#40 Salesforce enters RPA, Appian + Lana & Automation with low code/no code

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast.

We've got a jam-packed episode today. We're going to talk a bit about automation. Automation using low-code, and just a bit of a roundup of news that's happening in the hyperautomation world. Some acquisitions has taken place, and then also some, some new product features from some of the vendors. So it should be a good episode for our listeners. I guess we can dive in.

Yeah, so, so let's, let's jump in into our first topic. Obviously, as I mentioned, we have a couple of news after that. Democratizing automation with low-code and no-code, that's, um, yeah, that's a topic we, we, we talk, uh, quite a lot, uh, about, um, here on the podcast, in our Clubhouse sessions, um, because low-code and no-code is just, just a thing in the market at the moment. And, um, what do you think, why is everyone using low-code, no-code, or wants to use low-code, no-code?

Well, of course, you know, low and no-code platforms, you know, provide very high scalability, performance, and security, and also integrations, you know, across your enterprise. And it gives you the ability to create these enterprise-grade applications that, you know, are very, very easy to configure. And, you know, they say that this is starting to democratize automation. And basically what that means is that it's bringing it out to the masses, you know, a very high volume of low and no-code developers are now sort of working in tandem with, I guess, professional conventional developers, you know, to scale automation initiatives across different enterprises. And they are saying that low and no-code developers are set to sort of amplify the available development resources by up to 3 times compared to sort of conventional developers. So it's kind of bringing enterprise developers or enterprise development really to be very accessible for businesses. It makes sense.

That we have the number increasing, isn't it? Because there's just not enough skill in the market anyway to, to be normal developer, or we can't access normal developers, and we have to implement so much stuff, so many applications, solutions. It cannot be done by, by the developers we have. So a new approach needs to be here, and that seems to be no-code into the future more than low-code.

Yeah, so yeah, I guess in the low and the no-code space, what we're seeing is— and they've done a recent survey, you know, looking at CXOs, and they found that, you know, over 60% of those individuals are interested in deploying low-code technologies or investing heavily in low and no-code technologies. And around about 30% of those CXOs is already leveraging low-code to build applications. And from that percentage, when we say build applications, I mean sort of deploying 50 or more applications that's workflow-driven. So it's a big market. It is expanding. I think it's becoming, heavily mainstream. And also, I think the big driver for this is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, where, you know, applications and solutions needed to be built up very fast, very quickly. And of course, low and no-code technology is a great way to do that, you know, and a key driver for innovation as well. In businesses. You know, there's certain surveys that's been done. I know that Forrester has done a total economic impact on several low-code vendors. And you know, some of those sort of the numbers in terms of return of investment is really encouraging. You know, some of the vendors, their platforms, their low-code platforms, if you deploy it, It can take up to 70% less time to develop applications. It's a very attractive proposition still. We see a very, very big shift in it, a lot of adoption. A lot of people understand what it brings. And it goes back to your analogy of Lego blocks. Absolutely. It is a box of Lego with loads of components, logging components, audit components, workflow components, forms components, reporting components, integration integration components, and it's really sort of putting all of those bits together in order to solve your business problem, but very quickly, and also doing it in a, in a very agile fashion and almost like in a hyper-agile fashion where you can discuss an idea for a potential solution, you can go away, assemble the blocks, showcase it back, you know, to, to people that, need to use the application, for example, provide you with feedback. You can change the application very quickly, and it's a very fast-moving, fast-paced sort of process. And, you know, in some instances it actually eliminates the need for conventional business analysis, because when you speak to, I don't know, the, the end users, the stakeholders, and you talk about their problems, it's very easy to come up with the solutions to those problems and almost instantly or near instantly, you know, in a couple of hours, show them the result of a potential solution. And, you know, it's really powerful.

These tools, the low-code and no-code tools, they are so user-friendly structured these days. Everything visually drag and drop. I think everyone who is keen and lots of, especially the younger generation entering the The workforce, they are so keen on just playing around with things and they get these applications very, very quickly. And they just, if they have an idea, just try it out because they can't, it's so fast, you can't really break anything. They don't have to worry about the typical things we have seen in the past in development. Is it secure? 'Okay, this is a great solution, but how about if you have to send— have to deploy globally? How do you do that?' So all those kind of topics actually not— sure, you have to be aware of them and know about them, but generally these bigger platforms for no-code and low-code, they take all that away. So you mentioned that very early on, scalability and performance and security, that's already dealt with. And this is a huge, huge topic when it comes to enterprise adoption, of course. And everyone can just, whatever idea they have, wherever they are within the organization, whatever department, they can just build their own solutions. And we see it not just in enterprise, we also see it now with startups. They are so fast, they're growing so fast, they very often just concentrate on the main main thing of the business, basically building a product, the startup core sort of objective. But when it comes to sort of all the operations of a startup, a fast-growing startup, suddenly you need applications, you need solutions, you need automations. And everyone in these innovative companies, they just pick up a No-Code tool, a Low-Code tool, just build everything they need sort of in a couple of days and weeks. And it's very customized to their own needs. They don't need to buy something out of the box like an SAP and customize it for months.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that comes back to the topic of the podcast. It's all about democratizing development and liberating development really to bring it out to the masses so you can have more people experimenting with little solutions that makes a difference to their lives. Now, whether or not that's a Microsoft Flow application that, you know, opens up an email, downloads an attachment, and go save that in SharePoint, for example, or perhaps a collaborative team effort where it's a full quote-to-cash process that's got robotic process automation, a bit of artificial intelligence, perhaps to extract information from documents and turn it into structured data, workflow automation that handles approvals, and then, you know, digital forms to ensure that any data capture is done online or can be pushed out to a mobile device, for example. So all of these capabilities are out there, and the democratization of it is really bringing it to the various stakeholders including non-technical people to build these solutions and to build it very fast, to roll it out, and then also to be able to change it. So should there be governance changes or changes in any regulatory sort of procedures or rules, you know, it's very easy then to roll those changes out. So it's sort of for the people, I guess. Um, but of course, you know, we can't, uh, airbrush conventional development out the picture. There'll always be a place for that. Um, you know, there's always going to be a backend system perhaps that you want to maintain where you want to overlay some of your low-code solutions on top, um, which we recognize. Um, but I think what we, what we're saying here is that if you do have existing investments in your line of business systems and they feel slightly disconnected because, you know, the process that flows between those systems are not 100% joined up. Low-code automation is a brilliant way to actually join those dots. And, you know, it allows you to carve out those really good user experiences to deal with work. You know, to carve out the optimum path of the process to flow in order to achieve your outcomes. So there's a lot of benefits, and I think that, you know, one of the things that's quite exciting is the fact that you can get started pretty quickly. You know, most of the tools are very intuitive. It's all drag and drop, whether it is creating electronic forms or creating a workflow or robotic sequence to mimic human behavior. All of that is sort of within the realm of normal sort of citizen developers. And, you know, even if it's just from an ideation perspective where people sort of tinker with it and creating their own sort of automations that makes a difference for them and their productivity to full-scale sort of enterprise deployments, there's sort of something for everybody within it. It's not just reserved for a, you know, a selection of people. And I think different people will choose different, I sort of, I guess, different elements of a low-code or no-code project that they want to be involved in. So, you know, some people might want to be involved with process discovery or ideation. Other people might want to conquer creating their own digital forms to get rid of Excel spreadsheets, for example. So people might be interested in creating process automations that allows them to automate manual processes with the view to be able to see exactly for a particular process where an approval is or get better visibility in a particular process. So it's quite a It's quite a big rainbow and there's a lot of space for people, you know, under it. And I think that, you know, the best thing is to get started, is to sort of dip your toe in it. Look out for those opportunities with inside your business, you know, look out for places where there are still sort of manual paperwork, manual scanning, email of documents to different people for approvals, lots of emails to, for instance, automate your accounts receivable, accounts payable. So there's loads of these things, right? And I think that, that, that those are the things that screams out for, for, for low and no-code. And again, you know, existing IT investment in your line of business system, that still stays. I think the aim of this is not necessarily to get rid of it. The aim of this is just to, to actually make those usually sort of deep backend systems that can sometimes be a bit disjointed and very complicated, quite easy to use by providing a very, very thin sort of veneer on top of it that's very consistent, very modern, easy to use. And, you know, and I think, you know, that, that's what the— that's what this democracy looks like, right, in my view.

Absolutely. Yeah, you touched on it lightly. It really covers, covers all the different areas of automation. It might be RPA, low-code RPA. So RPA in general is quite easy to use and there are no-code platforms for AI available. Process mining has also the idea of no-code, low-code. All these areas, yeah, you can start on the pro level or you can really get really far already with the no-code level and something what some people in the business wouldn't really sort of think of. They think, oh, AI machine learning is super complicated. Sure, it might be in some scenarios, but you can get started with, with the no-code, low-code platform. And, and as well, when it comes to connecting these systems, there might be already iPaaS platforms which are complicated, and there are some other platforms which are low-code, no-code. And so in all these areas you can find the right vendors to cover these things. Maybe some vendors have everything in one platform, which makes it then maybe attractive or maybe more attractive than picking another platform. But there is so much movement in the market in that area. So even if you— yeah, there are lots of Lego blocks and you can build almost anything. But sometimes you need these extra special Lego blocks. You usually can't you can't find anywhere else. Maybe there's another tool you just bring in, or you put your pro-coder, as it seems this becomes sort of a term in comparison to low-code, no-code. You bring that pro-coder in to build you that very special Lego block, and then the whole team again can use that special Lego block with no-code and low-code. So I think the combination, as you mentioned earlier, Arno, of the low coder and the pro coder. That's what we see in the future.

Yeah, and I think it's also, you know, it is interesting that, you know, a lot of the sort of the new talent, the new graduates that's coming through, this is the world that they're used to. It's a world where you can see sort of instant results and you don't have to go very deep and code using high-code your solutions up. It's literally assembling your solutions using drag and drop. And if you want to then change the configuration because you've got a requirement change or you have a new idea to change the way the application works, it is simply just a reconfiguration of your application. So I think what we're saying is that, you know, that sort of that instant ability to be able to see the results of putting an application together, low and no-code platforms is the vehicle to actually provide that. And again, you know, if you look at the sort of the young talent that's coming through, you know, we recently had some interns as well, university graduates, they totally embrace it because you know, for them, they're so used to being able to do something very quickly, order something, and it's sort of just there, and it's sort of instantly available. And then to bring this sort of development methodology to them, they really, really embrace it. And, you know, we see a lot of those people actually excelling with you know, rolling out these applications because it, you know, it is such an exciting thing to be able to use the different blocks, solve a problem using it, perhaps, I don't know, to see an additional way to do it or to make it better, change the configuration and then see the results pretty quickly. So I think, you know, going forward, we're going to see A lot of the vendors obviously, you know, investing a lot more in making low and no-code platforms accessible to even more people. I think Microsoft is probably leading that with their Power Automate initiative. Of course, you know, most businesses that's on the Office 365 platform, you know, for them kind of stepping into the Microsoft Power Automate domain is really easy because it's simply a question of going to your Power Automate dashboard and starting to configure your Power Automate flows and your Power Apps and bring in your RPA, for example, if you need to creates robotic scripts, and it's easy, it's fast, it's accessible, it's quick results-driven. You can see stuff happen and you could roll it out, you know, very quickly.

Yeah, and what you mentioned earlier, based on the study, 27% of enterprises have done sort of a good amount of processes, but But this is, yeah, it's just 27%. So, so we will definitely see so much more uptake within every organization, from small to really large enterprises. So, and the market development, if that— if it really grows up to $45 billion by 2025, that will be just ridiculous in comparison to now. Just in the next 4 years we will definitely see this hockey stick growth. Yeah, so the only way to actually get done with all the modernization of all these systems and going forward, the answer is only that, because we won't have all these other developers and other types of developers. And even if we would have them available, it wouldn't be, in my mind, it wouldn't be the best way going forward anyway. It doesn't make sense. Always rely on developers anyway. We want to make these changes when the business needs to make a change and really get rid of these hundreds of spreadsheet and email processes. They don't seem to go away. It really takes time and requires the right toolset, and now the toolset is there. It's getting really, really good. Yeah, and the market, as we said, it's, it's moving crazy, crazily fast. Every, every— yeah, it's like every day some, some new big announcement comes up, isn't it? And, um, maybe a good segue into, into some of the, uh, the market movements recently.

Yes, so, uh, do you want to talk about the Appian and Lana acquisition?

Yeah, absolutely. So Appian, as maybe some of you know, is one, one of the leading low-code automation platform providers out there. So concentrating on basically coming, coming a lot from the workflow BPM and case management world. Yeah, Appian has developed into this cloud full automation platform, really including sort of the typical workflow case management still, plus having this low-code approach for building, building apps, incorporating RPA. A couple of years ago, they also acquired an RPA vendor, combining that with AI, with native AI, and cooperating with Google a lot and being open anyway as a system connecting with any kind of application out there. But yeah, recently they now added process mining into their platform, and obviously a big, big step. Everyone was keen to understand more what is this acquisition. And yeah, they acquired Lana, which is a process mining platform made in Germany. And yeah, so they now acquired them to make Appian from their perspective sort of the most complete automation platform out there. So really looking at sort of all elements of intelligent automation, um, or the sort of the, the, all the automation areas— intelligent document processing, AI, process mining. So pretty much everything is in there. That's probably one, one part missing, which is the, the iPaaS element, which also becomes very important. And I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually doing that step as well. So yeah, the process mining market recently anyway has lots of attention because of the biggest player. The biggest player is Celonis in the market, just a pure play sort of process mining. Well, actually it's not pure play because they are building a few other things around their platform as well to approach intelligent automation from their angle. So they're now reaching out to other sides to do more than just process mining. But anyway, so they really put process mining onto the sort of on the map again. Process mining is existing for quite some time to really identify what's really going on in processes. And but yeah, but by actually taking all this event data which flows through all your systems, so based on that event data, you can you can actually find out how everything is running, really, not just what someone thinks, how a process is running. That's, that's really, really important, um, for, for larger corporations, especially when they are global and people really don't know how they— how the end-to-end process was working, because that's the important part. Sometimes someone knows, okay, my accounts payable department, everything is smooth, but, but in these other 8 departments, part of the end-to-end process, things that might be not so good. And this, this, this Celonis platform, for example, brought this all, brought this up in a really nice way and really shows where the sort of execution capacity is and where actually the rotten apples are in execution. And Appian is also now jumping onto this, like any other, like, like many other vendors previously. So Appian is not just the first one of the big sort of other automation vendors. So just last, last year we had IBM acquiring myInvenio, so which was already quite, quite well known. SAP acquired Signavio. So, so they all have process mining and task mining capabilities. And yeah, now it was, was about time that Appian is jumping on that as well. And yeah, it was that obviously we will get a really tight, tight integration from really from process discovery to automation and improvement. So we're really closing this typical business process management, the business process movement cycle, isn't it?

Yeah.

We discover, we mine, we build applications, we improve, we automate more. We, we, we, yeah, we go through that cycle again and again. And yeah, everyone is quite excited about this. We are, as Appian partner, obviously very excited to try that out and see how we can put that into our offerings.

And I think that there is obviously a race to expand process mining capabilities. Like you say, I think it's no surprise that Appian acquired Lana Labs, you know, to bring sort of process mining capabilities onto their platform. Talked a bit about process mapping. I know a couple of years ago, Nintex acquired Promap as well, and that's all to do with process mapping and understanding processes and having a centralized repository to, you know, manage those processes and to control them, version control them, and also to collaborate around them. Nothing yet on the Nintex space in terms of sort of true process mining itself, but again, that might be something that's in their pipeline that they're looking out for. You talked a bit about Celonis' acquisition of Integromat. Of course, that was a massive one. And I think that kind of Celonis, you know, I think they raised a billion US dollars recently. So they already on an $11 billion valuation. So it's a huge market. Of course, UiPath acquired StepShot and ProcessGold as well. And, you know, that's also for process mapping and understanding. And Process Gold is, of course, for process mining. So I think there's probably a lot coming in this space still for the other bigger vendors. You know, I think Microsoft is probably one of them as well to look out for. They probably already scouting around to understand how they can join this party.

Yeah, the thing is the market is in such a, yeah, such a movement as I mentioned earlier. Every week you find out about a new up-and-coming player and there's maybe another startup like Lana already sort of available or really active coming up with a nice angle to maybe process mining, a nice angle to something else. And just, just because of that, then they are a good fit maybe with Microsoft platform. But yeah, it is, it is really a race currently what's going on.

And then, yeah, so just moving on to, um, the next interesting, um, acquisition is, um, Salesforce entering the, the RPA or robotic, robotic process automation space. So they recently also acquired a— it's also a German company called Service Trace. And, you know, they are niche RPA player, you know, again, based out in Germany. And they've been active for a long time, I think since 2003, 2004. And, you know, they didn't really scale as quickly as the other sort of big players, including UiPath. So it's, it's quite an interesting move from, from, from Salesforce to, to enter the RPA space. So it's not just the movers and shakers with inside process mining. I think with inside RPA as well, there is, there's a lot of acquisitions, strategic acquisitions. Of course, ServiceNow acquired Intellibot as well. IBM acquired WDG Automation. And in 2020, of course, a big one was quite surprising, was Microsoft's acquisition of Softomotive. And that's, of course, now incorporated into their Power Automate platform. So again, the market itself, there is a there's space for a lot more on the dance floor, as they say. And it looks like, you know, a lot of the big players are still focusing on RPA, and for a good reason. You know, it is a technology that is becoming very, very mainstream. I think, you know, we talk a lot about low and no-code workflow automation, but of course robotics actually provides additional value to automation because you can, you know, deploy robots to do mundane tasks that perhaps humans shouldn't do in the first instance. Again, I think no surprise there that, you know, Salesforce has entered this market. I mean, what's your view?

Obviously, there's a large customer base out there as well, sort of competing in the business app space. And if you're on this platform, there's then always something, because everyone starts thinking more about the end-to-end, and the end-to-end organizations, they are not just on— it's not on Salesforce, not everything is end-to-end on Salesforce. So every organization has to, yeah, has to dip into some other systems at some point, and some of that then was covered by someone else, but if you— by another vendor, obviously it's not a problem to include a Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere in that Salesforce mix, and everyone has done so far. And, um, but now obviously if you're a Salesforce customer or you become a Salesforce customer as part of your journey now jumping onto this digital transformation, um, uh, program starting with low-code, no-code, new business apps, that kind of stuff. Now then you will ask yourself, okay, who can do also this and this and this? Because everyone has on their shopping list all sorts of things, all these capabilities, all the capabilities we're talking about here on the podcast, all things automation really, and everyone wants that. So it was— if Salesforce wouldn't have added RPA or some similar tool onto the platform, In comparison, then Salesforce doesn't look like the strongest offering in the market anymore, maybe for some, so in some aspects. And yeah, and then you would look somewhere else, isn't it, where we maybe have another really full, complete automation platform. Now when you know Salesforce has RPA capabilities, you maybe stick with Salesforce for longer, or you would really appreciate if your sort of main vendor maybe has it already on board. So it's a— yeah, it's, it's, it's an important move. They already have, have done a couple of other acquisitions in the past, like MuleSoft, when it came to sort of connecting systems with the API sort of integrations. And yeah, that all makes sense because it can't be an isolated system these days. And we know in enterprises and companies you will have legacy systems. You need to record maybe what people are doing and then sort of let the digital workforce sort of replicate that in high volume. So there's no way around that. It's not necessarily something which will be around in 20 years, or maybe it will be because still we have lots of enterprises not doing that move fast enough. But yeah, it's an interesting move and it will be good for customers who are keen on Salesforce in general and customers already using Salesforce.

Yes, exactly. And I think, like you said, I think it's a good strategic move for them to, especially for their enterprise customers. So, you know, if there's an RPA capability it's in the platform. There's no need to actually, you know, introduce a new vendor. You know, it's all just a part of the same platform. And, you know, and it is sort of Salesforce focus is really to create this sort of modern workspace, you know, for its users and to provide a sort of a very, very good customer 360 view for its subscribers. I think RPA is probably just one of those additional things that allows that to happen. If there's some automation that needs to be built within Salesforce, which can take advantage of RPA, it's in the same platform. They probably will open that up as well and democratize that as well. So it's not a very heavy tech sort of experience. So yeah, so very interesting. And sort of just bringing us to our last news snippet, it's just an update from, from Nintex. Of course, Nintex acquired K2 last year, and Nintex is focusing on K2-5 and bringing enhancements to K2-5. Of course, K2-5 is an enterprise Workflow automation platform that's got workflow capabilities, electronic form capabilities, as well as integration capabilities with third-party systems, ability to create reports, and, you know, all of the best-of-breed, world-class, low-code elements you would expect, like, you know, security, scalability. Interestingly, K2-5 is the on-premise version of K2, which, which Nintex is obviously investing heavily on. And, you know, some of the new features they're bringing out is a sort of a style profile. So it allows you to create even better looking forms by using themes and styles. And of course, you know, that just enhances the user experience elements. When you build your applications and things like error resolution on your workflows. So when a workflow goes into an error state, they just bringing features in that allows you to perform different actions if your workflow goes into error state. And then also continuing on the software development lifecycle, they bring in continuous integration, continuous deployment pipelines. So it just means that if you do check in your, your K2 forms, you know, there's automated packaging and deployment of your K2 software and all of the dependent resources. So it's good to see that they're still investing in K2. It will be good to see the new features coming out. And then of course, you know, going forward into 2022, you know, it is on-premise. I think a lot of customers where they still prefer to have their sort of applications with inside perhaps their own private cloud, you know, definitely a very, very good offering, strong, strong support from, from, from Nintex. And again, it's good to see them to continue in developing the K2 platform.

All right, yeah, so there's so much news in general out there. So after the previous news article— news article— news podcast episode we have done, yeah, we received plenty of feedback. So this is why we're jumping into this monthly roundups. Now it's already end of the month again. So if you like us to cover more of these news, or if you hear about something we might not spot, just share that with us and we're happy to talk about this and give our, maybe our view on it. And otherwise, yeah, we keep monitoring the market for the latest. It's super, super interesting. We're looking forward to what the future brings. And if you really like to dig deep into the whole process discovery, process automation in general, low-code, no-code, all these different areas, reach out to myself or Arno. We're always here for you to have a chat and discuss your automation needs. And Yeah, hope you join us next time again. Thank you very much. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time and Until then, let's automate it.