2 min

The move is a bold step into the world of robotic process automation.

ServiceNow announced this week the acquisition of Indian RPA startup Intellibot. With this deal, the company is trying to cash in on a surge in RPA popularity. Enterprises today are increasingly looking for ways to automate workflows. RPA allows them to use robots that can perform numerous repetitive tasks within common business applications.

Josh Kahn, SVP of Creator Workflow Products at ServiceNow, explaioned the reasoning behind the deal. “ServiceNow is the platform of platforms for the workflow revolution, offering powerful end-to-end automation capabilities that allow customers to streamline business decisions and unlock new levels of productivity,” he said.

“Our customers represent nearly 80 percent of the Fortune 500, and the vast majority are trying to drive automation across a mix of legacy and modern applications. With Intellibot, we will extend ServiceNow’s ability to help customers connect systems so they can easily automate workflows and drive productivity.”

The plan is to build Intellibot’s capabilities natively into the Now Platform. This will make it easier for customers to integrate RPA with their modern and legacy enterprise systems, they say.

RPA is the hot new thing in the enterprise software sector

ServiceNow’s acquisition of Intellibot comes at a time when other enterprise software providers have been moving to add RPA capabilities to their platforms. Even Microsoft Corp. added new RPA tools to its Power Platform earlier this month.

ServiceNow recently delivered the Now Platform Quebec Release to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation. The releas helps them to innovate quickly and operate more productively, the company claims. And this is necessary in “a new world of work hastened by COVID.”

Intellibot will complement these capabilities, ServiceNow says. It will do so by extending ServiceNow’s existing AI and ML integrations. It will also buttress their low-code development, process mining, process automation, NLX, chatbot, and virtual agent capabilities.

“We are proud to join forces with ServiceNow as it continues to invest in powerful end-to-end automation capabilities to make the world of work, work better for people,” said Srikanth Vemulapalli, CTO and co-founder of Intellibot.

“Our RPA combined with ServiceNow workflows will help businesses better connect disparate systems to accelerate innovation and thrive in a new world of work.”