There's been an awful lot of focus on the emerging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions since we unveiled the concept to the services industry in 2012. While early movers, like Blue Prism, have stolen most of the early headlines in the space, we've seen other very effective tools and platforms emerge, such as Kryon Systems, UIPath, WorkFusion and Nice.
However, one solution has been especially rampant in the BPO space (especially in finance and accounting) - Automation Anywhere - whose team has been working tirelessly with leading providers such as Genpact, Accenture and EXL to streamline processes and drive all the associated benefits of automating high volume, high throughput tasks that were previously plagued by unnecessary and costly manual interventions.
So we felt it time to sit down with Automation Anywhere's brainchild and co-founder Mihir Shukla, to learn a little more about what is driving this unprecedented demand for RPA, and where this is all leading as we venture into curious times...
Phil Fersht, Chief Analyst and CEO, HfS Research: Good afternoon, Mihir Shukla. You've been at the forefront of so much of the new thinking and ideas in RPA and Intelligent Automation in the last couple of years. Automation Anywhere almost came out of nowhere. So I'd love to hear a bit more about your background and how you really ended up leading this firm. What was the journey?
Mihir Shukla, CEO, Automation Anywhere: Good to talk with you again, Phil. It's interesting when you look back, how you end up with something. I came to the US to do my PhD around the time when the Internet was just coming around. So I got the disruption bug, and it was a lot more fun disrupting different industries than doing a PhD. 22 years later, I look back and I’m fortunate enough to have led five or six large disruptions in various capacities. First, I started at Netscape, where I had a chance to shape the era of the Internet. Then I worked at Infoseek, which was one of the early search engines, where I got to help define how to access the Internet, how you discover things, and we built an early eCommerce platform. Then I had a chance to be an advisor to OmniSky, creating the first Internet-enabled smartphones. I still remember the time when I was one of the 14 guys in Silicon Valley who could go anywhere in the world and find the nearest restaurant. Today, there are a billion of us who can do that.
There was lots of learning along the way. The genesis of Automation Anywhere came from one of my last disruptions, which was at E2Open, where I had the opportunity to integrate the supply chain of the top 10 high-tech companies. At that time I had a chance to use various BPM tools, enterprise application integration tools, and ETL tools. It was during that experience that I saw the challenges faced in trying to integrate a global supply chain that includes hundreds of applications and thousands of people.
I thinking at that time was there must be a better way to do this.
So in 2003, we started Automation Anywhere—and that was a genesis of RPA. Of course, it wasn't called RPA back then. But the idea was to simulate human behavior on a computer and be able to automate everything we do on a computer screen. And 13 years later, we're the largest provider of RPA solutions. So that's how it all started, and that's where we are today.
Phil: So what can you share with us about Automation Anywhere secret sauce? What is it that makes you guys tick? What is it that you feel has been the catalyst to this hyper-growth that you've been experiencing?
Mihir: There are quite a few things that we do very differently, that are unique to us. First of all, we're the largest and most fluent platform on RPA today. We have over 500 enterprise
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Outsourcing Heros, Robotic Process Automation, Intelligent Automation