Credits: Dreamstime
Microsoft purchased Minit, a process mining software developer, to help its customers optimize enterprise-wide business processes, inside and outside the Microsoft Power Platform.
The move comes just days after Celonis announced its purchase of Process Analytics Factory to strengthen its own process mining offering on the Microsoft Power Platform-and the same week SAP announced new functionality for Signavio, the process mining tool it acquired nearly a year ago, integrating process performance data and customer experience.
With Minit acquisition, Microsoft gains the ability to extract process data from enterprise systems such as Oracle, SAP, ServiceNow, and Salesforce using its suite of Minit Connectors, transforming that data into events. log, and check it to identify process bottlenecks that can be optimized or automated.
Minit started life in Slovakia in 2015, and now has approximately 50 employees. Founder Rasto Hlavac resigned as CEO in May 2021, becoming chief strategy officer, with former Automation Anywhere executive James Dening taking over as CEO. Now, it seems, Hlavac’s strategy is to find an acquirer to grow the business.
Microsoft all-in on process automation
Acquisition is the latest in a series of purchases associated with the automation process for Microsoft. In October 2021, it purchased cloud-based business process management specialist Clear Software, another product aimed at helping businesses automate SAP and Oracle systems using the Power Platform. It bought Softomotive, the developer of the low-code robotic process automation (RPA) tool WinAutomation, in May 2020 to enhance the capabilities of its own automation tool, Power Automate.
“This clearly demonstrates Microsoft’s seriousness to establish itself firmly in the intelligent automation space,” said Amardeep Modi, a vice president at research firm Everest Group.
Microsoft’s procurement strategy becomes clearer when you look at the different roles of tools for process mining, process automation, task mining, and task automation, says Marc Kerremans, a vice president and analyst at Gartner.
The roles of an actor (whether it is a human, a machine, or a software agent) are compatible in a particular sequence to form a process. By knowing how people perform a particular task (by observing mouse clicks and keystrokes), businesses can save time and money by automating it using the RPA.
Process mining possibilities
But using process mining to determine how to integrate a particular business process opens up many more possibilities, including improving processes through techniques such as Lean Six Sigma, applying root -cause analysis to eliminate exceptions and reduce complexity, improving collaboration between actors-or, in perhaps a quarter of use cases, automating the process, Kerremans said.
In many automation projects, both approaches – process automation and task automation (e.g., RPA) – are highly complementary and should live together, he said.
Starting with the Softomotive acquisition makes sense for Microsoft because most RPA implementations today involve desktop productivity tools, where Microsoft owns most of the market, Kerremans said.
To discover what tasks could be automated, Microsoft initially partnered with FortressIQ (which was later acquired by Automation Anywhere) then went on to develop its own task mining tool, Process Advisor, he said.
If Microsoft wants to improve its Power Automate platform, of which Process Advisor is a part, it needs to provide more powerful process automation capabilities, Kerremans said.
One way Microsoft could do that is by partnering with Celonis, as originally expected under the partnership they announced last year. But Celonis is a large company with bigger ambitions, and aims to apply the mining process to more than just automation by appealing to business leaders as well as IT leaders.
As evidence of its acquisition of Minit, “Microsoft should have decided to go for a more technical process -focused mining company that is also looking … so let’s call it a different roadmap,” Kerremans said. Meanwhile, Celonis found its acquisition of Process Analytics Factory the perfect integration with Microsoft’s Power BI environment, he said.
MicrosoftMinit tags
.