Keeping up with most software updates many times feels like running on a treadmill and most times it’s not even worth it!
It is not so much different with RPA vendors with multiple products and so many versions and patches to keep up with. Automation Anywhere has been notifying customers that they will soon discontinue the Enterprise 11 platform and is urging customers to move to the A2019 platform.
I have heard from some customers that the V11 migration announcements have not gone down well and their A2019 is not yet ready for prime time. Yet, AA has now taken the plunge and put out dates for both End of Sale (March 1, 2021) and End of life (Sept. 1, 2022).
Automation Anywhere has clearly indicated that they would like to move all in into the cloud. They have already pulled the plug on the V11 community version and you must use the A2019 cloud community version. So, most of the new people getting trained on AA are using the A2019 cloud version.
So, it is no major surprise as they say in their FAQ.
Since October 2019, Automation Anywhere has offered Enterprise A2019, the latest version of the platform.
Automation Anywhere V11 EOL FAQ
Enterprise A2019 has been built from the ground up as the world’s only purely web-based, cloud-native
Digital Workforce platform. In addition to the advantages of its cloud-native architecture, Enterprise A2019
includes advancements such as native integration with Discovery Bot, IQ Bot, and Bot Insight to deliver an
end-to-end automation experience that is continuously improving. Now that Enterprise A2019 has gained
maturity and more advancements than Enterprise 11, the focus for Automation Anywhere will be on
delivering the best possible experience for our customers and partners on the latest platform.
I have co-authored a book on RPA projects where we used A2019 for the projects. It is truly intuitive and easy to use with some incredibly good additions. So, the direction seems right to me. The only issue was that there were still many teething issues with the community version that we had to work around. Hopefully, they are getting over those issues and we will have a robust A2019.
Whatever the case though, if you are using Automation Anywhere, you should get ready to migrate. This timeline from ISG seems about right.
The good news from all this is that with cloud version, you would have lesser or no software to upgrade and can hopefully get off the treadmill.
