Robotic process automation (RPA) company Automation Anywhere today announced it will acquire FortressIQ, a provider of cloud-based process discovery and mining services.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The FortressIQ acquisition will build out the RPA vendor’s existing Discovery Bot process mining tool, Mike Micucci, chief operating officer at the San Jose, Calif.-based Automation Anywhere, told Bank Automation News. “This will enable customers to speed and scale their automation journeys,” he said.

The plan is to integrate FortressIQ’s technology into Automation Anywhere, which Micucci said should be “a smooth transition” since both are cloud native. He added the companies “will be supporting customers using either technology as we work to integrate.”

Micucci specified FortressIQ technology will enhance Automation Anywhere’s Automation 360 platform by adding:

• A process analysis engine with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML);
• AI-based process analysis;
• The ability to remove personally identifiable information from data;
• Complete process blueprints for customers;
• Continuous recording capabilities; and
• The ability to translate process intelligence into software bots with continuous learning.

Process intelligence such as FortressIQ also can help identify, map and analyze business processes that should be automated across applications, Automation Anwhere said in its announcement.

Increasingly, process mining and discovery are expected of RPA vendors.

“Tools aimed at providing insights about where a process and its individual tasks are holding back overall operating performance are becoming the de facto starting point for automation and improvement projects,” Maureen Fleming, program vice president of intelligent process automation research at market intelligence firm IDC, stated in Automation Anywhere’s announcement.

Process mining helps advance bot automation by examining software event logs to determine how business information is processed, while process discovery looks at logs at the user interface level to gauge users’ software interactions.

Capabilities such as ML and process mining and discovery are advanced features for RPA platforms, according to technology research and consulting firm Gartner. Gartner identified leaders in the space as Automation Anywhere, UIPath and Microsoft in its annual Magic Quadrant for RPA report, and predicted the “highly fragmented” RPA market will consolidate through 2024 as vendors seek to differentiate themselves.

“The RPA market is growing rapidly as incumbent vendors jockey for position and evolve their offerings,” Gartner stated.

Founded in 2003, Automation Anywhere is has raised a total of $852.7 million in 11 funding rounds, Crunchbase reports. San Francisco-based FortressIQ was founded in 2017 and has raised a total of $46 million in three funding rounds, according to Crunchbase.

“Integrating process insights with automation planning and development speeds up time to value while improving the accuracy and completeness of the resulting automation,” Fleming noted.

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