What the Industry Needs: More Choice [More RPA Solutions and Providers]

Why the current status of RPA just isn't enough

The last few years have seen a meteoric rise in RPA adoptions and the emergence of multiple RPA players. A closer glance at what’s been going on with a few of the larger RPA players recently tells you everything, with UiPath having raised series B funding in excess of $150M and Automation Anywhere raising $250M. Along with Blue Prism, this group reflects the “Big Three” that currently dominate the market.

Investors, it seems, have a lot of confidence in RPA.

However, there have been some concerns from clients who have adopted RPA and now want to scale it. RPA is still in its early stage and so a certain degree of disappointment is to be expected until the time that solutions evolve further.

By now, the industry has realised that RPA is not a one size fits all solution. It is dependent on type of process, domain, industry, complexity, system dependencies … and the list goes on.

There are currently already a few dozen RPA players, but I feel that what the industry needs is more RPA players. We need higher competition to drive the rapid development of better services and solutions.

One can easily draw a parallel with the traditional IT industry, which has hundreds of players ranging in size, variants of services, and regional and geographic spread. Over the last 2-3 decades, the large numbers of IT and BPO players have resulted in better solutions, services and choices for customers – to the overall benefit of the industry.

Clients and the industry in general will benefit by having more RPA players with niche solutions and specialists.

To that extent, RPA2AI has done a great job by identifying and classifying many RPA players [ed’s note: as has SSON Analytics, the Shared Services industry’s premier data resource, which you can view here]. A quick review of the chart below will surprise many readers in terms of just how rapidly the market is evolving, with more RPA players joining constantly.

In fact, the report claims to have analysed around 50 RPA vendors across a variety of categories.

Source: https://rpa2ai.com/news/rpa50/

Ultimately, RPA needs to be seen from the prism of services that impact customer experience and efficiency. It’s not surprising that customers have high expectations around RPA solutions that are specific to their industry and processes.

The answer is more RPA players that can fill in the all that white space.