UiPath, the robotic process automation (RPA) vendor that went public in April, will offer its automation solution as a self-hosted platform called Automation Suite.

Automation Suite is currently in public preview through the end of the month and will be released soon afterwards, Geoff Anderson, UiPath director of core platform marketing, told Bank Automation News.

New York-based UiPath currently offers its tools as a software as a service (SaaS), along with and several products for self-hosting on-prem or in public cloud. The new release will be able to run either on-premise on Linux hardware as a self-hosted solution, or in a public or private cloud, Anderson said. The new release is designed to make the entire platform available for self-hosting with additional platform-level management tools and capabilities built-in, he said.

This enables the on-premises installation of some UiPath products for the first time for organizations that do not want a SaaS solution. Examples include Automation Hub, which enables crowdsourcing of automation ideas from within a business, or Task Mining, which assesses the automation potential of tasks and accelerates automating them.

“Why might the customer make that choice? It could be anything from the regulatory environment they’re in and what they’re allowed to consume, assess, through to their preference on how they want to run their IT, how they think about their security posture,” Anderson said. “There is absolutely a use case for financial institutions.”

In addition to appealing to regulated industries — including banks and other financial services — Anderson said the app could be used by information technology (IT) services or consulting firms who bundle their own services with UiPath automation.

The app offers the same solutions and experience as the cloud solution, including Automation Ops, the governance framework for RPA development, and a web-based portal. There are two functions not yet included — process mining and data services — which will be added to the on-premise suite in the future, Anderson said.

“The unambiguous intention is to have every product in there, both in the cloud, which we’ve now achieved, and on-prem,” he said. “It will just take a little longer to realize that in Automation Suite.”

The application suite is containerized with Kubernetes, an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling and app management.

Containerized apps use an operating system-level virtualization method to deploy and run distributed applications without launching an entire virtual machine (VM) for each app, according to marketing company TechTarget. In this case, it’s designed for a Linux OS. Multiple isolated apps or services can run on a single server and access the same OS kernel.

Containerization is cost-efficient since it does not require multiple virtual machines. It also allows financial institutions and other companies to download parts of the app and run it without the whole.

In addition to the already-containerized UiPath products, Automation Suite will contain tools for managing and monitoring the Linux and Kubernetes-based platform in the same installation package, which Anderson said will reduce complexity for customer IT.

Licensing detail will be finally determined by release, Anderson told BAN.