The Future of RPA: Recapping the UI Path Forward Conference

Last week I attended the UI Path Forward conference in scenic Las Vegas, NV. It was an impressive gathering of 3,000 attendees, including 600 partners.  There was a great deal of enthusiasm from the attendees and UI Path did a terrific job of creating lots of spaces to network.  Overall the RPA industry is on fire.  Gartner stated that RPA is the fastest growing enterprise software segment, and that UI Path is now the most widely deployed RPA software.

Daniel Dines, the UI Path founder and CEO gave a very compelling talk about the origins of the company and when he was announced for the cover of Forbes for being #3 in the Cloud 100.  It was very motivating to hear the startup story from an apartment in Romania to a $7 billion valuation.

The first set of meetings was for partners.  UI Path has invested heavily in creating a partner ecosystem complete with certifications and tons of online enablement.  It was fun to see the enthusiasm and hear from leadership at UI Path regarding their future.  The channel is important for UI Path to grow and meet its expectations. Essential in this process is the ability to scale.  Scale was at the center of the conference with multiple sessions and customer presentations dedicated to growing the RPA footprint.  What we are seeing in the RPA industry as a whole is lots of enthusiasm for the technology. We are seeing the low hanging fruit being taken down, and after that initial success comes the inevitable question: “What’s next?”

At this point I became very enthused about the iGrafx story.  In order to scale RPA, a partner must be able to identify additional tasks that are right for automation. But, how do you not only identify the right tasks, but then decide which ones should be done first. Successful implementations of any project must be dictated by the business outcome.  As a veteran of VMware I saw a very similar phenomenon in the 2007 timeframe.  A powerful, game changing technology has been introduced, but before it can cross the chasm from the early adopters to the mainstream, we must be able to tie the technology to business outcomes. At the center of this transformation is process.  Process helps a company look at itself and align to business objectives.  Capturing these processes in a central repository allows alignment to business outcomes, identification and prioritization of the right RPA projects.  iGrafx has been in the process business for many years and when I shared our offering with partners it was received with a lot of enthusiasm.

The future is very bright for RPA, but like many promising enterprise technologies we must be able to speak to business outcomes to truly cross the chasm to realize its full potential.