Automation platform technologies need pertinent software application development topographies to apply themselves to in order to shine, provide outcomes-based functionalities that lead to new efficiencies… and to illustrate and validate their effectiveness.
Equally, enterprise software platforms – especially the more expansive ones that might populate the ERP space – need new forms of autonomous acceleration and automation that they themselves may not have been engineered with from the starting principles that formed their initial architecture and subsequent expansion and development.
If were writing an introductory message to encourage a loving union between UiPath and SAP, these might be our opening statements.
In fact, automation platform company UiPath and SAP have been working together for some time now, but things have started to ‘get more serious’ (in the ‘dating’ sense… and in the data sense too for that matter) recently. UiPath used its annual user and practitioner convention – now in its sixth year, so logically known as UiPath Forward VI – to detail the developments currently underway between the two enterprises.
SAP Build Process boosted
The bond here sees an expanded partnership now detailed between both firms so that SAP to offer the UiPath Automation Platform to its customer base. Not without its own offering in the automation space – SAP Build Process Automation is the German softwarehaus’s own technology proposition that works in this space – the expanded partnership is hoped to enable customers to execute business transformations, migrate critical business systems to the cloud and augment existing business systems with the UiPath Automation Platform.
“Business leaders today are facing crucial moments where they must profoundly adapt and evolve business models and accelerate digital transformation or be left behind,” said Scott Russell, president of customer success and member of the executive board of SAP SE. “Our partnership with UiPath builds upon the strong momentum we’ve seen with SAP Build Process Automation. It enables customers to become intelligent and sustainable enterprises that are more efficient and adaptable to change.”
Working across workloads
As noted, this partnership is designed to complement SAP Build Process Automation and give organizations in all verticals an opportunity to improve efficiency and productivity across both SAP workloads and non-SAP workloads. UiPath Automation Platform will be available as an SAP-endorsed application and on the SAP Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. As part of this partnership, UiPath is also committed to its continued adoption of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to run its own business operations.
“The need for digital transformation has never been more urgent. The most successful companies will undergo total enterprise reinvention over the next decade, transforming every part of their business through technology, data and AI to create new business models and ways of working and engaging with employees and customers,” said Rob Enslin, UiPath co-CEO. “UiPath is a leader in robotic process automation and has a broad set of connectors and pre-built content for various systems. This adds value to our customers’ landscape and helps complete their automation needs.”
UiPath integrates with other enterprise vendor applications and custom applications to automate processes and eliminate manual tasks across SAP and non-SAP solutions. This newly expanded partnership helps large enterprises take advantage of a ‘clean core’ with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It enables customers to optimize business processes that can result in rapid innovation and better outcomes across the company’s entire value chain.
A more ‘complete’ SAP
“Working with UiPath as closely as we do today, we now feel more complete with the automation layer competencies now accessible to our customers,” said Lloyd Adams, president, North America, SAP. “In a world where companies know they need to do more with less, we want users to be productive across SAP workloads and non-SAP workloads. By working with UiPath in the way we do, we can now help enable a more governable way to bring enterprise IT stack customizations forward into that automation layer. Combining process intelligence technologies such as SAP Signavio into this means we can come to market with a really complete storyline that is comprehensively outcomes-oriented – and allows us to address end-to-end deployments more holistically.”
Looking at how this partnership will evolve, Adams says that the two companies are ‘just getting started’ and next year will see UiPath become inevitably more embedded into the total SAP customer and technology proposition. The company will now be looking to move current customers to the cloud and bring in new customers as well but will do so while making UiPath a more integral part of that process.
Speaking to the ERP Today editorial team in Las Vegas this month of UiPath Forward VI, SAP president for North Americas region Lloyd Adams explained that enterprise-level partnership is one designed to provide tangible and identifiable value to real-world deployment use cases.
