UiPath unveiled several its on-premise offering during its virtual conference Thursday and rolled out a number of updates,  including increased support for citizen developer automation, more artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and automated security for bots.

The biggest announcement was that the on-premise platform is now available and packaged on a cloud-native,

container-based foundation that allows the robotic process automation (RPA) vendor to shift some capabilities — such as the automation hub and task mining — from the cloud to the on-premise version, said Param Kahlon, UiPath’s chief product officer. Test manager and process mining are also now available to cloud customers.

Overall, the updates include “hundreds of feature enhancements” across four key themes, Kahlon said.

1. New integration support

UiPath Integration Service, a library of API-based connectors into common enterprise systems such as Microsoft Office, SAP, Salesforce, G Suite and ServiceNow, was unveiled by Kahlon at the conference.

“What this gives us is a very rich library of API-based connectors to commonly use systems you use in the enterprise,” he said.

The vendor also made it easier for RPA developers to access and call these APIs through an authentication system that is consistent across all interfaces in which the UiPath platform is available, Kahlon added.

Finally, the platform added a server-side trigger function, in addition to the desktop triggers, that allows developers to “listen” to third-party APIs for events on other systems that triggers the automation.

“With the capabilities here, our developers now can combine a UI automation with a rich set of API automation to automate more within the enterprise,” Kahlon said.

2. Elevating automation across the enterprise

“As we know, enterprises are running now hundreds and thousands of robots and workflow processes to automate more and more processes within the enterprise,” Kahlon said. “We are making it easy for them to use those automations.

To do that, UiPath added a configurable, policy-based interface that allows an enterprise to update all robots and desktop clients to the same version the enterprise is using for orchestrator as “a single-click, centrally managed operation,” he explained.

Also new: A capability to “run the robot self-healing workflows to make sure you’re running the workflows on the machines that have the right environment, the right characteristics to run those workflows,” Kahlon said.

An addition that should appeal to compliance-minded financial institutions is a partnership with the cyber security firm CrowdStrike, which automatically incorporates endpoint and threat detection functions into bots. There is also additional support for runtime governance and source control detection, Kahlon added.

3. Accelerating automation development

Bots can now execute across platforms, allowing enterprises to create an automation that can run on Windows- or Linux-based machines.

“You can create an automation across platform project today that’s accessing APIs and that’s accessing browser-based automation. You can run that on a robot that’s running on a Linux-based machine,” Kahlon said. “So if you have the need to handle peak time loads and things, you can run them all in Docker containers that are provisioned for those specific intervals in which you have those needs.”

Docker is an open-source containerized tool that uses operating system (OS)-level virtualization to deliver software in packages with everything needed to run applications.

UiPath has also made its process mining tool available as a cloud service, giving it a “major architectural uplift” along the way so that it can ingest large amounts of data, Kahlon said. The tool comes with an expanded set of connectors so enterprises can connect the lines of business systems.

Finally, the RPA vendor is leveraging a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses a “semantic automation-based approach” to understand and extract information in forms.

“It looks at a tax form and automatically finds the four fields that are relevant from a business perspective,” Kahlon said. “This tremendously accelerates the time that’s needed to build automations, but also makes it easier for citizen developers, for business analysts to be able to build these models [and] extract information from near type of documents.”

4. End-user support

Finally, to help end users grab some quick wins, UiPath has added ready-to-go automations for common business tasks, Kahlon said, although he did not specify what those tasks are.

It’s also now possible to take any commonly used automations and add them directly from the Windows start menu, he said.

The company also built integrations within the UiPath assistant so that business users can capture a task and submit an idea for automating it into UiPath’s automation hub.