MuleSoft today announced that it’s buying Servicetrace GmbH, a German software company with a robotic process automation platform for making enterprises’ business operations more efficient.

Financial terms were not disclosed. MuleSoft is a subsidiary of Salesforce.com Inc. which it joined in 2018 through a $6.5 billion deal. 

Servicetrace’s RPA platform observes how a company’s employees perform a given task in a business application and, with time, learns how to perform the task automatically. The software can in this way automate manual chores such as sending product orders to suppliers. The value proposition of RPA is  that it allows companies to free up employees for other tasks and, at the same time, reduce human error by relegating the most repetitive chores to software algorithms. 

Servicetrace’s platform also helps with some of the other steps involved in automating business tasks. The software identifies operational workflows that can be automated with RPA, a process that normally has to be carried out manually by a company’s employees. For large enterprises, Servicetrace provides a centralized dashboard that enables managers to monitor all the active RPA projects throughout their company and ensure each initiatives complies with corporate policies.

MuleSoft didn’t have a significant presence in the RPA market before announcing the acquisition of Servicetrace. The Salesforce subsidiary focuses on an entirely different task: it makes software tools that companies use to share data between their internal applications. Online retailers, for example, can use MuleSoft’s software to send customer purchase logs from their sales databases to a revenue forecasting tool.

But though MuleSoft competes in a different market, the RPA technology that it will obtain as part of the Servicetrace deal could prove a valuable addition to its product portfolio.

MuleSoft’s specialty, enabling data to be shared between applications such as sales databases and revenue forecasting tools, is done through application programming interfaces. APIs are the channel through which a program shares data with other systems. Notably, APIs also have another use: they can be leveraged to create RPA automation workflows.

RPA platforms usually perform business tasks via an application’s graphical interface just like human users. However, it’s often  possible to perform the same tasks via the application’s API. For example, instead of clicking the “Create product order” button in a supply chain tool’s graphical interface, an RPA platform could send a piece of code to the supply chain tool’s API instructing it to send a product order to a supplier. 

MuleSoft’s vision may be to integrate Servicetrace with its API tools to let customers create automation workflows. The Salesforce subsidiary currently provides a large set of features that companies can use to create APIs, secure them from cyberattacks, identify technical issues and build integrations with other applications. Adding in API-based RPA automation features could enable MuleSoft to offer an even broader value proposition to customers. 

“Our platform makes it easy to unlock and integrate data from anywhere — wherever it resides — and manage, monitor, secure, and govern that data at scale,” Brent Hayward, the Chief Executive Officer and general manager of MuleSoft, wrote in a blog post today. “MuleSoft will now also make it easy for line of business and knowledge workers to automate business processes and dramatically increase efficiency and speed.”

Building RPA automation workflows that use applications’ APIs rather than their graphical interfaces has  become a bigger focus for UiPath Inc. as well. The RPA giant  earlier this year acquired Cloud Elements Inc., a venture-backed MuleSoft competitor. Cloud Elements developed a platform that enables companies to share data between their applications using APIs.

The acquisition of Servicetrace will boost the RPA capabilities of not only MuleSoft but also its parent, Salesforce, which has been prioritizing this area for quite some time. Salesforce last year introduced a suite of tools called Einstein Automate to help companies create software workflows for streamlining repetitive business tasks. Servicetrace’s technology could help the cloud giant further expand its presence in the RPA segment. 

RPA is one of the enterprise software market’s fastest growing segments. As a result, other major industry players besides Salesforce have also made RPA-related acquisitions  over recent quarters to help them capture a bigger portion of enterprises’ process automation budgets. Microsoft Corp. bought automation software maker Softomotive Ltd last May and, a few months later, IBM Corp. acquired myInvenio Srl. ServiceNow Inc., in turn, purchased an RPA startup called Intellibot this March.

Photo: MuleSoft