Roadmap to Robotic Process Automation

The opportunities to automate within an organization are broad and deep -- including within IT, finance, HR, supply chain, and customer services, and interest in automation continues to deepen. Automation remains one of the fastest growing enterprise software categories, with a recent report by research firm Gartner stating it expects global robotic process automation (RPA) software revenue to increase nearly 20% over last year. While RPA solutions traditionally focused on automating tasks via screen scraping, today's modern RPA solutions focus on an API-first approach for process automation. Meanwhile, RPA vendors are continuously enhancing their API integration capabilities to offer both user interface-based screen scraping and API-first integration capabilities to their customers. "Vendors are focusing on evolving their RPA offerings into a broader automation platform with complementary technologies, such as process mining and task mining for process automation, monitoring and improvement, and wide range of integration capabilities," says Gartner senior market research specialist Varsha Mehta.