Today IBM announced that it is to acquire Italian process mining vendor MyInvenio. This deal follows SAP’s move earlier in the year to acquire Signavio, another process mining vendor. So, what do we think of this move? Firstly, it is no great surprise that in an era of digital transformation and (though we are not keen on this term) ‘hyper-automation, such deals are happening. Automation comes in many forms. The tools used to automate range from AI to good old Rules Engines – but the Achilles heel of most automation projects is flawed or inadequate business analysis. To put it another way, enterprises are complex. Though they may think they know their internal processes, in reality, they typically have but a sketch idea of the details of what goes into a particular task or process operation. Process and Task Mining tools like MyInvenio, Signavio, Celonis, FortressIQ, and Minit go a long way to automating enterprise automation analysis.

The MyInvenio deal follows closely on the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Brazilian RPA vendor WDG and add’s yet more practical functionality to its growing Cloud Pak services. Despite IBM being one of the largest IT vendors, its work in moving advanced automation to the cloud has received less attention than one might expect. Though last year Deep Analysis was impressed by the innovation and work IBM showed in delivering IBM Automation Document Processing, and I hope to see MyInvenio bundled there too shortly.