IBM va a comprar WDG Automation, fabricante brasileño de RPA, para avanzar en las capacidades de automatización con IA.

IBM anunció el 8 de julio que ha alcanzado un acuerdo definitivo para adquirir el proveedor brasileño de software de automatización de procesos robóticos (RPA) WDG Soluções Em Sistemas E Automação De Processos LTDA (conocido como WDG Automation), con sede en São José do Rio Preto, Brasil. WDG Automation ofrece RPA, Automatización inteligente, Respuesta de voz interactiva (IVR) y chatbots principalmente a clientes en América Latina. La tecnología WDG Automation está diseñada para que los usuarios empresariales creen automatizaciones utilizando una grabadora de escritorio sin necesidad de TI. Estos robots de software pueden ejecutarse a pedido del usuario final o de un programador automático.

Los términos financieros no han sido revelados.La transacción está sujeta a las condiciones de cierre habituales. Se espera que cierre en el tercer trimestre de 2020.

En la era digital actual, las empresas buscan nuevas formas de crear nuevos modelos de negocio, ofrecer nuevos servicios y reducir los costos. La necesidad de impulsar esta transformación es aún mayor ahora dadas las incertidumbres de COVID-19. IDC predice que para 2025, las empresas impulsadas por IA verán un aumento del 100% en la productividad de los trabajadores del conocimiento, lo que dará como resultado tiempos de reacción más cortos, mayor éxito en la innovación de productos y una mejor satisfacción del cliente. (White Paper de IDC, patrocinado por IBM. "Arquitecto de transformación de negocios con IA y Multicloud híbrido". Copyright 2020)

Cuando la automatización infundida por IA se aplica a los procesos de negocio y las operaciones de TI, puede ayudar a acortar el tiempo entre identificar un problema y responder. Esto es crítico ya que los incidentes de TI y las interrupciones imprevistas, por ejemplo, pueden costar a las empresas tanto en ingresos como en reputación. Al incorporar las capacidades RPA de WDG Automation en las capacidades de automatización infundidas por AI existentes de IBM en los procesos de negocio y las operaciones de TI, los líderes de negocio, incluidos los directores de operaciones (COO) y los directores de información (CIO) tendrán un acceso más amplio a la automatización inteligente a través de robots de software. 

Denis Kennelly, General Manager, Cloud Integration, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software, indica que "con el anuncio, IBM está dando un paso más allá y ayudando a los clientes a acelerar la automatización a más partes de la organización, no solo a la rutina, sino a tareas más complejas para que los empleados puedan concentrarse en el trabajo de mayor valor". "La automatización es crucial en la era digital, ya que las empresas necesitan realizar varias tareas repetitivas o rutinarias, para que los empleados puedan centrarse en la innovación. Estoy increíblemente orgulloso del papel que ha jugado WDG Automation en el mercado de RPA con un sistema unificado y plataforma integrada para ayudar a las empresas en Brasil a aumentar su productividad ", dijo Robson Felix, fundador y CEO de WDG Automation. "Unir fuerzas con IBM ampliará nuestras capacidades a un público más amplio, ayudando a las empresas de todo el mundo a acelerar su crecimiento en sus viajes de transformación empresarial", dijo Kleber Rodrigues Junior, cofundador de WDG Automation. 

Como parte de la adquisición, IBM integrará más de 600 funciones RPA preconstruidas de WDG Automation en Cloud Pak for Automation para ayudar a las empresas a convertir los conocimientos de AI en acciones automatizadas. Disponible en cualquier nube pública o privada, o en las instalaciones, IBM Cloud Pak for Automation ofrece a los clientes un conjunto único de software y servicios de automatización con  IA, que incluye captura de datos, orquestación de flujo de trabajo, gestión de decisiones, monitoreo e informes, que ayuda a las empresas diseñar, construir y ejecutar procesos de negocio y operaciones de TI automatizadas de manera inteligente. Con WDG Automation, los clientes podrán identificar más rápidamente oportunidades más detalladas para la automatización, acelerar la implementación de bots y optimizar más flujos de trabajo de extremo a extremo. 

Por ejemplo, durante el procesamiento de facturas, las capacidades de minería de clics de WDG Automation pueden ayudar a priorizar las implementaciones de RPA con scripts prefabricados de WDG Automation, integrados con Cloud Pak for Automation, y pueden implementarse de manera más rápida e inteligente con IA. 

Organizaciones como Banco Galicia, ENN Group en China, PNC Bank en los EE. UU., Varias entidades gubernamentales de Qatar y Reino Unido NHS Blood and Transplant, ya están utilizando las capacidades de IBM Cloud Pak for Automation para digitalizar y automatizar el trabajo. 

Además de las operaciones comerciales, IBM planea integrar WDG Automation RPA en sus capacidades para automatizar operaciones de TI, específicamente Watson AIOps y Cloud Pak para Multicloud Management. IBM Watson AIOps, por ejemplo, automatiza la forma en que los CIO detectan, diagnostican y responden a las anomalías de TI en tiempo real. RPA puede ayudar a cerrar el ciclo y garantizar datos consistentes en todas las herramientas que se conectan a Watson AIOps. Esto puede aumentar la calidad de los datos y mejorar la precisión de la IA, así como la productividad de los ingenieros involucrados.

La tecnología WDG Automation se unirá a la organización de IBM Cloud Integration y estará disponible a través de IBM Cloud Pak para Automatización local y en entornos de nube públicos o privados. 

Fuente: Nota de Prensa

Más Información: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/why-ibm-acquired-this-rpa-provider

ABBYY Acquires TimelinePI (Process Mining Vendor) as a strategic decision

ABBYY, a vendor in Digital IQ technologies and solutions, today announced it has completed the acquisition of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based TimelinePI, a developer of a comprehensive process intelligence platform designed to empower users to understand, monitor and optimize any business process. The acquisition of TimelinePI represents a significant milestone in establishing ABBYY’s  role in the digital transformation market as well as a global player in the emerging process mining market, which Gartner estimates will triple by 2023. The combination of ABBYY’s deep understanding of enterprise content in all its forms with the critical process context provided by the TimelinePI technology allows customers to achieve a level of digital intelligence previously unavailable. They call this Digital IQ for the enterprise. The use cases for Digital IQ cross all industry boundaries. For example, financial services institutions are challenged with onboarding new customers for products including mortgages, consumer credit offerings, traditional banking services and investment products. Each of these services follow different business processes and require specific supporting documentation needed to verify employment, assets, income and identity. Any delay or error in these onboarding processes could significantly impede transactions resulting in lost revenue, higher-processing costs or a negative consumer experience. 

 “We have received incredible interest in the capabilities we can offer with the combination of TimelinePI’s process analytics technology and our entire Digital IQ portfolio,” commented Ulf Persson, CEO at ABBYY. “We will be aggressive in our delivery-to-market to enable organizations the ability to analyze and take action on business operations, processes and customer interactions with the goal of always driving business value.” 

ABBYY’s Digital IQ solutions are designed to optimize these operations by removing friction from business processes through automated understanding of structured and unstructured content (such as IDs, paystubs, tax forms, etc.). This insight is key to greatly increasing the speed and accuracy of executing these processes while also reducing costs. With the addition of the TimelinePI technology, organizations can now more deeply analyze these processes to identify opportunities for improvements, compliance issues, and assess the performance of human and digital workers within processes. 

 “The acquisition of TimelinePI is a strategic decision by ABBYY since process mining is predominantly used in business process automation and robotic process automation – sweet spots for ABBYY,” commented Cathy Tornbohm, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “TimelinePI offers support for the full spectrum of process types, especially the ad hoc process patterns common to case management. Additionally, TimelinePI offers specific analysis modules optimized for unique process styles not possible with schema-centric approaches.” 

ABBYY will continue to market and enhance the TimelinePI platform and offer it to its thousands of customers globally, including healthcare providers, banks, insurance companies, government agencies and others. Its solutions will be offered both separately and as part of new solution bundles as an extension of ABBYY’s current and future AI-enabling products. “The response to us joining the ABBYY organization has been extremely well received by TimelinePI’s and ABBYY’s customers and partners,” said Scott Opitz, president and CEO of TimelinePI. “The combination of our leading-edge process intelligence technology with ABBYY’s extensive content intelligence and AI/ML resources will allow us to further extend our lead far beyond traditional process mining products, and cements our position as a must-have for digital transformation projects.” 

TimelinePI co-founders Scott Opitz and Alex Elkin will join ABBYY’s management team and will continue to drive ABBYY’s process intelligence vision and business growth. ABBYY will also extend TimelinePI’s research and development capabilities through a combination of increased investment and by providing access to ABBYY’s extensive resources in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Terms of the transaction are not being disclosed. 

About ABBYY 

ABBYY is a global leader in Digital IQ technologies and solutions. ABBYY offers a complete range of AI-based technologies and solutions getting insight from business content and processes. By providing digital transformation solutions to financial services, insurance, transportation, healthcare, and other industries, the company helps organizations achieve the next wave of growth by understanding customers and delivering responsive real-time intelligent systems. The flexibility of ABBYY AI solutions enables customers to utilize a diverse range of advanced technologies, platforms and solutions for process analytics and intelligence, classification, text analytics, data and entity extraction, and data validation via any communication channel and in any format. ABBYY technologies are used and licensed by some of the largest international enterprises and government organizations, as well as SMBs and individuals. The company maintains offices in Australia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, the UK, Ukraine, and the United States. For more information, please visit www.abbyy.com/company. ABBYY and the ABBYY Logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of ABBYY Software Ltd. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby recognized.

SOURCE: ABBYY's Press Release

The IPA vendor Nintex acquires the BPM vendor Promapp

Nintex,  an intelligent process automation (IPA) vendor has announced it has acquired Promapp, a business process management software company which provides partners and customers new tools to better optimize business processes through a market leading visual process mapping solution. Promapp will help Nintex customers more effectively automate, orchestrate and optimize business processes across any organization from the back to the front-office, easily connecting people and integrating with the world's leading business ecosystems and apps. Promapp has become an important Cloud BPM software company with more than 500 customers. Headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, Promapp was founded in 2002 by Ivan Seselj and is co-owned by Richard Holmes. Both Seselj and Holmes are process experts from global consulting firms. Businesses and government agencies leverage Promapp to empower teams to own their processes and to drive accountability for continuous process improvement.

"Our acquisition of Promapp creates tremendous opportunities for companies to visually map and better manage every business process," says Nintex CEO Eric Johnson." By bringing together the power of the Nintex Platform with Promapp, our customers and partners can easily design, deploy and manage their business processes and address process automation scenarios that have been difficult or expensive to solve." 

Nintex plans to maintain Promapp's offices in Auckland, Austin, San Francisco and Sydney and will relocate the Promapp teams in Melbourne and London to Nintex's offices in those cities. The company plans to integrate the technologies quickly and will accelerate enhancements of the Promapp solution to benefit the company's rapidly growing customer base, which includes well-known brands such as Coca Cola, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's and Toyota.

Source: Press Release (Nintex) and post from Eric Johnson

Genpact Agrees to Acquire Dynamic Workflow Platform PNMsoft

Genpact (NYSE: G), a global vendor in digitally-powered business process management and services, announces that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PNMsoft, a Gartner Magic Quadrant-rated dynamic workflow, case management and work optimization solutions provider based around Tel Aviv, Israel. PNMsoft complements and easily integrates pre-existing systems of records that typically host manual process work, and will act as a core component in Genpact’s digital portfolio whose roadmap comprises close to 100 digital solution components (“digital assets”). Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Closing is subject to satisfaction of certain customary conditions and expected in the third quarter. The transaction is not expected to be material to current year financial performance.

Despite the promise of digital technology and analytics, enterprises still struggle with architecting and transforming business processes that thread from the front to the back office, resulting in suboptimal customer experiences and operational performance. As a result, only about a quarter of executives are comfortable with the business impact of their digitally-enabled transformation, according to recent research conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in association with the Genpact Research Institute. Dynamic, intelligent workflow can help address this and that’s what PNMsoft combined with Genpact’s business process transformation capability sets out to achieve.

Financial services firms for example underwrite customer credit or insurance policies, and routinely struggle to ensure that employees interact with their counterparts efficiently, access the right data at the right time to make decisions such as approving a loan based on its financial conditions, or ensure that the transaction is compliant with regulations. Often, these processes are poorly documented, very manual, not scalable, and unable to learn and adapt from each transaction. This leads to dissatisfaction of clients and partners, rework, compliance issues, and often revenue loss.

Genpact addresses these challenges through its Lean Digital^SM approach, which drives practical and nimble digital solution choices from its Systems of Engagement that leverage and integrate into pre-existing systems of records. For example, Genpact’s Systems of Engagement incorporate the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) engines, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to completely automate exception management and transform business processes, creating a disruptive outcomes for clients. PNMsoft’s iBPMS solutions will provide a core layer for further building out Genpact’s Lean Digital assets.

Sanjay Srivastava, Genpact senior vice president and Chief Digital Officer, said, “PNMsoft will help us deliver agile, focused workflow interventions tightly aligned with business outcomes, that leverage data analytics in real time, use machine learning to learn over time, and utilize integrated machine intelligence. This is really exciting for us in our Lean Digital journey with our clients.”

“We are thrilled to be joining Genpact and look forward to integrating our iBPMS platform which also includes Case Management and Work Optimization into their growing portfolio of digital assets,” said Gal Horvitz, CEO of PNMsoft. “Genpact’s global footprint, horizontal and vertical solutions and expertise, combined with our products and services, will allow us to help a wider range of clients further transform their operations. We will support our current clients with more resources, invest more in our technology, and provide solutions to Genpact clients. Our goal is to become the world leader in BPM and dynamic workflow.”