UiPath turns tables on tabulation with Tableau
Every company wants to be more than a specialist niche technology focus these days i.e. hyperconvegence specialists now want to be known as platform and software suite-level companies, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) specialists want to be known as enterprise cloud companies and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) purists want to be known as enterprise automation companies.
In fairness to the all these players, ambition and elevation through innovation and expansion and diversification is no bad thing… but of all those examples listed (above), the leap from pure-play RPA to wider enterprise automation is probably (arguably) the most justifiable.
This is the label that UiPath (the company you know for its RPA-fueled software bot intelligence) now goes by.
So then, as an enterprise automation company, UiPath has now formed new integrations with Tableau, the data visualisation company.
Now sitting inside the Salesforce family of companies, Tableau itself follows suit with the “we’re not just that, we’re this too” naming convention and now calls itself not just an analytics platform company, but the world’s leading analytics platform to boot.
The new connection between the firms is intended to enable Tableau users to deploy UiPath robots to automatically perform actions and trigger downstream business processes.
The integrations make data and insights immediately actionable, turning Tableau reports and dashboards into what both companies want to now call “dynamic action centres” (yeah, more name-upping at the product level… hey, why stop when you’ve already got a head of steam going eh?) and so this should make automation easier for a given business function in an organisation.
The UiPath Activity for Tableau uses Tableau APIs, so UiPath robots can extract relevant data from Tableau for use in UiPath automations. In addition, UiPath created the UiPath Connector for Tableau to allow a person to kick off automations from directly within Tableau reports or dashboards.
Drag-and-drop-a-bot
The integrations function as a drag-and-drop experience that do not require writing complex code, meaning users can now implement automation as part of data analysis to simplify decision-making and improve time-to-value.
“Incorporating enterprise data into an automated workflow can truly transform the way people work with data,” said Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer at Tableau. “The new integrations with UiPath unlocks the power of data by automating and simplifying repetitive tasks, enabling organisations to make faster, data-driven decisions.”
Use cases could be nearly limitless.
For example, a supply chain analyst reviewing inventory data in Tableau can automate a purchase request for stock items that need replenishing from directly within that dashboard. Similarly, an IT system administrator can launch a robot to investigate an incident without leaving the IT service management dashboard.
“Automation from within leading enterprise offerings and tools, such as Tableau, is core to our vision of helping companies on their journey to the fully automated enterprise,” said Ted Kummert, executive vice president of product and engineering at UiPath. “Our integration with Tableau empowers companies to extend the scale and efficiency of automation across their business by combining the power of data and insights with UiPath robots.”
The bots are on the table (figuratively, technologically and literally in this case)… where they land next is sure to be close by.
