Microsoft has announced that it has acquired robotic process automation (RPA) startup Softomotive for an undisclosed sum.
In a blog post, Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s citizen application platform, said that the company’s desktop automation solutions will join together with Microsoft’s Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) capabilities at “uniquely affordable pricing.”
To this end, starting today, Softomotive’s WinAutomation platform is available at no cost to existing Power Automate customers with RPA attended licenses.
“Microsoft is further democratizing RPA and enabling everyone to create bots to automate manual business processes,” Lamanna wrote. “Together with Power Automate, WinAutomation will provide customers additional options for RPA desktop authoring so anyone can build a bot and automate Windows-based tasks.”
In a statement on Softomotive’s website, CEO Marios Stavropoulos said that Microsoft provided a “natural path” to not only greater scalability but complementary solutions like augmented AI and analytics. He also said that he expects Softomotive will be able to provide its customers with “better professional services” as a result of the buyout.
“As part of Microsoft, we will usher in the next phase of RPA with a true end-to-end, agile offering together. We’ve come a long way from our roots and are now ready to deliver a new RPA vision to our customers,” he said.
RPA — technology that automates monotonous, repetitive chores traditionally performed by human workers — is big business.
Softomotive, which was founded in 2005 in Greece and moved its headquarters to London in 2015, offers a robust set of connectors and applications for desktop automations — such as SAP, HTML5, .NET, legacy terminal screens, Java, Citrix, and more — that let customers execute multiple workflows and automations in parallel and on the same machine.
With a drag-and-drop user interface, macro recorder, and web recorder, WinAutomation users can define workflows based on day-to-day activities while developing, configuring, troubleshooting, and testing processes.
