Ibm Robotic Process Automation (Rpa) and Uipath Buyer'S Guide and Reviews November 2021
Ibm Robotic Process Automation (Rpa) and Uipath Buyer'S Guide and Reviews November 2021
Automation (RPA)
and
UiPath
Buyer's Guide and Reviews
November 2021
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
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2
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
Contents
Top Review by Topic of IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath 10-11
Overview 12
Vendor Directory 27
3
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
PROS
"I like the integration with Watson and the possibility to have an intelligent reading of all the customers' documents." [Full Review]
Alfonso
Abad
Lucas
Ferreira
"The quality is great! It's very strong and has a very strong platform." [Full Review]
Fernando Di
Lelle
"If you have a business process, and once you have automated that process, you have a readily available workflow in place." [Full
Review]
reviewer146
0010
"The solution's ease of use is its most valuable aspect." [Full Review]
Sornsarun
Ratananopa
donchai
4
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
CONS
"The time it takes for approvals, and risk analysis could be faster." [Full Review]
Alfonso
Abad
Lucas
Ferreira
"IBM should provide specific solutions for specific problems, like templates for invoicing processes, or general templates for
creating efficient processes." [Full Review]
Fernando Di
Lelle
"This RPA should be under the umbrella of BPM." "This is what the future should be." [Full Review]
reviewer146
0010
"We're based in Thailand, but the documentation is not in Thai, which makes it difficult for us." "If they could translate all of their
documentation into our language, we'd be very grateful." [Full Review]
Sornsarun
Ratananopa
donchai
5
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
"IBM licensing is annual and based on Virtual Processor Cores (VPC)." "This provides flexibility as part of the containerization
environment." [Full Review]
reviewer146
0010
6
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
UiPath
PROS
"The two reasons that we went with UiPath were, one, the learning curve, and, two, the community edition of UiPath, which had
everything we needed to dig into the solution." "Whereas with the other companies, there wasn't that option." "With Blue Prism, for
example, we had to buy a license in order to check whether the tool was going to work for us." [Full Review]
Sumesh
Velu
"Every project we've delivered that has some sort of time savings to it has had an intrinsic ROI." [Full Review]
reviewer169
5615
"People, in their careers, can become relevant again." "If they are in a dying industry or disrupted industry, they can get into
something that's growing rapidly." "If you have a computer, and a decent internet connection, you can have a new career in a fairly
short amount of time." [Full Review]
Brian
Joseph
"UiPath has enabled us as an organization to perform an array of tasks with more proficiency and efficiency." "Automation is very
important to our organization now and UiPath has played an immense role." [Full Review]
Priya Zaveri
reviewer169
5111
"UiPath saves costs for our customers’ organizations." "That would just be the cost savings from RPA bots." "I haven't really dug into
the cost savings of the ancillary products, however." "I know that one of my clients is using the test suite now after I had built a proof
of concept for it, and they've fully implemented it." "I'm sure there's going to be a lot of cost savings there as well." [Full Review]
reviewer169
5108
"UiPath has helped with data scraping and plugging into websites and combining that with Alteryx." "We can attack 90% of our use
cases now." [Full Review]
Sam Clarke
7
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
UiPath
CONS
"There are a lot of cloud solutions that we already use in our organization." "However, with UiPath, we have stayed on-prem out of
concern for security." "We don't have clarity on if cloud solution is going to work securely." [Full Review]
Sumesh
Velu
"I would really like the ability to bring OCR connectors into Studio X, if possible." "Right now we're only using OCR and Studio as
that's where the plugins are available." [Full Review]
reviewer169
5615
"The forum's a great place, however, for a new person, it was better some years ago." "It's grown so fast, and it's not that as nimble."
"Previously, if you asked questions and the response time was quicker." [Full Review]
Brian
Joseph
Priya Zaveri
"The studio design is a little different." "If you go from one tool to the next, you might be a little shocked at how things are
organized." [Full Review]
reviewer169
5111
"The license model changing every year can be a little bit frustrating." "It's hard sometimes when things go from being robot-based
to being runtime-based." [Full Review]
reviewer169
5108
"I would like to see them dive into more industry-specific use cases." [Full Review]
Sam Clarke
8
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
UiPath
"The pricing for the robots is fair." "One thing that annoys us a little bit is that we have to pay for each developer." "With Blue Prism,
you can have 20 developers and not incur any additional costs." "We don't like having to piecemeal all these different licenses." "It
is providing value, but it is not in the sense of a robot." "You're paying for the tools, whereas other people just give you the tools,
Allen and then you pay for the bots." [Full Review]
"It is pricey at the beginning, but we'll have to see going forward what we get for the tools." "It is always expensive to buy a really
nice car and not drive it very far and very much." "So, it is about utilization." [Full Review]
Timothy
Green
"Over and above the subscription fees, we're paying probably $51,000 a year right now." [Full Review]
Earl Jess
"I'm not sure about licensing and pricing, but the pricing for their certification is a little bit more." "Previously, we could do it for no
price." [Full Review]
Jyothi
"I began learning UiPath with the Community version, which is available free of charge." [Full Review]
reviewer164
2950
"The price for the attended bot is between $1,800 and $3,000." "The unattended bot was $8,000 last year." "Orchestrator is around
$20,000." [Full Review]
Shubham
Agrawal
"Different licenses are used to activate features that the organization wants to use." "For example, they offer licenses for UiPath
Studio X, attended automation, unattended automation, document understanding, and so forth." [Full Review]
HARSHAD
JADHAV
9
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
VALUABLE
FEATURES reviewer1460010 reviewer1414743
Number one, you can record your actions, number The best feature in UiPath is their robotic
two, you can orchestrate between the human task enterprise framework because that is an inbuilt
and bots. The biggest benefit is that you can processing framework for utilizing their work
orchestrate between the human tasks, system queues. It's plug-and-play, and already pre-built to
tasks, and the bots. That is what the complete IBM where you don't have to start from scratch. It's
portfolio can provide. No other solution I have enterprise-grade and ready to be used. All you
seen can provide this level of flexibility. In addition need to do is populate your dispatcher, create a
to that, we have the IBM Business Analytics insight queue, create a performer, and you're good to go.
as well, which is like real-time dashboards. [Full The highest benefit of it is that it's just there, ready
Review] to use, and you don't need to start from a blank
screen. ... [Full Review]
Alfonso Abad
Jeroen Van Smaalen
10
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
ROOM FOR
IMPROVEMENT reviewer1460010 reviewer1414743
The way the robots are being used actually. We Features for process discovery would improve the
need to design the robot to instantiate it based on end-to-end development capabilities. From a
some event or human intervention. If that can also developer's point of view, my biggest struggle
be automated, that would be good. That would be with UiPath is debugging. The debug mode in
an additional workflow completed. The next step UiPath feels clunky and it is a sore spot. It feels it's
after that would be to use the RPA service. Some hard to control the flow of the process. There are
things which require human intervention can also a lot of internal errors and it's not intuitive. In
be automated using some decision management, general, debugging is not a good experience and I
based on rules. If there's a framework which does don't enjoy doing it. In contrast, Blue Prism has
all of this part, that would be good I think. RPA better debugging capabilities. Blue Prism is a little
should be c... [Full Review] mo... [Full Review]
IBM should provide specific solutions for specific I'm trying not to sound negative about it as I like
problems, like templates for invoicing processes, them a lot, however, the process mining and the
or general templates for creating efficient process mining features stem further away from
processes. Another good example would be to the development of the robots and the monitoring.
have a template for a credit onboarding process. The development, run, and monitoring are really
This would give us something to show the client in closely knit, or really close together, and then
terms of a working solution, and that we're not process discovery is starting to get there. It's on its
having to create something from scratch. The way, however, I don't see that it's as closely
quality is great! It's very strong and has a very connected as the other three parts. The
strong platform. However, you need to consider automation operations have not brought down
the clients and have ... [Full Review] any company costs. ... [Full Review]
The time it takes for approvals, and risk analysis The AI Center area could definitely improve. The
could be faster. It's probably the main benefit you StudioX model could also improve just a little bit
can get from the whole process. If it can do the so that the introduction of variables is better and
tedious work quickly, employees with specialized would make it possible to pass on a similar kind of
skills can concentrate on the things that require data in between multiple activities. This is a very
deep knowledge or specialization. Then all the simple concept, however, this kind of feature is
manual, repetitive tasks can be forwarded to not available within UiPath. From the business
automation. Integrating with artificial intelligence perspective, a little bit more insight on the
should be more mature and more complete. So dashboard that is currently available in
far, it works, but there are still many more benefits Orchestrator would be ideal. I agree with UiPath
that w... [Full Review] having a ded... [Full Review]
11
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
Overview
SOLUTION IBM Robotic Process Automation UiPath
(RPA)
OVERVIEW IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation UiPath is leading the “automation first” era –
Anywhere enables you to automate the highly championing a robot for every person and
repetitive tasks normally performed by humans enabling robots to learn new skills through AI and
with robotic process automation (RPA) so you can machine learning. Through free and open
boost employee productivity and allow employees training, UiPath is led by a commitment to bring
to focus on higher-value knowledge work. The digital era skills to millions of people around the
RPA solution from IBM includes market-leading world, thereby improving business productivity
RPA technology from Automation Anywhere, Inc. and efficiency, employee engagement and
that is pre-integrated with IBM Business Process customer experience. The company’s
Manager Express, which allows organizations to hyperautomation platform combines the #1
orchestrate and manage... Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with a
full...
SAMPLE The Hanover Insurance Group Airbus, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway,
CUSTOMERS
Chevron, CVS Health, DHL, General Electric,
Google, Lufthansa, NASA, NTT, Orange, Philips,
Singtel, Spotify, The Home Depot, Toyota, Uber,
United Airlines...
TOP UiPath vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Automation Anywhere (AA) vs. UiPath
COMPARISONS Compared 41% of the time Compared 28% of the time
Automation Anywhere (AA) vs. IBM Robotic Microsoft Power Automate vs. UiPath
Process Automation (RPA) Compared 15% of the time
Compared 21% of the time
Blue Prism vs. UiPath
Blue Prism vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation Compared 13% of the time
(RPA)
Compared 12% of the time
* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.
12
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
Easy to grasp the basics and to get started; has a very low learning
curve
Jeroen Van
Smaalen
We primarily use UiPath for outsourcing. Customers call us when they need extra people to fill positions, on a temporary or
permanent basis, similar to a temp agency.
The biggest use case that is running right now is that we get job openings or requests from a lot of different third-party
brokerages, customers, clients, vendors, et cetera. They all arrive through different platforms. We get an email saying there's a
request, please check it out and let us know if you have someone to fulfill the position, and the request is implemented through
UiPath. It's automated. We've created all of the mailbox folders based on the sender and the subject, so we know which customer
or which broker it is. Then, we make the email follow a link to the information for the job opening or the inquiry and we put it into
our Salesforce system.
There are a couple of smaller use cases as well, where we have task operations that have to be done weekly or daily. Mostly it's
reading emails or reading schedules and making changes in files.
The automation of job inquiries has a lot of sufficiency on how we operate as we used to have multiple people need to be
available throughout the day to manually check if an email with an inquiry came in, and that would require them to drop work and
open the email, check it out and maybe take action immediately. Now that the robot is running and taking care of the need for
filtering through all the results for them, employees can stay focused on the other tasks that they have. They don't have to keep an
eye on a second monitor every time and drop everything they're doing to read an email only to decide what is relevant or not.
I understand work has to be tested. It hasn't impacted the entire company yet as I've been here a little short of a year now and we
haven't made that big of an impact just yet.
13
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
The most valuable aspect of UiPath is the community in terms of the way they open up their platform to the community and make
it freely available for people to try and to practice. The amount of feedback from that community makes it very easy for us to get
into UiPath and if you're trying something that you've never done before, you at least have some insights. There's almost always
someone who has done it before or who has asked the question. I would say the community is one of the biggest extra treats for
UiPath.
From a technical perspective, I like the learning curve in the Studio and in the orchestrator - or the Cloud Platform as they call it
now - due to the fact that it's easy to get into. It's easy to grasp the basics and to get started. You can scale up as fast and as far as
you'd like or need to for your customer. It can do everything. You don't have to learn everything in advance to be able to work with
it. It makes it really approachable.
Building automation can be really easy. The biggest challenge is to find the easy use cases as the use cases in the company can
get quite complicated quite fast. That said, using the recorder in the Studio and then converting that to work in a mobile office is
quite easy. I started in 2016 or 2017, and between then and now there's been a lot of changes. It's always been easy for
developer-minded people to get started. However, now with the introduction of StudioX, it is even more focused on the different
users and they have a different entry point for them. What I like about UiPath is that the training is really comprehensive. You can
almost just record what you do by hand and then StudioX will translate that into a robot and then you can fine-tune it to make it
more robust. Smaller costs can be easier steps. Just press record, do what you do, and then you're able to work with teams.
Scaling automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure does make my job a lot easier for now. What I do see in
companies is when they've taken the first steps and they start to scale up, a lot of them have policies or ways of working in place
where they want to stick to the ways that they know. A lot of time I see customers will, in the end, do it by themselves anyway, so
they use all of the upscaling functions that are available as they want to do it the way that they always did.
UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring
of automation. However, while it does facilitate end-to-end automation, it does take a lot of the development and running and
monitoring of the robots on itself. That is something that is facilitated really well by UiPath. The process discovery and the analysis
is rather newish within UiPath. Maybe it's not as well integrated into the community platform.
At this time, UiPath has helped to minimize our on-premises footprint as it is a cloud-based solution. It's important that the on-
premise footprint has been minimized as it makes it easier for us being a small company. We have 160 people working for us in
the Netherlands and then a couple in the Caribbean. Bringing new technology in like robotic process automation and then asking
from the IT department to get me free service and results of my configuring and have all the discussions about what goes where,
how the security works, how to find the work, who gets access, et cetera is easy. This is due to the fact that UiPath is offered on a
cloud basis and I don't have to do all that on-site work, which allows me to get to building and talking about RPA quicker.
The fact that the vendor handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates saves time for our IT department. It helps us to
implement a lot faster. The client companies can have a reliable cloud solution to help them do at least the first steps to get them
acquainted with the product. It makes it a lot easier. It helps me a lot, and it helps our customers in starting out as well.
UiPath has decreased the time to value in that since it's cloud-based, I can deliver faster than I would be able to do on-prem. If we
have an idea, or if we want to scale up, we can do so faster in the cloud solution than I could on-prem.
The product lowers the overall total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates,
however, I'm not sure what would happen if we scale up.
The automation Cloud Platform has definitely helped reduce the time it takes to create automation. It brings a lot of things
together. It's easy to use for clients and customers. It makes it easy to bring different disciplines together, so I don't need to think
14
about how to reuse my code, or how to explain to the customer, and I don't need to share the processes to be able to release,
run, and monitor and to get reports on the results.
UiPath has reduced human error. There are fewer errors and the processes are less error-prone and once the technology has
proven itself within the company, within the customers, people start to trust the robots to do what they do. Employees don't need
to check the work that had been done as they know that if the robot reported that it was done correctly, then it was done
correctly. In that way, it has saved a lot of time by not having to check anything.
It has also freed up employee time. It's a three-person team and it saved them a couple of hours a week doing the work that they
used to do. It saved them a lot more focus as they didn't have to monitor the email inbox all the time. They were able to apply
more focus to the other things that they were doing. That said, it's hard to quantify the gains. However, overall, it has made them
happy. That's one guarantee. They absolutely love that they gave the mundane work away to the robot because it was bothering
them to be monitoring an email inbox all the time. It's given them the time to focus on cases that match the right people to the
right inquiries or openings. I don't have any metrics on it, however, anecdotally, they tell me that it helped them to do the rest of
their work better as they could apply more focus to more important tasks and placements are better attended to. There's much
more focus and attention and better matches being made.
I'm trying not to sound negative about it as I like them a lot, however, the process mining and the process mining features stem
further away from the development of the robots and the monitoring. The development, run, and monitoring are really closely knit,
or really close together, and then process discovery is starting to get there. It's on its way, however, I don't see that it's as closely
connected as the other three parts.
The automation operations have not brought down any company costs. Automation operations have gotten more expensive due
to the fact that we added UiPath to them. That said, you do get gains at a different branch of the company. We didn't replace
anything with UiPath. We weren't able to skip a step or program or tool, which makes it an added cost.
More documentation would be helpful, as they change rather quickly. There are two yearly stable releases and then a couple of
community releases and data releases in between. Sometimes not all documentation is changed as quickly as the features are.
Sometimes you can find something in the documentation that is not the answer, or not available in the product anymore. That's
simply a side effect of how fast they develop the product.
Sometimes it's not entirely clear what features are, for example, available in their community edition, or in the on-prem, or in the
cloud. The difference between the on-prem and the cloud has become clearer in the past few weeks, however.
I started out at my previous company with systems integration. We started out with discovering robotic operations, discovering the
tools, and suppliers. We chose UiPath and one of the competitors, as we found them to have the best suit with our customers.
That was the end of 2016. That's when I started doing training in UiPath and started doing some custom integrations.
Now, I switched to a new job at a different company where they want to start an RPA practice as well and they chose UiPath solely
for RPA.
15
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
From the operations standpoint, the stability of the cloud it's very good. I haven't had any issues with stability. The Studio will crash
at random times. I've identified two scenarios where I'm able to make the Studio crash every time by just doing the same actions.
However, other than that, the automation was really stable, and I haven't had any issues or incidents. In Studio, I'd say it is good
enough, however, there is some room for growth there.
Scaling automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure is a bit pro for UiPath as I'm starting an RPA practice. We don't
have a lot of infrastructure engineers to build the project yet. Therefore, a lot of the time, with new customers as well, it will be a
bit of a one-man show. Yet, what we can do is communicate to the platform and then make sure the infrastructure is there and
then implement the platform and build a business analysis basically in an un-built realm. I have to do a lot of things by myself, so
the fact that UiPath brings in the Cloud Platform and the Studio and it's all integrated and you can scale up without having to have
too much. You need to know something about infrastructure to understand what it does for you, however, you don't have to do it
all by hand. I don't need like three or four DP-trained individuals to be able to scale up or scale out. It's helped me get further
faster.
Once you build the infrastructure and you know what you're doing and you know where you want to go with your platform and
scaling, it's rather easy.
The only people really using it at this time are me and six trainees. There are a couple of ops people as well that are able to log in.
We might have a total of ten people on the solution.
It's not being used too extensively now, however, that's for a large part due to the fact that most of my colleagues are working with
our customers, so there are not too many internal processes or tasks. However, we do have plans to increase its priority as the
tasks that we do have are at some points largely repetitive. We do a lot of operations and maintenance for our customers as well
in different fields, so we are mainly looking at that for further automation opportunities.
I get a quick response and it's usually constructive. I manage to fix my own problems a lot of the time using the community forums
and information from there. I haven't had too much interaction with UiPath tech support.
16
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
We currently have it running, so some internal processes. And, we're looking to expand that into the customer landscape.
The setup is simple. They deliver it in a cloud environment, I didn't need to do any installs or make any arrangements.
You need to make an account and get started and watch a couple of training videos that will help you through it. The adding of
the robots is very well documented in the forum, in the community, and in the training sessions. They have made it really easy to
get started and to get the information you need to take the first step.
The deployment question is a tough one as I started out at this company while already having a communicators subscription on
my own account. Therefore, I started out using that one and then gradually shifted toward using more automated resources. I
don't have a clear overview of how much time it took to deploy. It might have been a couple of weeks overall, however, I was
doing different things at the same time, and I never took a metric of how much time it took. I'd say starting out if the prerequisites
are in place at the company, it could be a matter of days.
Tasks such as setting up an account, getting some service, et cetera, if you know what you're doing and you know what to ask a
few questions before starting, it's a couple of minutes or hours. That said, in reality, there are always things you forget or things
that they didn't do, so it always takes a little extra time.
My implementation strategy was basically to figure it out as I went, which is not the best strategy, however, it was the best we
could do due to the fact that the company didn't really know what they wanted to do with RPA. I was figuring out my own place in
the company and then their wishes with robotics with RPA. There were a lot of things at the same time, so there was not a closed
strategy other than to start up quickly, as soon as possible, get feedback, and then try again.
For now, I alone handle deployment and maintenance tasks. That will be the case until our trainees finish training.
17
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
We have not yet seen an ROI and have no concrete plans for any in the near future.
While I have one or two sheets from old presentations that have pricing information, they are over a half year old. I have no current
insights. I wasn't included in discussions between the company and UiPath in relation to licensing.
The company might have looked at other options. However, they did this before I was hired. Ultimately, they did want to choose
UiPath, and I was hired based on my experience with the product. They chose UiPath at that time as they were working together
with Oracle and that company has always been very Oracle-minded.
I use the community Studio and the Cloud Platform. I take the cloud from UiPath. I'm not sure where they host their solutions. I use
the automation cloud from UiPath.
End-to-end coverage is not too important to my work at this time. Maybe if they were more closely integrated, I would be able to
offer it more easily to my customers. However, now, due to the fact that I often go in at the first interaction with a customer or at a
company, I have to introduce the concept of RPA, I have to introduce the product of UiPath, and I have to introduce or orchestrate
the Cloud Platform and Studio. What I've seen is that that's enough for the first steps, usually, the company will have a pretty clear
vision of what they want to start out with in terms of automation. However, introducing the process mining capabilities would add
an extra step to the start-up that we have to do and what they want to see is faster results in the early phase. It's short the time
from when I come in to initiate the first value, so they can appreciate the value and start the business cases and go from there.
Maybe, once they are a couple of steps further on and they have a couple of automations, then they go look at the process of task
mining as they have the infrastructure, they understand what the process automation is about, and then they start to see the value
process or task mining. Therefore, the end-to-end factor, for my job, for now, is not too important as I don't truly use the end-to-
end approach. I do the start by myself with the customer and then we go from there. Then, in the next phase, I will build them
practices and they will start to automate the beginning of the process discovery as well. There is not something that I have initially
do. Once companies start beyond that first phase and the first steps, then process discovery and process mining can be really
important in automation. In a later stage, it becomes more important. However, in my case, I work a lot in the early phases and
haven't seen too much of the process discovery products in that phase.
Attended automation hasn't really helped us scale RPA benefits as we are a rather small company and there's only a small group
18
that works with the product, and therefore, we haven't been able to use the assistance in the same way a larger organization such
as a bank or insurance company might use it.
We don't use the staff solution yet and we have not taken advantage of the AI functionality. While I have played with AI, I haven't
had any use cases to implement the AI sensor.
I'd advise new users to start by doing instead of only reading. Start small, like finding small processes or if you're an individual,
look at your own work. Find something you could do and automate that as it gives you the best appreciation of the value. Try it
out in your own environment and just explore how it goes as that gives you the best insights. For me, when I started, it was a great
feeling to watch your screen and watch your cursor follow the screen without doing anything.
Keep asking questions when talking to users. When translating the biggest use case into other processes, spend more and more
time talking to the users and going through the processes, and defining and understanding what happens. Otherwise, it's going to
cost you a lot of extra time figuring out why you've got all these weird exceptions that you didn't expect. Everyone always talks
about how easy robotic process automation is. However, only once you understand your processes from a user's perspective,
you'll run into a wall. It's never standardized. It's never the same. I need to warn my customers more frequently about this pitfall,
due to the fact that, yes ultimately, it's very fast, but it only is once you know exactly what you want to automate and that's why
most of the time it's time-consuming.
Public Cloud
IF PUBLIC CLOUD, PRIVATE CLOUD, OR HYBRID CLOUD, WHICH CLOUD PROVIDER DO YOU USE?
Other
19
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
Fernando Di Lelle
We are a solution provider and we have been working on selling the IBM RPA product during 2020. We are primarily dealing
with the on-premises version because our clients are not willing to use the cloud because of issues with their data. We have a lot
of banks as clients, and it is a problem for them to use cloud versions.
One of our primary use cases is creating chatbots for clients, such as financial institutions.
Other things that we can automate are tasks like dealing with incoming credit processes, and administrative processes such as
invoicing. These are the processes that take a lot of time.
We have not generated any sales yet, but we have experience with the product and are working on selling it.
IBM should provide specific solutions for specific problems, like templates for invoicing processes, or general templates for
creating efficient processes. Another good example would be to have a template for a credit onboarding process. This would give
us something to show the client in terms of a working solution, and that we're not having to create something from scratch.
The quality is great! It's very strong and has a very strong platform. However, you need to consider the clients and have a client
perspective.
From my point of view, the RPA from IBM is not yet in touch enough with the clients. They are not taking the client's
perspective into consideration, and they don't guide them enough throughout their journey to RPA.
They need to provide more guidance and more coaching. At the end of the day, it's a type of culture that they are trying to build
within the company.
I would like to see an interface that would help customers establish which process is suitable for RPA or not. Maybe some type of
scoring process would be helpful in establishing the processing suitability for whether it is an RPA or not. That would be a great
feature to consider.
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
I think that it is a stable solution but I am not yet experienced enough to answer with certainty.
If you are working on-premises then scalability could be a problem. This is certainly not a problem with cloud solutions but again,
this is the same problem for us. Our clients would like to remain working on-premises. we all know that cloud-based solutions are
the best, in order to have scalability and in order to grow in the number of bots or applications.
Most of our clients are mid-sized banks, and we have a lot of government entities.
I think that the pre-sales and technical support are really great. I had worked for IBM myself in 2016, and these people are really
professional.
We are competing with UiPath and Blue Prism, and also, our clients have been considering minor regional RPA companies. One
such example is a company from Argentina that is very popular in the region, called BI.
The main difference between IBM RPA and the other products is that the small companies have developed ready-to-use solutions.
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
We work with the presales teams and have not had much experience with the setup.
The length of time required for deployment will be two or three months, depending on the infrastructure. When you have an on-
premises deployment, you need to prepare the infrastructure to perform the implementation. There are times where the initial
setup takes longer than you first imagine when the project begins.
For example, having availability with the client's infrastructure in order to start working on an RPA project is sometimes a problem.
The cloud is the best way to deploy RPA. However, we face the dilemma that we cannot use the cloud. So, I think that the solution
to this type of problem is to try and set up a private cloud for our clients. Unfortunately, I have found that it is not a simple process
to set up a private cloud. The number of resources required is not necessarily reachable for many entities.
My advice for anybody who is considering an RPA product is to carefully consider where to start because not all processes are
suitable for RPA. You need to carefully evaluate what you are going to do because if you are starting from scratch, you need to
carefully choose which processes you are going to start with.
Don't try another RPA solution for the company from scratch. You have to create a culture of RPA inside your company. A good
product comes from creating a culture.
On-premises
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
reviewer1460010
It's used at a high level by about 100 users. A few of them are customer agents and a few of them are in the operations
team. Currently, the product is deployed on a container-based platform, called Cloud Pak. We have created containers for our
solutions for Automation on the OpenShift cluster.
If you have a business process, and once you have automated that process, you have a readily available workflow in place. We
are using it after a sale is done, the next step is that the RPA calculates the offer and offers it to the customer. We have
implemented this in sales.
Number one, you can record your actions, number two, you can orchestrate between the human task and bots. The biggest
benefit is that you can orchestrate between the human tasks, system tasks, and the bots. That is what the complete IBM portfolio
can provide. No other solution I have seen can provide this level of flexibility. In addition to that, we have the IBM Business
Analytics insight as well, which is like real-time dashboards.
The way the robots are being used actually. We need to design the robot to instantiate it based on some event or human
intervention. If that can also be automated, that would be good. That would be an additional workflow completed. The next step
after that would be to use the RPA service. Some things which require human intervention can also be automated using some
decision management, based on rules. If there's a framework which does all of this part, that would be good I think. RPA should be
configured as a part of business process management and built-in. For the user, it shouldn't matter if he is using RPA or he's using
none of the automation. It should be seamless from their viewpoint. So they would just use drag and drop, choose the features
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they wanted, and that would be it. RPA and BPM in one solution and RPA encapsulated inside BPM. This RPA should be under the
umbrella of BPM. This is what the future should be.
We have been using IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for less than one year. I'm the analyst for this project. My
responsibility is to design the system, but I am not the developer for the project.
For now, it is stable because the best thing we have is the scalability as part of our cloud-native application.
The size of a container is quite small. I think it's only a single MB, so not big. Initially, we started from 20 containers and it grew to
around 50 containers or maybe more, depending on the configuration. I think we now have approximately 50 to 100. The
assumption is that each container will run a separate process.
We have raised some support tickets, but not very often. We have trained staff also, and therefore we have several teams which
could potentially deal with support.
One is the IBM RPA. as a company, we are using UiPath as well. But IMB RPA is the one which my team is using as part of this
Cloud Pak for Automation.
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
Now that it is based in the cloud, it is an easier process and minimises the time for deployment. We are using the OpenShift OCP
platform to achieve this. It's like a gateway for the infrastructure team which manages the servers and the cloud server. IT
operations take care of the operational activities, and the Gateway infrastructure team does the deployment. IT operations provide
support, so we are using three to four resources.
IBM licensing is annual and based on Virtual Processor Cores (VPC). This provides flexibility as part of the containerization
environment. The licenses can be allocated across multiple products. So for example, if you have IBM BAW, Business Automation
Workflow, ODM, Operational Decision Management, and IBM Datacap, or whatever product you are using, you can allocate the
licenses to your needs. This provides licensing flexibility, as opposed to single licenses for standalone products.
We considered Automation Anywhere and UiPath. However, IBM RPA i's a part of one bundle. The Business Automation Workflow
can directly integrate with the IBM RPA. The business becomes more robust. Your platform gives you more flexibility to integrate
with multiple different types of tasks.
Based on what you want to do, you can automate your processes in the organization. You need to have a roadmap as part of
digital transformation and application modernization. I would give this solution 8 out of 10.
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
Private Cloud
IF PUBLIC CLOUD, PRIVATE CLOUD, OR HYBRID CLOUD, WHICH CLOUD PROVIDER DO YOU USE?
IBM
26
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
Vendor Directory
ABBYY ABBYY Vantage Keross Ikon
Automai Automai RPA Micro Focus Micro Focus Robotic Process Automation
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
Chart Key
Number of views Number of times compared Total number of reviews on Average words per review Average rating based on
to another product IT Central Station on IT Central Station reviews
Bar length
The total ranking of a product, represented by the bar length, is based on a weighted aggregate score. The score is calculated as follows:
For each ranking factor of Reviews, Views, and Comparisons, the product with the highest count in each ranking factor gets a maximum 18
points. Every other product gets assigned points based on its total in proportion to the #1 product in that ranking factor. For example, if a product
has 80% of the number of reviews compared to the product with the most reviews then the product's points for reviews would be 18 * 80% = 14.4.
Both Rating and Words/Review are awarded on a fixed linear scale. For Rating, the maximum score is 28 points awarded linearly between 6-10
(e.g. 6 or below=0 points; 7.5=10.5 points; 9.0=21 points; 10=28 points). For Words/Review, the maximum score is 18 points awarded linearly
between 0-900 words (e.g. 600 words = 12 points; 750 words = 15 points; 900 or more words = 18 points). If a product has fewer than ten reviews,
the point contribution for Rating and Words/Review is reduced: 1/3 reduction in points for products with 5-9 reviews, two-thirds reduction for
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Reviews that are more than 24 months old, as well as those written by resellers, are completely excluded from the ranking algorithm.
All products with 50+ points are designated as a Leader in their category.
1 UiPath
80,724 views 42,152 comparisons 201 reviews 1,254 words/review 8.9 average rating
61,547 views 24,612 comparisons 142 reviews 651 words/review 9.1 average rating
31,191 views 20,728 comparisons 51 reviews 654 words/review 7.4 average rating
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
4 Blue Prism
33,209 views 15,813 comparisons 39 reviews 661 words/review 7.5 average rating
5 Kryon RPA
9,340 views 4,607 comparisons 6 reviews 1,978 words/review 8.8 average rating
1,555 views 1,007 comparisons 15 reviews 582 words/review 7.9 average rating
7 BotFarm
1,030 views 470 comparisons 29 reviews 492 words/review 7.9 average rating
8 VisualCron
1,455 views 809 comparisons 5 reviews 516 words/review 9.8 average rating
9 WorkFusion
6,732 views 3,515 comparisons 13 reviews 516 words/review 7.5 average rating
10 Jiffy.ai Automate
890 views 398 comparisons 6 reviews 1,974 words/review 8.0 average rating
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
VIEWS
1 UiPath 80,724
Reviews
REVIEWS
1 UiPath 201
4 Blue Prism 39
5 BotFarm 29
Words / Review
WORDS /
REVIEW
3 UiPath 1,254
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IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath
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