Five Essential API Features for End-to-End Automation

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Gartner recently forecast that by 2026, “95% of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) vendors will have enhanced their API integration capabilities in order to offer both UI scraping and API-first automation approaches to their customers”.¹

But why wait? UiPath Business Automation Platform offers both API integration capabilities and UI automation within the same platform - today. In fact, it even allows both capabilities to be used within the same automated workflow.

UiPath Integration Service provides the engine that powers API automation in the UiPath Business Automation Platform. Integration Service enables users to connect third-party business systems with essential automation capabilities, such as computer vision, document understanding, and workflow design for attended and unattended robots.

Recommended core integration features—and best practices

Since the power and success of UI and API automation is dependent on a company’s RPA integration strategy, we’d like to share our short-list for five essential API integration features.

1. Ease of authentication

Automation developers need to authenticate to automate. Authorized connectivity should be easy to perform from any point within the end-to-end automation platform. Design vs. run-time connections should be sharable within an organization, while allowing individual users a personal connection to run automations.

2. Robust, prebuilt connectors, ready to support automated workflows

A catalog of prebuilt connectors significantly simplifies API integration by containing the necessary native objects and standardized activities associated with a given application. This reduces reinvention and opens up automation through API connectivity to everyone from professional developers to end users.

Connectors should be centrally managed to validate connections, as well as enable and disable access. Plus, automations should rely on connectors to invoke any method through APIs and applications, including the REST-HTTP method, as in this Salesforce example:

GET=read data, PUT or PATCH=update data, or insert. Used when a new id is updated for a new Salesforce account.

3. Customize your own connector

Being able to create new automation connectors is a powerful option for enhancing your connector catalog, or supporting a one-off, proprietary application. An option to import common API formats, such as Swagger, YAML and Postman collections, will quickly free up developers from integration bottlenecks.

4. Event Triggers

Server-side triggers automatically empower robots to work across dozens of applications based on events in connected systems. Server-side events include data updates, insertions, or added data and deletions.

Monitored events could include a new employee added to an HR system that triggers automated tasks for IT, security, compliance, or payroll.

5. Single API/UI-based design environment

To maximize productivity, developers should have access to UI- and API-based capabilities within the same integration design environment and automation workflow.

Your business automation platform should provide separate design environments supporting different skillsets. Advanced, API-savvy developers should have their own workspace, as should citizen developers and/or business users who need to configure simple robots and native integrations.

Additionally, the platform should support a center of excellence (CoE) team, including business and IT application owners.

Live webinar/demo

Coming back to Integration Service, we invite you to see our upcoming webinar and demo that will present a wide range of API automation use cases. We’ll show you how Integration Service builds automations faster and seamlessly when combined with other UiPath Platform capabilities, such as UI automation, document understanding, and other UiPath services.

Register now and select a convenient time zone option:

¹Gartner: Forecast Analysis: Robotic Process Automation Software, Worldwide Published 14 November 2022 - ID G00777147 - By Analyst(s): Varsha Mehta, Fabrizio Biscotti, Cathy Tornbohm, Saikat Ray, Arthur Villa Initiatives: Technology Market Essentials

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.uipath.com/blog/product-and-updates/end-to-end-automation-essential-api-features