Hi community members,
The market leaders seem very entrenched.
Who are we going to be talking about 3-5 years from now? Still the same few companies? Is anyone doing anything innovative in this space that could be a real game-changer?
Share your forecast!
ProcessRobot (Softomotive) and WDG were very promising. They were adding niche features such as chatbots with IVR support etc. Now, after their acquisition by Microsoft and IBM respectively, their potential and promise will get a drastic boost to upstage the RPA biggie (BP, AA and UiPath).
Winautomation and Process Robot - with its end to end integration with Microsoft Power platform, they can seamlessly integrate with a variety of other complimentary techs to provide end to end automation.
WDG - once WDG is incorporated into IBM CP4A platform, it will be able to seamlessly participate in a long running true business process, integrate itself with rules and other cloud pak features to provide a much higher ROI.
Keeping that most big enterprise uses significant number of IBM or Microsoft products, i believe an integrated end to end platform will be more appealing as compared to standalone RPA platform.
Rony - I think the big RPA players are already moving that way (toward more end-to-end platforms). It's a long way to go, but they have significant customer adoption on their side. The big integrated players - IBM, Pega, SAP, etc. and smaller ones like Appian - have less distance to travel as they already have platforms, but their customer adoption/distribution game is not as robust as the RPA players (nor as expensive so they are quite a bit more profitable i imagine). Interesting to see how it plays out!
Based on my analysis, the players which are not including everything and anything in their core offering but are creating an eco system will be long lasting. I don't see new platers will have a good chance given big player like Microsoft(taking over Softmotive, and announcing UI flows), SAP (iRPA) have already entered the space, they see the potential and will try to take on the market share. I am particularly impressed by MS in this space, the cognitive services, Azure learning services and it can be incorporated in the existing ecosystem for example BLueprism is launching all MS COg services from within its studio with only one week of lag and you still pay for Azure services but the fact that you can make your existing robots more smarter without any hassle - already gives it competitive advantage (this is about getting ecosystems together). The MS UI flow is no where near what big players like UI path, blueprism offers but in 2 years, I think this wil also grow to full potential. To answer your question, I think market will grow something like this -> some players will try to build everything and anything in their own tool and sell this (this will possibly intrest organisation new to the joining race), some will build ecosystem (this will interst large organisation who are heavily invested in automation and will try to leverage it). My personal belief Is the one who looks at Process automation as a whole but by not reinventing the wheel with the players already existing will win this game.
@Nancy_Sachdeva Thanks for an interesting perspective! It will be interesting to see how things play out in the next few years.
There are a lot of RPA players coming up in the market.
Most of them would not survive the tough feature line-up from the leaders. Especially Microsoft in the space could overshadow the current leaders.
However, we can certainly be looking at low-cost or alternative pricing model vendors which can cater to the mid-market.
I would also watch the leaders much closer to see what innovation they are going to bring to be at the top.
Intellibot.io would be my suggestion. From DPA to RPA to cognitive model long to Chatbots to IOT they have come a long way since inception.
Within the short time they have rose to the top contenders in the forestor wave report and the g2 crowd report. With stronger client bases being added to their portfolio they are slowing rising to the top.
@AswinSasi Interesting! What would you say differentiates Intellibot.io from the big players? What are they bringing to the table that is enabling them to challenge leaders like Blue Prism, UiPath and Automation Anywhere?
Please feel invited to have a look at the Cognitive AI of EMMA RPA - a real No-Code RPA solution that can be really used by non-IT-employees.
A huge advantage at the age of digitalization while developer salaries are raising permanently.