Thursday, March 28, 2024

To manage data explosion, tech firm touts automation tool using software robots

Enterprise software modernization firm Micro Focus has updated its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which uses software robots to make companies including SMEs to cope more efficiently with the current data explosion.

Nick Lim, managing director for Southeast Asia and Korea at Micro Focus

According to market analyst firm IDC, the world will see 180 zettabytes of digital data by 2025.

“Many companies have yet to equip themselves with the right tools to cope with the ongoing data explosion, causing employees to continue to spend long hours on repetitive, mundane, and error-prone tasks that result in the movement of data across groups, departments, and businesses,” said Nick Lim, managing director for Southeast Asia and Korea of Micro Focus.

Among these daily repetitive tasks are filling in forms, cutting and pasting data, checking emails, moving files and folders, logging in and out of apps, preparing and manipulating data, and merging data.

Aside from being time-consuming, these activities also tend to make a company more prone to cyberthreats specifically when errors and negligence are committed.

RPA addresses these problems by automating these repetitive tasks. The tool uses software robots or “robo workers” to automate these activities across different platforms. The robots do this by imitating UI-based acts of humans. These are monitored via a centralized security dashboard.

With these software robots in place, automation lessens the possibility of human error and thus protects the company’s data and its entire IT ecosystem more strongly.

Automation also cuts down on costs which is beneficial for SMEs. In the Philippines, 99.6 percent of registered companies are SMEs. Yet, these same companies account for only 35 percent of the country’s total GDP.

RPA likewise addresses the issue of legacy systems.

According to Lim, Micro Focus has seen attempts to modernize legacy applications where the “rip and replace” approach — its risks, costs, etc. — were greater than the benefits.

Instead, the automation tool allows the company to build from its legacy system and enhance its value.

“Optimising IT resources — through enhancing, rather than replacing, legacy infrastructure with highly customised applications — definitely plays a critical role in our offerings,” explained Lim.

“Micro Focus guides customers’ continuous modernization efforts by zeroing in on the friction points: business capabilities with poor application support. For instance, RPA allows users to automate tasks with minimal changes to existing systems and applications. This is ideal for organisations that are unable to fully automate and integrate legacy technologies yet are aiming to automate quickly,” he added.

A 2018 Harvard Business Review survey indicates that less than one-third of business leaders allow functional groups within the enterprise to access data and only 15 percent share business intelligence with key vendors and suppliers.

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