AWS and Mendix Partner on Intelligent Automation Solutions
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is partnering with low-code provider Mendix to simplify its intelligent automation solutions, which is automation that blends in technologies such as AI and ML. From Mendix’s perspective, it hopes to bring Amazon-capable components (such as speech-to-text) to its low-code solution. But it also means that customers can purchase app and service components through either the Mendix or AWS marketplaces.
“Intelligent automation” is a new idea that can help create solutions to bring about higher levels of efficiency and more reliable business operations. In order to build intelligent automation into your current workflow, you’ll need to focus on three different technologies:
- Artificial Intelligence: This is at the heart of intelligent automation. You’ll need to leverage both AI and Machine Learning, along with complex algorithms capable of analyzing massive amounts of data from numerous sources.
- Business Process Management: This is a paradigm that uses various methods to improve, optimize, and automate business workflows. Within the realm of intelligent automation, BPM is used to provide more agility and consistency to your business processes and streamlining interactions and engagement.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): This is the implementation of automation and robotics focused on performing back-office tasks (such as data extraction from numerous sources).
Intelligent automation offers a number of important benefits, such as cost reduction, improving the accuracy of decision-making and repetitive tasks, improving customer experience, and keeping your business in compliance. Any tasks that require the analyzing of historical and real-time workload and compute data would be a perfect candidate for the application of intelligent automation.
Who Benefits?
But what sectors could benefit from the application of intelligent automation? Although IA can be applied across nearly every type of business, there are certain industries that might find the application of this technology to be immediately beneficial. Any industry where the elimination of waste and the regulation of very precise instrumentation will find IA to be highly effective. Industries such as automotive, life sciences, healthcare, and insurance are obvious targets for intelligent automation.
I sat down with David Bailey, Mendix Director of Technology Alliances, to chat about this partnership. Right out of the gate, Bailey made it clear that the company knew they were good at low-code, but realized there were lots of other technologies involved — such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Since Mendix isn’t capable of doing them all, in order to remain who they were, they needed to leverage other people and companies to bring next-level technologies and services into the mix.
“There are lots of other technologies that are evolving around us, like machine learning, data and integration, AI, and user experience,” Bailey said. “We can’t do all of them. We don’t really want to do all of them. We want to be who we are. So we need to be able to leverage other people around us that can help us with that. And when we look [at] AWS, given what we have with them, but also given what our parent company Siemens are doing with them, we realized that actually there’s a really strong alignment now.”
Mendix has a number of customers in insurance, banking, and manufacturing. But Amazon is at a completely different level, with thousands upon thousands of customers.
“They’ve also got a huge amount of data,” noted Bailey. “And they’re helping us in understanding those customer problems at scale, and then being able to work with us.”
Starting Feb. 15, 2022, both Mendix and AWS customers will be able to license Mendix from either marketplace, where customers will find the whole platform. And for those unfamiliar with low-code, Mendix does offer support to help businesses get up to speed on using the tools so they can eventually be completely self-sufficient.