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SAP acquires robotic process automation company Contextor

SAP has acquired Contextor, a European robotic process automation (RPA) company based in France. The acquisition will help SAP accelerate the development and expansion of its Leonardo Machine Learning portfolio, SAP said in a statement.

Contextor’s RPA technology relieves business software users from performing repetitive tasks and enables both attended and unattended RPA within and across applications. To date, Contextor’s customers have deployed more than 100,000 bots automating business processes.

RPA will help to simplify user interface interactions across SAP and non-SAP applications. Contextor’s RPA will be combined with SAP Cloud Platform and conversational AI technology and document processing capabilities provided by SAP Leonardo Machine Learning to deliver intelligent RPA, which SAP plans to include in key SAP solutions.

The integration of intelligent RPA into SAP S/4HANA is expected in the first half of 2019, the company said in a statement. Other SAP applications will follow soon thereafter.

With Contextor’s RPA technology, SAP says it plans to automate half of all the business processes supported by its SAP ERP software over the next three years.

[Image courtesy:  Contextor]

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