Taking Celonis PAF expands the hyperautomation lead

Celonis, a leader in process mining tools, has announced the acquisition of Process Analytics Factory (PAF), a leader in process analytics for the Microsoft Power Automate and Power BI platforms. The acquisition of PAF cost approximately $ 100 million in cash and stock. Celonis has more than two thousand employees spread across twenty global offices and PAF has nearly forty employees in offices in Germany and the United States.

PAF was founded in 2014 by Tobias Rother, a process mining pioneer. The company’s core product is PAFnow, built into Microsoft Power BI, embedded in the Microsoft Power Platform and seamlessly integrated with Microsoft 365.

In 2008, Rother met Wil van der Aalst, a professor who developed theoretical underpinning for process mining and now serves as Chief Scientist for Celonis. He is the founder of ProcessGold, acquired by the head of robotic process automation (RPA) UiPath.

BI addresses the mining process

Marc Kerremans, vice president analyst at Gartner, told VentureBeat, “PAF became the first vendor in the market mining process to be integrated. [business intelligence] BI software and services with mining process technology. ”

PAFnow is embedded in Microsoft’s Power Platform and extends Microsoft Power BI with mining process capabilities. This allows Power BI users to enhance their existing BI infrastructures using the mining process. Because Power BI is a critical component of the Microsoft Power Platform and Office 365, users can use other components of Microsoft, such as SharePoint and Teams, Quick Insights for AI, Flow for workflow automation and RPA and MS Power Apps.

By acquiring PAF, Celonis not only gains other mining capabilities in the process but also adds capabilities that give Celonis a direct and proven strong connection to Microsoft’s successful Power Platform and Office 365 suite.

It fits Celonis’s many tools for evaluating business processes implemented in SAP and other common business applications. In addition, it expands Celonis ’ability to deliver process insights through Power BI, which is one of the most popular business intelligence platforms. The move could also extend Celonis ’reach into the hyperautomation market, which Gartner predicts to reach $ 596 billion by 2022.

Hyperautomation represents the combination of tools for capturing process data using process intelligence and then automating them using RPA, low-code and the automation capabilities built into enterprise software tools such as SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft productivity tools.

It will also improve the alignment between the mining process and BI tools.

“Teams working on process evaluation and improvement planning will be able to use analytics tools that are already familiar to them,” said Maureen Fleming, vice president of intelligent process automation at IDC.

This will expand the number of participants who can provide useful inputs. And there is a possibility to use other critical data already managed in the current data sources attached to Power Automate in the improvement evaluation.

Furthermore, it helps solidify Celonis ’position against competition from analytics vendors. Fleming said the acquisition eliminates any unique advantage an analytics vendor may have by entering the market mining process.

Amardeep Modi, vice president at Everest Group, predicts that this acquisition will encourage other process mining providers to form partnerships and integration with BI providers to extend their ecosystem and fuel growth. In addition, Microsoft is looking to develop its own mining process offering and this integration will mean giving clients the flexibility to choose mining process capabilities.

Modi also expects to see it driving more merger and acquisition activities as part of the growing trend of the mining process becoming an integral part of larger business platforms. He predicts that other process mining providers embedded in BI platforms are likely to be good procurement targets. Examples include Merhwerk for Qlik and Monkey Mining for PowerBI, both Major Contenders in Everest Group’s Process Mining PEAK Matrix.

Automation connection process

Celonis is the largest vendor of tools for process intelligence, analyzing data from business systems to understand how common businesses operate with an eye on efficiency.

Process intelligence tools combine process mining techniques that analyze the back end of enterprise app data logs and various process retrieval techniques that track the front end of enterprise apps using machine vision. This latest acquisition will enhance Celonis ’ability to retrieve data from the front end through Power Automate integrations built into PAF.

The PAFnow process mining product is fully integrated with Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Office 365 to evaluate, visualize and optimize virtually any process built into Microsoft tools. Celonis labeled its platform as an execution management system (EMS) because of its combination of process mining, analytics and low-code automation capabilities built from its Integromat acquisition.

Kerremans hopes it will improve the ability to assess opportunities for process improvements on the Microsoft platform and monitor processes to deliver insights into future change requirements.

“If PAFnow’s existing backend capabilities are extended by Celonis’ powerful and scalable EMS engine capabilities, it brings world-class mining process and execution management into the hands of Microsoft’s broad community, “said Kerremans.

Execution management everywhere

A careful reading of Gartner’s outlook on the market for hyperautomation tools is that most of the revenue comes from enterprise software built on platforms from Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce. But the fastest growth is coming from upstarts focusing on RPA, mining processes and new low -code tools. Celonis ’deeper integration with business platforms could help it take advantage of the largest market and opportunity for the fastest growth.

Gunther Ramaseder, senior vice-president of apps and business experience at Celonis, told VentureBeat, “Acquiring PAF is part of Celonis’s ubiquitous implementation strategy.”

This approach enables companies everywhere and in all industries to use the mining process within Celonis EMS to disclose and fix process inefficiencies. Celonis implements this strategy through partnerships, R&D and acquisitions. Together, Celonis and PAF will allow millions of Microsoft Power Platform users in their familiar environment to use Celonis EMS for process mining, automation and collaboration.

PAF says it is the first vendor in the mining process to embed the mining process in BI software. The joint companies plan to work together to offer a seamless experience with the Microsoft Power Platform and Celonis EMS. As a result of the acquisition, existing PAFnow customers will have the opportunity to access the mining process and implementation management capabilities of Celonis software. “Celonis will make the PAFnow user interface available to its customers in the future, which will further reduce the learning curve for users,” Ramaseder said.

The Celonis Experience

Celonis has aligned these capabilities with what it calls the “Celonis Experience” to simplify the adoption of implementation management across various enterprise software platforms, including systems and tools offered by ServiceNow, Salesforce and Microsoft.

Ramaseder said Celonis Experiences will start with Microsoft, which will debut on Celonis World Tour 2022. Celonis customers will be able to integrate Celonis EMS into Microsoft Power BI reporting seamlessly, collaborate with Microsoft Teams and -trigger flows in Microsoft Power Automate. It will combine the power of Celonis EMS across the Microsoft Power Platform to democratize enterprise -wide implementation management.

“This is a great step to help customers expand their reach in a variety of markets, including the Microsoft ecosystem,” R “Ray” Wang, chief analyst and founder at Constellation Research, told VentureBeat.

He believes that PAFNow has achieved impressive results in delivering Process Mining to the Microsoft Power BI market, which is growing rapidly and has almost 6% of the global market share for data visualization. In addition, Power BI has a 13% market share in the BI market and a large portion of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.

“We will see more integration in the market as it is a growing and hot space towards not only the mining process but in the future more cognitive automation and intelligent orchestration,” Wang said.

Creating digital twins of the organization

In the near future, the combination of Celonis and Microsoft will connect the mining process to low code/no-code application development on top of Microsoft Power Apps. This will allow businesses to instrument business processes to better model and improve digital transformation initiatives.

“By continuously using the mining process to track and capture the working process, a low code application development environment can consume this knowledge, reverse engineer the outcome and create and continuously adapt applications that reflects the actual organization, ”Kerremans said.

In this way, the paradigm that organizations must adapt to applications is reversed to applications that adapt to the organization, enabling a new type of application lifestyle.

“This mechanism is the next step [in] creating a digital representation of the organization, which Gartner referred to as the Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO), ”Kerremans said.