ServiceNow’s acquisition of Intellibot, a provider of a robotic process automation (RPA) platform, this week is part of a larger effort to automate the development of applications that are driving digital business transformation within enterprise IT environments.
Earlier this month, ServiceNow unfurled a set of revamped low-code tools that both professional and so-called citizen developers could employ to build applications to modernize various business processes. However, many existing business processes are either manual or paper-based. An RPA platform enables organizations to create bots that mimic, within an application environment, the way those processes are currently managed.
Josh Kahn, senior vice president for Creator Workflow Products at ServiceNow, said ServiceNow envisions the Intelligent RPA platform as a mechanism to automate rote processes that, for one reason or another, don’t manifest themselves via a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that application developers can easily invoke.
Each IT team, of course, will need to decide when it makes more sense to employ bots to digitize an existing workflow versus reengineering it using a set of custom applications infused with machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. As digital business transformation initiatives become more urgent, the application development backlog within many enterprise IT organizations that require those capabilities is steadily increasing.
However, in some cases, an RPA platform can reduce that backlog by surfacing a set of visual tools to automate a process that doesn’t require a lot of developer expertise to effectively digitize.
In general, Kahn said ServiceNow is making a case for building a wide range of applications on top of the same software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform many internal IT teams already employ for IT service management (ITSM). That approach enables IT teams to streamline processes as the number of custom applications that need to be both developed and, ultimately, managed, steadily increases over time, Kahn said.
The developers of those applications might be professionals using a low-code tool instead of writing additional code to quickly build an application, or it might be a “power user” that has enough understanding of software development best practices to build an application. Regardless of who builds the application, the rate at which applications are built using low-code tools is clearly about to accelerate.
Kahn said the next step for ServiceNow will be to embed the Intellibot RPA capabilities in the ServiceNow platform sometime after the deal closes in the second quarter. In fact, one of the reasons ServiceNow opted to acquire Intellibot is because, as a smaller startup vendor, it is easier to incorporate their RPA platform than it would be to reengineer a much larger RPA platform. However, ServiceNow remains committed to integrating with other third-party RPA platforms that are already being employed by its customers, Kahn noted.
Regardless of how or at what rate applications are developed, the number of core technologies required to build them continues to expand. The issue IT organizations will need to come to terms with is the degree to which they want to stitch all those tools together themselves, or rely on a platform to do it for them.
