Robotic Process Automation is a technology that allows users to configure a software to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting with digital systems to execute various business processes. The software is also called a robot or simply a bot. It is important to distinguish a software robot or bot from a physical robot.Software bots utilize applications user interface to capture data, perform tasks on the data and report the results just as humans do.
Software robots are written in different computer programming languages using different RPA automation tools. There are numerous automation tools available on the market for organizations looking to adopt RPA technologies. The tools differ in terms of ease of usability, set of offered products, costs, support etc. The comparison of RPA tools is out of scope of this post and will be covered in the next topics. The 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation published this year categorized 16 vendors into Leaders, Challengers , Visionaries and Niche players. The leaders category contain a list of well known RPA tool vendors such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and WorkFusion.
