Mulesoft announced that it is buying Servicetrace, a German software company with a robotic process automation platform for making enterprises’ business operations more efficient.
Mulesoft is a subsidiary of Salesforce which it joined in 2018 through a $6.5 billion deal.
Servicetrace’s RPA platform observes how a company’s employees perform a given task in a business application and gradually learns how to perform the task automatically. This way the software can automate manual chores such as sending product orders to suppliers. The value proposition of RPA is that it allows companies to free up employees for other tasks and simultaneously reduce human error by delegating the most repetitive tasks to software algorithms.
The software also identifies operational workflows that can be automated with RPA, a process that normally has to be carried out by a company’s employees. For large enterprises, Servicetrace provides a centralised dashboard that enables managers to monitor all the active RPA projects throughout their company and ensure each initiative complies with corporate policies.
MuleSoft’s specialty, enabling data to be shared between applications such as sales databases and revenue forecasting tools, is done through application programming interfaces. APIs are the channel through which a program shares data with other systems. APIs also have another use which is creating RPA automation workflows.
MuleSoft’s vision is to integrate Servicetrace with its API tools to let customers create automation workflows.
Brent Hayward, the Chief Executive Officer and general manager of MuleSoft, said:
“Our platform makes it easy to unlock and integrate data from anywhere — wherever it resides — and manage, monitor, secure, and govern that data at scale.”
“MuleSoft will now also make it easy for line of business and knowledge workers to automate business processes and dramatically increase efficiency and speed.”
The acquisition of Servicetrace will boost the RPA capabilities of not only MuleSoft but also its parent, Salesforce, which has been prioritising this area for quite some time. Salesforce last year introduced a suite of tools called Einstein Automate to help companies create software workflows for streamlining repetitive business tasks. Servicetrace’s technology could help the cloud giant further expand its presence in the RPA segment.
