Today, I am excited to share the team’s work from the last few months in the 2021.10 release of the UiPath Automation Platform. With more than 100 feature enhancements touching every product, it’s the best automation platform for today and the right automation foundation for tomorrow. Let me walk you through some key highlights.
Introducing UiPath Integration Service
World-class API automation, brought seamlessly together with our industry-leading user interface (UI) automation
With the introduction of the UiPath Integration Service, UiPath becomes the first automation provider to offer best-in-class, enterprise-grade, UI-based and API-based automation capabilities that can be used seamlessly together. Integration Service greatly expands the types of processes that can be automated while providing developers with enhanced design flexibility.
In today’s increasingly complex technology landscape, automation can play a critical role in defragmenting the environment by providing digital “joins” between different systems and apps. One way to accomplish this is with UI automation, which gives robots the ability to read and understand screens so they can emulate the ways that people interact with user interfaces. Another way to create these “joins” is through API integration. APIs can be a better choice, for instance, when automating high-scale data extraction or event-triggered processes.
Developers need access to both types of integration capabilities—UI and API—to capture all their automation opportunities. In fact, many times, they need to use both types of integrations within a single automation. UiPath has long led the industry in UI automation, and we have also provided robust client-side API integration. Our recent Cloud Elements acquisition builds on our capabilities, allowing UiPath to combine best-in-class API integration with best-in-class UI integration.
Check out the new UiPath Integration Service web page for more information.
Powering the mission-critical role of automation in the enterprise
Enterprise-grade automation management, reliability, governance, and security
As the first in the market to offer an end-to-end automation platform, UiPath has long recognized the critical role that automation can and should play throughout the enterprise. We believe every organization should evolve into a fully automated enterprise, where automation is integral to all operations and ‘automation first’ is a core tenet of corporate strategy.
Each UiPath release includes innovations and improvements that expand our platform’s ability to enable the fully automated enterprise and meet the standards of truly enterprise-grade technology. The 2021.10 release is certainly no exception.
We’ve listened intently to people in different roles across our customers, from center of excellence (CoE) leads who strategize enterprise automation to developers who write the automations to the IT teams who architect and manage the technical environment. This release ensures that the UiPath Platform continues to pull away from the field with enhanced enterprise capabilities that our customers have asked for: governance, security, robot resilience, lower-cost maintenance, and enhanced ongoing support.
For example, with our endpoint protection integration with CrowdStrike, we became the first in the industry to offer endpoint security for RPA. Joint UiPath and CrowdStrike customers now can enjoy the same level of endpoint protection for robots as they already have for people. The endpoint protection integration offers real-time correlation of events with the originating RPA processes and the ability to quarantine hosts without disrupting business processes. The integration also significantly improves and accelerates threat hunting, investigation, and remediation while ensuring business continuity.
The 2021.10 release also includes new capabilities to automatically monitor and maintain critical platform elements. Robot auto-healing, powered by our platform’s built-in IT automation capabilities, assesses robots’ runtime environments to detect and remediate issues without requiring human intervention. The release also includes a new Runtime Governance capability, where workflows are automatically checked at runtime to see if they meet corporate quality and security standards. Auto-updating of Robots and Desktop Client reduces the platform maintenance burden and ensures up-to-date software.
We have also decided to move to a long-term support model for all releases. Beginning with 2021.10, all Enterprise releases receive two years of standard support and one year of extended support, simplifying your upgrade timing.
Read the blog post about these new capabilities.
Accelerating the development and use of automation
Features and new offerings to make developer, end user, and partner experiences simpler, faster, and more gratifying
The 2021.10 release includes a variety of enhancements focused on making it easier for developers to build, for end users to find and use simple automations, and for partners to grow revenue streams while serving their clients better.
For developers, we have focused both on expanding what can be automated and on providing packages, components, and intelligent “assists” that accelerate building while standardizing and improving automation quality—including capabilities to make it easier to build high quality apps.
This release makes it easier for developers to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their automations. Developers can bring their enterprises’ data science, as well as models from our partners, directly into UiPath AI Center with the new ML Ops Solution. The release also includes new out-of-the-box models and enhancements to existing models, as well as AI solution templates, which make it easier for developers to automate processes that require AI, such as processes to read, classify, and extract meaning from emails. Forms AI (preview), brings the power of AI to help developers in setting up automations involving forms processing.
We have also made it possible to build automations for Linux—something that our development community has been asking for.
For citizen developers, we have created integrations with oft-used business applications like Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint. And the Object Repository now in UiPath StudioX automatically captures and codifies source codes and creates a library of reusable components.
For end users, a new integration between UiPath Assistant and UiPath Marketplace now makes it simpler to take advantage of the rich—and rapidly growing—array of ready-to-go, simple-to-use Marketplace automations. This new “choose and use” capability brings our partners’ innovations to end users’ desktops and makes it easier for end users to find solutions for their everyday needs.
And for UiPath partners, we are expanding Marketplace monetization opportunities, as well as enabling partners to offer multi-tenant hosted services through the new cloud native Automation Suite.
Read the blog post about these new capabilities.
Leading with cloud native delivery
A complete modern enterprise automation platform, in-cloud and on-premises
Now all UiPath customers can get the benefits of cloud native architecture, however they choose to take delivery of the UiPath Platform. With the 2021.10 release, those who prefer on-premises, public cloud, or third-party hosted options can go cloud native through the new UiPath Automation Suite.
Automation Suite takes the best of our Automation Cloud™ software as a service (SaaS) experience and optimizes it for delivery on-premises, in public cloud, or from hosting partners. A market-first single-install containerized package delivers everything–all UiPath server products containerized with Kubernetes, integrated, and delivered with platform management tools already built in. Also built-in are high availability and scale management as well as end-to-end support from UiPath for everything in the package, including the platform components and product integrations.
This offers IT many new full-platform flexible deployment scenarios—bare metal, public cloud Linux VM, air gapped—all with low upskilling overhead and total cost of ownership (TCO). Automation Suite also allows users to run multiple separate organizations on the same infrastructure, making it ideal for hosting scenarios. It shares the cloud native architecture of Automation Cloud, meaning the complete UiPath Platform is now available from SaaS to air-gapped scenarios, with everything in between.
From the RPA CoE’s point of view, Automation Suite (like Automation Cloud) now makes available all platform capabilities for business transformation initiatives. Developers and architects can immediately take advantage of the entire UiPath Platform to enhance their automation development capabilities and deliver faster ROI. And do so without waiting for additional infrastructure and configuration work. Features that Automation Cloud users benefit from every day are also now available in Automation Suite, including the UiPath Portal experience and platform-level permissions across multiple products.
While Automation Suite is the headline for this release, our every-two-week updates to Automation Cloud continue. Recent update highlights include delivery of UiPath Process Mining, Test Automation, and our first online purchasing direct buy offers targeted to smaller organizations and departmental buyers.
Read the blog post about these new capabilities.
As you can see, there is a lot in this release whether you are just getting started with the platform or you’re running a mature high-scale automation program.
To learn more about all the new capabilities released during 2021.10, join the webinar “UiPath 2021.10:The Automation Platform for the Future” on November 18, 2021, at 11:00 am EDT.
Special thanks to all our Insiders for their work and feedback. You have had a huge impact on the quality and prioritization of capabilities. We look forward to your continued input in the next release—2022.4, which we are already working on! More on that next time.