Microsoft has acquired Softomotive, a provider of robotic process automation (RPA) with over 15 years of experience and the creator of WinAutomation, to expand low-code robotic process automation capabilities in Microsoft Power Automate.
Charles Lamanna, corporate VP for Microsoft’s Citizen Application Platform, said thay by bringing Softomotive’s desktop automation together with the existing Power Automate capabilities, the software giant is further democratising RPA and enabling everyone to create bots to automate manual business processes.
Softomotive currently helps more than 9,000 global customers seamlessly automate business processes across legacy and modern desktop applications. Together with Power Automate, WinAutomation will provide customers additional options for RPA desktop authoring so anyone can build a bot and automate Windows-based tasks.
The combined offering will also enable RPA connectivity to many new apps and services including SAP and traditional green-screen terminal applications.
Lamanna said the possibilities that the acquisition opens for our customers, include delivering a comprehensive low-code desktop automation solution with WinAutomation; expanding the out-of-the-box UI automation drivers for commonly used apps and services; enabling parallel execution and multitasking, and; offering thousands of additional features – We are bringing even more innovation from Softomotive built over the last 15 years to our customers to support low-code bot development.
More than 350,000 organisations use Power Automate every month to improve their productivity with advanced features like AI-based data understanding through AI Builder, UI-based application automation through UI flows, and integrating with applications and databases via 315 built-in API connectors.
The comprehensive Power Automate platform represents the next generation of RPA and is accessible to everyone in an organisation, including coders and non-coders alike, through a low-code development environment, Lamanna said.
Now, all existing Power Automate customers can immediately benefit from WinAutomation to automate legacy tasks in the cloud or on their desktops. Lamanna said this is available at no additional cost to customers with an RPA attended license in Power Automate. Power Automate users can now take automation one step further with a rich desktop-based authoring experience.
