UiPath Leads the Leaders:
RPA Forrester Wave and Gartner Reports Breakdown
UiPath is leading the pack of RPA vendors according to recent Forrester and Gartner reports. In this article, we’ll highlight some key criteria from the assessment that we believe makes a top RPA vendor and how UiPath meets them.
T his July, Gartner officially named UiPath as the leading Robotic Process Automation(RPA) vendor among 14 significant providers, confirming the findings and results of the Q1 2021 Forrester Wave Report. UiPath launched their $29 billion IPO in April 2021 and have demonstrated a significant revenue growth of 63% from 2019 to 2020.
UiPath’s rise to success shouldn’t be ignored. Only 10 people were working at this start-up just six years ago. Their combination of first-mover advantage and maintaining a product built on good UX has kept them in this leadership quadrant with a stable market presence. They’ve shown business users you really can automate ALL functions and departments.
The pace of technological evolution within business automation took the fast train to relevance when the pandemic forced businesses to do more with less. This has opened the door for many other vendors to enter the space with solutions that come in at a fraction of the cost. So now, as a potential buyer of RPA software, you have a lot of options these days.
Image courtesy of The Forrester Wave™: Robotic Process Automation, Q1 2021
Image courtesy of Gartner’s July 2021 Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation
Why the Leaders are Leaders
RPA is not immune to the idiom, “you get what you pay for”. As more RPA vendors claim that you can automate for less, it’s important to understand what your future-state will look like.
Do you need to only run 1 to 2 automations, and you’re certain? Are those automations dependent on only 1 or 2 systems? Does it require any Natural Language Processing, human interaction points and can you be confident there will never be any fringe cases?
There are many preliminary assessments that need to be taken before you deploy a tool that may not be able to support your needs. It’s so critical, that UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and others have developed process discovery tools to aid with the development of automation bots.
Forrester and Gartner decided that UiPath, alongside Automation Anywhere, Microsoft Power Automate, and 13 other vendors were worthy of their scrutiny because of these reasons, and so many more. In fact, the RPA Forrester Wave report bases its evaluation on 25-criterion. Here’s a quick glimpse as to some reasons why we agree with their assessments.
CURRENT OFFERING
Criteria spotlight: Discovery, bot ideation, portfolio, Document Understanding, and ROI
As said already, UiPath has created a process discovery tool and we love it. The Automation Hub is a great crowdsourcing mechanism to step business users through the necessary requirements to fully flesh out their automation idea. You grade the complexity of your idea, supply any documents, and even record the steps if so inclined. We use it internally ourselves for Smartbridge’s own bot discovery.
Along with UiPath’s Document Understanding component, PDFs, emails, webpages, and images can be read, classified, extracted into a readable format, and then uploaded to their AI Center to be validated. Document Understanding utilizes optical character recognition (OCR) and AI to obtain text from documents, analyze the text, and then provide the desired output.
A glimpse at a part of the Forrester Wave scorecard and some of the criteria for scoring.
STRATEGY
Criteria spotlight: Partner ecosystem
There’s no way to NOT toot our own horn on this one, but Smartbridge is a UiPath Certified Professional Services partner. This credential was created by UiPath last year to step select partners through extensive requirements. When their customers spend 2-5x more on the services than the licenses, you want to get it right the first time.
MARKET PRESENCE
Criteria spotlight: Enterprise RPA customers
In their short six years, the most impressive thing of all is just how many Fortune 1000 companies have put their trust in UiPath. We all know that the big guys aren’t usually biting at the bit to be alpha testers on anything. And the significant role that RPA plays in serious business processes can mean everything (remember how a simple decimal placement mistake almost sent Peter to prison in Office Space?).
UiPath has a great rolodex of clients – LexisNexis, Nielsen, Skanska…. though we have to say, our own UiPath + Smartbridge portfolio is nothing to sneeze at!
From just the few highlighted criteria above, it’s easy to see how UiPath has gained the top spot in the RPA space. As an automation service provider, we’re excited to see where all of these RPA leaders are going and what’s next for the industry as a whole.
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Keep Reading: UiPath Document Understanding
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