Scaling automation initiatives | Enterprises should select service providers that can ECHO their automation-led aspiration: Educate, Commit, Help, and Orchestrate
Enterprises that lack access to the requisite specialized skills or have limited experience with agile/DevOps principles of application development should avoid large-scale cloud native initiatives; they will be best served by running pilots for select, low-risk greenfield applications to learn and scale the practice
Key considerations to select and prioritize application candidates for cloud-native
Successful cloud native adoption requires a SMART IT operating design and model
Tier-2/3 Indian cities comparison for digital services delivery PEAK Matrix™
The relationship between RPA vendors and their clients isn’t so different from the relationship between Marvel Studios and its fans.
Since the movie Iron Man hit the big screen in 2008, fans’ expectations of superhero films have skyrocketed. Despite the rising and evolving expectations, Marvel has satisfied its audience and has made a little pocket change in the process.
In a similar way, RPA buyers are expecting increasingly more from their RPA vendors. So, have RPA technology vendors been MARVELous in their customers’ eyes?
Our recent research study among 50 enterprise RPA buyers makes it clear that vendors have excelled in addressing their primary drivers, which are cost reduction and process optimization.
Consequently, technology vendors should focus on continuously evolving their RPA solutions with a host of capabilities to help enterprise buyers achieve their strategic business outcomes.
As to be expected, the buyers in our research study found their RPA vendors excelled in certain areas and had work to do in others.
The key strengths for those vendors who were identified as the Leaders as per our PEAK Matrix™ assessment on RPA included:
Key improvement areas for Leaders included:
As there are so many RPA tools available in the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, it can be daunting for enterprises to select the right vendor for their unique needs. One critical part of the decision-making process is to focus on the X factors that are most important to their strategic agendas.
Our study found that factors including “ease of use and robot maintenance” and “scalability” highly correlate to buyers’ overall satisfaction levels. This is not surprising, as these are factors that buyers typically face issues with during RPA adoption. “Product vision and strategy” – and in some cases vendor expertise in a specific vertical industry or function – are also important buyer X factors.
While it’s clear that RPA vendors can do more to satisfy the needs of their customers – and that they’ll need to continually evolve their solutions – they have indeed been relatively MARVELous in delivering value and overall satisfaction to their buyers.
To learn more, please read our report “Buyer Satisfaction with RPA – How Far or Close is Reality From Hype.”
With enterprise cloud becoming mainstream, the business case and drivers for adoption have also evolved. The initial phase of adoption focused on operational cost reduction and simplicity – what we call the “Cloud for Efficiency” paradigm. We have now entered Wave 2 of enterprise cloud adoption, where the cloud’s potential to play a critical role in influencing and driving business outcomes is being realized. We call this the “Cloud for Digital” paradigm. Indeed, cloud is now truly the bedrock for digital businesses, as we wrote about earlier.
This is good and powerful news for enterprises. However, to successfully leverage cloud as a business value enabler, the services stack needs to be designed to take advantage of all the inherent benefits “native” to the cloud model – scalability, agility, resilience, and extendibility.
Cloud native is not just selective use of cloud infrastructure and platform-based models to reduce costs. Neither is it just about building and deploying applications at pace. And it is definitely not just about adopting new age themes such as PaaS or microservices or serverless. Cloud native includes all of these, and more.
We see cloud native as a philosophy to establish a tightly integrated, scalable, agile, and resilient IT services stack that can:
Achieving a true cloud native design requires the underlying philosophy to be embedded within the design of both the application and infrastructure stacks. This is key for business value creation, as lack of autonomy and agility within either layer hinders the necessary straight-through processing across the integrated stack.
In this regard, there are salient features that define an ideal cloud native IT stack:
Cloud native applications – key tenets
Cloud native infrastructure – key tenets
While cloud native has, understandably, garnered significant enterprise interest, the transition to a cloud native model is far from simple. It requires designing and managing complex architectures, and making meaningful upfront investments in people, processes, and technologies/service delivery themes.
Everest Group’s SMART enterprise framework encapsulates the comprehensive and complex set of requirements to enable a cloud native environment in its true sense.
Cloud native environments are inherently complex to design and take time to scale. Consequently, the concept is not (currently) meant for all organizations, functions, or applications. Enterprises need to carefully gauge their readiness through a thorough examination of multiple organizational and technical considerations.
Our latest report titled Cloud Enablement Services – Market Trends and Services PEAK Matrix™ Assessment 2019: An Enterprise Primer for Adopting (or Intelligently Ignoring!) Cloud Native delves further into the cloud native concept. The report also provides the assessment and detailed profiles of the 24 IT service providers featured on Everest Group’s Cloud Enablement Services PEAK MatrixTM.
Feel free to reach out us to explore the cloud native concept further. We will be happy to hear your story, questions, concerns, and successes!
In a report identifying the top 18 top robotic process automation (RPA) vendors, Everest Group has named Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, NICE, Thoughtonomy, and UiPath as the five market leaders.
The a Dallas-based consulting and research group’s highly respected “Product PEAK Matrix Assessment” for the industry noted that the standouts outperformed their peers in several key areas.
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