Hiding under the Name, RPA, Enterprise Automation is Reaching a Billion Dollar Market
RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation but make no mistake: the robotic process refers to the algorithmic automation of software. RPA is quickly making its way towards a billion dollar revenue market and in recent months alone, leading startups in the space have raised over $450M for their RPA systems.
For years, large enterprises have answered the how-to-digitize question by turning instead to BPM (Business Process Management) as the most comprehensive method for streamlining core systems and processes. The BPM solution is to replace core software, which often proves costly in expenditure, adjustment time and potential returns. Given the multiple vendors encouraging a BPM approach, businesses have indeed felt pressure to cut costs, improve customer experience and increase capacity.
Now however, with the quiet rise of RPA, BPM is no longer the only scalable opportunity for automation. The more we observe digital figures and trends, the more we see RPA as the true driver of automation and AI in the enterprise sector, expectant to become a $1B market in the next 2 years.
What is RPA?
Employees of large enterprises spend countless hours, daily, on tasks such as customer order processing, data transfer, call center operation, payroll processing, etc. RPA replaces this repetitive work with its mimicking software. Requiring little integration, RPA can be installed on an employee’s desktop and function on a simple GUI layer, as most of us are already used to. In its more developed adaptations, RPA has advanced to include several other forms of integration to allow for flexibility and choice in the automation of different tasks.
Once looked at as a temporary replacement for human work, RPA is now proving to be a more efficient, less disruptive approach towards automating enterprise systems. Potentially accounting for 3–5 workers, RPA means future scalability for businesses, already demonstrating effectiveness with its minimal process changes, data integration and analysis effort.
The costs of employing RPA are also significantly lower than BPM, because software robots range from $5K-$10K annually and can be implemented within weeks with high ROI.
Operated on the GUI level for a user-friendly experience allows for fewer functional mistakes and inconsistencies. Thus, non-technical and operational teams alike can learn and work with the system without over-involvement from IT. Furthermore, because RPA does not require any hard programing capabilities; it leaves the enterprise in full control over implementation as well as the extent to which it digitizes.
Put simply, RPA is demonstrating a certain agility that is unattainable with BPM. It can be applied in the automation of small daily tasks, deeper systems of the enterprise or external systems such as SaaS that don’t have API’s. An important feature of RPA is its capacity for both attended automation, a collaborative work effort between human and robot, and unattended automation, in which the robot works as a sort of outsourced worker, doing the task and learning the system simultaneously.
Growth and Partnerships
The RPA industry has grown significantly and is expected to maintain 40–50% annual growth in the future. We see it as both a standalone solution as well as a complimentary system, able to blend into the larger $7B BPM market.
Currently, we see big-name BPM vendors moving towards RPA as both a complimentary and necessary alternative. Software AG and Kyron recently announced their partnership in selling and distributing Kryon Systems’ RPA technology and Dynamic Apps Platform. Kryon spearheads unique computer vision technology, allowing its customers to automate any type of process and service without code. Their platform, Leo, offers both service-based (unattended) and desktop-based (attended) automation. Its upcoming installment will include advanced machine learning and deep learning algorithms to further optimize and discover automation processes and opportunities.
IBM has also made a distinct move towards RPA by partnering with Automation Anywhere, one of RPA’s most well-established vendors. IBM’s choice to integrate RPA highlights a growing awareness and intention to diversify automation methods. We perceive this new direction for IBM will continue progressing into AI development in the future. Oracle has also announced a partnership with UiPath, one of the leading RPA vendors to accelerate the adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Appian and Blue Prism also announced their collaboration in early 2017, in which Appian will promote and sell Blue Prism’s RPA technologies as well as offer implementation and customer support of the Blue Prism system.
AI in 2018
We believe that RPA pioneers will play a major role in the entry of AI into the enterprise. Specifically for enterprises, AI has been slow to adopt because of the myriad of dispersed software present in business’s core systems. As RPA swiftly brings together disconnected systems, we believe it can also be the platform on which sophisticated algorithms can be implemented.
A final thought to consider is that while analysts estimate a 40–50% growth rate, the field might actually be growing faster. The top 5 BPO companies are lining up with RPA vendors to offer increased functionality, suggesting perhaps that analysts underestimate RPA’s current presence and potential influence in the market.
