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.

Wi-Fi 6

 

While the IEEE 802.11 standard defines the Wi-Fi standard, the Wi-Fi Alliance is an industry group that also helps to define these technologies. This group is responsible for the ‘Wi-Fi CERTIFIED’ program which ensures interoperability between devices regardless of their vendor. The internet of things (IoT) is becoming more prevalent in our everyday lives and within industrial settings, and this is driving the demand for more secure, efficient, and reliable connectivity methods. As customers ask for higher capacity and lower latency Wi-Fi, the community is pushing to adopt new capabilities and features to support these requests.

The next generation is called Wi-Fi 6, based on the 802.11ax standard, and it provides a variety of features such as ‘orthogonal frequency division multiple access’ (OFDMA) which improves performance in dense environments so devices can divide the spectrum allowing for a more consistent and deterministic network experience. For example, smaller packets can still be transmitted while larger packets for video streaming are unaffected.

‘Target wake time’ (TWT) is another feature of Wi-Fi 6 that allows connected devices to determine how frequently they should awake and transceive data. Basically, access points can now increase a device’s sleep time thus extending battery life and lowering consumption. This is imperative for smart and IoT devices which are required 24 hours a day, but don’t need to always be on.

Used in conjunction with the Wi-Fi Alliance’s ‘HaLow’, IoT devices remain power-efficient. HaLow provides long-distance, speed, low-power, penetration, and security features that other technologies do not. This technology supports higher throughput at ranges up to a kilometre while consuming a low amount of power and maintaining performance.

The alliance has also expanded their ‘CERTIFIED’ program to help optimise networks that are experiencing a rapid growth in the number and type of devices connecting to personal and corporate networks. For example, 1 certification is provided for those devices that improve mobility when roaming between networks. Other optimisations focus on QoS management or helping providers and network managers manage complex networks with more secure, efficient, and smart Wi-Fi networks.

In the most demanding wireless network environments, Wi-Fi 6 provides users the coverage, capacity, efficiency, and performance that is required as more devices are connected to our networks. The features of this next generation technology will only continue to grow in demand as out homes and offices become more connected through smart devices.

Cloud and Open Source

 

While developers may prefer open source solutions over closed, proprietary ones as they offer more ‘freedom’, they actually prefer the convenience of using open source software without requiring approval from a swathe of other business departments in their organisation. This has also started applying to cloud solutions, as open source providers are available in a timelier manner and in a non-preferential manner.

In order for multicloud to work, developers need tools that allow them to build with the best-in-class technologies that are also open – such as MongoDB or PostgreSQL. This is because these technologies can run across different cloud, data centre, and PC environments thus making it more convenient for a developer to use. A developer must be able to run these technologies in their vanilla format so that the application is portable across different cloud environments.

PostgreSQL, for example, is run on certain cloud providers but with additional patches and performance improvements. The vanilla version that anyone can download doesn’t have these features, but those enterprises with multicloud success have decided to use these battle-tested vanilla versions of open technologies to improve portability and convenience for developers.

Each cloud environment is different and using an open source technology that developers can carry between these solutions is extremely powerful. A developer that knows one of these technologies can be just as productive with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. It is still important for a developer to know the intricacies of each cloud vendor, but these open source technologies allow developers to transfer their skills between these cloud environments.

So while cloud perfects many of the motives that developers first chose to work with open source, cloud has certainly not rendered open source extinct as previous commentators first imagined.