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.

We are half way through January and I can finally take a breath and reflect a bit. 2009 really ended with a bang for Automation Anywhere and 2010 shows no signs of slowing down.  I’d like to take a moment to say I’m quite proud of our team for all of their contributions. Due to our team’s tireless efforts Automation Anywhere was awarded the “Best IT Automation Product” Gold award for our Windows Automation Software and was featured in a Wall Street Journal article on management practices that have made Automation Anywhere a leader in business and IT automation.

Windows IT Pro wrote:

• “Automating the most time consuming and repetitive IT tasks can reap huge benefits for any harried IT professional. Automation Anywhere Enterprise isn’t the only IT automation product on the market, but it’s unarguably one of the best.” —Jeff James, editor in chief, Windows IT Pro
• “This best-of-breed solution lets you easily design and manage your automation task—without the necessity of programming knowledge.” —Jason Bovberg, senior editor, Windows IT Pro

Our pride cannot be described in words. Something we have known for years, our customers have been saying again and again, is now echoed by the #1 IT magazine. Automation Anywhere is best there is in IT automation. Period.

But we aren’t resting on our laurels. As Cari Tuna from the Wall Street Journal reported  – everyone at Automation Anywhere has great ideas and we are willing to put in the hours.

In addition to our continued commitment to Automation Anywhere, we also launched our newest product, Testing Anywhere, in December. This is a very big deal for us, our channel partners and pretty much anybody who cares about low cost, automated software testing.

Since our launch:

• Our channel program has caught the eye of several very important partners who recognize the disruptive nature of Testing Anywhere over more expensive archaic products such as HP QuickTest Pro
• We’ve had dozens of leading industry experts join our “Team Anywhere” program.

We’ll be announcing details of a new channel program for Testing Anywhere. Please contact us directly if you would like to talk with us before then.

We live in a real-time on-demand Internet-based immediate-gratification world. Not only true today, this reality was made clear to us 6 years ago when we launched our company. At the time, we were a very young, small startup proud of our first product and ready to take on the world. As such, as CEO, I wanted to show our team how proud I was of our efforts by purchasing the first copy of our product online at our launch (okay, I also wanted to make sure everything worked…). Our office space looked like a television commercial spot as our small team gathered around my computer to watch me make that first purchase. There was only one problem, the world beat me to it. Or, more factually, a person in Australia had already purchased the first copy of our product. Automation Anywhere delivered.

What do we mean when we say “Automation Anywhere”? The promise of Automation Anywhere is to create intelligent software that automates any business or IT process or task. These processes or tasks can include:

• Business process automation
• Web data extraction
• Data integration/data automation
• IT automation
• Automated testing
• Application integration
• Job scheduling
• Batch processing
• GUI automation
• And much, much more

What are our goals for delivery of Automation Anywhere? We had a number of goals and client promises that we agreed to early on and still deliver today, these include:

• 1/10 the price, 1/10 the time. If it takes $250,000 to for business process automation, with AA it should take under $25,000 and if it takes 10 months for a project, it should happen under 1 month.

• Ease of Use – we want Automation Anywhere to be available to anyone (developer, QA, line of business manager, IT) this is not a technology that should be limited by one’s technical abilities

• Cost Effective – today’s economic climate notwithstanding, we design and deliver all of our solutions as cost effective components of organizational infrastructure

We felt calling our company Automation Anywhere was a bold statement and we want to be a bold company. Even 6 years later in today’s Internet-driven distributed computing environment, the promise of delivering automation anywhere to organizations of all sizes is a daunting task. But, we’ve been doing it to the tune of 25,000 customers in more than 90 countries.
Finally, stay tuned, our next blog will feature some big news. Based on our customer feedback, we’ve picked one of the tasks from the list above to receive some special attention – we’ll be launching an exciting new product with an exciting new offer. If you have ever used HP QTP (aka HP QuickTest Pro) this news will definitely be of interest.