How Is RPA Innovation Taking Shape?
I have written in the past about how impressed I was when I visited IBA Group in person. They don’t really shout about it, but their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) team has a level of expertise that I was not expecting to find when I visited Minsk last December. I keep recalling this when I see some of the analyst and media coverage of RPA online because there is still a strange mixture of anticipation and hype in most of the analysis.
HfS Research has been one of the main critics of the hype around RPA. They have consistently called on other analysts to provide realistic market projections and to stop using the ‘robots are taking over’ myths that have grown in frequency in the past two years. Their Horse For Sources blog in particular has been scathing when individual analysts have made RPA claims that just cannot be supported by evidence or case studies.
HfS has documented that they believe the ‘big 3’ RPA companies – Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath – are creating a baseline for the entire industry. It’s messy out there because there are loads of companies that are trying to get a piece of the RPA hype and yet not everyone can succeed – not least because each system needs experienced people who can implement and use it. I believe that WorkFusion should also be on this list as they are not only creating a baseline, but they are disrupting the marketing by even offering basic RPA services free.
On March 3rd the Horses For Sources blog said this: “However, beyond scripts and bots and dreams of digital workers scaling up rapidly to provide reams of value, most enterprises are fast coming to the realization that they need an actual process automation platform capability that ingests their data, visualizes it, machine learns it, contextualizes it and finally automates it. ”
The blog goes on to say: “The implication is that for many companies the dream is over. They thought that RPA would work easily and yet they have found that it’s actually quite complex to integrate into their main business processes. You cannot just point an RPA system at a business and say ‘automate that’ in the same way that computer software doesn’t write itself – someone needs to understand how to code so the computer understands what you need.”
Go and follow the link above if you want to read the conclusion to what they think will happen next, although the short story is that they believe that there may be a new phase of RPA led by AntWorks with a more integrated approach to automation. In a way, we are seeing the process of automation becoming more automated.
I think there are two conclusions that can be drawn from what we are seeing in the RPA market at present. First is that most implementations are started to coalesce around the three top system suppliers and that’s a good thing because the market cannot tolerate the fragmentation that dozens of small systems creates. Second, the RPA story is not over yet. It remains quite difficult to implement and anyone making this process easier could well lead the next chapter in the RPA story.