Open Source RPA: Boon for Organizations? (Part I)
As organizations are increasingly realizing the many benefits of automation, and the RPA Adoption rate is steadily picking up.
According to Gartner, the robotic process automation software market is expected to grow by an enormous 41 percent year over year through 2022.
Still, for the traditional industries that run on restricted or legacy systems, achieving optimum modernization via automation is still quite a challenge. The reason behind this is the systems along with customized processes no longer support new-age automation frameworks to completely deploy streamlined automations replacing humans with digital workers.
Open source RPA framework
One way to get the digital workers without disrupting the core legacy systems to opt for an Open Source RPA Platform. Because of its openness, it is highly adaptable to perform with customized applications and processes.
Today, RPA is a billion-dollar industry and is the fastest-growing segment amongst IT technologies. As it happens with new technologies, RPA is dominated by commercial players with proprietary technologies.
And a lot of proprietary tools and technologies come with user-hostile licensing requirements creating vendor-lock-in and prohibitive spends. This affects the reach of the technology to a large user-base who otherwise could have reaped the benefits of RPA.
Such an impediment seems callous especially when you consider that the tech stack of some of these solutions aren’t even so ambiguous. The tools seem to borrow from each other and seems to be almost similar in functionality, development interface and implementation. Open Source is a great way of exploring if there is a better way to do RPA.
RPA-driven Digitization in Firms; is there really a level-playing field?
Digitization is not another buzzword. It is fundamental as to how businesses will operate in the near future and RPA is a great catalyst for digitization. It would be a mistake to endow only the large corporations with the benefits of RPA technology and leave the SMEs and smaller enterprises to fend by themselves.
Unfortunately, today, that is how the free-market economics works. But the recent few years have seen an invigorated movement of open source solutions, and that trend is all the more just going to improve. RPA must be democratized instead of being wrapped around license-based access restrictions.
Another fundamental reason is that RPA development is a developer domain despite the low-code/No-code argument. The concept of Citizen developers hasn’t really taken off. Business users are not adopting RPA as advertised. Business users are not acting as citizen developers to automate the workflow the daily process. In fact, developers are the ones working on RPA automations.
Here are some of the basic set of features that should be supported in any RPA tool — be it an Open Source or a Commercial RPA Tool
The software should be able to:
- Find and interact with windows components. It should be selector-based i.e. selectors correspond to UI elements from a tree of windows UI components using rules and patterns
- Record facility. The robot should redo what has been recorded.
- Support browser automation- IE, chrome, Firefox, Edge.
- Support Image recognition — buttons, fields, etc. for automation. The image recognition should support anchoring and extracting field values using OCR
- Support for unattended robot execution
- Support automation of terminal sessions, Citrix sessions.
Let’s understand the differences between an Open Source RPA and a Commercial RPA
Reasons why Developers prefer Open-Source?
- Strong developer community for sharing code and knowledge
- Expressive tools that can extend the functionality of the solution when required
- Proper programming language and constructs, libraries to share, integrations, and documentation
- Support for developer workflows and version control
- Trust. Not controlled or managed by any company
Businesses need to extend the automation scope as per needs and don’t want to be restricted by closed platforms. There hasn’t been any open-source project that has the kind of finish and polish like some commercial product due to capital that commercial players can attract.
That is motivation enough for developers to improve upon open-source options. Pricing is a huge factor for market acceptability of open-source RPA and the open-source players want to bring the pricing down to near-about zero.
What’s Next?
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