In today’s fast paced world digital transformation is paramount and has driven an increased demand for every business to develop innovative and engaging digital experiences for their customers and employees. RPA is already a key catalyst helping companies adopt digital strategies faster and changing the way employees work through the power of automation. Today at our DevCon event we are excited to announce UiPath Apps, a low code app builder for delivering engaging experiences powered by automation.
Let’s explore a couple of key concepts to show you how UiPath Apps marries low code and the power of automation to make you more productive.
I’ll start with the idea of engaging experiences – UiPath Apps includes a low-code app builder called App Studio. It lets you build visually appealing professional apps quickly using only a web browser through a rich library of drag and drop controls. You can see a few examples in the app above including a date picker. With the designer you can create simple experiences such as a single form or advanced apps that include multiple screens and tailored business flows. There is almost no limit to the sophistication of experience you can easily create in App Studio.
I also mentioned UiPath Apps is powered by automation – typically low-code solutions connect to APIs and transactional data sources to power their apps. UiPath Apps takes it one step further by harnessing the power of RPA which means it supports APIs but also allows you to work with existing applications and data that are not easily programmable. For example, legacy applications without an API, VDI environments or data co-mingled with web experiences can be first class citizens in your apps. As you create your app instead of connecting forms and controls directly to APIs and data, you connect them to automations. The automations have the full power of UiPath’s leading RPA platform behind them and work across the widest possible set of applications and data sources, to get work done. An app can be connected to a single automation or to as many automations as you like. An app can be connected to attended automations running on a user’s machine, unattended automations running on a server, or both. You can effectively use your automations as simple self-contained building blocks in a larger process delivered as an app. App Studio provides a single click experience for deployment and sharing of applications in development as well as with business users making it easy to distribute or redistribute.
Here is a sneak peek at the App Studio experience for building apps.
We talked a little about creating in App Studio, now let’s talk about the experience end users will have when they use them. UiPath Apps allows them to engage with their company automations directly from a web browser delivering a seamless high-quality digital experience. They can access Apps from any supported browser and on multiple platforms including Windows, Mac, Chromebook and even from mobile devices. The web experience will adapt based on the connecting device. Here are a few more examples from our own internal out of office app to give you an idea of an actual user experience.
So, what can you build with UiPath Apps in the real world? As always, we have been co-innovating with many of you and working closely with companies in our insider program to develop Apps. We have seen examples that cover a diverse spectrum of use cases. They range from simple Apps like the out of office example above to very sophisticated Apps such as a Contact Center agent console that combines data from multiple systems into a single App. An agent console app like this is especially powerful as it eliminates the need for an agent to toggle between multiple applications, enter complex keystrokes and read scripts all while trying to help a customer. In the new interface built with UiPath Apps, the agent gets a 360 view of the customer information, can centrally enter information, and behind the scenes UiPath robots log the agent into all the required applications and work on behalf of the agent to complete tasks allowing the agent to focus solving the customer problem.
As you can see, the impact of integrating a low-code App builder into our platform to deliver automation powered apps is a large step forward for the automation industry and we can’t wait to see what you do with it! We will also collect and highlight some of the best examples in the months ahead.
In addition to UiPath Apps we also recently announced and released the UiPath Data Service, in public preview. It allows you to model and store business data directly in the hyperautomation platform for easy access from the UiPath suite of products for example UiPath Studio and UiPath Apps.
This allows you to build powerful automations that can leverage capabilities like rich relational data types, with an integrated security model, and instantaneous provisioning and deployments via the Automation Cloud. The Data Service reduces the need to access external databases or system of records to store the results of automations simplifying development and allowing easier sharing of data across automations and applications. Try UiPath Data Service from your Automation Cloud account.
We believe democratization of automation is at the forefront of any successful digital transformation strategy. UiPath Apps and UiPath Data Service deliver delightful experiences powered by automations and enable developers to build faster and more powerful solutions accelerating your digital transformation initiatives. UiPath Apps is currently in private preview and we are putting the final touches on the public preview which will go live in the Ui Automation Cloud later this month. If you missed the exciting UiPath Apps demo at our DevCon keynote session, you can watch it here.
