IBM acquires business process automation startup MyInvenio

IBM this morning announced it has acquired MyInvenio, a process mining software company based in Reggio Emilia, Italy. IBM says the buyout, which is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close by Q3 2021, will help enterprises tackle streamlining backend processes across accounting, sales, and production.

Intelligent process automation, or technology that automates monotonous, repetitive chores traditionally performed by human workers, is big business. Forrester estimates that automation and other AI subfields created jobs for 40% of companies in 2019 and that a tenth of startups now employ more digital workers than human ones. According to a McKinsey survey, at least a third of activities could eventually be automated in about 60% of occupations. And the pandemic is bolstering the uptake of automation, with nearly half of executives telling McKinsey in a report that their automation adoption has accelerated moderately.

Roadmap

IBM’s purchase of MyInvenio builds on its existing OEM agreement with the company, announced in November. As a part of this deal, IBM plans to integrate MyInvenio’s capabilities with its automation portfolio, which spans IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, IBM’s hybrid cloud software, and over 600 prebuilt workflows on Red Hat OpenShift. IBM says MyInvenivo’s technologies might also eventually become available to IBM business partners to assist customers in generating insights into their workflows.

MyInvenio, which was founded in 2013, offers a platform designed to spotlight inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and tasks in industries that can benefit from automation. MyInvenio can run simulations to assess automation opportunities and measure the benefits of applying automation at the outset. Leveraging historical process execution data and desktop behavior enables the platform to determine exactly where to apply RPA bots, automated decisions, and AI models. Companies can use this to examine the most common IT requests, for instance, and automate resolution.

Paired with its automation services, IBM envisions MyInvenio’s software allowing organizations to streamline things like accounts receivable by looking at interactions with enterprise resource planning and invoicing systems. The software can help determine if employees spend a lot of time manually examining invoices and auditing purchase requests to find anomalies, two processes where AI-powered automation can potentially boost efficiency while cutting costs.

Expansion

The MyInvenio acquisition is IBM’s second this year after Salesforce consultancy 7Summits in January, and it follows IBM’s purchase of RPA developer WDG Automation last July — signaling the company’s ambitions in the enterprise automation space. According to Grand View Research, RPA alone is a market opportunity anticipated to be worth $3.97 billion by 2025.

“Digital transformation is accelerating across industries as companies face increasing challenges with managing critical IT systems and complex business applications that span the hybrid cloud landscape,” IBM general manager Dinesh Nirmal said in a press release. “With IBM’s planned acquisition of MyInvenio, we are continuing to invest in building the industry’s most comprehensive suite of AI-powered automation capabilities for business automation so that our customers can help employees reclaim their time to focus on more strategic work.”