Microsoft has entered the RPA market -- what does that mean?

Microsoft officially entered the robotic process automation (RPA) marketplace this week with some major changes to its Power Platform. It's not the first incumbent enterprise software vendors to feel the need to have a product in this category (SAP purchased French RPA vendor Contextor late last year), and it won't be the last. We should expect to see a steady increase in RPA investment in from big enterprise vendors, with a mix of internally developed and acquired technologies. The fundamental challenge driving these investments is that RPA is the first step in a journey to reinvent how companies build the software they use to run their businesses (see my recent article on how UIPath is reinventing the RPA category). RPA lets companies record a series of computer-based processes done by a human so that the series can then be repeated automatically without human involvement.