Micro Focus launches new robotic process automation product

Micro Focus has announced the general availability of Micro Focus Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which gives companies the power to build, secure, and scale automated business processes, from legacy to modern, across the enterprise.

According to Gartner, "The ability to integrate legacy systems is the key driver for RPA projects. By using this technology, organisations can quickly accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, while unlocking the value associated with past technology investments." 

Micro Focus RPA automates repetitive, error-prone UI-based human actions on legacy apps and integrates them with modern IT process automation in a single product.

"Micro Focus RPA delivers on key capabilities such as scalability, resiliency and security that our customers and partners demanded," says Micro Focus chief product officer Tom Goguen.

"It adapts to UI changes, automates UI and API-based applications, and includes real-time auditing and traceability, giving our customers the confidence to deploy RPA across the enterprise while providing for centralised governance and compliance for their digital workforce.

"As we have worked closely the last few years with our customers and partners to leverage test automation for their first RPA projects, it presented a convenient way to evaluate the potential of business-related automation and further prove its value to the organisation," says Micro Focus application delivery general manager Raffi Margaliot.

"With Micro Focus RPA, we augmented our core capabilities to be purpose-built for RPA and we believe our innovations in making automation more resilient to change will deliver a lower TCO compared to existing solutions.

Micro Focus RPA capabilities include:

• Easy-to-use design studio: An intuitive design interface that allows users to easily record screen actions and design sophisticated end-to-end RPA workflows, visually or with code.
   
• Cross-platform connections: A technology-rich product that combines UI automation with API and other integration methods to connect business processes spanning old and new applications.
   
• Scalable robots: A worker-queue-based architecture to scale robots up or down as workloads change, making it possible to run hundreds or thousands of robots at once.
   
• Centralised security: A centralised dashboard to manage the robots that have unique IDs and encrypted, role-based credentials.
   
• Resilient robots: Advanced object recognition technology to detect UI changes and automatically adapt as needed, saving time on maintenance.

"At Kinetic IT, we strengthen our personalised service offerings by minimising effort on activities better suited to automation," says Kinetic IT chief product officer Brett Roberts.

"The release of Micro Focus RPA opens up new opportunities to explore and pursue for the benefit of our customers."

Companies can keep their RPA costs predictable and scalable as pricing starts at US$15,000 per robot, with special pricing that extends to Micro Focus Unified Functional Testing and Operations Orchestration customers.

"As a Platinum partner of Micro Focus, we are excited about the release of the RPA product and see the definite benefits it can start to bring our clients," says Revolution IT CEO Jamie Duffield.

"The RPA product will enable us to automate their processes and focus areas of their application stack to drive value into repetitive tasks quickly and efficiently."