without even having to use Outlook, and without writing a single line of code! Or generate over $150m in new revenue using our powerful differentiating AI technology with inbuilt empathy, to drive a second to none CX. - THAT's all in LOW-CODE!

"Code, where we're going, there is no code"