Technology Trends in 2020: Robotic Process Automation

The start of the new year is typically the time when experts and pundits predict the new trends for the years ahead, and the IT industry is a prime example with hundreds of authors publishing their ‘Top 10’ trends or similar for the year ahead. Even Gartner and Forrester get in on the act.

Just about all commentators are agree that Artifical Intelligence (AI) has a major role to play in our lives in the years ahead. One AI subset is Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is “the use of software to automate business processes such as interpreting applications, processing transactions, dealing with data, and even replying to emails. RPA automates repetitive tasks that people used to do “. [1]

While there are predictions of mass job losses more likely is that workers will find their jobs partly automated freeing time for other (more profitable and interesting) activities. [2]. McKinsey studies have found that 60% of all jobs can be partially automated. The market for RPA is estimated to reach $5Bn in 2020.

As a leader in IT Operations Management (ITOM) Micro Focus is active in the RPA market and has released it’s own solution that includes [3]:

Easy-to-use design studio: An intuitive design interface that allows users to easily record screen actions and design sophisticated end-to-end RPA workflows, visually or with code.
Cross-platform connections: A technology-rich product that combines UI automation with API and other integration methods to connect business processes spanning old and new applications.
Scalable robots: A worker-queue-based architecture to scale robots up or down as workloads change, making it possible to run hundreds or thousands of robots at once.
Centralized security: A centralized dashboard to manage the robots that have unique IDs and encrypted, role-based credentials.
Resilient robots: Advanced object recognition technology to detect UI changes and automatically adapt as needed, saving time on maintenance.