Automation Anywhere Redefines Digital Workforce Platforms

 Automation Anywhere, the global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), announced the most significant upgrade in the company’s history to its flagship Digital Workforce Platform, Automation Anywhere Enterprise. Building on a robust enterprise RPA platform recognized as the most widely deployed in the industry, version 11 delivers enhancements in scalability, security and cognitive automation. This latest version has been architected from the ground-up to meet the demanding requirements of both IT and business users in banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and other industries.

“Within the next five years, it is our vision that robotic process automation will be as ubiquitous and as essential as electricity,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and co-founder of Automation Anywhere. “A digital workforce platform, therefore, must be just as reliable as the power grid and just as easy to deploy as flipping a switch. Automation Anywhere Enterprise version 11 is a major step in this digital transformation, enabling enterprises to automate business processes. This includes not only automating repetitive tasks, but using AI technology along with predictive analytics to deliver even greater business value. With input from our large customer base and partner community, we have engineered a new standard for digital workforce platforms with this latest release.”

Automation Anywhere is the only provider that offers RPA, cognitive and analytics technology to enable end-to-end automation of business processes for global, enterprise organizations. The Automation Anywhere Enterprise platform has already been deployed across 700 of the world’s largest companies, delivering 500,000 automated full-time equivalents that have saved hundreds of millions of hours of manual tasks.

“Automation Anywhere has enhanced its software by adding new features in areas such as workload management, automation lifecycle management, SLA-based automation, Citrix automation, and credential management as well as adding new data APIs,” said Sarah Burnett, vice president of analyst firm Everest Group.“These additions should appeal to enterprise users who are looking for higher operational and security capabilities in RPA software.”

Operational Scalability for the Modern Digital Enterprise

The new Automation Anywhere Enterprise release introduces significant updates to its open, highly adaptive and IT-acclaimed platform architecture, dramatically enhancing the enterprise-grade, rapid scalability that has been its hallmark.

• Workload Management – To enable industrial-scale automation, AA Enterprise now includes Workload Management (WLM). WLM has been designed from the ground up to meet enterprise-class SLA demands with prioritized queue management. It enables users to manually prioritize high value transactions within an automated queue management system. It has built-in SLA calculators and RPA-as-a-Service capabilities with the integration of BotFarm™ – the industry’s first and only bots-on-demand functionality that enables hundreds or even thousands of bots to be spun up to meet increased automation demand the moment it is needed. All of these features empower an enterprise to achieve the best optimization of its digital and human resources to meet highly dynamic SLA demands.
• Automation Lifecycle Management – Delivering an enterprise-grade framework, Automation Lifecycle Management (ALM) brings order to an often-chaotic process of developing automation in large enterprises. It forces bots to graduate through lifecycle stages as defined by the organization (e.g., Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production). ALM employs software development best practices that are essential for successful repeatability. It also helps organizations meet stringent demands for compliance, such as CMMI Level 5 certification and SOX. ALM includes complete version control with check-in/check-out, version comparison, rollback, lock/unlock and more.
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery – Full-fledged High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) builds on the existing HA/DR foundation to make disaster recovery a virtual non-issue. As opposed to the typical business continuity solutions that only provide recovery at the server level, HA/DR in the latest release ensures recovery down to the bot level and across multiple locations in the event of an interruption.
• Central Control Room – Control Room is the brains of the entire RPA operation and enables users to deploy, schedule, audit and manage an army of bots from a central location. Now, Control Room features predictive operational analytics through the built-in Bot Insight™ - the industry’s most comprehensive, enterprise-grade RPA analytics solution. RPA analytics are presented in visual dashboards with actionable insights, such as bots with the highest ROI, bots at risk of failure, and much more. Control Room now showcases a highly intuitive interface that delivers a seamless user experience across the board and on all devices. These updates are driven by a central focus on design thinking that delivers a consistent and transparent user experience throughout the platform.
• Cloud-ready Architecture – The AA Enterprise platform can be installed on-premises or on the leading cloud provider platforms, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. These cloud platforms provide infinite scale and flexibility, offering the best range of options to meet the highly demanding deployment needs of large enterprises.

“Release 11 represents a significant movement of the needle as it relates to ease of use, scaling, and analytics,” said James Manos, director, Robotic Process Automation at ISG. “The user interface brings the overall user experience to new levels and the enhanced security management capabilities of the credential vault demonstrate Automation Anywhere’s continued commitment to listening to its customers feedback and incorporating enhanced features and functionality in every release.”

Enhanced Security Capabilities for Greater Compliance and Control

Some of the most significant updates in AA Enterprise are in security, building on a solid foundation that already includes a credential vault, role-based access control, and encryption for data at rest and in motion. Enterprise 11 delivers enhanced capabilities for admins to set and enforce enterprise-wide security policies. Most importantly,segregation of duties and least-privilege access are the two pillars of the security framework.

• Credential Vault with Locker Management – Delivering bank-grade credential security, lockers are used to manage any data deemed sensitive (such as user credentials, account numbers, and SSNs) and allows setting of bulletproof, highly configurable security policies. Passwords and other sensitive information are not stored on the client machine; instead all data is encrypted using AES-256 and RSA-2048 algorithms and stored in the vault.
• CyberArk™ Integration – AA Enterprise has been certified by CyberArk, a leader in privileged account security with more than half of the Fortune 100 companies as its customers. This third-party vault integration provides a secure and convenient storage solution for sensitive data including user credentials. For customers using CyberArk, the integration delivers a plug-n-play capability, saving IT time and resources. Customers without any credential security mechanisms in place can use the built-in AA Enterprise Credential Vault.
• Granular RBAC and Latest Security Standards – With this release, AA Enterprise continues to expand support for modern security standards and methodologies including SSL, Kerberos, MS NTLM, SAML 2.0 for Single Sign-on, Veracode Level 5 and two-factor authentication. The platform continues to build on the robust and highly granular role-based access control (RBAC) that helps enterprises apply human standards of security, such as prevention of impersonation, to bots.

The Most Reliable Citrix Automation
Citrix and similar security environments are image-based systems that do not lend themselves easily to automation. Automation Anywhere’s AISense applies significant AI capabilities in version 11 to deliver a solution that can automate any data.

AISense brings intelligent image recognition through computer vision and AI techniques for Citrix, Delphi, Flex and remote desktop environments. Since a bot is only allowed to use mouse clicks and keystrokes in a Citrix environment, choices are restricted to image-based automation, coordinate-based automation and OCR-based automation. Automation Anywhere’s AISense for Citrix scans the application image, identifies UI elements (such as labels and text boxes) and automatically creates all the UI objects. AI-powered automation intelligently creates the dynamic linking between these objects. AISense is agnostic to application changes and delivers complete automation even if the on-screen fields change position, the application changes colors, the zoom level is modified, or the screen resolution is updated.