We have evaluated other products. The problems are not always with the products but what they can be used for in an organization according to regulations. So far BotFarm works in specific areas like Oracle A/B. But there are really no relevant bank software solutions in BotFarm for transactions and business processes that I know of. Although the bots are working on machines, solutions for bankers have to work within the regulations. I do not know exactly if this is because of security or that they do not want sensitive information to be published online in the cloud space.  

We have been exploring BotFarm since about January (2019) and as part of our offerings for about six months in situations where it can be used. BotFarm is included in our product package. We are a partner; we are not the customer. We are executing the implementations for the customers. I am not using it to implement it within my architecture.  

I work with banks and the AutomationAnywhere BotFarm product does not have any software for banks included it, so we can not generally deploy it as a solution in banking. IBM BPMS is more suitable for the banking sector.  

We also looked at IQ Bot, which is another AutomationAnywhere product. The problem with this is that currently, IQ Bot does not support Arabic. So in this region of the world, it would be impossible to use that product right now. When it is possible to use it with Arabic, it might get further consideration.   

We were concerned about support mostly, but we were also concerned with reliability.

When selecting a product, I want to make sure that the vendor is going to be there tomorrow, but that also goes back to support.

If they're out of business in five years and I have $2 million invested in the hardware, what do I do?

So we went with IBM. There are other solutions out there. There are open-source solutions. But there are advantages of going with IBM:

• Nobody gets fired for buying IBM, right?
• They have an appliance: This is very, very desirable from a security standpoint