RPA Archives - Page 9 Of 17

A New RPA Unicorn is Born | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

March 7, 2018

UiPath recently made history by becoming the first Romanian RPA unicorn, thanks to $153 million Series B funding provided by a group of investment firms led by Accel and including CapitalG and Kleiner Perkins. This is the largest round of funding to date in the RPA market, leading to a valuation of over $1bn for UiPath – a unicorn. It is good news for all vendors and buyers as well.

What it means for the RPA market

Other examples of increased investment in the RPA industry include Blue Prism raising £70m ($100m) in funding through new share issuance in January 2018 and WorkFusion raising $35m in Series D financing in January 17.

The fact that investors are willing to put in these huge sums of money is great news for the industry for both buyers and vendors.

What it means for enterprises and RPA

This is an endorsement of not only UiPath but RPA as whole by the cream of Silicon Valley investment firms
These and other RPA investors will have completed many rounds of due diligence with the vendors, and in the process put a big lens on each software product
That RPA is here to stay – that the investors will be doing their best to make sure that the vendors and the platforms perform, to protect their investments
That there will be significant investment in enhancing the products to keep ahead in this very competitive market

What it means for other RPA vendors

For other RPA vendors, this may seem like a huge competitive threat but it also means that:

Other investment firms will be looking for similar deals. Consequently, we will see rising interest in other vendors and there are an increasing number. We have conducted in-depth assessments of 18 RPA vendors in the past six months and will be publishing our results very soon:
- We will unveil the Everest Group RPA PEAK Matrix^TM at our London Symposium on March 22
- Our full report will be published soon after
With both Blue Prism and UiPath now valued over $1bn, any RPA vendor thinking of issuing public shares will have a very strong backdrop for the IPO
It is great for the partners of RPA vendors, particularly technology partners that are likely see more resources thrown at their integrations with the RPA platforms

What could happen next in RPA

Organic or inorganic growth: We now have several RPA companies that are flush with cash; most were already able to operate in a cash-positive manner, so these funds provide for accelerated investments. Some have had the money for longer than others and have invested in organic growth, e.g., opening new offices and hiring more staff. This is a path that UiPath, Blue Prism and WorkFusion have taken already. Expect more announcements from some of them on this front. For UiPath, given that CapitalG is an investor, we expect to see much more integration with Google AI/ML technology.

Then there is the inorganic growth option – to acquire complementary capabilities. This could be cognitive or other technologies to enhance the core RPA capabilities or growing their professional services to accelerate adoption/training. We believe this is highly likely.

4 Top Tips for Implementing SDA in Contact Centers | Market Insights™

March 2, 2018

Top tips for both enterprises and service providers

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Quick Wins for SDA Adoption in Contact Centers | Market Insights™

March 2, 2018

Service Delivery Automation (SDA) adoption can see positive results as quickly as 9-15 months for RDA and RPA and 18-24 months for chatbots

Visit the report page

RPA & AI: Different Approaches to Problem Solving | Market Insights™

January 29, 2018

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Opportunity Varies by Industry and Function

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are often grouped together, but they involve different approaches to solving business problems

Service Optimization Technologies

Is Your GIC the Secret Weapon for Digital Enablement? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

January 26, 2018

You might recall, back in December we identified digital agility as a key 2018 initiative. In that blog, we discussed how you can create business value by making things easy, reliable, and fast for your customers. The question I would ask GIC organizations for 2018: In realizing that goal, are you part of the problem? Or are you part of the solution?

Our research, Digital Maturity in GICs | Pinnacle Model™ Assessment 2018, seeks to answer those questions.

Most GICs started small and expanded over time as they proved their value. Now that most GICs have realized the fundamental benefits of labor savings, quality and process improvement, and – in some cases – business outcome improvement, it’s time for them to look to their next act.

Our central thesis is that a GIC can be a critical driver in building and running new digital competencies. But we want to hear from you about the functions and processes that are getting the most attention and investment. Which digital technologies are you focusing their efforts on? And what capabilities did you deploy to build out these capabilities?

There are plenty of digital surveys that you can participate in, so – why Everest Group’s? Because we take a different approach that results in more meaningful, useful outputs. Our Pinnacle Model™ approach asks questions about what the very best GICs are doing in terms of real impact and then correlate the capabilities required to achieve those results. And we go beyond the online survey, talking with some respondents to understand their journeys – what worked and what didn’t.

With that information in hand, we identify a set of Pinnacle Practices™ that you can consider deploying in your GIC.

Yes, there is a ton of hype around digital; let’s get beyond the headlines and talk outcomes and practices in your GIC.

Take the survey

Driving RPA from GICs? Learn from the Best-in-class | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

January 22, 2018

The shift towards a “digital-first model,” in the wake of technology-led disruption, has given GICs an opportunity to become strategic entities that can drive innovation across the enterprise, instead of an arbitrage-first-oriented low-cost set-up delivering back- / middle- office services at scale. A very positive move for GICs and the enterprises they support.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA), among other digital technologies, is gaining popularity across enterprises and GICs thanks to its many business benefits. And enterprises are increasingly leveraging their GICs to drive RPA usage. This is largely driven by factors such as GICs’ tighter integration with the core business, increased endorsement from the enterprise, shift toward insourcing, higher visibility to enterprise leadership, lower costs, and availability of talent.

So what factors enable best-in-class GICs to drive RPA programs successfully? We’ve identified eight:

Successful GICs, through dedicated RPA CoEs, have gone beyond exploring RPA technology for in-house consumption. From educating various stakeholders across the enterprise on capabilities and benefits of the technology, to executing RPA solutions across functions and locations, these CoEs are playing a key role in transforming processes across the enterprise. CoEs in best-in-class GICs have gone a notch higher, and are focusing on creating an ecosystem that enables businesses to independently explore RPA opportunities.

While GICs are well positioned to drive RPA across the enterprise, successful implementation requires dedicated focus on factors including governance and business continuity. They must also be on the lookout for advanced technologies, such as AI and cognitive, that can augment existing RPA technology and enhance overall automation business benefits.

To learn more about the best practices employed by best-in-class GIC adopters of RPA, please read our recently published report, “RPA Implementation in GICs – Learnings and Best Practices.” We developed it based on interactions with 100+ global enterprises’ GICs and a range of automation technology vendors.

If you are driving RPA from your GIC, I’d love to hear your story. Feel free to share your opinions and stories on how your GIC is evolving in its RPA journey directly with me at [email protected].

And/or, join in on our research on how enterprises design their GIC journeys to drive their enterprises’ digital agendas. Click here to take the survey; responses will, of course, remain anonymous.

Digital IT contracts now come with tough liability clauses | In the News

January 19, 2018

The newer IT contracts involving higher levels of automation and New-Age digital components like cloud, analytics, and artificial intelligence, often get service providers better prices, but they also come with more stringent liability clauses.

This is because the work either impacts the front-end operations of clients, and hence the overall business — or they are aligned to delivering specific outcomes. Traditional IT contracts were based on the time-&-material model, under which clients simply paid for the number of hours spent on delivering a project.

Rahul Barwe, a senior analyst with IT research firm Everest Group, says a global consumer goods company’s outsourced robotic process automation (RPA) solution malfunctioned. “It took six months for the base product to be updated and fixed. The company could not recoup the lost opportunity costs from the service provider because such a scenario was not adequately incorporated into the contract terms and conditions,” he says.

Robotic Process Automation to create 2 lakh jobs by 2021: Dines | In the News

January 19, 2018

India is in prime position to become a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) powerhouse because of its growing talent pool and cost advantage and an estimated 2 lakh jobs can be created by it in the country by 2021. Daniel Dines, CEO and Co-Founder of UiPath, the leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company said RPA had been gaining traction as a way of automating repetitive, tedious tasks to handle higher-value analysis and decision-making.

Sarah Burnett, Vice President, Global Research Company Everest Group, said that automation was the way to go. ”It will create incredible opportunities in the IT sector. In a recent study by Everest Group, 80 per cent of companies that we surveyed rated RPA to meet expectations and even exceed them. RPA addresses many areas including regulatory compliance, process automation and more. Also it is secure and most importantly, it is scalable.”

IT Modernization Investments to Dominate 2018 | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

January 8, 2018

What are the major areas where companies will focus their spend on technology or third-party services this year? What challenges will impact those investments? In reviewing the trends in 2017, I believe we’ll see more of the same this year and an increase in digital adoption. However, I believe we’re at the beginning stages of a megatrend for the next five years, and I’m calling the start of this phenomenon: I believe 2018 will be the year of IT modernization.

Over the next five years, large enterprises will drive relentlessly to modernize their IT environment. This activity will range from moving workloads out of legacy environments into the cloud, adopting agile and DevOps and investing much more deeply and thoroughly in world-class security.

I differentiate modernization from digital transformation. I see a different set of initiatives occurring often in the same companies, which I characterize as digital transformation. These initiatives often use some of the same technologies; however, they arise from the business and are focused on achieving competitive advantage. The funding, project management, and impact on change management are different in kind and scope. The rise of IT modernization will not slow the need and velocity of digital transformation, which I believe will continue to grow as well.

With respect to digital transformation, we can expect the 2017 trend of digital pilots moving to much bigger programs to continue. However, change management and business model redesign will be a major constraining factor for successful digital transformation, and I believe we’ll see companies start focusing more on managing digital change.

As IT organizations prepare for modernization, they increasingly focus on three main journeys:

The journey to cloud resulting in establishing cloud as the infrastructure of choice
The journey from waterfall to agile
The journey to implement adequate security.

IT modernization will sweep across an organization’s entire IT portfolio, rethinking and restructuring infrastructure, networks, applications, and the process and policies that govern them. I expect IT modernization to drive a profound rethink of the enterprise IT structure as it will both collapse the IT stack and cause organizations to align services by end-to-end functions rather than horizontal functions. In contrast, digital transformation goes end to end and integrates the portfolio. In digital transformation, a company considers pulling workloads and activity out of the enterprise IT function or segmenting it into a different organization that is run end to end.

The results of this modernization will lead to a dramatic decrease in IT costs, while significantly increasing the speed and agility of IT’s ability to react in a timely fashion to business demand. This sudden increase in efficiency will have a dramatic effect on the service provider community, shrinking their existing revenue streams while demanding new skills and capabilities.

The new business models that emerge from this transformation are unlikely, at least at first, to be as profitable as the existing business models based on labor arbitrage. The combination of reduced revenues and lowered margins will place the incumbent service providers in a dilemma with very substantial conflicts of interest. The necessity to protect revenues and keep margins high is likely to make the incumbent service providers poor partners in the emerging digital marketplace.

One potential bright spot for the imcumbents, at least in the short run: although the overall legacy services segment will shrink, I believe IT modernization will result in a set of workloads with new workloads for service providers. For legacy workloads that have not been outsourced and are not ready to be modernized, companies will need to put them into a stable environment. I believe some of those workloads will move to the services market so companies can focus on modernization rather than legacy. This new work for service providers will partially offset some of the runoff that is happening because of IT modernization.

As I look forward to spending trends and challenges for this year, I think Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is hot and will continue to grow in adoption. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is starting to build momentum, and I think it will be red hot in 2018. I see AI being more disruptive than RPA and, therefore, causing greater change management and business model changes than RPA. RPA adoption already was constrained by change management issues in 2017, and I believe AI will be even more constrained by these issues because of its deeply disruptive nature.

We will also see blockchain technology grow in adoption. Although blockchain is truly a disruptive technology, its disruption will focus on specific areas where a distributed ledger can be applied (in comparison to AI, which has a broader set of uses than blockchain). 2018 will see a greater number of blockchain pilots, and some pilots will become programs. However, like AI, RPA and other new technologies, disruptive business model changes will be a major constraint to adoption.

RPA & AI Germany Forum — April 13 | Event

January 4, 2018

Research VP Sarah Burnett will be a keynote speaker at the 2018 RPA & AI Germany Forum in Berlin held on April 13. Sarah will lead a session titled RPA and AI: The Power of Two.

Summary: RPA and AI are very different types of technologies but when combined, they can help organizations get significantly more value out of automation. In this session, Sarah Burnett, lead automation analyst at Everest Group, will talk about:

The differences between the two types of technologies
The suitability of the two for automating different types of processes
Automation technology adoption trends – how enterprises are using RPA and AI for process automation
How to get started on each and combine the two for end-to-end automation

The session will help organizations look beyond tactical deployments to develop automation capabilities that deliver business outcomes.

When

April 13, 2018

Where

VKU-Forum, Invalidenstraße 91, 10115
Berlin

Speaker

Sarah Burnett, Research VP, Everest Group

Tag: RPA