SAP has announced that it acquired Orsay, France-based Contextor SAS, which is a Europe-based company that is a leader in the design and integration of robotic process automation (RPA). Through the acquisition, SAP plans to accelerate the development and expansion of its Leonardo Machine Learning portfolio.
Contextor’s RPA technology enables business software users to perform repetitive tasks and it enables both attended and unattended RPA within and across applications. So far, Contextor’s customers have deployed over 100,000 bots to automate business processes. These automation tools are compatible with Microsoft Remote Desktop setups, XenDesktop workstations, and XenApp application servers, according to ZDNet.
And Contextor’s RPA is going to be combined with SAP Cloud Platform along with the conversational AI technology and document processing capabilities that is provided by SAP Leonardo Machine Learning. From there, SAP will deliver intelligent RPA through its key solutions.
“With intelligent RPA accelerated by Contextor, businesses will be able to achieve the high automation level necessary to become intelligent enterprises,” said SAP’s head of machine learning Markus Noga. “The acquisition is a big step towards orchestrating process automation and will help SAP inject RPA capabilities into our applications, first and foremost into SAP S/4HANA.”
Through Contextor’s RPA technology, SAP is planning to automate half of all businesses processes supported by its SAP ERP software in the next three years. And SAP said that the integration of intelligent RPA into SAP S/4HANA is expected to happen in the first half of 2019 followed by other SAP applications shortly after that.
Contextor was founded in 2000 by Patrick Lemare and the company previously raised €600,000 from K Partners in 2015. The financial details of this deal were undisclosed.
