Everything you're saying is 100% something I deal with on a day-to-day basis, and ongoing support is a huge struggle to workout with the companies I've implemented software at.
Looking at your product offerings made me chuckle - I definitely have versions of a lot of what you do! My robots are called workers, my orchestrator is called a broker, etc etc ha. Lemme know if you guys are ever looking for a remote automation engineer w/tons of cloud experience ;)
- Never use an RPA tool that doesn't generate plaintext-serialized scripts. You're going to have a bad time if they're binary locked
- Never choose an RPA tool that's been around fewer than 3 years. It's probably just a shim on top of MS automation libs, and can't handle the really gnarly stuff
- Never promise anyone you'll automate 100% of their workload. Never try to automate 100% of their workload. Never hesitate to tell a VP you're not going to automate 100% of their workload. There's value in 50%+, get the easy win and move on. Only come back when you've gotten all the easy wins
- RPA is fundamentally about target selectors (or match rules, or whatever else your tool calls them). Their robustness is the only real feature of an RPA platform, and a smaller toolset is going to result in some fragile, quick-to-break stuff
Ultimately, RPA is about one thing: creating a more tactically malleable layer on top of your existing software. Development and change speed is the biggest advantage.
It shouldn't ever be a core system, but it should be where you prototype functionality.
Taught me a big lesson about realistic messaging and never up-negotiating expectations.
(A) Selenium's UX isn't nearly where it needs to be to upskill an analyst to create their own automations.
(B) Selenium's Windows app compatibility is haphazard.
(C) Selenium doesn't have the kind of corporate support it would take to expand compatibility quickly enough to catch up with its competition.
The RPA space is the Linux desktop problem in a nutshell. Polish and niche compatibility are the final 10%.
Nobody on the open source side has the interest in making a VB6 app work. And nobody on the corporate side really wants to use it for more than what they're currently using it for.
I can't overstate the sheer number of bizarre situations a tool needs to be able to handle to be effective here.
Because being able to automate something 95% of the way to completion is usually a lot less valuable than 100% (note: talking about percentage of happy-path process, not of total incoming workload here).
At this point, I've been doing it for... about 7 years?
It's been an interesting ride.
Email in profile
Tl;dr - different target user & no corporate sponsor seriously incentivized to improve legacy compatibility
Would love to get the Selenium viewpoint though! Have always been curious, and I'm not as well versed in that side of the house.
Maybe - but how would one go about contacting you? (I have my email in my profile, should you wish to contact me).
Maintaining & expanding the automation is a heck of a challenge though. Like, once you got the stuff deployed, make sure that it works without headaches, in the face of other software/ OS upgrades. The robots/automation services are essentially a "fleet of microservices" that you have to maintain for a customer whose strength is likely not IT, and who will change the infrastructure from underneath your "microservices". It's a hard problem, but I feel we're well positioned to tackle that, and if we do, the sky is the limit really. (disclaimer: I work for UiPath, though that should be obvious from the message)