Sanae BEKKAR – My Blog –

As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation, many still struggle with processes that can’t be automated through APIs. This is where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comes in and Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) now provides native capabilities to orchestrate robots as part of your automation flows.

Why RPA matters ?

RPA enables you to automate manual, repetitive work that traditionally depends on human interaction with legacy systems, spreadsheets, or web interfaces. In scenarios where APIs are unavailable or outdated, robots can step in to mimic user actions and bridge the automation gap.

Oracle’s RPA solution, embedded within OIC, helps businesses build, deploy, and manage robots seamlessly without leaving the integration environment.

APIs unavailable to automate ?

Many legacy applications don’t offer modern APIs. With Oracle RPA, you can:

• Build and deploy robots directly within OIC
• Manage robot lifecycles alongside your integrations
• Automate user interface interactions safely and efficiently

This allows teams to extend automation to systems that were previously “unreachable” by standard integration tools.

Hybrid Automations: The best of both worlds

One of the most powerful capabilities of Oracle RPA is Hybrid Automation combining traditional API-based integrations with robot actions.

You can now orchestrate robots inside your integration flows just like any other connector. This makes it possible to:

• Automate complex processes across hybrid environments
• Reuse existing OIC integrations
• Combine data-driven and UI-driven steps into one seamless flow

For example, you might use OIC APIs to fetch customer data, then trigger a robot to input that data into a legacy CRM that has no API.

Critical challenges in RPA

Despite its potential, RPA adoption comes with known challenges. Oracle directly addresses two of the most critical pain points in the industry:

1. Managing Robot Environments & Machines

Traditional RPA solutions require complex infrastructure:

• Constant resource allocation and monitoring
• Synchronization issues across environments
• Costly scaling and version management

Oracle simplifies this by managing robots natively within OIC, reducing operational overhead and making scaling more efficient.

2. Robot fragility & robustness

Many RPA scripts are fragile — a minor UI or system change can break the automation. Oracle’s RPA improves robustness through:

• Centralized orchestration within OIC
• Simplified exception handling
• Easier robot maintenance and deployment

This minimizes downtime and ensures higher return on investment.

Example of using RPA :

A simple robot can be created to register customers into a legacy application a common use case where APIs are unavailable. Once the robot was built, it was added into an integration flow using the native “Robot Flow” action.

From there:

• The robot flow was configured and selected from a dropdown
• The integration continued like any other flow
• Execution triggered both API and RPA steps seamlessly

In short, building and orchestrating robots in OIC is as simple as configuring any other integration action.

Key Takeaways

• Oracle’s RPA eliminates silos between API-based and UI-based automation.
• Hybrid automation allows for complete process coverage across legacy and modern systems.
• Future-proofing ensures long-term value through easy technology substitution.
• Native integration in OIC removes the need for separate RPA infrastructure.

With RPA embedded in Oracle Integration Cloud, enterprises can finally automate end-to-end business processes — even when APIs aren’t available. This marks a major step toward unified, future-ready automation, combining the intelligence of integrations, AI, and robots within a single platform.

 Want to see RPA in action inside Oracle Integration Cloud?
Watch the full demo and other OIC tutorials on my YouTube channel 🎥 Cloud Intégrateur Notebook By Sanae BEKKAR

Thanks for reading !