Welcome to Episode 68 of the Cloud Wars Horizon Minute — featuring news and commentary hosted by Acceleration Economy analyst Tom Smith. Each episode provides insights into one or more innovation accelerators on the Cloud Wars Horizon. In this special episode, Tom and CIO/Acceleration Economy analyst Kenny Mullican talk about Automation Anywhere.
Highlights
01:15 — Kenny notes the discussion with Automation Anywhere CTO Prince Kohil “really helped me to understand a little bit better where Automation Anywhere fits into the whole ecosystem of automation.”
02:40 — Kenny notes the Automation Anywhere product takes the form of SaaS software and, for those types of products, you don’t really have to care where they’re hosted. All that really matters is whether or not they will work with your systems, wherever those systems are hosted. Kohli made it clear that it doesn’t matter if all of your systems are on-prem or located behind your own firewall, you can still connect them to a cloud-based automation framework. This is a benefit because we often tout the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy but as a CIO, Kenny says that’s not always easy to accomplish when you have to do things and really understand the low-level framework. It can be tough to be able to support and implement on multiple clouds.
04:25 — Kenny references an automation use case/customer example from Automation Anywhere that was discussed: a company manufacturing wafers for chips. Sometimes wafers meet the specs to be able to be included in a particular product, and sometimes they don’t. This customer has technology that analyzes the product that is being made and can then use AI to sort into different levels of quality. With automation, 99% or 99.9%, a huge percent of the product that’s being made, is analyzed for quality. All this opened up a lot of ideas about how other manufacturing companies might implement this specifically for the case of quality, as a product is being manufactured, to help users make decisions about how to continue the manufacturing process with live data.
07:43 — The discussion included the role of IT in automation: Automation Anywhere recommends focusing IT on security, reliability, and resiliency — centralized functions — and simplifying automation so it can be used more broadly and without heavy IT involvement. Kenny calls that the “perfect approach” and notes that it dovetails with something that we’ve been advocating at Acceleration Economy, which is not trying to take anyone out of the equation but providing a way that people can spend their time working on the things that really require people or that really require their skillset. In the past, automation frameworks required real “brainiacs” to set up. Now, you don’t have to worry about that part.
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