Everest Reports On A Complex And Competitive RPA Market

The industry analyst firm Everest Group recently reported their latest research into the development of the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market and they have some interesting findings. The market is getting larger and more competitive, but the services provided are also increasing in complexity too.

“The market for RPA technology is becoming more complex, with highly competitive and evolving product offerings,” said Sarah Burnett, executive vice president and distinguished analyst at Everest Group. “The Everest Group Products PEAK Matrix is an unbiased assessment that uncovers vendor and product differentiators to identify the leaders in RPA technology based on research that goes deep into the vendors performance and product details, features, functionalities and more.”

The PEAK Matrix reporting method summarises the 22 companies studied along two different axes. The first is vision and quality, describing the ability of the company to successfully deliver the products they promise. The second is the market impact, how is their sales performance and impact on the wider RPA marketplace?

Everest Group classified the main RPA technology vendors into three categories of Leaders, Major Contenders, and Aspirants: 

• Leaders: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, NICE and UiPath
• Major Contenders: Another Monday, AntWorks, EdgeVerve, HelpSystems, Jacada, Jidoka, Kofax, Kryon, Pegasystems, Servicetrace, Softomotive, Thoughtonomy, and WorkFusion
• Aspirants: AutomationEdge, Datamatics, Intellibot, Nintex, and Nividous

AntWorks, Automation Anywhere, Datamatics, Softomotive, and UiPath demonstrated the strongest year-over-year movement on both market impact and vision-and-capability dimensions and emerged as 2019 RPA Market Star Performers. WorkFusion scored as high, or higher sometimes, on the vision and quality measurement as the leaders, but it was felt that they have not quite made the market impact to be categorised as a leader – yet.

Other interesting takeaways from the Everest research include:

• Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath are the top vendors in terms of RPA license revenue, closely followed by NICE. Pegasystems leads in terms of revenue from attended RPA (RDA) licenses
• Softomotive has the highest number of RPA clients in the market, most of which are small-sized enterprises and SMBs. Witnessing almost 300% year-over-year growth in its number of clients, UiPath holds the second spot in terms of number of RPA clients
• Automation Anywhere leads in North America, which is the largest RPA market, and Latin America. Blue Prism leads in the UK and MEA markets, while UiPath leads in Continental Europe and Asia Pacific
• UiPath holds the highest market share by license revenue across horizontal functions such as F&A, procurement, and HR, while Blue Prism leads in banking and insurance industry-specific process areas. Pegasystems has the highest market share in the contact center space
• Leaders have moved away from perpetual licensing to annual/monthly subscription-based licensing models. Advances in RPA technologies and increasing client maturity are fuelling the rise of more output-oriented pricing models such as flexible usage-based (e.g., per minute/hour) and per-process or transaction-based models
• RPA solutions continue to evolve with a host of capabilities, such as computer vision, workflow orchestration, intelligent workload balancing, auto-scalability, and predictive SLA monitoring, to help enterprises achieve strategic business outcomes
• Attended RPA / RDA continues to witness increased demand in the market. AI-based next-best-action recommendation and interactive UI for on-screen agent guidance, which enhance worker productivity and help improve customer experience, are among the key RDA differentiators

This new research from Everest Group is comprehensive and insightful and was only just published in July 2019 so the information is current. I recommend browsing their findings because it is clear that RPA has moved beyond the hype cycle now and is becoming a serious strategy for many company executives.