Microsoft to optimize process automation stack with Minit acquisition

Microsoft bought Minit, a developer of process mining software, to help its customers streamline business processes across the enterprise on and off the Microsoft Power Platform.

The move came just days after Celonis announced it Purchase of the Process Analytics Factory to empower yourself process mining Offered on the Microsoft Power Platform – and in the same week that SAP introduced new features Signaviothe process mining tool, acquired just under a year earlier, that brings together data on process performance and customer experience.

With the acquisition of Minit, Microsoft gains the ability to extract process data from enterprise systems like Oracle, SAP, ServiceNow, and Salesforce using its suite of Minit Connectors, turn that data into event logs, and analyze it to identify process bottlenecks that can be optimized or automated.

Minit was founded in Slovakia in 2015 and today employs around 50 people. Founder Rasto Hlavac stepped down from the CEO role in May 2021 to become Chief Strategy Officer, while former Automation Anywhere executive James Dening took over as CEO. Well, it seems Hlavac’s strategy was to find an acquirer to expand the business.

Microsoft all-in for process automation

The acquisition is the latest in a series of process automation-related purchases for Microsoft. In October 2021, the company bought cloud-based business process management specialists Clear Software, another product designed to help companies automate SAP and Oracle systems with Power Platform. It bought Softomotive, the developer of low-code Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Tool WinAutomation in May 2020 to improve the capabilities of its own automation tool Power Automate.

“This clearly shows Microsoft’s seriousness about making a strong move in the intelligent automation space,” said Amardeep Modi, vice president of research firm Everest Group.

Microsoft’s acquisition strategy becomes clearer when you look at the various roles played by process mining, process automation, task mining and task automation tools, said Marc Kerremans, vice president and analyst at Gartner.

Tasks performed by an actor (be it human, machine, or software agent) assemble in a specific order to form a process. By finding out how people perform a specific task (by observing mouse clicks and keystrokes), organizations can save time and money by automating it with RPA.

Process mining opportunities

However, using process mining to identify how a particular business process is put together opens up many more possibilities, including improving processes through techniques such as Lean Six Sigmaapplying root-cause analysis to eliminate exceptions and reduce complexity, improve collaboration between stakeholders — or in perhaps a quarter of use cases, automate the process, Kerremans said.

In many automation projects, both techniques — process automation and task automation (e.g., RPA) — are highly complementary and should live together, he said.

Starting with the Softomotive acquisition made sense for Microsoft because most RPA implementations today include desktop productivity tools, for which Microsoft owns much of the market, Kerremans said. To figure out which tasks could be automated, Microsoft first worked with FortressIQ (which was later acquired by Automation Anywhere) and then developed its own task-mining tool, Process Advisor, he said.

If Microsoft wants to improve its Power Automate platform, which Process Advisor is a part of, it needs to provide stronger process automation capabilities, Kerremans said.

One way Microsoft may have achieved this is by working with Celonis, as originally envisioned as part of the partnership announced last year. But Celonis is a big company with bigger ambitions and aims to apply process mining to much more than just automation, appealing to executives as well as IT leaders.

As the Minit acquisition demonstrates, “Microsoft must have decided to go with a more technical process mining company that was also looking at a different roadmap,” Kerremans said. Celonis, on the other hand, found the perfect integration with Microsoft’s Power BI environment in its acquisition of Process Analytics Factory, he said.