Only one software giant to make impact on the robotic process automation market, says analyst
(2021/08/19)
- Reference: 1629392766
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/08/19/microsoft_rpa_winner/
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Microsoft is set to be the only firm among the enterprise tech giants investing in robotic process automation (RPA) tools to make a significant impact, a report from Forrester claims.
The RPA market is set to be worth $2.9bn by revenue in 2021, up from $125m in 2016, while the two biggest players, Automation Anywhere and UiPath, have a combined $39.2bn.
It is tiny compared with the enterprise application market, worth $225bn in 2029, according to IDC, yet vendors in the bigger market are still tempted to get a slice of the action. [1]Salesforce , [2]SAP , [3]Oracle , and [4]Microsoft have all made significant investments knitting RPA into their platforms in recent years, but only the Redmond OS giant is likely to make headway, Forrester said.
[5]
It predicted that two pure-play RPA vendors plus Blue Prism, which offers RPA and low-code tools, would control 32 per cent of the market by 2023, while Microsoft would command 5 per cent because it is integrating RPA with its Power platform, which includes low-code and self-service BI offerings and is integrated with Office and Dynamics application products.
[6]
[7]
"With the exception of Microsoft, IA acquisitions are less of a threat to pure-play RPA vendors. Tech giants have 'license power' but may bundle RPA as a check-off item or loss leader, and therefore, they lack focus on what makes RPA so compelling," the report said.
[8]Salesforce follows application rivals into the RPA market with Servicetrace purchase
[9]Salesforce follows application rivals into the RPA market with Servicetrace purchase
[10]SAP hits back at interlopers with its own twist on workflow, low-code and RPA tech
[11]US small biz loan system bans software robots. The lesson? Make sure IT knows about any automation projects
Speaking to The Register , report co-author and Forrester principal analyst Craig Le Clair said users might want to look at applications vendors' RPA products if they were looking for specific automations in those environments.
"If a large percentage of uses are in these domains like ServiceNow for IT Service Management or Salesforce for CRM, then it's absolutely fine to do a technical automation that links with those capabilities," he said. "But there are companies that are using [RPA] broadly across so many use cases across HR, finance and in their line of business that are trying to build an enterprise shared services for RPA, so they're better off with the alpha players."
The alpha players, the report explains, are the companies that specialise in RPA without also having products in applications or infrastructure, such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath, the two biggest.
[12]
RPA has been seen as a fragile approach to automation because it can rely on scrapping application interfaces, which, should they change, can make the whole process fall over.
But Le Clair claimed the leading vendors were beginning to overcome these problems.
Machine learning techniques such as computer vision can help sense when an application interface changes and understand what those changes are, and help to automate an adjustment to the bot, he said.
[13]
"Those changes are likely to be a character field is moved from this location to another. A lot of these issues can be treated with relatively simple service automation capabilities that are evolving pretty well." ®
Get our [14]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/salesforce_servicetrace_acquisition/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/20/sap_acquisition_contextor_rpa/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/oracle_rpa_announcement/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/23/microsoft_bots_ahoy_as_the/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YR7UnZ4u-tpNtzOyZnekpwAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/salesforce_servicetrace_acquisition/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/salesforce_servicetrace_acquisition/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/08/sap_ruum/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/05/sba_rpa_ban/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YR7UnZ4u-tpNtzOyZnekpwAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The RPA market is set to be worth $2.9bn by revenue in 2021, up from $125m in 2016, while the two biggest players, Automation Anywhere and UiPath, have a combined $39.2bn.
It is tiny compared with the enterprise application market, worth $225bn in 2029, according to IDC, yet vendors in the bigger market are still tempted to get a slice of the action. [1]Salesforce , [2]SAP , [3]Oracle , and [4]Microsoft have all made significant investments knitting RPA into their platforms in recent years, but only the Redmond OS giant is likely to make headway, Forrester said.
[5]
It predicted that two pure-play RPA vendors plus Blue Prism, which offers RPA and low-code tools, would control 32 per cent of the market by 2023, while Microsoft would command 5 per cent because it is integrating RPA with its Power platform, which includes low-code and self-service BI offerings and is integrated with Office and Dynamics application products.
[6]
[7]
"With the exception of Microsoft, IA acquisitions are less of a threat to pure-play RPA vendors. Tech giants have 'license power' but may bundle RPA as a check-off item or loss leader, and therefore, they lack focus on what makes RPA so compelling," the report said.
[8]Salesforce follows application rivals into the RPA market with Servicetrace purchase
[9]Salesforce follows application rivals into the RPA market with Servicetrace purchase
[10]SAP hits back at interlopers with its own twist on workflow, low-code and RPA tech
[11]US small biz loan system bans software robots. The lesson? Make sure IT knows about any automation projects
Speaking to The Register , report co-author and Forrester principal analyst Craig Le Clair said users might want to look at applications vendors' RPA products if they were looking for specific automations in those environments.
"If a large percentage of uses are in these domains like ServiceNow for IT Service Management or Salesforce for CRM, then it's absolutely fine to do a technical automation that links with those capabilities," he said. "But there are companies that are using [RPA] broadly across so many use cases across HR, finance and in their line of business that are trying to build an enterprise shared services for RPA, so they're better off with the alpha players."
The alpha players, the report explains, are the companies that specialise in RPA without also having products in applications or infrastructure, such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath, the two biggest.
[12]
RPA has been seen as a fragile approach to automation because it can rely on scrapping application interfaces, which, should they change, can make the whole process fall over.
But Le Clair claimed the leading vendors were beginning to overcome these problems.
Machine learning techniques such as computer vision can help sense when an application interface changes and understand what those changes are, and help to automate an adjustment to the bot, he said.
[13]
"Those changes are likely to be a character field is moved from this location to another. A lot of these issues can be treated with relatively simple service automation capabilities that are evolving pretty well." ®
Get our [14]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/salesforce_servicetrace_acquisition/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/20/sap_acquisition_contextor_rpa/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/oracle_rpa_announcement/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/23/microsoft_bots_ahoy_as_the/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YR7UnZ4u-tpNtzOyZnekpwAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YR7UnZ4u-tpNtzOyZnekpwAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YR7UnZ4u-tpNtzOyZnekpwAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/salesforce_servicetrace_acquisition/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/03/salesforce_servicetrace_acquisition/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/08/sap_ruum/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/05/sba_rpa_ban/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YR7UnZ4u-tpNtzOyZnekpwAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YR7UnZ4u-tpNtzOyZnekpwAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Il'Geller
Only AI-parsing is a novelty in the entire field of "robotic process automation", nothing else has been fundamentally new proposed. (This AI-parsing replaces the outdated n-gram parsing, helping to structure texts into a format that is understandable to computer.) And finding the right information in the right context is simple. So, the new thing that Microsoft has added to "robotic process automation", is its search for textual information.
Robotic Process *Analysis*, not automation
The biggest value of RPA tooling is not automation, but Analysis.
While RPA tools are great for screen scrapping, the advent of Single-Page-Application frameworks {Angular, React, Vue, Elm, etc} has rendered a generation of automations redundant because [1] pages are more complex [2] web-services are better suited to traditional integration (even if the integration is node.js mashup)
*Attempting* RPA, is a good way to perform process analysis, but the outcome is just as likely to provide information for an integration project as it is for a robot - and in a small number of low-volume cases it's actually cheaper to get people to do it.
The exception is where the integration touch-points are well understood by the vendor, or they have hooks in the API (usually because they wrote it). This is why Microsoft is likely to be the biggest winner:
[1] Outlook/Exchange/Office365 are the largest automation surface (even if few are using Dynamics, or hosting in Azure), and Active-Directory is the trust mediator
[2] RPA tooling can be discounted for platform lock-in