When we talk about robotics, we often think of the Boston Dynamics acrobat robot, the ones that populate car factories or, more recently, the one that returns pancakes to Japanese restaurants.
But there is another category: RPA services for Robotic Process Automation, which concern automated tasks between digital applications. It is in this sector of software robots that Vess Bakalov, the founder of PLIANT, an American start-up born in 2017, is positioned.
Software robotization has become common in many industries because it eliminates the need for human intervention for repetitive tasks. Most of the innovations observed replace human interaction, such as chatbots (conversational robots), but few companies have tackled the machine-to-machine segment. Pliant has developed a programming interface platform (API) that allows users to establish interactions between heterogeneous applications without having to write a line of code.
Today, the RPA focuses on simple tasks: if "x", do "y". Pliant's objective is to automate complex tasks with several intertwined conditions, for example: "if Microsoft has a new server patch, which servers are not up to date, is an update enough to upgrade it ?, if yes push the update and send back a confirmation of compliance, if not push a hardware upgrade request".
The implementation of this type of process used to take weeks, the programming is now done in a few hours with Pliant. The CEO is well acquainted with this field since he was the co-founder of SevOne, an IT infrastructure performance management and optimization company, a "unicorn" acquired by Bain Capital.
The company has already signed its first integration contracts, including Microsoft Azure and Windows, Cisco, Oracle and Google Cloud.