Formulated Automation Podcast | RPA Podcast | Business Automation | Process Automation

In this episode we speak to M. Scott Ford, the Chief Code Whisperer at Corgibytes.  A company that focuses on mending software.  He is also the host of one of our favorite podcasts - Legacy Code Rocks.  This episode is all about legacy code, a topic that is really near and dear to the RPA community.  

Just a note this episode may get technical but have some solid lessons for anybody dealing with tech that frightens them.

On this episode of the podcast, we talk to co-founders Jackson Ostler and Dave Aditya about their company Plena Data.  Plena has built their own RPA platform and has focused the offering on some very specific finance and accounting use cases.  We talk about their experience getting into the RPA space as well as their model for how they operate and deliver value to their customers.  

Mark and Brent catch back up with Antti Karjalainen the CEO of Robocorp.  Robocorp is the leading open-source RPA company that has recently released their GA release.  We dive into how they are supporting other open-source projects in the space and what tools are in the works in the coming months.  We also talk about how community-driven projects can help the initiatives of the company.  

We chat through how the team and Antti himself manages remote work and growing a team during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Brent shares his experience hiring automation engineers on upwork to write automation in Robot Framework.  Antti reveals some upcoming content that is in the works including an upcoming certification course.

Also Robocorp is hiring!

Brent and Mark chat with Babu Sivadasan, CEO of Jiffy.ai.  Jiffy is an IPA (Intelligent Process Automation) platform that is meant for scale.  We get a background on Babu and why he got into the space.  We also dive into some of the key features needed to execute IPA.  Babu talks to us about leadership qualities for successfully ushering automation through an organization.  We also talk about how change affects automation and the timescale lens that Babu looks at automation through.

We speak with Dmitry Karpov the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Electroneek.  Dmitry has a rich background in automation and entrepreneurship.  Dmitry walks us through his experiences and how Electroneek is different than the competitors in the space.  We discuss what ingredients are needed for RPA to flourish in an organization.

In this episode, we have a conversation with Guy Kirkwood, UiPath's Chief Evangelist.  We discuss his story and perspective as hire number 27 back in 2015 to the current state of the company and marketplace.  Guy talks about the reality of implementing RPA and what effect it has on culture or "Mood Music" as he calls it.  

We also dive into what the future holds for the RPA space, some exciting features on the UiPath roadmap and the real value of human capital.

Mark and Brent walk through the week's news and dive into what is included in the Robocode General Availability release.  Robocode is an exciting company making waves in the open-source RPA space.  We got access to the product and walk through some of the high-level features and pricing.

Tom has a technical background and got his start in publishing literally publishing his code to magazines.  He got exposed to RPA when he was writing his book on AI and found there wasn't much available about RPA.  In digging into RPA he spoke with several CEOs and immersed himself in the space.  We chatted about what is happening in this space.  His response - the winners are winning.  There are over 70+ vendors in the space and the competition is tight.  Most companies interested in adopting RPA are likely to rely on a Gartner report to even start the vendor selection process.

What of mid-market RPA?  Enterprise RPA is growing and the ROI is convincing.  We chat through the notion of how the smaller companies may benefit but the adoption issues that come from licensing to start.  Why can't you just get a clear picture of what it will cost to use most RPA software?

We chat through the players and recognize that Microsoft wants it all.  The price compression in the space (for licensing) is not yet happening but will.  Tom predicts that Amazon and Google will likely get involved through acquisitions.

Tom teaches Brent what BPM software is and how it got it's roots.  We cap off the conversation in talking about open-source RPA and the unique challenges and possibilities it contains.

Mark and Brent dig into the latest news in the RPA space.  With fundraising happening left and right, what will that mean for the RPA space in general.  We gaze into the crystal ball and make some initial predictions.  Also, Mark talks about the new open-source robot-profiler project that is a power tool for understanding the environment that your bots run on.  

Mikkel has an interesting background. He came from the world of hardware, working in physical robotics. It isn't a mystery that lessons in the physical space carried over to the software space.

We went into what RPA looks like in the public sector. What platform they selected and why and understood where RPA plays best. We also heard about a blossoming citizen-developer program. An interesting approach to a difficult space of non-technical user adoption.

Mikkel told us more about the robust environment surrounding over 40 bots across 9 VMs. The business units that leverage the bots ultimately control the bots but Mikkel and his team take great care to build and maintain a set of common libraries. This approach requires diligent effort is paying dividends to avoid downstream headaches and reduce bot breakage.