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MAGIC QUADRANT FOR ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION
Updated 29 September 2021, Published 26 July 2021 - ID G00733929 - 57 min read
Updated This Magic Quadrant now includes links to relevant Corporate Transaction
Notification research.
By Saikat Ray, Arthur Villa, and 4 more
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EXPLORE THE INTERACTIVE VERSION
Robotic process automation remains the fastest-growing software market, as RPA
is one of the most popular choices for improving operational efficiency with
tactical automation. This Magic Quadrant evaluates the leading enterprise
vendors to help you make the best choice for your needs.
THIS MAGIC QUADRANT IS RELATED TO OTHER RESEARCH:
Critical Capabilities for Robotic Process Automation
View All Magic Quadrants and Critical Capabilities
STRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTION(S)
By 2023, almost all major RPA vendors will offer a broader process automation
and integration platform combining screen scraping with APIs.
By 2023, the attended form of RPA will evolve into voice, mobile app and/or
other user-experience-driven automation.
MARKET DEFINITION/DESCRIPTION
> Gartner defines the robotic process automation (RPA) market as the market for
> licensed software platforms used for building scripts to integrate any
> application via a user interface and a control dashboard or orchestrator. RPA
> platforms automate repetitive, rule-based, predictable tasks.
RPA software platforms typically use a combination of user interface (UI)
interactions and application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate
different enterprise applications, such as ERP applications, client/server
systems, mainframes and other applications.
RPA automates repetitive human tasks by emulating the transaction steps
traditionally taken by humans, mainly via orchestrated UI interactions. It maps
a human process or task in RPA software language, for a software script —
commonly known as a “robot” or “bot” — to follow, with runtime allocated to
execute the script by a control dashboard or orchestrator. Bots can be developed
by programming or by using intuitive low-code/no-code GUIs native to the RPA
software platform.
At minimum, RPA software tools must:
* Enable citizen developers to build automation scripts
* Integrate with enterprise applications, primarily via UI scraping
* Have orchestration and administration capabilities, including configuration,
monitoring and security
Some RPA platforms also offer advanced capabilities such as:
* Intelligent document processing
* Auto machine learning (Auto ML) and natural language processing (NLP)
libraries with drag-and-drop models
* Process mining and discovery
Certain RPA platforms also have emerging features and capabilities, such as:
* API connectors that can be orchestrated along with UI scrapers
* A low-code user experience (UX) for building UI front ends for bots
* Headless or serverless orchestration of automation workflows (also described
as “headless bots”)
The RPA market is growing rapidly, as incumbent vendors jockey for position and
evolve their offerings. Through 2024, we expect this market to mature and
consolidate. At present, it is still highly fragmented, as vendors in adjacent
markets are beginning to offer RPA capabilities. Gartner finds that the 10
largest RPA vendors account for more than 80% of the market (up from 70% in
2020), and that the three largest vendors account for 52%.
This is the third edition of the Magic Quadrant for RPA. Each year, vendors
raise the bar in terms of their viability, relevance, growth, revenue,
innovation and vision for RPA software offerings. To reflect this dynamic
market, we adjust our inclusion and evaluation criteria annually. This can
result in shifts in the positioning of many vendors (and the exclusion of some
that appeared in previous editions). This Magic Quadrant focuses on providers of
RPA software products, not service providers that use RPA capabilities licensed
from another vendor.
MAGIC QUADRANT
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation
Source: Gartner (July 2021)
VENDOR STRENGTHS AND CAUTIONS
APPIAN
Appian is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, Appian RPA, stems
from the acquisition of the Jidoka RPA platform from Novayre Solutions in
January 2020. Appian offers an integrated RPA solution that focuses on
augmenting and interacting with sophisticated processes, such as those involved
in end-to-end case management. It also offers low-code application building,
rich multiexperience capabilities, and business process and decision automation.
Appian RPA runs as a cloud service.
Appian has a global presence. Its customers tend to be large enterprises.
Appian’s product roadmap includes process mining, task mining, recording,
discovery capabilities and multicloud support.
Strengths
* Product portfolio: Appian’s platform focuses on business process automation
and other high-value applications that require sophisticated rules and
analytics. Its differentiating RPA features include full-stack automation
capabilities such as automation planning, prebuilt integration with various
artificial intelligence (AI)/ML services (for example, image recognition and
AutoML), workflow orchestration, and end-to-end life cycle support for
DevOps.
* Viability: Appian has a large ecosystem of customers and partners, along with
a feature-rich product designed to meet large enterprises’ automation
requirements. Its RPA tool is tightly integrated with its low-code
application platform (LCAP)/intelligent business process management suite
(iBPMS) platform to deliver end-to-end automation.
* Pricing and sales execution: Appian bundles unlimited RPA licenses for all
new customers of its LCAP, thus reducing cost-related barriers to entry. For
existing clients, Appian offers its RPA platform as a fixed-price add-on with
unlimited usage.
Cautions
* Stand-alone RPA: Appian primarily offers RPA functionality to augment its
LCAP/iBPMS platform. Customers with simple, tactical RPA use cases may not
see value in Appian’s more strategic, end-to-end automation solution. Its
overall automation pricing, considering potential customer investment in its
LCAP/iBPMS platform, is likely too high to justify use solely for RPA.
* Cloud-only RPA: Appian RPA offers cloud-only orchestration and is not
available as an on-premises service. Customers preferring on-premises
deployment must look for other solutions.
* Business model: Appian has a relatively high proportion of professional
services revenue associated with its software business, which implies that
its solution is aimed at large-scale transformations within global
enterprises.
AUTOMATION ANYWHERE
Automation Anywhere is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, Automation
360, is an RPA platform that includes RPA as a service, the Automation Anywhere
Robotic Interface (AARI), AI/ML (IQ Bot), process discovery (Discovery Bot),
analytics (Bot Insight) and marketplace integration (Bot Store).
Automation Anywhere has geographically distributed operations. It has a balanced
mix of large-enterprise and small and midsize business (SMB) customers.
In 2021, it plans to further develop AARI to expand the use of RPA with
front-end user apps that invoke unattended automations.
Strengths
* Innovation: At the core of Automation Anywhere’s innovation are components
such as AARI and AISense computer vision. AISense is built on Google’s
TensorFlow, which augments Automation Anywhere’s screen capture accuracy.
AARI is Automation Anywhere’s low-code platform for creating mobile, and web
apps that can control and invoke its bots. The RPA product also offers a
multipersona UX, guided navigation, reusable AI/ML libraries, strong native
security and an intuitive analytics dashboard.
* Cloud focus: Automation 360 is one of the leading cloud-native RPA platforms
that offers RPA development, governance and deployment across public cloud
platforms such as those of Google (the Google Cloud Platform [GCP]) and
Amazon Web Services (AWS). Automation 360 components are built using
microservice design patterns. The services are packaged in containers and
hosted and orchestrated by Kubernetes in a public cloud.
* Pricing: Automation Anywhere offers simple, fixed pricing for bundled
solutions that include unattended bots, attended bots, capped document
processing and analytics. Its solutions are well-suited to new customers
looking to scale RPA capabilities. Automation Anywhere’s Partner Pack, an
entry-level solution, continues to provide high value, relative to its low
cost, for SMB customers.
Cautions
* Product upgrade: Feedback from Gartner clients, received through Gartner’s
inquiry service, Peer Insights platform and/or other interactions during the
past year, indicates that upgrading from Automation Anywhere’s legacy
platform (v11) to its new platform, Automation 360, can be challenging for
some customers. Automation Anywhere says that it has included tools to inform
customers about what to expect. Customers using v11 (or earlier versions)
should work with the vendor to prepare for the upgrade to Automation 360
before support for v11 ends in September 2022, especially if they are using a
library of complex automations.
* Document processing: Although Automation Anywhere’s IQ Bot has powerful AI/ML
capabilities that offer intelligent document processing, customers have
indicated that accurately extracting data from images remains a challenge.
* Sales operations in Europe: During inquiry calls, some Gartner clients in the
past year have pointed to challenges associated with Automation Anywhere’s
closure of some regional offices as it downsized its field sales team in
Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic. These closures have been especially
detrimental to its partners in those regions, which depend on direct
interactions with regional sales offices. Automation Anywhere says that its
Europe operations are supported by its support centers in Poland and
Bangalore, India.
BLUE PRISM
Blue Prism is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, the Intelligent
Automation Platform, includes the following major components: Blue Prism Cloud,
Automation Lifecycle Management (ALM), Capture, Interact, Decipher IDP and
Digital Exchange (DX). It also includes governance tools and security
capabilities.
Blue Prism has geographically distributed operations. Its customers tend to be
large enterprises.
Blue Prism’s product roadmap includes improved architecture and integration for
capture, dashboards that highlight the number of hours saved, and a categorical
decisioning engine that teaches digital workers to make intelligent decisions
using active learning.
Strengths
* Partner and customer ecosystem: Blue Prism has more than 168,000 active RPA
users (including over 2,000 enterprise customers with RPA bots in production
environments) and a community of more than 50,000 DX users across 5,000
companies. It also has more than 10,000 certified partners across all
regions, which contribute to a well-developed implementation, technology and
consulting ecosystem.
* Industry strategy: Blue Prism has a strong vertical-market strategy, with
industry-focused experts, campaigns, partners and accelerator tools. It
offers 42 industry-specific solutions and has a large customer base spanning
most industries.
* Product portfolio: Blue Prism’s RPA offering includes enterprise features,
such as a wide variety of connectors to enterprise applications and centrally
managed automation with strong security. Blue Prism listened to customer
feedback requesting enhancements to its offering, which now includes
intelligent document processing (Decipher IDP), human-in-the-loop automation
(Interact), contact center automation (Service Assist), task mining and
discovery (Process Assessment Tool, Capture), governance (ALM) and ERP
accelerators. Blue Prism has also introduced a consumption-based pricing
model for cloud customers to allow for bursting and scalability.
Cautions
* Market understanding: Blue Prism has been slower than some of its competitors
to expand its capabilities into complementary areas, such as low-code app
development and API integration. Blue Prism needs to accelerate its
investment in hyperautomation capabilities, as the RPA market is evolving to
include more of these as standard.
* Responsiveness: Feedback from some Gartner clients, received through
Gartner’s inquiry service, indicates that Blue Prism has, on occasion,
responded late to their initial inquiries.
* Pricing: Over the past year, Gartner customers have indicated that Blue
Prism’s subscription costs seemed higher than those of its competitors. Some
prospective Blue Prism customers have reported that they were offered only
the more expensive Blue Prism Cloud SaaS platform, with its minimum
requirement for five digital workers, instead of the on-premises offering.
However, Blue Prism claims that the total cost of ownership of its product
for long-term, high-volume RPA operations is lower than many of its
competitors when solutions include all incremental components, such as
optical character recognition (OCR), AI/ML, intelligent document processing
(IDP) and process discovery.
CYCLONE ROBOTICS
Cyclone Robotics is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant and a new entrant for
2021. Its RPA product, Cyclone Robotic Process Automation, includes major
features such as Cyclone Intelligent Robotic Interface (CIRI), Cyclone Mobile
Assistant, Cyclone Chatbot, Cyclone Automation Centre, Cyclone Automation
Marketplace, Cyclone Data Insights, Cyclone Swift and Cyclone AI Skill Platform.
These can be run as software or as a service.
Cyclone Robotics’ operations are mainly in Asia/Pacific. It has customers of all
sizes across all industries.
Cyclone Robotics’ roadmap includes enhanced cloud capabilities, process mining
and a business rule engine, and the company continues to invest in AI research.
Strengths
* Innovation: Cyclone Robotics has invested heavily in AI to deliver services
like CIRI and the Cyclone AI Skill Platform, while also providing a strong
foundation for Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing capabilities and
supporting standards-based Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)
orchestration. CIRI is an AI-enabled and attended RPA feature, available on
desktops and mobile devices, that can automate routine workflows.
* Product strategy: Cyclone Robotics is focused on offering end-to-end
automation by expanding beyond standard RPA use cases. It delivers AI/ML
features, low-code UI creation, and support for IoT and edge automation use
cases.
* Strong regional presence: With more than 80% of its client base in
Asia/Pacific, Cyclone Robotics has a significant market share in this region.
It provides deep, localized industry expertise for its Asia/Pacific-based
customers.
Cautions
* Geographic strategy: Cyclone Robotics does not have a strong geographic
presence outside Asia/Pacific, though it plans to expand into North America
and EMEA by the end of 2021. Customers outside Asia/Pacific must determine
whether Cyclone Robotics can provide adequate product support and guidance in
their region via its solution partners.
* Marketing execution: Cyclone Robotics is positioning itself as the largest
automation vendor in China, but its market visibility outside Asia/Pacific
remains low, compared with its competitors. This is to be expected, however,
given that it entered the global market only recently.
* Product maturity: Despite Cyclone Robotics’ strong innovation focus, its
product still lacks some features, including web-based RPA development, data
adapters for large-scale data/ERP platforms, integrated process mining,
autodiscovery and an RPA runtime in the cloud. Nor does it support the
greenscreen emulators common in IBM mainframe and AS/400 platforms. Cyclone
does, however, plan to release a web-based development platform in 2021.
EDGEVERVE SYSTEMS
EdgeVerve Systems is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product,
AssistEdge, comprises a unified automation platform with process automation,
process discovery and native AI features. In addition to AssistEdge RPA,
EdgeVerve’s automation portfolio includes AssistEdge Discover, AssistEdge
Engage, AssistEdge Cloud RPA and the AssistEdge Community Edition.
EdgeVerve’s operations are geographically distributed. Its customers tend to be
large enterprises.
EdgeVerve’s roadmap features expansion of its end-to-end process automation and
orchestration with a low-code development platform and workflow, self-healing
bots, predictive analytics, next-best-action recommendations, and anomaly
detection algorithms.
Strengths
* Large-enterprise focus: EdgeVerve’s engagement model draws on the existing
system integration and outsourcing relationships of its parent company,
Infosys, to meet the needs of large enterprises. EdgeVerve engages its
customers via outreach programs that promise a product portfolio to deliver
the functionality they desire. Its focus on governance, security, reliability
and scalability also demonstrates a thorough comprehension of enterprise
requirements.
* Pricing: EdgeVerve offers flexible pricing models, including pay per use,
automation as a service and gain-sharing/outcome-driven models. These benefit
customers looking to scale their automation programs with their choice of the
best possible pricing model.
* Professional services: EdgeVerve has many active client engagements in more
than 150 countries. These engagements have enabled it to build
industry-specific automation accelerators that improve its professional
services and support for its RPA software. This is a key differentiator from
many of EdgeVerve’s competitors.
Cautions
* Sales strategy: Compared with competing RPA products, EdgeVerve’s offering
has little visibility outside its core Infosys engagements. Although
EdgeVerve offers end-to-end services, customers who do not already engage
with Infosys may be unaware of EdgeVerve’s RPA platform.
* Business model: EdgeVerve’s customer engagement model incentivizes customers
to adopt its professional services. Feedback from Gartner clients, received
through Gartner’s inquiry service, Peer Insights platform and/or other
interactions during the past year, indicates that a few customers who did not
use EdgeVerve’s professional services and support faced some challenges with
configuration and deployment.
* Product experience: EdgeVerve lacks a full-scale web development tool.
Additionally, some Gartner customers who may be using older versions of
AssistEdge have indicated that EdgeVerve’s reporting and monitoring
capabilities did not meet their requirements. EdgeVerve has, however,
confirmed that these capabilities have been improved in the latest version.
Customers who have similar reporting and monitoring issues are advised to
check for the upgrade to the latest version of EdgeVerve’s RPA product.
IBM
IBM is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant and a new entrant for 2021. Its
product, IBM Robotic Process Automation (which stems from the acquisition of WDG
Automation in June 2020), provides full-featured RPA capabilities that can be
delivered in a multitenant SaaS (RPA as a service) or on-premises offering.
IBM’s RPA product can be purchased as a stand-alone offering or within all four
of IBM’s Cloud Paks for Automation, along with process-mining, task-mining and
automation services for both business and IT.
IBM’s operations are geographically distributed. Its customers tend to be large
enterprises.
IBM’s RPA roadmap includes expanded AI capabilities (driven by IBM Watson), task
and process mining (following the acquisition of myInvenio), extended
intelligent chatbot capability (with Watson NLP), increased application
connectivity (via tools like IBM App Connect and those of Zapier and IFTTT), and
container-based deployment for improved delivery.
Strengths
* Viability: IBM, which has a large ecosystem of partners and customers and a
long history in the business and IT automation market, enters the RPA market
as a viable vendor. The IBM Marketplace and IBM Cloud marketplace house a
catalog of more than 650 products and services, including stand-alone SaaS
and on-premises RPA offerings and IBM Cloud Paks for Automation that include
RPA capabilities.
* Business model: IBM has been acquiring automation technologies, including
RPA, to complement its existing automation portfolio and build an end-to-end
platform. IBM is focused on heavy investment in AI and complex orchestration
of end-to-end IT and business automation. In the long term, this focus
promises to deliver a strategic automation platform featuring RPA among its
capabilities for end customers. IBM charges for its RPA offering based on
usage rather than bot installations, enabling customers to scale attended and
unattended bot deployments without incurring unnecessary software
subscription costs.
* Built-in intelligent chatbot: IBM’s RPA product provides the ability to
create NLP-driven bot assistants that can be used to interact with an end
user and trigger bot scripts to complete work. This enables customers to
create self-service automations to ease the workload associated with
repetitive tasks.
Cautions
* Marketing strategy: Although automation is a major theme for IBM, its RPA
messaging tends to get lost within that surrounding the broader portfolio.
Many customers for whom IBM’s RPA product might be suitable may not shortlist
IBM simply because they are unaware of its RPA capabilities.
* RPA features: IBM’s RPA as a service (SaaS) provides an RPA server in the
cloud, but attended and unattended bots run within local client environments.
Therefore, disaster recovery and/or application redundancy for these bots are
managed by the customer. The product does not offer the native process
discovery capability or autogeneration of process design documents (PDDs)
found in other vendors’ RPA products.
* Offering strategy: IBM includes RPA capabilities in its Cloud Paks for
Automation, but it is hard to determine how many Cloud Pak customers are
actively using these capabilities. As a result, it is difficult to assess
whether IBM is focused on competing in the RPA market or, rather, the wider
business and IT automation markets.
KRYON
Kryon is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, the Full-Cycle
Automation Suite, includes Kryon Studio, Kryon Console, and process discovery
and analytics capabilities. It is available as a service.
Kryon, which has operations and R&D facilities in EMEA, has a global customer
base that now extends to North America and Asia/Pacific. Its customers are
mostly midsize enterprises, but there are also some large enterprises.
Kryon plans to introduce consumption-based pricing and a freemium model
featuring its native process discovery capabilities. Its roadmap also includes
flexible licensing models, process optimization, serverless bots and embedded
testing for automation scenarios.
Strengths
* Process discovery: Kryon has embraced the idea of integrating process
discovery and task mining with RPA to support scaled automation programs. Its
process discovery component recommends the best path for customers seeking to
execute a process, and even optimizes it. Kryon’s focused value proposition
resonates with buyers looking to simplify and accelerate the development and
management of an automation program.
* Value for money: Kryon offers a relatively low price for an RPA product that
bundles many key capabilities and features, such as those of the Full-Cycle
Automation Suite deployed as-a-service. These include process discovery, a
citizen-developer-friendly design studio, enterprise security, a central
orchestration component (ConsoleX) and the ability to scale up to a large
number of bots.
* Operations: With several International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
standards under its belt and a focus on Payment Card Industry (PCI), General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) certifications, Kryon is prioritizing quality and
compliance. This focus should benefit clients in highly regulated industries.
Cautions
* Service and support: Kryon is one of the smaller RPA vendors by revenue and
employee count. Feedback from Gartner clients, received through Gartner’s
inquiry service, Peer Insights platform and/or other interactions during the
past year, indicates potential buyers’ concerns about the relatively limited
support resources and implementation partners available to help them get
started with Kryon’s platform.
* Intelligent document processing: Although Kryon offers a native OCR component
based on its proprietary, patented computer vision technology, it does not
offer the fully fledged native IDP capabilities found in competing solutions.
Customers of Kryon’s solution may need to use Kryon’s API capabilities to
integrate with third-party IDP solutions.
* Viability: Kryon faces strong competition from larger vendors that can invest
more resources into their RPA capabilities. Kryon faces a challenge to scale
up and compete with the disruptive pricing strategies of larger vendors.
LAIYE
Laiye is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant and a new entrant for 2021. Its
RPA product, Laiye RPA, complements its main RPA features with IDP, chatbots and
pretrained AI models. The product is well-suited to the diverse Chinese OS
market, as it can automate in Windows, Android and Linux environments.
Laiye has its headquarters in China, and its operations are mainly in China and
the broader Asia/Pacific region. Its customers are mostly SMBs.
Laiye has limited visibility outside Asia/Pacific, but its revenue growth,
investor capital and plans to expand across Asia/Pacific could easily disrupt
the rapidly growing Asia/Pacific RPA market. In 2021, Laiye raised $50 million
to expand its intelligent automation platform.
Strengths
* Innovation: Laiye’s platform includes RPA, IDP, conversational AI, process
mining and other capabilities focused on end-to-end automation. Unlike
competitors that add complementary capabilities through partnerships, Laiye
developed its end-to-end platform from the ground up, which has simplified
integration and support. Laiye has built-in integrations with Azure Cognitive
Services and Google Cloud AI to support AI/ML models and AutoML.
* Market understanding: Laiye’s platform features are targeted at the needs of
customers primarily in China and some adjacent markets in Asia/Pacific.
Laiye’s roadmap reflects the direction of the RPA market in China and
includes cloud-native orchestration, enhanced computer vision, IDP
capabilities and a bot marketplace.
* Partner and developer ecosystem: Laiye’s growth and expansion strategy relies
on its large population of developers. Laiye has more than 500 partners and
over 400,000 community developers, and it is expanding its training and
presence at multiple universities.
Cautions
* Geographic presence: Nearly all of Laiye’s revenue comes from customers in
China. Although Laiye prioritizes the Asia/Pacific market and plans to expand
into North America and Europe, customers in major markets outside
Asia/Pacific who might have selected Laiye for its innovative features may be
deterred by its lack of broad geographic presence.
* Product offering: Laiye’s RPA platform does not support features such as
web-based development tools, native process mining or mainframe/green-screen
emulators. Laiye does, however, include these capabilities on its product
roadmap.
* Customer ecosystem: The majority of Laiye’s customers are SMBs. Laiye
confirms that it has secured some large customers and is working to extend
its global footprint. Large enterprises considering Laiye for RPA must make
sure that the vendor can scale up to meet their requirements.
MICROSOFT
Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product is Power Automate,
which includes Power Automate Desktop (PAD) augmented by Microsoft’s SaaS-based
automation platform on Azure. It also includes API integration and orchestration
capabilities. Microsoft provides fully integrated features as part of the Power
Platform, namely Power BI (for analytics), Process Advisor (process mining),
Power Apps (LCAP), API connectors and Power Virtual Agents (chatbots).
Microsoft’s operations are geographically diversified. Its customers tend to be
large enterprises and SMBs.
Microsoft’s roadmap includes more out-of-the-box API connectors, a richer
recording experience, a more resilient runtime on virtual machines, an easier
installation experience, and simplified document processing with embedded AI.
Strengths
* Product strategy: Microsoft’s RPA value proposition includes RPA with API
orchestration that can integrate multiple systems of record to automate
routine data transcription work. Microsoft uses all the components of its
Power Platform to create a single, unified, end-to-end platform that offers
automation, integration, low-code application development and analytics
capabilities in order to meet enterprises’ business process automation
requirements.
* Microsoft ecosystem: Microsoft has a large customer ecosystem, with 15.8
million deployed bots driving 1.5 billion actions daily. Its Azure-based RPA
offering is accessible to 1 billion people. Power Automate provides rich
integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem of widely used apps.
* Sales execution and operations: Microsoft offers a free version of PAD to all
Windows 10 users. It also offers a paid premium offering that includes all
additional capabilities, such as API connectors, process discovery/task
mining and IDP on a per-user, per-month basis. The sales ecosystem for Power
Automate includes more than 400 partners and continues to grow as Microsoft
trains new partners and invests more in marketing.
Cautions
* Windows dependencies: Microsoft’s RPA is heavily dependent on PAD as the RPA
runtime, which is Windows-centric. At present, PAD requires local
installation on desktop devices or virtual machines that are running on
Windows 10 Home/Pro/Enterprise, Windows Server 2016 or Windows Server 2019.
Microsoft does not support PAD installation on devices with ARM processors or
other OSs.
* Pricing: Microsoft’s per-user pricing model can be complex, especially for
enterprise customers with a large user base. There are various different
add-ons, plus limitations on storage, file capacity and daily requests.
Microsoft’s willingness to negotiate discounts as part of Office 365
licensing agreements is not always communicated clearly.
* UX: Navigation between Microsoft Teams, PAD and the Power Automate service on
the cloud can be confusing for business and IT users. Although PAD is the
cornerstone of Microsoft’s RPA, the UX for automation design often starts
with the Power Automate web portal. Additionally, some connectors and
productivity apps are offered via Teams, which complicates navigation choices
when designing and developing bots.
NICE
NICE is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, NICE Robotic
Process Automation, also includes NEVA, a desktop RPA assistant that focuses on
attended automation for global contact centers. The product also includes
Automation Finder (for process discovery), Automation Studio and OCR.
NICE’s operations are geographically diversified. Its customers tend to be large
enterprises.
The company’s roadmap includes enablement of semisupervised learning to drive
accurate prioritization of discovered processes. Additionally, NICE recently
introduced the next phase of its integration of its AI with NEVA in order to
provide guidance based on employee behavior, sentiment and phrase detection.
Strengths
* Innovation: NICE has expanded its Automation Finder snapshot capability and
its “click to automate” capability for citizen developers. NICE’s completely
elastic cloud architecture is based on microservices that are fully
dockerized and containerized with Kubernetes. NEVA can use voice analytics to
pick up any phrase and recommend the next best action.
* Workforce automation: NICE targets global enterprises and contact centers by
offering specialized attended bots to augment its workforce management
functionality for a range of industries. Its automation community, open SDK
and center of excellence enhance developer collaboration and are supplemented
by a cloud-based automation studio and video-based courses and tutorials.
* Pricing: NICE offers a relatively low entry price for its RPA product. Its
starter RPA kit includes NEVA on a three-month free trial, after which it
provides all-inclusive, transparent pricing for NEVA Unlimited. Large
enterprises looking for good-value RPA should consider NICE’s offering.
Cautions
* Market focus: Although it supports unattended automation, NICE focuses on
contact center and attended automation. NICE’s contact center focus could be
misunderstood as meaning that it lacks unattended capabilities, which may
deter customers looking for generic RPA solutions. It is, however, the case
that NICE may not always meet the requirements of customers seeking support
for generic RPA use cases outside contact centers.
* Product features: Unlike many RPA vendors’ products, NICE’s RPA platform does
not include native IDP and process-mining capabilities, although NICE does
offer task mining via its Automation Finder. NICE depends on third-party
components for OCR, ML and NLP for its IDP, which may require additional
effort to configure and integrate.
* UX: Feedback from Gartner clients, received through Gartner’s inquiry
service, Peer Insights platform and/or other interactions during the past
year, indicates that NICE’s product has a relatively steep learning curve for
automation beyond simple use cases. These customers, and particularly those
who would have used older versions of NICE’s RPA, want improvements to its
development GUI to make it more intuitive. Also, some customers have reported
intermittent connectivity issues with applications while using NICE’s RPA.
NICE, however, states that its completely new Automation Studio, released in
January 2020, has improved the overall UX.
NINTEX
Nintex is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, Nintex RPA,
depends on IT-centric RPA development and reliable computer vision. Nintex’s
product portfolio includes RPA, along with capabilities for workflow automation,
digital forms, document automation, e-signatures, process mapping (Nintex
Promapp), LCAP and iBPMS solutions. It also offers hundreds of prebuilt
automation and process map templates via the online Nintex Solution Accelerator
Gallery.
Nintex has more than 10,000 customers worldwide. They tend to be midsize and
large enterprises. They come from all industries, but its RPA product is
primarily used by financial services and banking organizations in North America
and EMEA.
In October 2020, Nintex acquired K2 Software to support complex BPM and case
management features. Additionally, in June 2021, Nintex acquired AssureSign to
bring native e-signature capabilities to the Nintex Process Platform. The
company also plans to create a new event-driven bot flow for file creation,
introduce DevOps features and expand its support for government customers.
Strengths
* Product portfolio: Nintex offers an easy-to-build RPA solution that includes
an intuitive web-based interface with strong security controls. Nintex RPA
has specific features to automate processes residing on SAP ERP. Its RPA
platform can support bidirectional workflows between RPA bots and Nintex
Workflow. Nintex also offers a separately licensed product, Nintex Gateway,
which is an on-premises application that enables Nintex Workflow Cloud, the
company’s next-generation platform, to access on-premises resources.
Customers can build solutions that connect RPA bots and workflow automation
for an end-to-end automation experience.
* Sales strategy: Nintex has a clear sales strategy with well-defined personas
targeted at IT operations and per-workflow pricing. Its strategy draws on
specific partnerships, such as one with Fiserv to support core banking RPA
use cases.
* Customer ecosystem: Nintex Workflow and Nintex Workflow for SharePoint have
strong name recognition, with 500 Nintex RPA customers. Existing Nintex
customers may find value in Nintex’s prebuilt automation templates while
using its native RPA to perform task automation within their Nintex
workflows.
Cautions
* Product features: As a new player in the RPA market, Nintex offers an RPA
product somewhat lacking in important features found in many other vendors’
products. Those gaps include native IDP, guided navigations for citizen
developers, AI-assisted development, autorecovery of bots, and process
discovery and mining.
* Business model: Nintex aims its platform at software engineers, IT staff and
business technologists. It has a strong focus on industry-specific automation
for the banking and finance sectors, which may not suit all organizations.
* Operations: Nintex has only a small (but growing) team focused on its RPA
platform. This team’s size may present challenges as the company pursues its
plans to scale up to meet the demands of larger RPA initiatives. Nintex also
needs to streamline its support for multiple workflow tools (including K2’s)
that may require RPA integration.
NTT
NTT is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. NTT offers its WinActor RPA with
WinDirector and WinActor Manager on Cloud for on-premises or cloud-based
management, WinActor robot as a service (WinActor Cast on Call), and other
WinActor components such as AI, library service and no-code storyboarding. NTT
complements WinActor with other NTT services for process mining, low-code UI
building and identity management.
NTT’s business is primarily in Asia/Pacific, but it also supports customers in
EMEA and North America through subsidiaries and partners. NTT’s customers
include large enterprises and SMBs.
The company’s roadmap features an end-to-end RPA solution, scenario management
optimization, self-healing bots and use of blockchain technology for security.
Strengths
* Partnership ecosystem: NTT is exploiting its business services and technology
capabilities to sell RPA to many customers, including via distributors and
partners. This model has been especially effective for driving sales growth
outside Japan.
* Sales strategy: NTT’s large base of clients and solution partners puts it in
an advantageous position to sell RPA, compared with its traditional
competitors. Its strategic partners include several major vendors of other
RPA technologies.
* Viability: NTT is a major global vendor focused on AI, data science and
automation for multiple vertical markets. Its extensive support for RPA and
its investment in other automation technologies have enabled it to build a
significant customer base. NTT’s RPA business grew significantly in 2020,
despite the impact of COVID-19, to make it the fourth-largest RPA vendor,
according to Gartner’s market share data.
Cautions
* Market understanding: NTT’s system integration (SI) business also sells
competitors’ RPA products. This can be confusing to customers who choose to
explore NTT’s RPA via its SI services. NTT’s SI approach can also impact RPA
service comparisons — for example, NTT’s disaster recovery plan and SLAs are
defined per customer and at the customer’s request.
* Product navigation: NTT provides a wide range of products for end-to-end
automation, including WinActor’s numerous components, as well as other
solutions for business processes, AI and other, third-party products.
Customers, especially those new to NTT, may have difficulty navigating these
options.
* Product strategy: NTT intends to offer more flexibility to its solution
partners, which may require integration with either NTT or third-party
products, depending on customers’ needs. In accordance with NTT’s product
strategy, its RPA product does not natively support many common features that
are built into competitors’ RPA products, such as IDP, AI/ML and real-time
collaboration between developers.
PEGASYSTEMS
Pegasystems is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, Pega Robotic
Process Automation, is part of the Pega Infinity platform, which complements the
vendor’s feature-rich iBPMS, low-code app platform capabilities and other
features, such as AI, CRM, and multiexperience and business rules support.
Pegasystems’ RPA product features a proprietary computer vision technology known
as X-ray Vision.
Pegasystems has geographically distributed operations. Its customers tend to be
large enterprises.
Pegasystems’ product vision includes enhancement of its X-ray Vision technology,
process mining, case management and automated decision making.
Strengths
* Product portfolio: Pegasystems’ RPA tool includes a design studio, an
orchestration manager and a bot manager for attended and unattended
automations. The RPA offering is integrated tightly with the vendor’s wider
process automation products. Pegasystems provides a feature-rich platform for
customers looking beyond RPA to event-driven, end-to-end automation.
* Innovation: Pegasystems’ innovations include its X-ray Vision technology for
mapping low-level screen objects to screen concepts, a process fabric layer
for serverless orchestration, an iBMPS foundation within the Pega Infinity
platform, and prebuilt AI/ML models for decision automation. In addition,
Pegasystems offers composable and reusable business applications (also known
as “microjourneys”) that can be used in any end-to-end workflow.
* Viability: Pegasystems has a large ecosystem of customers and partners, a
strong Pega Community and a feature-rich product designed to meet the
end-to-end automation requirements of large enterprises.
Cautions
* Pricing: The Pega Infinity platform offers premium features, but at a premium
price. Although Pegasystems has introduced several updates to its pricing
model, it continues to target large enterprises with large budgets.
* Product focus: Pegasystems’ RPA platform lacks the tactical focus of other
RPA products that can help deliver a quick ROI from automation. Pegasystems
has a large app footprint, with extensive configuration, integration, skills
and development requirements. Customers focused on relatively small, targeted
use cases may find suitable alternatives to Pegasystems’ platform at a lower
cost.
* Pega experience: Pegasystems’ RPA offering tends to have both strong
advocates and strong detractors, which results in disparate ratings. The
occasional low-satisfaction ratings it receives on Gartner’s Peer Insights
platform are, however, usually associated with factors such as overly
ambitious projects. Nevertheless, the value proposition for the broad Pega
Infinity platform assumes significant commitment and investment by customers.
Those investing in Pegasystems should be aware of the additional effort
involved and the investment required in the large aftermarket of Pegasystems
consultants.
SAMSUNG SDS
Samsung SDS is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, Brity
RPA, includes a conversational AI platform with native ML and RPA-as-a-service
features.
Samsung SDS’s operations are mostly in Asia/Pacific, but there are plans to
expand into North America and EMEA in 2022. This vendor serves organizations of
all sizes.
Samsung SDS’s roadmap for 2022 includes a new platform-level iBPMS toolbox
called Workflow Service. It also features enhancements to AI-driven design and
development, OCR, data extraction through web scraping, and libraries and
recordings to simplify development.
Strengths
* AI/ML focus: Brity RPA offers an intuitive experience for citizen developers,
one that supports automatic design with recording and process discovery.
Samsung SDS also includes a chatbot, integrated OCR and native AI in its RPA
offering.
* SMB focus: Samsung SDS has a strong focus on creating an RPA solution for
SMBs, in addition to its capability to support large enterprises. Customers,
who often plan to start small and gradually expand the scope of their
automation, should consider Samsung’s RPA-as-a-service offering, which can be
adopted quickly on a small scale. Samsung also offers a free trial of this
offering.
* Viability: Although it operates primarily in Asia/Pacific, Samsung SDS’s RPA
business achieved year-over-year revenue growth of 88% in 2020 (as estimated
by Gartner), which was higher than the RPA market average. Furthermore, many
of its customers are highly satisfied with its online customer support portal
and overall service.
Cautions
* Product features: Samsung SDS’s RPA product is based purely on the Microsoft
Windows platform and currently supports no other OS. Nor does it offer a web
interface for development. Samsung SDS offers only a limited number of
prebuilt connectors for applications from vendors such as Oracle and SAP, and
for Microsoft Office 365. It offers limited or no support for some key
features, such as IDP, bot autorecovery and continuous integration/continuous
delivery.
* Pricing: Samsung SDS lacks an all-inclusive pricing strategy for its RPA
offering. In addition to the price of its core RPA product bundle, customers
may be charged incrementally for tangential components such as chatbots,
analytics and process discovery. This runs contrary to Samsung’s SMB focus,
as its overall price may be higher than many SMBs expect.
* Marketing strategy: Samsung SDS has demonstrated impressive growth, but it
lacks the visibility of many other vendors, and is not typically shortlisted
for RPA by Gartner clients who contact us for advice. Samsung SDS is working
to broaden its marketing outreach via social media and limited partner
channels. Although it plans to expand into North America and Europe, its lack
of a broader geographic presence may deter organizations outside
Asia/Pacific.
SAP
SAP is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product is SAP Intelligent
Robotic Process Automation (iRPA), which extends SAP’s ability to integrate
disparate applications and automate business processes in finance, sales,
customer services, human resources and other areas.
SAP’s operations are geographically distributed. Its customers tend to be large
enterprises.
SAP’s roadmap includes multicloud and private cloud deployment options, support
for Linux and macOS desktop agents, improved task and process mining, and new
analytics dashboards.
Strengths
* Market understanding: SAP has a strong vision for application-focused
automation. Its end-to-end capabilities include a wide range of technologies,
such as process discovery, iBPMS, AI/ML and low-code tools, and it has a
unique ability to execute with APIs using screen recording and cloud
delivery. Following the acquisition of Signavio in March 2021, SAP is
positioned to offer an end-to-end integrated solution, including RPA, process
mining, BPM and cloud ERP capabilities, in order to deliver integrated
enterprise business automation.
* SAP ecosystem: SAP iRPA is available as a SaaS offering on top of the SAP
Business Technology Platform as part of the SAP Extension Suite. The
citizen-developer-ready Cloud Studio, configuration and orchestration,
monitoring, and triggering and notification are the main cloud-based
features, along with connectors for SAP S/4HANA, the Advanced Business
Application Programming (ABAP) language, SAP Fiori applications and non-SAP
applications. SAP also offers a bot store with more than 200 free, prebuilt
automations from SAP and its partners and customers.
* Viability: With more than 400,000 customers and a large-scale ERP ecosystem
that features quite frequently in many RPA use cases, SAP’s RPA business is
viable.
Cautions
* RPA focus: SAP iRPA is especially appealing to SAP application customers.
Although this product can connect to non-SAP applications, Gartner customers
who have used it have stated that the first set of use cases is to automate
routine data transcription work within the SAP ecosystem and migrate data to
SAP S/4HANA.
* Cloud-only orchestration: SAP iRPA supports cloud orchestration only — it
does not provide any on-premises orchestration component. Furthermore, its
cloud capabilities do not include multicloud support, containerization or a
bot runtime in the cloud. Customers should plan to use iRPA’s cloud
orchestration component with its desktop agents serving as the bot runtime.
Cloud parts of the solution are automatically upgraded every month, whereas
on-premises agents are upgraded only on demand, which can be confusing.
Automated upgrading of agents from the cloud is on SAP’s roadmap.
* Product experience: SAP’s RPA product currently does not support features
such as bot autorecovery and autoscaling of bots from its cloud orchestrator.
It also lacks some advanced features offered by other leading RPA providers,
such as AI-driven development and mobile/voice UI integration (which requires
additional platform services like SAP Conversational AI). SAP’s
postacquisition integration of Signavio’s process mining is still in
progress.
SERVICETRACE
Since the initial publication of this Magic Quadrant (26 July 2021),
Servicetrace was a party in the following significant corporate transaction(s).
For Key Background and Considerations for Technology and Service Selection, see:
* "Completed Corporate Transaction Notification: Servicetrace, Robotic Process
Automation” (29 September 2021)
Analysis within this Magic Quadrant remains as originally published.
Servicetrace is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA platform,
XceleratorOne (X1), is focused on delivering a secure, end-to-end environment
that combines RPA, BPM, AI and task-mining capabilities in a single offering.
Servicetrace’s operations are mainly in EMEA. Its customers tend to be midsize
and large enterprises.
Servicetrace’s roadmap includes containerization of the platform, a web-based
design studio, a process and template marketplace, and new decision model and
notation (DMN) capabilities.
Strengths
* Innovation: Innovation is at the heart of Servicetrace’s RPA product. It
offers an impressive feature set, including AI/ML-based native OCR and
computer vision with pattern recognition, an intelligent process recorder, an
embedded BPM engine (powered by Camunda), native test automation, patented
vertical scaling, ROI analytics, and an agile Kanban board. Servicetrace also
plans to roll out a Docker-container-based architecture in 2022.
* Value for money: Servicetrace offers a rich set of innovative features at a
relatively low price. It has a flexible pricing model with multiple options,
such as per bot, per X1 module, per minute and per process type.
* Self-building bot: At the core of Servicetrace’s innovative offering is the
uniquely differentiating “self-building bot” capability, which involves
autorecording of multiple user execution actions, such as mouse actions and
keystrokes, to autocreate a workflow with a BPMN 2.0 path. Many process
recordings can be linked to include possible exception handlings, depending
on user decisions. Additionally, a recorder creates an XES file, so that
process-mining tools can generate more predictive analytics from many
recordings of different users.
Cautions
* Marketing execution: Although Servicetrace has a good understanding of the
RPA market and a strong innovation focus, the fact that more than
three-quarters of its customers are in EMEA means it has relatively limited
market visibility, compared with many other vendors. Servicetrace states that
it is well-positioned to support its growing customer base, but it reported
revenue growth lower than the RPA market average in 2020.
* Operations: Servicetrace’s market presence and operations have not changed
much from 2020. Outside EMEA and some regions in Asia/Pacific, Servicetrace
has no direct presence. Servicetrace delivers first- and second-level support
to customers outside the regions where it operates through partners.
Subsequently, these customers’ direct support contact with Servicetrace is
limited.
* Cloud capabilities: Although Servicetrace offers an RPA-as-a-service feature
via Microsoft Azure, it does not yet offer containerization.
UIPATH
UiPath is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA platform, the UiPath
Platform, offers rich governance features, a citizen-developer-friendly UX,
enhanced computer vision and cloud-orchestrated RPA as a service.
UiPath’s operations are geographically distributed across the globe, and its
customers tend to be large enterprises, midsize enterprises and SMBs.
Following its initial public offering in April 2021, UiPath has the resources
and partnerships to further enhance its platform by enabling end-to-end
automation programs. UiPath’s March 2021 acquisition of Cloud Elements, an
enterprise integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendor, signals the
importance of both UI-based and API-based integration for scalable process
automation initiatives. UiPath’s roadmap includes support for Linux and macOS,
and low-code apps and data services for on-premises customers.
Strengths
* Product strategy: Aided by its strong brand awareness among RPA customers,
UiPath is influencing the market’s narrative about process automation. Its
vision includes an integrated low-code platform with features including IDP,
process mining, cloud delivery and iPaaS. UiPath targets a broad range of
personas involved in the process automation life cycle — it caters to IT
staff, business technologists and fusion teams. UiPath’s RPA platform also
includes what it calls “automation ops” to support enterprise-scale
governance.
* UX app for automation: In addition to having a strong RPA focus, UiPath’s
product portfolio includes a low-code UX app builder, UiPath Apps, which
helps create business value by interfacing with various cloud and on-premises
applications, including ERP and legacy systems.
* Viability: UiPath demonstrates strong viability and stability with its $29
billion IPO and strong revenue growth of 63% from 2019 to 2020, which was
above the overall RPA market’s growth rate. UiPath’s marketplace offers more
than 1,300 reusable components, which account for 2.5 million downloads. The
vendor’s community of more than 1 million users reflects its massive customer
and partner ecosystem.
Cautions
* Web-based development: Despite its strong focus on cloud-based RPA, and its
existing web based UX App builder, UiPath still lacks a web-based RPA
development environment — a shortcoming that will limit adoption by
enterprises that prefer a minimal hardware footprint. However, UiPath does
offer cloud orchestration capabilities and plans to build a web-based
developer environment soon.
* End-to-end automation: UiPath has built a narrative around hyperautomation
and a range of complementary capabilities, including process mining, IDP,
LCAP and iPaaS (via its acquisition of Cloud Elements). However, many
competitors that have entered the RPA market from adjacent software sectors
(especially the iBPMS and LCAP vendors) provide capabilities that may surpass
or match UiPath’s offering, especially in terms of complex orchestration,
decision automation and case management.
* Pricing: New RPA customers often discover that UiPath’s pricing model is more
complex than those of other RPA products they evaluate. UiPath’s pricing and
packaging strategy also changes, as evidenced by its introduction of
developer personas and subsequent elimination of them within one year. That
said, UiPath has launched simplified starter packs for new customers and is
piloting consumption-based pricing options (such as per-minute pricing),
which may reduce entry costs for customers.
WORKFUSION
WorkFusion is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product is WorkFusion
Intelligent Automation Cloud, an integrated, end-to-end automation platform with
native AI and best-in-class automated ML and NLP capabilities.
WorkFusion’s operations are mainly in North America, but it also has some
presence in Asia/Pacific and EMEA. Its customers tend to be large enterprises,
especially in the banking, finance and insurance sector.
WorkFusion plans to expand its prepackaged solution for industry use cases such
as “know your customer” and insurance underwriting, and to enhance its platform
with ML and a human-in-the-loop designer.
Strengths
* AI/ML focus: Alongside its WorkFusion Intelligent Automation Cloud,
WorkFusion has demonstrated superior AI/ML capabilities and product vision by
augmenting its RPA capabilities with prepackaged, pretrained ML models for
specific use cases, such as loan processing, end-customer account creation
and claims intake.
* Finance automation: WorkFusion specializes in catering to the automation
requirements of the banking and financial services industry. Its prebuilt
AI/ML models, AutoML features and library of RPA components addressing
financial use cases make it a particularly good option for organizations in
the banking and financial services sectors.
* Viability: WorkFusion recently raised $220 million in funding to support its
plans to expand both geographically and into other industries. This
investment underlines WorkFusion’s potential to progress in the market and
reduces the risk to customers of purchasing a WorkFusion RPA solution.
Cautions
* Product UX: Feedback from Gartner clients, received through Gartner’s inquiry
service, Peer Insights platform and other interactions during the past year,
indicate that WorkFusion’s product requires significant technical knowledge —
there is a substantial learning curve. It requires some programming skills,
such as in Java and advanced AI/ML with Python. WorkFusion confirms that it
is focused on enabling easy extension of complex, high-value use cases,
instead of enabling rapid small automations. Customers have also mentioned
that WorkFusion’s platform requires complex and effort-intensive
infrastructure maintenance for all servers, app hubs and nodes. WorkFusion
says that it plans to improve its infrastructure support in a major upcoming
release.
* Business model: WorkFusion’s focus on large organizations in banking, finance
and insurance may deter customers in other major industries, such as
manufacturing and retail. Additionally, WorkFusion has a much smaller
geographic footprint and ecosystem of system integration partners than other
major RPA vendors, and many of those partners also support competing RPA
products. Customers may struggle to find effective support in their region.
* Pricing: WorkFusion’s pricing is based on platform cost plus an incremental,
per-process cost. Its average selling price may be higher than those of other
vendors, but it does automate much more complex use cases than many RPA
vendors.
VENDORS ADDED AND DROPPED
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets
change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic
Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one
year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our
opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
ADDED
* Appian
* Cyclone Robotics
* IBM
* Kryon
* Laiye
* Nintex
DROPPED
* AntWorks
* HelpSystems
* Jacada
* Kofax
INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION CRITERIA
To qualify for inclusion, each vendor had to:
* Demonstrate an active go-to-market strategy for its RPA platform, as
demonstrated by its website, Gartner’s Peer Insights forum, social media and
marketing that explicitly mentioned RPA.
* Offer a platform that, at a minimum, supported:
* Design, development and deployment of UI interaction scripts/bots
* Orchestration of bots and overall workflow (a central orchestrator or
control panel/ administrative component was considered essential)
* Automation capabilities for desktops, virtual machines (VMs) and
servers/clouds — and not just any one of these environments (support for
both desktops and VMs was considered essential)
* Both attended and unattended forms of automation (attended and unattended
bots)
* Storage of data in a database native to the RPA platform
Each vendor’s platform also had to have at least two of the following:
* Augmented citizen developer capabilities: Built-in, AI-driven smart workflow
development capabilities with guided navigation or chatbot-assisted features
for building usable bots without active scripting.
* Process discovery/task mining: Native process discovery/task mining
capabilities to augment citizen development and automated process design
document (PDD) generation (not via integration with third-party tools).
* Intelligent document processing (IDP): Built-in IDP capabilities with
prebuilt, easily trainable AI/ML models that can intelligently classify and
standardize data extracted by OCR (integration with third-party OCR was
allowed, but the IDP had to be native to the platform).
* API and integration support (other than UI interaction): Native API and
integration support to create serverless automation objects that can be
integrated with any orchestration engine.
Lastly, each vendor had to either:
* Have generated at least $15 million in revenue from RPA software and/or
subscription licensing in 2020.*
Or:
* Have generated at least $10 million in revenue from RPA software and/or
subscription licensing in 2020; and at least 50% year-over-year growth in
2020; and at least 300 paying enterprise customer organizations (logos) for
licensed RPA software and subscriptions in 2020, with a minimum 100 paying
logos each in at least two of the following regions:*
* North America
* South America
* Europe
* Middle East and Africa
* Asia/Pacific, including Japan and China
* Annual revenue, growth and customer numbers were for RPA software and/or
subscription licenses (excluding professional services, maintenance and other
non-RPA software licenses) only, in 2020.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
HelpSystems: HelpSystems was a Niche Player in the 2020 edition of the Magic
Quadrant. It offers RPA, IT security, file transfer, IBM i automation and other
infrastructure management tools as separate but complementary products, for both
midsize customers and larger enterprises. HelpSystems did not meet the revenue
and growth criteria for inclusion in the present Magic Quadrant.
Hyland: Hyland acquired Germany-based RPA vendor Another Monday in August 2020
to complement its content service platform and workflow software. Hyland
provides professional discovery and design tools with a unique decentralized and
highly scalable runtime environment. It has already deployed RPA projects
integrated with its broader content services portfolio and continues to invest
in the development of its RPA offering. Hyland did not meet the revenue criteria
for inclusion in the present Magic Quadrant.
Jacada: Jacada was a Niche Player in the 2020 edition of the Magic Quadrant. Its
RPA product focuses on contact center and customer service automation for
midsize and large-enterprise customers. Jacada did not meet the revenue criteria
for inclusion in the present Magic Quadrant.
Kofax: Kofax was a Challenger in the 2020 edition of the Magic Quadrant. It
targets the automation needs of large organizations with a portfolio of
capabilities including RPA, intelligent document ingestion, AI/ML, process
discovery, iBPMS and analytics. We have not included Kofax in the present Magic
Quadrant, as Kofax RPA is sold as part of the vendor’s broader Intelligent
Automation Platform.
ServiceNow: In March 2021, ServiceNow announced the acquisition of Intellibot, a
vendor based in Hyderabad, India. As a leading provider of enterprise low-code,
IT service management and digital workflow software, ServiceNow plans to
integrate Intellibot into its Now Platform by early 2022. ServiceNow’s RPA
product did not qualify for the present Magic Quadrant, as the acquisition
occurred after the 2021 cutoff for prequalification.
Workato: Workato is primarily an enterprise iPaaS vendor that also offers RPA.
Workato’s RPA strategy is to deliver end-to-end automation with an orchestration
layer powered by its core iPaaS platform. Workato caters to large and midsize
enterprises. It does not appear in the present Magic Quadrant as it did not
reach the required minimum level of revenue attributable entirely to RPA.
EVALUATION CRITERIA
In Magic Quadrants, Gartner evaluates vendors on two axes: Ability to Execute
and Completeness of Vision. These axes include criteria that measure each
vendor’s 2020 performance and its future vision. Vendors receive scores
according to Gartner’s methodology for Magic Quadrants, and these scores define
their positions in Figure 1. Vendors are invited to provide data for the
evaluation criteria via questionnaires and briefings, but evaluations also
reflect the results of Gartner customer surveys and information gathered from
users of Gartner’s client inquiry service.
ABILITY TO EXECUTE
Gartner evaluates technology vendors according to how well their processes,
systems, methods and procedures enable them to be competitive, efficient and
effective. Each vendor is evaluated for its Ability to Execute.
TABLE 1: ABILITY TO EXECUTE EVALUATION CRITERIA
Enlarge Table
*
Evaluation CriteriaWeighting
Product or Service
High
Overall Viability
High
Sales Execution/Pricing
High
Market Responsiveness/Record
Low
Marketing Execution
High
Customer Experience
High
Operations
Medium
Source: Gartner (July 2021)
COMPLETENESS OF VISION
Gartner also evaluates each qualifying technology vendor according to how well
it articulates an understanding of the RPA market’s current and future direction
— including in relation to innovations, customer needs and competition — and how
well each vendor’s understanding matches Gartner’s. Each vendor is evaluated for
its ability to anticipate market forces and create new market opportunities.
TABLE 2: COMPLETENESS OF VISION EVALUATION CRITERIA
Enlarge Table
*
Evaluation CriteriaWeighting
Market Understanding
High
Marketing Strategy
High
Sales Strategy
Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy
High
Business Model
Medium
Vertical/Industry Strategy
Medium
Innovation
High
Geographic Strategy
Low
Source: Gartner (July 2021)
QUADRANT DESCRIPTIONS
LEADERS
Leaders have an insightful understanding of a market’s realities, a reliable
track record, an ability to influence a market’s direction, and an ability to
attract and retain customers.
In the RPA market, Leaders demonstrate an understanding of enterprise customers’
needs and of opportunities to expand functionality and add new products and
services to their core RPA offerings. Simply put, a Leader must have a
market-leading vision and the ability to deliver on that vision.
A Leader may not always be the best choice for every customer. A focused,
smaller vendor that is not a Leader can sometimes provide superior support and
commitment. Other vendors may provide a specialized capability that is essential
for some organizations, such as enhanced security or specific features or
functions (required, for example, by call centers and individual desktop use
cases). A vendor that focuses on RPA for a specific vertical market or within a
limited geographic area may not be a Leader in the overall market, but it may be
a competitive option within its chosen market or area.
CHALLENGERS
A market’s Challengers excel at attracting a large customer base, but are often
limited to one part of the market.
In the RPA market, a Challenger may have a strong following for attended RPA,
but lack traction, commitment or sophistication in the unattended RPA market. A
Challenger must demonstrate sustained excellence in execution and a significant
following — a combination that few vendors have achieved in this dynamic,
nascent market.
A Challenger may become a Leader if it adopts aggressive, innovative strategies
to expand its focus to encompass the entire market. It would also need to
demonstrate exceptional insight into the market’s direction and continue to
execute excellently.
A Challenger may alternatively become a Visionary by sacrificing growth and
instead focusing on developing innovative, differentiating features and
capabilities.
VISIONARIES
Visionaries are a market’s innovators. They propel a market forward by
responding to emerging customer demands and offering customers new opportunities
to excel.
Visionaries must also show insightful understanding of market trends and
innovative strategies for marketing, sales and product and business management.
Typically, these vendors appeal to leading-edge customers — they may have
minimal mainstream presence or name recognition. A Visionary’s ability to
deliver sustained, dependable execution in the mainstream enterprise market has
yet to be tested sufficiently.
In the RPA market, a Visionary may invest in leading-edge RPA offerings that are
not yet readily adopted by mainstream enterprise customers. Visionaries excel in
understanding the demands of enterprises that are looking for fully inclusive
automation support, as they often provide related tools like AI, chatbots and
process management.
A Visionary could eventually grow to become a Leader. Alternatively, a Visionary
may become a Niche Player if it decides to limit its target market by focusing
on its core competencies, technologies or existing customers.
A Visionary could also become a Challenger by developing its specialties in
order to advance in terms of execution.
NICHE PLAYERS
A market’s Niche Players typically specialize in one vertical or functional
area, or have a strong product that is limited to one part of the market.
In the RPA market, Niche Players also include vendors that focus on other
software markets but are moving into the RPA market.
In the RPA market, Niche Players:
* Focus primarily on related tools, rather than RPA capabilities — for example,
process discovery or ML tools.
* Have yet to demonstrate excellent execution and success.
* Have limited geographic reach.
* Exhibit an unclear vision or focus only on a subset of use cases.
Because of their relatively small size, Niche Players often represent the best
choice for a specific category of customer or a particular use case. Niche
Players typically offer specialized expertise, focused support practices,
flexible terms and conditions, lower costs, and greater commitment to a
particular market segment and its customers.
In this fast-evolving market, opportunities exist in all directions. Some Niche
Players are poised to improve their execution and evolve into Challengers.
Others may become Visionaries by developing innovative solutions that attract
interest beyond their niche segments. Still others may strengthen and broaden
their businesses to become Leaders eventually.
CONTEXT
RPA automates repetitive tasks by emulating transactional steps currently taken
by humans, mainly via orchestrated UI interactions.
RPA platforms translate a human process or task into RPA software language to
create a script to follow (commonly known as a robot or bot). Additionally, a
runtime is allocated to execute the script by a control dashboard/orchestrator.
Software engineering leaders can develop bots programmatically or by using
low-code/no-code GUIs native to the RPA software platform.
MARKET OVERVIEW
The RPA software market remains one of the fastest-growing segments of the
enterprise software market. Despite COVID-19 uncertainties, the RPA software
segment’s revenue grew by 38.9% in 2020, outpacing all other segments and far
exceeding the 8.9% growth of the overall enterprise software market.1
The RPA software market includes more than 60 vendors as of mid-2021.
ORGANIZATIONS SCALE BEYOND RPA TO DELIVER HYPERAUTOMATION
Increasingly, software engineering leaders are scaling beyond tactical
automation to deliver greater efficiency, efficacy and business agility with
hyperautomation. Hyperautomation is a discipline that helps to combine several
technologies in an orchestrated manner in order to deliver end-to-end,
intelligent, event-driven automation.
RPA remains essential to achieving efficiency with hyperautomation, especially
for business technologists who are not in IT departments. Gartner’s 2021
Hyperautomation Survey found that these business technologists used an average
of two vendor products, which indicates that a single tool may not be enough.2
RPA PRODUCT CAPABILITIES ARE EXPANDING
RPA is moving beyond orchestrated screen-scraping technology. Offerings are
rapidly evolving into a larger automation platforms with embedded process
discovery, IDP, AI/ML, low-code development and complex workflow orchestration
capabilities.
Many software providers are entering the RPA market with enterprise-grade
automation platforms that include RPA as a key feature. At the same time,
vendors of stand-alone RPA products are expanding the scope of their platforms
to provide API integration, low-code development and complex orchestration.
RPA in the cloud is also gaining momentum by offering composable automation
features as packaged business capabilities, including headless bots, serverless
bots, nanobots and microbots.
NEW PRICING MODELS REDUCE BARRIERS TO ENTRY FOR SMBS
As more RPA vendors begin to offer consumption-based pricing, a growing number
of SMBs can afford to adopt RPA. We have seen several SaaS pricing models emerge
in the RPA market, including per-second and per-minute utilization of bots. Many
vendors also include unlimited bots at a fixed price or offer free RPA
components as a starter pack.
RPA VENDOR LANDSCAPE IS EVOLVING
Collectively, the RPA vendors in the Leaders quadrant still outspend the rest of
the market. However, the entry of large vendors with enormous spending power is
transforming the market landscape — vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Samsung
SDS, NTT, Hyland, ServiceNow, Pegasystems and Appian. Notable vendors that have
yet to enter the RPA market include Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Oracle.
As a result of these new entrants, some vendors in the Niche Players quadrant,
with comparatively little revenue and limited geographic presence, may struggle
to scale their business. These Niche Players may also become the targets of
acquisitive vendors looking to enter the RPA market. Nonetheless, many vendors
have emerged in China and Asia/Pacific by driving innovation focused on
comprehensive AI/ML with RPA and low-code development capabilities.
EVIDENCE
1 Market Share: Application Infrastructure and Middleware, Worldwide, 2020
2 Gartner’s 2021 Hyperautomation Survey was conducted online during March 2021
among 558 business technologists from North America (n = 226), Europe (n = 146),
Latin America (n = 78) and Asia/Pacific (n = 108).
To qualify to answer the survey, respondents had to:
* Have created, built or coded analytics or technology capabilities on their
own or with input from others in the preceding 12 months.
* Have used at least one of the tools to produce analytics or technology
capabilities for work.
Twenty-one tools were considered in four categories: application development
tools, automation tools, integration tools and data science and AI tools.
The results of this survey do not represent global findings or the market as a
whole. They reflect the sentiments of the respondents and companies surveyed.
EVALUATION CRITERIA DEFINITIONS
ABILITY TO EXECUTE
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined
market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature
sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM
agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the
subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall
organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the
business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will
continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will
advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities
and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and
negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales
channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible
and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act,
customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers
the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs
designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote
the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a
positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of
buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable
clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this
includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This
can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality
thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments.
Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills,
experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization
to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.
COMPLETENESS OF VISION
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and
needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the
highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and
can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently
communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website,
advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate
network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication
affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise,
technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and
delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature
sets as they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business
proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills
and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments,
including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources,
expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive
purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and
offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native
geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as
appropriate for that geography and market.
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