Microsoft Acquires Process Mining Vendor

 

Microsoft has acquired Minit, a process mining technology vendor based in Slovakia for an undisclosed sum. Microsoft hopes it will help customers to digitally transform their processes and identify which ones are good candidates for automation. Minit allows organisations to analyse, monitor, and optimise their processes by gaining deep insights into how their processes run and discover the causes of operational challenges posed by such processes.

Microsoft claims this acquisition will allow its customers to better understand their process data and drive process standardisation and improvements across a business, ensuring compliance along the way. The big tech company is committing to a software category that could be worth over $11 billion by 2030 after its 2020 acquisition of Softomotive and the launch of new capabilities in Power Automate. Minit’s customers shouldn’t expect a change in the support they are receiving, but it is still unclear whether their team will merge with Microsoft or if the teams will remain separate.

Process mining is also called task discovery and it involves identifying root causes behind workflow issues and bottlenecks by analysing data from desktop and email apps and other workflows. This is a key technology that facilitates robotic process automation (RPA) which aims to automate repetitive tasks and generate logs to further identify cost savings. This responsibility has traditionally been conducted by system integrators that map out processes after analysing workflows. RPA intends to digitise this process and reduce costs, time, and effort.

Businesses are hungry for more process data as more of them continue their digital transformation and any organisation not providing best-in-class capabilities in process mining may find it hard to offer customers a compelling solution. Process mining seems to be maturing as a market as more acquisitions are starting to be announced in the past year, along with the business process automation industry experiencing general consolidation. Task mining, process mining, and discovery are continuing to be commoditised under other major automation platforms.

Alteryx Cloud Analytics

 

A recent Gartner report predicts two-thirds of development and production analytics will be performed in the cloud by 2023. 75% of businesses are transitioning to the cloud for their analytics, or are already there. While many enterprises look to the cloud giants such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, other cloud providers focused with on-premises solutions are making moves. One such provider, Alteryx, recently announced its Analytics Cloud earlier this month which is a unified end-to-end automation platform for business analytics.

Alteryx recently acquired Trifacta, a data engineering software company that provides integration with other cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake and also provides architecture for the 3 giant cloud providers previously mentioned. This technology allows Alteryx to offer competitive deployment solutions that can meet any business analytical needs that may arise. This acquisition also improves Alteryx’s credibility with data engineers that manage the data pipelines and analytical tools and applications for enterprises.

Their aim is to “democratise analytics” and not leave the analysis to the data scientists, as the company’s chief data and analytics officer explains how simple it is to become certified in Alteryx and how the platform can be used to improve performance in a two-mile race or determine the correct amount of nutrition and sleep a person should be obtaining.

Analytics needs to move to the cloud as businesses become more sophisticated and an increase in processor power is needed to analyse the vast amounts of data; the cloud offers the perfect scalability for this. It is also important that the analytic tools are available where the data is, and as more customer data is exported to the cloud, the capabilities to analyse that data need to migrate too. While Alteryx’s approach is “cloud first”, they are continuing their on-premises products with the possibility of deploying cloud-native technologies on-premises in the future if required.