I've recently been dipping my toes in the RPA space (with Kofax RPA) and what you wrote validates my first impressions. The partner firm I'm working with insists that they have been seeing "insane and growing" demand for RPA solutions, which I kind of find hard to believe.
RPA is a financial services buzzword right now. I’ve worked on an RPA library that manipulates a web application…which the company already provided full API access to.
The RPA library requires those working with it to examine the page HTML in order to hook into it, since it’s highly dynamic: you have to see what form fields are available and their internal IDs in order to interact with them. Meanwhile, the API layer gives access to all the same CRUD, and maybe with better documentation (I have not seen it).
If you don’t have a human user, just use the APIs! That’s what they are there for!
That's interesting as I figured Kofax would be an operation that would really nail RPA and then move on to providing a very robust API middleware solution, given Kofax's bread-and-butter is literally addressing use-cases that take data from outside the system (document processing) to inside the system (process and data management).
