Decoding the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Earlier this year Gartner released their Magic Quadrant for RPA and those vendors happy with the findings went crazy to celebrate the recognition of their success. While others quietly shuffled it under the carpet, hoping no one would notice.
If you’d like to read the full report it can be downloaded from Appian on this link. The Magic Quadrant is your typical four-box grid, the x-axis tracking ‘completeness of vision’ and the y-axis ‘ability to execute.’ It’s the y-axis that really sorts the wheat from the chaff, capabilities are no good if they are difficult to deliver!
The report pulls no punches and no one really escaped completely free of some criticism, but as you fall lower down the y-axis, there were some harsh words and a sincere reality-check delivered. Credit to the Authors Derek Miers, Marc Kerremans, Saikat Ray and Cathy Tornbohm for not watering down their output. Anyone wanting to learn more about the RPA market should find a quiet hour and digest this report now.
The leaders: placing UiPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere will come as no surprise to anyone unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years. In reality, however, there is a becoming a greater separation between the three organisations when it comes to market share, an area where Blue Prism is starting to lag compared to the other two.
The Challengers: I’m pleased to see EdgeVeve and NICE sitting in this quadrant, worthy recognition in both cases for organisations that are sometimes overlooked by the hype around the big-3, despite a strong pedigree in this market. Personally, I was surprised to not see Pegasystems in this quadrant, a solution that seemed to have more in common with the Challengers than the Visionaries. It’s hard to imagine by any criteria that Pegasystems has less ability to execute than Antworks, still a relative newcomer to this space.
Visionaries: This is perhaps the most oddly named quadrant. It doesn’t quite conjure the right impression of the vendors in this section; a complete vision but lacking in the ability to execute is too much theory and not enough practice in my mind.
Niche Players: Finally, we have the Niche Players, and this is a real mixed bag of results. Congratulations to Kofax, Servicetrace and Softomotive; they’re still in the game and need to keep pushing forward. For the others, the battle is on, and there will be winners and losers!
The scope of the Gartner report is limited to those organisations that participated in the preparation of the report, presumably by contributing to Gartners’ coffers. Not included in the paper are a growing number of genuinely visionary organisations that are approaching automation in new and exciting ways. There is more risk associated with considering them as they are smaller with less of a delivery track record, but their approach is more completely a melding of RPA and AI into Intelligent Process Automation.
Rob
