Unlike other industry reports that are based on analyst opinion, the ETR Observatory follows a proprietary data methodology to assess IT decision-maker (ITDM) usage of a vendor’s product and services within a specific subsector. Read a brief excerpt from the report below, and then click through to access our latest Observatory for Process Automation for free!
Automation, especially in times of budget belt-tightening, is a goal of many organizations, and enterprise-scale implementation of automation workflows signals a maturity phase in larger digital transformation journeys. The business world latched onto the term "robotic process automation," or RPA, in the early 2000s to describe a collection of automation tasks that had been developing decades prior. These early tasks included screen-scraping data from websites and workflow automation rules that routed alerts and assignments to different people in an organization based on data captured and entered into forms and databases. Today, the market for RPA tools – and the vocabulary around the concept – has enlarged to include business process software, intelligent automation, and other functions. The bailiwick of RPA, which focuses primarily on automating repetitive, tedious tasks involving human labor, such as data entry, has now combined a host of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Optical character recognition (OCR) and other forms of computer vision, ML model training, natural language processing (NLP), generative AI, and many other new techniques have enriched the domain of process automation. Indeed, the line between AI/ML and the process automation industry has thoroughly blurred, bringing opportunities and new threats to some long-standing RPA vendors.
The process automation market, as it is collectively referred to here, features many vendors offering low-code and no-code, drag-and-drop user interfaces, helping business users build automation workflows. The vendors provide similar core capabilities of building steps in a process to automate tasks or business rules in highly customizable ways. Each vendor also boasts of some aspect of AI enriching or streamlining the process. The more robust platforms in the market offer more sophisticated governance and security controls, monitoring and dashboarding capabilities to track workflow performance, and sometimes ready-made bots or workflow templates to help jumpstart the tool's deployment. Leading and Tracking vendors like Microsoft, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and IBM are examples of these platforms. Beyond this set of core capabilities, most vendors in this space differ in their marketing approaches, focus on different industry-relevant use cases, or an emphasis on some aspect of the automation workflow.
I. Complete Process Automation Platforms for Enterprise Scale
Microsoft's Power Automate, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere comprise the Leading group in this Observatory, and IBM is the sole name in the Tracking group (see Figure 2). Each of these vendors are long-established names in automation, with Microsoft's entry into the space in 2016 (branded then as Microsoft Flow) the most recent arrival of these four. Microsoft has the highest Momentum in the process automation market, enjoying high spending and utilization from typically Microsoft-focused organizations deploying other products in the Microsoft Power Platform suite, such as Power BI. The process automation offerings from these established platform vendors are robust, with accessible user interfaces friendly to less tech-savvy business users who can build automation workflows themselves with drag-and-drop buttons, intuitive commands, and minimal coding. These platforms also come with management and governance capabilities, such as control over who can create, share, and implement workflows and other fine-tuning around the orchestration of automation scripts. Ease of use in this tool set is critical and essential for success.
In the OCT23 TSIS, Microsoft Power Automate holds the highest Net Score of these five vendors at 59%, a score that is high in absolute terms and relative to peers. UiPath has the second highest Net Score at 30%, followed by Automation Anywhere (23%), Pegasystems (20%), and IBM (6%). In Pervasion, on the other hand, IBM leads with 66%, highly penetrated in many organizations’ tech stacks. Microsoft Power Automate is close behind in Pervasion at 61%, followed further behind by UiPath (30%), Automation Anywhere (22%), and Pegasystems (11%).
One VP of Information Technology and Services for a large agricultural enterprise described his experience with Microsoft Power Automate, noting it "worked well. It took a few iterations to get it right for the business, but it seemed simple enough." This ITDM also praised what "seemed relatively intuitive" and the "low code / no code capability" of Power Automate and previous tools his organization had explored. He said he is turning to UiPath for a new proof of concept, however, saying he sees "UiPath as more robust, mature, and capable than the Microsoft platform right now." Another ITDM, the CTO of a small pharma-tech enterprise, pointed out that Power Automate has come a long way in a few short years. "In 2018 or 2019, it was something out that was complicated but not really fully baked. We have definitely increased our usage of it in the past two calendar years."
The above is only a very brief excerpt of the full report, which focuses on Process Automation tools and includes the following vendors:
Appian | Automation Anywhere | Blue Prism | Camunda | Celonis | Cutover | IBM | Infosys | Kofax | Microsoft (Power Automate) | N8n | Nice | Pegasystems | Pipefy | Tines | Tonkean | UiPath | WorkFusion | Zinier
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Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) is a technology market research firm that leverages proprietary data from our targeted IT decision maker (ITDM) community to provide actionable insights about spending intentions and industry trends. Since 2010, we have worked diligently at achieving one goal: eliminating the need for opinions in enterprise research, which are often formed from incomplete, biased, and statistically insignificant data. Our community of ITDMs represents $1+ trillion in annual IT spend and is positioned to provide best-in-class customer/evaluator perspectives. ETR’s proprietary data and insights from this community empower institutional investors, technology companies, and ITDMs to navigate the complex enterprise technology landscape amid an expanding marketplace. Discover what ETR can do for you at www.etr.ai