Appian RPA: Taking Low-Code Automation to the Next Level

Appian's acquisition of Novayre Solutions SL, developers of Jidoka RPA, is great news for our customers and partners. I have never experienced a higher level of enthusiasm in our global partner community in my 19 years at Appian. Customers can't wait to use this new functionality and we have seen a significant spike in demand for early access to our upcoming release. A big reason for this excitement is that our customers now have the option to utilize full-stack automation functionality (iBPMS, RPA, AI, and case management) via Appian Cloud with the expectation that these solutions will continue to be delivered rapidly with unparalleled ROI.

The new RPA functionality will be available in our next release (20.1) and its primary benefits include:

1. • The ability to easily orchestrate the next generation of blended workforce - people, software, robots, and AI in frictionless workflows (even in the absence of APIs).
   • Powerful governance to centrally manage, monitor, and deploy robots across the organization to increase scale and performance.
   • Running on Appian Cloud, which is secure, globally available, and trusted to run mission critical, enterprise applications for the world's largest organizations.

As we debriefed our partner community on this new feature, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that none of them had concerns with the requirement to write bots in Java. Developers can use any IDE of their choice and the new release will include Java SDK to build scalable RPA workflows.

What makes this capability different is its availability via Appian Cloud with best-in-class security certifications, high availability, and scalability. Furthermore, all enterprise applications running on the Appian platform will be able to seamlessly access data from RPA workflows, apply AI techniques to effectively run the bots, and empower people to incorporate bots' work into their decisions and actions. This is hyper-automation at its best!

During discussions with customers over the last week, a couple of use cases became evident to immediately apply Appian RPA:

(a) Last mile integration ñ to exchange data (in real-time) with legacy systems that don't provide APIs.

(b) GUI-based interactions to capture data ñ when a business process would typically require users to click through web pages or apps to extract meaningful information and complete their work.

We expect to work in an environment where our customers employ software robots from multiple RPA software vendors and we are fully committed to being an open and flexible platform. We will continue to integrate with RPA partners, giving customers flexibility and freedom of choice.

As we eagerly await the new release this quarter, our team is actively working to design a training course for Appian practitioners. We also plan to include RPA functionality in Appian Free Trials after our next GA release. To learn more about the benefits of our low-code automation platform and to get a deeper understanding of Appian RPA, be sure to join us at Appian World!

Ambarish Desai

Vice President, Technology Partners, Appian