UiPath New Major Release: Leading the Way in Robotic Process Automation

With a major update of over 800 enhancements and 50 new product features, this UiPath release gives customers the ability to deploy and/or upgrade existing virtual workforces with unrivaled productivity and scalability.

See the release notes.

Key release benefits include:

Intelligent Operations

Full utilization of robots with UiPath’s intelligent scheduling; increased accuracy from intelligent execution; and optimized virtual workforce deployments through intelligent scalability.

These three intelligent features deliver superior RPA breadth, velocity and agility.

Breadth: technology capable of automating business process with a wide range of           requirements and complexity.

Velocity**:** products that can automate processes quickly and reliably.

Agility**:** automation that gets more work out of fewer robots and less infrastructure.

• Intelligent Scheduling: applies work allocation algorithms to manage available virtual workforce capacity vs current demand and job priorities.  If demand outstrips availability, Intelligent Scheduling instantly reallocates robots by work priorities until demand and availability are re-balanced. This means easier deployments and a better organized virtual workforce, with fully utilized robots and proactively managed service levels.

• Intelligent Execution: delivered by robots with UiPath’s unrivaled and game-changing computer vision intelligence:  very accurate; fast implementation and highly reliable.

What makes UiPath computer vision technology so intelligent?

It provides UiPath robots with “eyes” that see the screen, understand relationships between screen elements and quickly locate fields just as human vision does.

Key feature**:** Computer vision enables the robots to reduce errors and exceptions by instantly adjusting (like humans) to shifts in field positions or screen variations - both of which can cause other robots to fail, requiring revised automation scripts.

• Intelligent Scalability: From inception, UiPath platform technology has been architected from the ground up to be flexible, scalable, open and extensible - whether in the Cloud or on-premises. This release uses the architecture to provide innovative multi-tenancy and multi-robot residency capabilities. Now customers can create a more secure, flexible and cost effective virtual workforce.

Multi-tenancy**:** enables customer RPA groups to utilize separate, secure tenant space provided by UiPath’s Cloud or on-premises server platform. And by using multi-tenancy, customers can dramatically reduce RPA operating costs and infrastructure investment.

Why is this innovation so transformational?

Without multi-tenancy, RPA solutions can require dozens of servers handling hundreds or thousands of robots. With multi-tenancy, just one central server is sufficient.

For example, a company may have several SSOs, each providing RPA supported services for different business units or geographies.  Or there could be any number of business units interested in  RPA self-sufficiency. In each case, multi-tenancy allows them to deploy robots in Cloud or on-premises with autonomy, privacy, data integrity and security.

Multi-Robot Residency**:** prior to this release, the industry constraint of one robot per virtual machine saddled every RPA deployment with inefficient performance and cost. Now this bottleneck is gone.

UiPath’s innovation of multi-robot residency allows customers to place multiple robots on a single virtual machine, all supported by a management platform which provides as many robot mappings as needed.

This means customers gain financial benefits: because deployments are no longer restricted by a 1-to-1 robot/virtual machine relationship, far fewer virtual machines are needed.

Cloud-based Virtual Delivery Center: all three of these Intelligent Operations features are essential building blocks for the next RPA accelerant: the Virtual Delivery Center (VDC).

VDC is a quickly emerging, low cost, plug & play, highly scalable delivery model for rapidly growing machine-to-machine (robots managed by events or other robots) RPA services.

Already implemented by several UiPath customers, this virtual delivery model is expected to spur rapid adoption of RPA technology in 2017. By providing VDC requirements, this release gives UiPath customers what they need to create that delivery model.

Cognitive Automation

As the only RPA company able to deliver intelligent automation infused with computer vision, UiPath is familiar with AI/Cognitive. Plus, its extensible product platform lends itself to robust cognitive services.  This release integrates Google, Microsoft and IBM OCR technology , providing:

• Language detection**:** is a prerequisite for precision and accuracy in OCR image analysis and outcomes.

• Named entity recognition**:** extracts unstructured and semi-structured information from text, then assembles it into a structured format.

• Sentiment analysis**:** creates process automation that understands the meaning and emotion of text language, then uses it as the basis for next-step decisions.

Helpdesk automation is an example of how cognitive services can create an intelligent RPA solution: ticket language is detected; the sentiment of the request is revealed; relevant keywords are extracted from the request and used in a knowledge base search; then the relevant search result is embedded in an response emailed to the ticket owner.

UiPath is committed to its AI/Cognitive journey and will be offering more NLP and machine learning services on Cloud and on premises in upcoming releases.

Extensible OCR

Rather than build a proprietary OCR engine, UiPath chose to incorporate leading third party OCR software into its product line, giving customers choices in what OCR engine would be best for their different automation requirements.

In this release, Abbyy has been added to our OCR family, and each engine has been         customized to work more accurately and reliably within RPA solutions to automate           more processes in less time; experience less errors; and encounter fewer exceptions         than would otherwise be the case.

What’s Coming Next?

If you attended the London UiPath User Event last fall, the product roadmap presentation provided good insight. Otherwise, the features and capabilities in this release are good directional indicators, along with UiPath’s commitment to increase its solution footprint with more cognitive services, machine learning and chatbots.

The timing of what’s next is not a mystery. UiPath has a history of very fast product advancement, with one major release in each of the past three years. Now the company is accelerating that pace to two major releases per year.

The goal of this pace is to give the UiPath development team more opportunities to increase product quality and innovation. However, customers are required to follow suite. They have choices: stay on long term supported releases or engage faster innovation with twice yearly releases. Either way, every customer remains a driving force behind the company’s mission - to deliver automation excellence through better technology.