Robotic process automation company Automation Anywhere Inc. said today it’s bringing its main RPA offering to Google LLC’s public cloud platform as part of a wider collaboration in which the two firms will work together to create new products for their joint customers.

In addition, Automation Anywhere will work with Google to bring its RPA capabilities to a number of Google Cloud products and services.

Automation Anywhere is widely considered one of the leaders in the fast-growing RPA market, valued at north of $6.8 billion. The company’s main platform is its recently rebranded Automation 360 offering, which enables companies to create artificial intelligence-based robots that can assume numerous repetitive manual tasks in a business that are normally performed by human workers.

The bots work by observing how humans carry out these tasks, which might including copying records to and from different business applications, for example. They teach themselves how to replicate these workflows so they can be automated in future.

The company said its partnership with Google is timely because its own research shows that more than half of all businesses are planning to increase their automation investments within the next year, and most of those will do so by deploying RPA in the cloud. It explained that the need for new remote work solutions that’s the result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is one of the main drivers of this trend.

“Intelligent Automation can be an important asset in digital transformation, particularly as global enterprises adapt to a new reality of distributed work,” said Automation Anywhere co-founder and Chief Executive Mihir Shukla (pictured). “By partnering with Google Cloud, we can help organizations leverage intelligent automation capabilities at a massive, global scale and dramatically decrease the amount of time that teams spend on their most common, repetitive business tasks.”

Automation Anywhere said Google Cloud will enjoy the status of “primary cloud provider” for its Automation 360 platform, while it will become Google Cloud’s preferred RPA partner. The company’s full portfolio of tools will be made available through the Google Cloud Marketplace, from where they can be deployed across both hybrid cloud and on-premises environments.

Meanwhile, Google is planning to integrate Automation 360’s RPA capabilities with a number of its cloud tools and services, including Apigee, which is a platform for building and managing application programming interfaces. It will also integrate Automation 360 with its AppSheet and AI Platform offerings. Finally, Google and Automation Anywhere plan to create new, industry-specific tools focused on areas such as financial services, healthcare, life sciences, supply chains and telecommunications, they said.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said he hopes the partnership will “help businesses quickly deploy and scale RPA capabilities on Google Cloud, and to address business challenges with solutions specially designed for industries.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE the partnership is beneficial for Automation Anywhere because software-as-a-service companies need infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as Google as a home for their offerings. And for Google, the analyst said it also benefits from having more SaaS workloads on its cloud.

“The additional ‘preferred’ partner and the Google work on integrating Automation Anywhere just show to what lengths Google had to go to attract Automation Anywhere,” Mueller added. “Now, Automation Anywhere can focus on building its product and Google gets a lot more workloads for Google Cloud.”

Automation Anywhere said its platform will be generally available on Google Cloud starting at the beginning of May 2021.

Photo: SiliconANGLE