At the beginning of 2011, analyst firm Gartner recommended to CIOs that they “should focus on at least one major business process and either make a huge overhaul… or get rid of it.”

Our experience is that a lot of CIOs listened.

As a result, Automation Anywhere has grown much, much stronger. Automation Anywhere remains a disruptive leader in the emerging Business Process Automation (BPA space,) which analysts size at $2 billion a year.

Automation Anywhere saw 55% growth in revenue in first half of the year alone compared to last year and added 14 new contracts with Fortune 100 companies, Yet Automation Anywhere’s largest customers still only account for 4% of total revenue. Our growth remains sustainable, broad and stable.

A few highlights of 2011 that make our entire staff and team proud:

• Launch of Automation Anywhere Enterprise 7.0: This Fall, we launched one of our most important new products, Automation Anywhere 7.0. It takes a big leap forward in helping enterprises efficiently create and distribute enterprise-wide automation processes to make ERP (enterprise resource planning), BPM (business process management), IPM (IT process management), and BI (business intelligence) solutions more efficient.

• Growing Partner Ecosystem: This was the year that some of the largest software companies recognized our momentum as we became an Oracle Silver Partner, a member of the SAP EcoHub, and an Intel Software Premier Elite partner. We are also very proud to be a Microsoft Gold Partner, which is reserved for the top 1% of Microsoft partners.

• Awards: We racked up more awards in 2011 including the prestigious Red Herring North American 100, the Windows IT Pro Community Choice Gold award and the Network Product Guide Best Product of 2011.

• Major Product Enhancements for Testing Anywhere: We didn’t rest on our laurels in 2011 – we continued to push our testing automation products forward. Among the most significant advancements included the release of a Java and Silverlight software testing platform with Testing Anywhere.

• Community: We’ve known from day one that we were offering automation tools that were powerful for a wide range of users. That trend continued in 2011, as we saw so many unique, unexpected uses of our product. We heard many of these first hand at our first user conference, held just outside New York City this Fall.

This was an exciting year for everyone involved with Automation Anywhere – and certainly we feel we are providing our clients unique and tremendous value. Gartner’s prediction and advice for 2011 – streamlining or getting rid of expensive processes – will remain true for years to come.

Mihir

The recent movie MoneyBall is an entertaining foray into the world of sports finance and team efficiency. It shows how the Oakland A’s and GM Billy Beane overachieved in a world where the past routine ruled the roost. In that world, if you change nothing, nothing will change. The uncommon results of overachieving only came after Mr. Beane implemented a mathematical, automated formula for drafting players, filling the gaps, and raising performance.

Your SAP team can do the same.

Let’s take, for example, the need for your team to move daily sales data that resides in Excel into SAP. Whether you’re using an SAP GUI or Web interface, automating the entry of new sales contacts, sales orders, and other information should be automated to increase the efficiency of your teams.

An SAP task might look something like this:
1. Log into SAP module.
2. Click on Account Management –> Contacts.
3. Click on Create New.
4. Copy Last Name field from Excel to Last Name field in SAP.
5. Copy First Name field from Excel to First Name field in SAP.
…Continue for all required fields.
6. Click Save.
7. Check for Error Messages.
8. Click Back to return to main menu.
9. Click on Log Off.

With today’s robust automation software, you can create a task in minutes that will copy data fields from cells in Excel directly to the corresponding fields in SAP. SAP error checking helps you identify problems with data constraints, business rules, and exceptions. You can schedule the tasks to run at convenient times, or run according trigger events. You can even package up the task to an EXE file and run it on multiple machines in parallel. Automation software solutions, such as Automation Anywhere, can increase your team’s productivity by more than 50%.

And here’s the real kicker—These tasks are reusable and customizable for other tasks you want to create. In fact, the more automation you create, the faster each automation project becomes—you might call it a MoneyBall that’s on a roll.

We, at Automation Anywhere are deeply saddened by the dealth of Steve Jobs. It feels like we lost someone very close to us. That is odd. It is not like we knew him personally. Heck, our software doesn’t even work on a Mac. Then why do we feel like we lost someone close to our hearts?

As we all talked, we realized, Steve wasn’t about the Mac or iPad, he represented the spirit of Silicon Valley. He had become to most of us a symbol of innovation. He epitomized how you can dream of changing the world and have the courage to do it. He gave us a thriving example of how technology can change lives. He inspired many of us that share this dream and with his loss there is a void that will not be filled. We will miss you Steve. Your inspiration and legacy will continue to live in all of us. Rest In Peace.

Automation Anywhere Team

If your company is like many others, it spends an enormous amount of time unloading and loading data into databases, ERP systems, and web forms. As we all know, the amount of data in the world is growing out of control—some predicting a growth of 50x by 2020.¹ With this data comes data movement, sharing, reporting and a host of other tasks to ensure data is converted into information and intelligence. How will your company deal with this explosion of data? In these uncertain economic times, will your business processes be agile enough to survive?

How you automate ERP will make a difference.

Companies are finding new ways to automate the movement of data. In fact, automation has become its own industry segment—the mid-tier expected to grow to $3+ billion.²

The number of automation technologies is exploding, and solution offerings are not all equal. For loading data into multiple target systems, including ERP, consider Automation Anywhere. You can move loads of data and integrate disparate systems with drag-and-drop ease, yet full functionality. This single solution can access data from any data source, including databases, GUI applications, web sites, legacy mainframe systems, and ERP applications. You can grab the data from the backend or the front end of any of these sources, but front end integration is becoming more popular, primarily because of security concerns with giving someone backend access.

Automation is being used every day in verticals like healthcare, government, and banking. For example, Automation Anywhere was used to do the heavy lifting for San Diego County when they needed to integrate their legacy system with their document management system.³ Mergers and acquisitions are also obvious examples where automation helps to integrate and synchronize piles of data within two companies.

Automating the data movement is easy with advanced automation technology. Just be sure that your process is well-defined; for example, let’s assume we want to integrate HR data that resides in a legacy application with your SAP financials, insert the combined data into a web application, and run a report. You might have a process that looks like:

1. Log into legacy HR system and SAP financials system.
2. Bring up employee records with the fields you need.
3. Copy 3 fields (name, ID number, phone number) from HR.
4. Insert this data into Excel spreadsheet.
5. Copy 3 fields (name, ID number, current wage) from financials.
6. Insert this data into the same Excel spreadsheet.
7. Continue for all employees.
8. Insert all spreadsheet data into new web application.
9. Convert spreadsheet to report and email to 5 managers.
10. Log out of both systems.

This entire process can be—and should be—automated. In particular, Step 8 can be completed in an automated, scheduled, and error-free manner. And, security is enhanced because you are not giving employees backend API access to the database.

Using automation software is ideal for mass data unloading/loading because it replaces an enormous amount of scripting and coding. By using drag-n-drop capabilities, you can focus more closely on the process itself, while still having the flexibility to customize as needed.  Using automation is simply a better way.

Find out more about how Automation Anwhere can help you load/unload data from Excel to SAP, Excel to Oracle, integrate applications, and run reports with a click of a mouse, making SAP even better and Oracle/PeopleSoft Applications even easier.

¹ ComputerWorld (Lucas Mearian June 28, 2011)

² Article: Data Center Post-“Business Process Automation Emerging As its Own Market

³ Case Study: San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency

We all know that ERP systems are implemented to tie enterprise information together and make business processes smoother. However, the reality is that making ERP applications talk to each other and perform as an integrated panacea for the company is an unrealized dream for most. ERP applications can be complex, cumbersome, and often times just downright expensive to implement and maintain.

But there is hope. Here are 5 ways in which ERP environments can benefit from automation technology like Automation Anywhere.

Turn the Rocky Road into a Cobblestone Path

The 5 ERP implementation challenges that IT staff should be thinking about automating include:

1. Initial deployment
2. Application integration
3. Day-to-day ERP tasks
4. Reporting and communications
5. Migration to new system releases

All these projects can be slowed to a standstill, hit with rising costs, or delayed from a painful technical restriction, resulting in a rocky project that might involve: construction of new business processes, time-consuming scripting, modification of legacy applications, and extra coordination and collaboration efforts.

Automating can significantly reduce the time, energy, cost, and employee turnover.

1. Make the Initial Deployment Less Costly

Many ERP deployments are scheduled and budgeted for months or years at a cost of millions of dollars. Too often, these figures balloon out of control because of technical snags and coordination problems. With automation, these projects can experience significant reductions in time and budget. Complex data movement issues turn into routine scheduling of automated tasks. Productivity gains can result in your more senior staff focusing on bigger-picture strategy. Everyone is happier.

2. Application X: Meet Application Y

Ah…to marry two or more ERP applications in a happy lovefest. How often do we arrive here without significant pain (and the feeling that divorce is the only solution)? Here, Automation Anywhere is capable of making the pain go away. Whether you are integrating applications from the same vendor or different vendors, the capabilities of integration are endless.

Take, for example, a business process that requires pulling data from SAP Financials, inserting it into a web portal, and then pulling and feeding the information into PeopleSoft. Wow. Using Automation Anywhere, this can happen relatively painlessly by extracting data from GUIs and inserting it into other application GUIs, Windows applications, or Web portals.

3. Ease the Daily Grind

Whereas data that rests inside ERP applications is not a problem, data that needs to be moved on a daily basis to other applications (such as a spreadsheet) can create scripting nightmares. Automate, and you’re great. The more of these daily tasks that you automate, the more productive and less error-prone your team will be. And life is just better when management needs the information….which brings me to my next point.

4. Reporting for the Masses

ERP reporting is pretty straightforward, you say? How about when those reports need to be merged, emailed, and filed in a certain organized manner? Forums abound with questions about how to generate reports and email them. Fortunately, automation can make sense of the reporting puzzle and help improve company communications and executive decision making.

5. When the New Just Became Old

ERP software is just like any other software—it gets updated and improved. That means we need to upgrade to new versions and releases, leading to changes in business processes and data design. It can also mean that more pain is involved. Front end automation can help in these migrations—both in data movement as well as sanity checks after the new system is up and running. In addition, workflow designs can be built with Automation Anywhere to model the processes before and after, and check the efficacy of the process flow.

In Summary

So, we know that automation software improves our ERP systems, and can improve our lives as IT professionals. It’s a good time to try new things with automation—the data in our world is increasing at amazing rates and customer-focused companies are increasingly trying to improve efficiencies with their ERP systems. ERP will be the next big beneficiary of advances in automation technology. Stay tuned ERP people…I wish you a smoother path.

Be sure to read more about how Automation Anywhere can make your Oracle Applications processes easier and your SAP processes more flexible.

Automation Anywhere has been recognized by many leading IT publications including Redmond Magazine and Windows IT Pro for our pioneering IT automation technologies. Which is why it was such a thrill for us to join hundreds of other software companies in a black tie event last week at the Interop Network Products Guide award ceremony in Las Vegas.

In front of a packed house, Automation Anywhere was a winner in the Hot Products category.

The peers and analysts who voted for us recognise how far IT automation has come. It was just in the past few years that automation tools became so much more powerful and much less expensive (we are often 1/10th the cost of broader automation solutions). The result is that business process automation (BPA) tools have become their own fast growing market.

Thanks again to Network Products Guide for a wonderful night and for the recognition of Automation Anywhere.

In the early 2000s, I managed the procurement and installation of a large, million dollar plus business process management (BPM) solution. BPM solutions are about understanding, documenting and refining business processes to better meet customer needs, thus improving business performance. Historically, business process automation (BPA) tools have been a subset, almost a feature, of much broader, expensive BPM solutions. BPAs automate business processes – reducing cost and improving performance.

Sound familiar?

BPM, BPA and BI solutions often strive toward the same goals but through different approaches. BPM and BPA focused on getting more out of business processes, while BI tries to get more out of the operational data that is generated by business processes.

Over the past few years, automation solutions, previously a subset of the BPM product suite, have expanded into their own stand-alone products. The automation tools have become much more capable and at same time much less expensive. This has profound impact on how BI professionals can view automation.

BI tools traditionally integrated with internal systems, generating reports analyzing history and day-to-day operational data. These reports lead to actionable intelligence.

When we talk to our customers who are business intelligence professionals in businesses ranging from small companies to Fortune 50 software companies – we hear 2 themes over and over again.

1) In today’s world, to make a decision you often need data from outside your organization. This can include competitive pricing, market trends or even compliance requirements.

2) The BI solutions available today do not access 100% of the data within their own organization, which can be spread out across many systems. BI tools are very good at getting 70% of necessary information, but often the other data is spread out in legacy computer systems, desktop applications, Excel files and PDF documents to name a few. The cost associated with pulling information from older computer systems is often cost prohibitive.

This leads to partial BI implementations that lack all the necessary data. Many companies try to overcome the data shortfall through large manual processes, which leads to higher BI costs and slower data collection times. If companies want to leverage their investment in BI tools, they need to make sure they are getting all required data from within their organizations as well as from outside sources.

Here are a few real world use cases where BI professionals are using automation tools to get better data:

• The BI group within a well known billion dollar software company automates the collection of pricing and competitive market info from literally millions of sources and compiles this data into the company’s own BI system.
• A $200 million a year international manufacturing conglomerate automates the extraction of account transaction statements from several banks and automatically integrates this information into Excel for reconciliation purposes.
• A $50 million a year energy producer extracts data daily from various web sites and transmits this time sensitive information to its BI system on an hourly basis.
• A $500 million a year diversified energy company extracts crude oil prices and oil futures from multiple web sites every day.

This is where the new generation of business automation tools come into play. Working in conjunction with existing BI systems, BPA solutions can inexpensively access all of the data, from external sources and within older enterprise systems, needed to make BI solutions as powerful as they can be.

Working with my team at Automation Anywhere has been tremendously, tremendously rewarding for me. We’ve all put in long hours building the most advanced and lowest cost automation software and automated testing software in the market today. It is with great pride that we see how the results continue to speak for themselves.

In 2010, we more than doubled our sales.

2011 promises to be even more exciting for us as we expand our products in new directions and work more closely with channel partners. When we first started Automation Anywhere, our vision was to offer automation software that cost 1/10th the price and took 1/10th the time of large of million dollar software packages. With results we’ve seen over past few years, it appears the market likes our approach.

We have created a number of flash how-to videos to show just how easy it is to automate tasks with Automation Anywhere.

See our “get started” demo to learn how to:
- Create a task
- Run a task
- Assign properties to a task

One of the challenges we face at Automation Anywhere is getting people to realize how much they can automate. The list of things you can do with Automation Anywhere is long: web automation, excel automation, database automation, IT automation, web data extraction, just to name a few.

On the other hand, one of our biggest thrills is hearing from happy Automation Anywhere customers after they realize how much time and money they can save by automating business processes. It’s fun to see our list of case studies grow.

It’s been very exciting to see Automation Anywhere’s hockeystick growth over the past 18 months. We were having an interesting discussion last week in one of our sales meetings about how this reminds us of what happened with mainframes when desktops became so much more powerful in the 90s.

Look at this article, called “Bye Bye Mainframe” from InfoWorld in 1994. A few of the quotes really resonated with me:

“All new development needed to be on PCs, no more mainframe applications being developed” – from an aircraft/aerospace company.

“Wanted to eliminate mainframe use, saving the company $120 million per year” – from a consumer electronics company.

As desktops became more powerful in the 90s, companies saved millions of dollars by moving applications to the desktop.  This reminds us a bit of what is happening in the automation space today. The business process and IT automation tools we compete with are expensive and complex to install.

Take a look for yourself. These products often run on backend servers, but much of what they do could be accomplished by our desktop solutions: IBM Tivoli for IT infrastructure automation; IBM WebSphere Process Server for Business Process automation;  and Oracle Automation Tools.

At Automation Anywhere, we have pioneered an innovate new approach to IT automation processes. As a result, our desktop edition and our multi-client, collaborative and centralized automation server editions save you 1/10th the cost, are 10x easier to manage and can be deployed 10 times faster.

If you are looking to automate, but aren’t sure if it’s right for you, take a look at some of our customer case studies. You’ll see why we are growing like we are.

Sometimes we read tech news to learn. Other times, the news validates what we are hearing in the marketplace. It was the latter when we read Michael Singer’s recent recap of Gartner’s advice for CIOs in 2011.

What is the top thing that CIOs should look for in 2011? New cost efficiencies..

In fact, Gartner vice president Mark Raskino says in 2011 or 2012 CIOs “should focus on at least one major business process and either make a huge overhaul… or get rid of it.”

That jibes with what we see at Automation Anywhere. Here are a few examples of how we have helped our customers save money and improve processes:

- Hedge fund company: A hedge fund with more than $3 billion in assets used Automation Anywhere to automate intelligence gathering, analysis and reporting.

- TravelPro: This famous maker of carry on luggage saved thousands of dollars and greatly simplified nightly processing by automating the process of importing sales orders in their ERP system.

- New York Credit Union: As NetworkWorld reports, this Credit Union was able to get rid of human error and at same time greatly increase efficiencies by rippsing out their old solution and installing Automation Anywhere.

Because it is our mission to make automation easier and faster, we are always interested in hearing from users about which features they find the most useful. Our customers tell us that these are their 5 favorite features of Testing Anywhere:

1. Avatar

Since launching Testing Anywhere’s groundbreaking Object Avatar functionality in July, we’ve seen a large amount of interest from our customers. Users tell us that the new feature has revolutionized the way that they approach software testing by greatly reducing the time spent updating and creating scripts. Object Avatar is the most advanced offering on the market for three reasons:

a) It has the ability to capture all the objects of a window (visible or hidden) in a single Avatar in one step;

b) It allows an Avatar to be of type Local or Global (shared by many tests); and

c) It is easy to maintain: users can add/edit/delete/import/export using the Avatar Manager. With Avatar technology, a QA Engineer can start building test cases without having to install the application on a machine. It’s every QA team’s dream to get a headstart on building test plans, which shortens the ramp-up time for QA significantly.

2. Data Parameterization

In the testing world, one of the most important features is feeding different data sets to the same test in order to ensure reliability of the application. Testing Anywhere has the ability to fetch the test data from various data sources (e.g., Excel spreadsheets, CSV and text files) or from databases—MS SQL, MS Access and MySQL, to name a few.

3. Test to EXE

Often, it is difficult to reproduce a bug in the development environment just by following the mentioned steps. In such cases, the patented Test to EXE feature of Testing Anywhere is essential. Using this feature, the QA engineer can actually send the self-executable of the test to the developer, while the developer can see the test in action without having to install the software in the dev environment.

4. Visual Logs

Testing Anywhere provides an innovative and intuitive Visual Logs feature, which allows the QA engineers to get the actual snapshot of a failed checkpoint at the time of execution. This capability helps users to identify the problem more quickly. Visual Logs also provides a summary of Pass/Failed checkpoints, along with the ability to export the logs to a CSV format.

5. Collaboration

A group of QA engineers will often work together on building and executing a test plan of a product. Therefore, being able to share one another’s work is key. Testing Anywhere provides the collaboration platform so that members of the QA team can upload and download tests based on their access permissions.

What is your favorite feature of Testing Anywhere?

Recently, I was talking with the CEO of a medical transcription business.  One of the major challenges his company faces is common with many organizations large and small  -  he has had to turn down new deals and revenue because integration is not possible between his own IT systems and those of his potential clients (in this case, medical record systems).

I explained to this CEO how he can integrate with any medical records system using business process automation (BPA) tools from Automation Anywhere, which offer easy drag and drop application integration.

The CEO asked me “Any system?” When I said yes, he asked me again.

When this CEO saw Automation Anywhere in action, he called it a game changer. For him, deploying Automation Anywhere means he can grow his business by taking on new clients that just a few months ago he’d have to turn down.

Fortune 500 companies have long been using BPA solutions, spending millions of dollars to automate million dollar processes. In these large deployments, BPA inherently involves integrating 1 or more applications (yet these traditional BPA tools only support a handful of application adapters).

Automation Anywhere was a radical idea when we launched it. Our goal was to create a solution that cost 1/10^th of existing solutions; could deploy in 1/10^th the time and could integrate with any application or website.

We thought Automation Anywhere would be popular with small to mid sized company – and it has been. Smaller companies, who haven’t had access to solutions like ours, are still amazed at what this means for their business.  But we’ve also been amazed at how large companies have jumped on it just as fast.

As the CEO reminded me, Automation Anywhere  is a game changer.

As leading software development site SearchSoftwareQuality.com reported in January 2010, agile development was one of the big stories in 2009. Their October 2009 survey showed that although agile adoption continues to be on the rise, development organizations are gaining more experience with the agile methodology and are reaping benefits of process improvement and faster delivery times. Yet they still cite age-old problems such as resistance to change. SearchSoftwareQuality concludes: “And even as many organizations are just transitioning to agile, some industry observers say the next-generation of agile methodology is already emerging.”

At Testing Anywhere, we believe we provide one of the next-generation automated testing agile tools.

The short iteration cycles, the collaborative and cross functional processes of agile development create new challenges for automated testing software.

In this “Testing Anywhere and Agile Testing” slide deck, I go into more detail about these challenges and how Testing Anywhere is designed to overcome the challenges agile developers face every day.

Testing Anywhere creates new ways to collaborate, new ways to communicate across functions and more effective ways to document the testing processes. Three ways we do this:

-       Test to exe: Once you automate any test, Testing Anywhere can convert it to an exe, allowing you to run this test on any machine, anywhere. The exes are self-contained and can even run on computers that do not have Automation Anywhere. In Agile testing, speed is the key. Generate an exe, once QA finds a bug to give to development, allowing a quick turnaround.

-       Compatibility testing: Need to run a regression test on Firefox, IE, Opera, Camino, and Safari? No need to write five separate Scripts – with Testing Anywhere, you can “script once and test everywhere.”

-       Automated regression testing: Regression testing requires you to retest an application after code modification. This often requires hundreds, if not thousands, of new tests to retest the application, check and rectify, both the newly written code and its integration with the original application code. Testing Anywhere makes it easy for you to automate all of your regression testing – creating and managing test cases can be done in just hours. Unmatched ROI and cost savings have made this, the software of choice for thousands of users.

If you are agile software developer, check out free trial of Testing Anywhere and tell us what you think!