As we move into the post-digitalisation era, organisations are looking to automation to save them time and money, increase productivity and drive business value.
Which is where hyperautomation comes in: the business-driven, disciplined approach that organisations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.
Hyperautomation, which is one of Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022, involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including:
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Machine learning
- Event-driven software architecture
- Robotic process automation (RPA)
- Business process management (BPM) and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS)
- Integration platform as a service (iPaaS)
- Low-code/no-code tools
- Packaged software
- Other types of decision, process and task automation tools
This trend is resonating with organisations. Gartner predicts that the worldwide market for technology that enables hyperautomation will reach $596,6-billion in 2022. This is up from $481,6-billion in 2020 and $532,4-billion last year.
The fastest-growing category of hyperautomation-enabling software includes tools that provide visibility to map business activities, automate and manage content ingestion, orchestrate work across multiple systems, and provide complex rule engines.
Technologies to automate content ingestion, such as signature verification tools, optical character recognition, document ingestion, conversational AI and natural language technology (NLT) will be in high demand.
Organisations will need such tools to automate the digitalisation and structuring of data and content – for example, automating the process of digitalising and sorting paper records.
Gartner expects that by 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyperautomation technologies with redesigned operational processes.
The measurable benefits of RPA
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a major subset of the hyperautomation market, and software sales are tipped to hit $2,9-billion this year, up from $2,4-billion in 2021, at a sterling year-over-year growth rate of 19,5%. This compares to the rest of the software market, which is tipped to grow at 16%.
And this growth is expected to continue into 2023, with growth rates of 17% expected.
Forrester agrees with the direction the RPA market is taking: it predicts that RPA will rapidly become part of a broader automation fabric and to support enhanced digital differentiation and transformation.
And a new report from Robocorp indicate that the new generation of RPA is rapidly becoming an imperative, with open source low-code development and organisation-wide automation the next step in the RPA journey.
Saucecode has developed the Roboteur RPA solution, which has turned the market on its head through its low cost and ease of use.
Bringing hyperautomation home
Saucecode helps organisations quickly move to hyperautomation with its Roboteur, Z-One and StarBridge solutions.
“RPA has become the entry point for hyperautomation, and forms part of the overall solution,” explains Brian Little, chief operating officer of Saucecode. “What organisations need is a layer that enabled things like computer vision, integration with legacy system and all the other services required for hyperautomation.
“There is a low-code stack with Z-One, which gives the commonality and the ability to pull data from wherever it is, and connect all the way up the software pillar to the StarBridge, where you can connect, convert and manipulate data, add in RPA where it’s needed and feed the data back in whatever form is required.”
Buck has a simple and succinct description of StarBridge: “It is the singularity,” he says. “It is the layer that bridges all the systems and can connect down to everything else in the organisation. It brings everything to the singularity and then RPA or any other tools can be used to do what is needed with the data.
“It gives customers a much better view of their data, enabling them to manage, manipulate and create intelligence out of it.”
With StarBridge, Saucecode believes it can deliver reduced development effort while saving money and increasing quality.
The StarBridge brings together all the disciplines associated with software development into one platform. “This makes it very easy to create high-quality software that could include complex features – and it’s 1 000-times faster than normal development.,” Buck explains.
“With StarBridge we are able to create business-critical apps quickly, with little effort, that can be modified quickly. It allows for any data to be extracted to the bridge where it can be used in any application or process, and the results fed back into any system.
“And this can be done by using either traditional or bespoke programming.”
If this sounds simple, it’s because the process is simple, Buck adds. “With StarBridge we are bridging all the disciplines in a software development platform into one platform. By surfacing all the data to a place where it can be used, it is now possible to create quite complex applications and processes with very little effort.”
And, because StarBridge doesn’t modify the underlying systems, any changes to any part of the data or processes, reflects through the system.
“It really makes it about one thousand-times faster than normal development,” says Buck. “It gives organisations the power to deliver macro software solutions that are able to span multiple facets of the business, perform lots of separate tasks with a high cognitive load that would be time-consuming or prone to mistakes if performend by employees – in one user-friendly business space that is able to pivot with the business’s requirements.”
In this environment, RPA is still a vital part of the automation process, but becomes one of many available features, Buck explains.
Low-code systems at the foundation
Gartner defines a low-code application platform as “an application platform that supports rapid application development, one-step deployment, execution and management using declarative, high-level programming abstractions, such as model-driven and metadata-based programming languages.”
According to Wikipedia, a low-code development platform provides a development environment used to create application software through a graphical user interface instead of traditional hand-coded computer programming. A low-coded platform may produce entirely operational applications, or require additional coding for specific situations.
Saucecode’s home-grown Z-One platform gives developers access to blocks of services which can be linked together to produce an implementable file that can be ported between different systems.
“It is a true low-code solution that developers can use to accelerate their application building,” Buck says.
“Essentially, they can build something once and use it many times; learn once and write anywhere. With a small set of standards, they can now achieve a huge amount of productivity.”
He describes the platform as being like a rack for code, which developers can plug in from any open source repository or resource library. These blocks of code are developed or compiled using the built in Z-Studio.
Overall, Z-One represents a solid foundation on which to build a house. “The traditional technology landscape is like trying to build on quicksand,” Buck says. “But now the Z-One architecture caters for all the things that cause developers pain. You are protected, it is open source, and you can learn something once then write anything.”
For most developers today, the way they build software solutions hasn’t really changed in decades, but Z-One is set to change that – and for the better.
Because Z-One is based on open source standards it works across any platform, with any interface.
What enables the fast code development, and ensures that everything works together seamlessly, is the fact that Z-One is strict about separating data and logic.
“The data in the database can and does change,” Bucks says. “Code doesn’t change that often. So you can deploy a standard set of code and, depending on what data is fed into it, it will do different things.
“If there are changes in the back end, the component can simply be plugged out and a new one plugged in – and Z-One manages all the integration.”
This feature helps in greatly reducing the cognitive load that developers traditionally carry. “Keeping track of how data is being stored, presented and consumed is a big ask,” Buck says. “But once it is standardised you don’t have to think about it again.
“All you have to worry about is the input going into the system and the output you want to come out.”
For more information, visit www.spacepencil.co.uk or mail Brian Little on brian@saucecode.tech