In the midst of increasing RPA adoption in global services, WorkFusion, a technology vendor that focuses on delivering smart automation solutions, has taken a bold move to offer RPA for FREE. While trial or community editions of RPA tools are available for free from RPA technology vendors such as UiPath, WorkFusion’s RPA Express is the first ever scalable and enterprise-grade RPA product to be made available for free and for all.
The adoption of RPA has been increasing rapidly, but it has been skewed toward a few industries and large-sized buyers. WorkFusion’s disruptive move of offering RPA for free will make the business case for it extremely favorable, and will significantly accelerate the adoption of RPA across all industries and buyer sizes. It makes RPA accessible to many, and accelerates trials and proofs of concepts by those that have not yet adopted it.
As organizations realize the benefits of RPA, they are likely to turn to cognitive technologies as the next natural step in their enterprise automation maturity. Availability of free RPA will consequently speed up organizations’ journeys to adoption of cognitive automation. WorkFusion is clearly looking to accelerate those journeys, and transition clients from its free RPA to its integrated RPA and cognitive automation platform, while putting commercial pressure on competitors who do not have a fully-fledged cognitive option to offer.
We believe this to be a very smart move. We think the message here is pretty clear that RPA is becoming table stakes, and the real deal is cognitive automation technologies. Also, it’s worth noting that this seems to be happening much faster than many of us would have predicted, and is a clear example of the “law of accelerated returns” and the exponential evolution of technology we talked about earlier this year in our blog: “Artificial Intelligence: How far or how close?”.
It will be exciting to see how WorkFusion RPA Express compares with the leading RPA technologies that are available in the market on a paid basis. Interestingly, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of WorkFusion’s full RPA capabilities, and overall, they stood up very well to relative assessment against better known RPA technology vendors. The technologies assessed included Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Kofax Kapow, Kryon Systems, NICE, Redwood, Softomotive, Thoughtonomy, and UiPath.
To read our complete assessment and analysis, please see our newly published report, “Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Technology Vendor Landscape with FIT Matrix Assessment – Technologies for Building a Virtual Workforce.”
