RPA adoption to expand amid business resiliency needs

Leslie Joseph, principal analyst at Forrester, expects a surge in RPA demand, with financial services, manufacturing, energy and utilities, and logistics outpacing other verticals.

The COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced a new use case for robotic process automation: business resiliency. Interest in creating digital workforces that can keep toiling through a public health crisis will spark a wave of RPA adoption, according to Leslie Joseph, principal analyst at Forrester Research, a market research firm based in Cambridge, Mass. The resiliency factor has implications for IT service providers and software outsourcing firms, which use the technology in-house and deploy it for customers.

In this Q&A, Joseph discusses his recent report on the effects of COVID-19 on enterprise automation, which, along with security and managed public cloud services, is expected to see continuing customer demand amid the pandemic.

Programming Without Code: The Rise of No-Code Software Development

Microsoft’s Power Apps, Oracle’s Visual Builder, and other tools let you create software without needing to code.

Code is the backbone of most software programs and applications. Each line of code serves as an instruction—a logical, step-by-step mechanism for computers, servers, and other machines to perform an action. To create those instructions, one must know how to write code—a valuable skill that’s sometimes in short supply. 

But what if you could build software without writing a single line of code? That’s the premise behind no-code development, a software development method that has been gathering momentum. With the help of no-code platforms, it’s possible to develop software without writing any underlying code.