{audio:0:00:13} Daniel, can you share a short introduction about your background and specific role within RPA?

{audio:0:00:20} I’m a digital transformation executive management consultant. I have 20 years of experience; I’ve worked for big firms, like Accenture, IBM, EPAM Systems. For the past four and a half years, I’ve been at HealthRede which is a smaller advisory services firm, focused on developing commercial and enterprise artificial intelligence capabilities.

{audio:0:00:45} How do RPA solutions fit in, within the digital transformation landscape?

{audio:0:00:50} Machine learning, robotic process automation, computer vision, natural language processing are all the major solution components of artificial intelligence capabilities. RPA is vital, because it has both front-end and back-end components to it; it’s almost like a middleware service, in some respects. They are all important but, as far as customer and marketing adoption of various solutions, RPA is at the forefront, in terms of what I see for commercial adoption of AI technologies.

{audio:0:01:35} What’s the median cost saving or efficiency gains for a customer that adopts an RPA solution, roughly?

{audio:0:01:44} It varies, but the beauty of RPA is that, of all the AI technologies and capabilities that are coming to market, it’s probably the easiest, in terms of quantifying a business case or a value case. Most people, when they do a vendor assessment and implementation process, because you are either augmenting or replacing human labor, they calculate what sort of returns they are looking for. I’ve seen numbers anywhere from 10% to 50% in acceleration of velocity, as well as cost take out. If you’re talking about a claims processing unit of a healthcare company and they have in excess of 100 claims processors, if you can eliminate 10% or 20% of those resources and replace it with RPA solutions, the business case is pretty clear and demonstrable.

{audio:0:02:49} How do you compare the major players in the market?

{audio:0:02:53} It’s a pretty narrow market. If you look at other areas of AI, it’s a crowded place. Right now, in the RPA space, there are a big three or four. Those are UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and then Pega is the fourth outlier. Then you’ve got other smaller firms, like Kofax. Right now, in the enterprise landscape, when customers or prospects are evaluating the market space and they are interested in an RFI or RFP type situation, it’s really those big three. I think there will be innovators that, potentially, come to market and join the ranks. Certainly, Pega is climbing up and maybe it’s a big four, in that respect. But it is a small cohort.

{audio:0:03:54} How do the big three compete?

{audio:0:03:57} They all have niche areas. UiPath is probably the most recognizable brand. They came to market at roughly the same time as Blue Prism, but they have different trajectories. The way I would segment the big four is that UiPath is probably the simplest to deploy and to use. It is very user friendly; anyone who knows how to use Excel can start building bots, in UiPath, with a minimal learning curve.

{audio:0:04:47} Automation Anywhere is very different, in the sense that it is more script based, so there is actual coding involved. Whereas both UiPath and Blue Prism have visual UIs, that non-developers can use to create bots. That’s the primary difference between them. I would say that UiPath is probably more user friendly than Blue Prism, even though they are in the same sphere.

{audio:0:05:18} Pega is slightly different. They are more focused on the workflow side, at the moment. You can build bots in Pega, as well, but it’s a more slowly-evolved capability. Where UiPath and these other guys started off in the bot development and automation space, Pega was very much more on business process management and workflow. They bolted on the bot capability, as an addendum. But they are catching up and they have a large market presence. For them, it’s pretty easy to upsell and cross-sell RPA solutions, so they are certainly a contender in the marketplace.

{audio:0:06:06} Are these solutions all on-premise or are there some that are cloud-native?

{audio:0:06:12} They all have different scenarios. You can do on-premise and cloud with all of them. That’s one of the unique aspects of the RPA space, because I feel as if, right now, with a lot of innovative technologies, it’s all cloud first and, sometimes, there is no on-premise component. Within RPA, because of the nature of the technology and the evolution paths, they do have the dual scenarios. I think that is a good thing because everyone is on this relentless march to the cloud and migrating as many apps and services as possible, but there are different levels of maturity, adoption and evolution in the market. Being able to sustain both environments is important, especially in the RPA space, because not everybody, in their market domain, are cloud innovators, so they need to have an on-premise solution, in order to be viable.

{audio:0:07:22} How, exactly, does the technology work, in terms of how the software agents are deployed or the desktop or client, to operate the bot?

{audio:0:07:32} There are both front-end and back-end components. On the front-end, I would say that it is not very different from an Excel Macro. They have created front-end development scripts that have certain services and APIs. They are, basically, observing your behavior. When you talk about RPA, the process mining component is very important. You can have a user go in and say, these are the 10 routine things that I do every single day; I just want to automate that away. But more often than not, you have a scenario where an organization says, what are my options or what is the value case for deploying RPA? Where are the processes that exist today that are highly repetitive, low skill and can, potentially, be automated? That’s where the process mining is a big component.

{audio:0:08:40} Very recently, UiPath actually acquired an exclusively process mining company. Now UiPath has both capabilities in various commercially-evolved forms. They all have some version of process mining, but it’s the degree of sophistication and capability that, I think, is somewhat differentiated.

{audio:0:09:04} How does process mining work?

{audio:0:09:06} It’s a database process where they are going in and looking at users and steps that they take and surfacing high-volume phenomenon. Basically, it’s pattern development. It’s the same way that, when you do business intelligence reports and analytics, you are surfacing heat maps of common phenomenon or typical phenomenon and you start off in that same manner, where you are identifying common processes. Then you have to do some due diligence and analysis, to see linkages between related processes, to see what is a business process that can, potentially, be automated or augmented with a bot.

{audio:0:10:02} So there is a process mining part, at the beginning, where the vendor has to work with the customer, to understand which processes to automate. Then you feed them through the software and almost write scripts, to automate those processes?

{audio:0:10:26} You can think of a bot as the commercial software manifestation of what was commonly referred to as service-oriented architecture, for 10 years; everyone wanted to be SOA. The basic point was, you were going to decompose core technology processes, within your organization, as a service, as opposed to having it bundled specifically within an application, such as a CRM. You would then have a Chinese menu of services that different business constituents could call and invoke and leverage. That was a great theory, but it was very hard to commercialize that IT process.

{audio:0:11:20} RPA is the realization of that dream, in many respects because a bot is a dumbed down application, which is a user manageable application, that is the manifestation of what those services are. That’s the linkage between those two.

{audio:0:11:41} If the architecture, in terms of the cloud and, partly on-premise is, typically, the same for all the players, what is really differentiated about a product that is offered in the RPA space?

{audio:0:11:55} I don’t know if you’ve heard of the notion of low-code and no-code solutions? But the degree to which you are masking the technical complexity of building a bot is, I think, somewhat unique. In my opinion, in UiPath, it is very easy to get a bot up and running. For Automation Anywhere, it is not as easy and I think that is because it is meant for a slightly different audience. In my experience, Automation Anywhere is probably a better fit for IT or more tech-savvy groups. If you are a claims processing group and you are trying to automate very mundane document management processes, UiPath makes a lot of sense, because you can get it up and running with almost no technical savvy, with just a handful of clicks.

{audio:0:13:04} Automation Anywhere is meant more to do IT type workloads, where you are orchestrating processes and developing business logic. It’s more than just drag and drop and click, to get a bot up and running. There is actual coding involved.

{audio:0:13:26} What is it about UiPath that enables that ease of use and deployment?

{audio:0:13:34} It’s the way that they’ve built the solution. The same way that, when you use an iPhone, it has a certain user experience, as compared to a Nokia phone. It’s about how the actual software is solutioned. What sort of functionality is enabled to an end user, versus what has to be configured by that end user? Automation Anywhere is different because there is more flexibility with the solution, as far as what you can actually customize, because you have more control over the actual capabilities and services, because you are scripting it.

{audio:0:14:21} Whereas in a UiPath model, and also for Blue Prism, it’s a configuration tool, where there are set parameters that you are choosing from. It’s like drop-down menus and you are clicking buttons. In Automation Anywhere, you are, basically, writing script and customizing it to a much greater degree than you are with the alternative solutions.

{audio:0:14:48} I assume that most of the dollars in the addressable market are from the no-code or non-developer use case, rather than the heavy, more complex processes?

{audio:0:15:06} True. If you look at the revenue of UiPath versus Automation Anywhere, UiPath has more than double the revenue. There is a larger addressable market, in that sense. However, if you look at growth and adoption, I believe that Automation Anywhere is growing at a pretty healthy clip. It’s one of those instances where the initial commercial use cases of the solution were form-fit more properly for end users, as opposed to IT type resources. But it’s slowly moving and evolving in that direction, as well.

{audio:0:15:54} How does the level of configuration, at Blue Prism, compare to UiPath?

{audio:0:16:01} If you were to do a user assessment and have a prospect pilot both solutions, I think the overall assessment would be that UiPath was functionally more robust and more user friendly. Whereas Blue Prism is a bit more limited in capabilities and facets. You could argue, probably, that Blue Prism is somewhat easier to use, in that respect, because there is less functionality and when you have more, it’s just more information to digest; a simpler console is a good metaphor. But by and large, in my experience, through assessments with clients, from a non-IT end-user perspective, UiPath seems to get more favorable reviews from customers and prospects.

{audio:0:16:58} Typically, which customers choose Blue Prism and UiPath?

{audio:0:17:02} I can’t say that there is a representative sampling of the types of customers. There are many different factors that go into those sort of configurations. For example, one area where Blue Prism would win, every time, is if you are an on-premise IT shop and you have client server architecture, pre-cloud, then hands down, Blue Prism is your best solution. That is their native soil. It’s a much stronger solution and you are familiar with the technology architecture and the metaphors. In that instance, I think Blue Prims wins, nine out of 10 times. That profile of market prospects is slowly diminishing over time, even though, in the mid-market and SMB there is still plenty of organizations that fit that profile.

{audio:0:18:11} I saw that Blue Prism purchased Thoughtonomy last year, as a cloud solution bolt on, to plug the gap in their offering.

{audio:0:18:22} Are these on-premise solutions under pressure from either upstart new competitors entering with a cloud-native RPA solution, or even the existing public cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure and Google, venturing into that world and offering some kind of automated RPA or workflow process?

{audio:0:18:52} This is where it’s a bit like religion; there are people in the industry that argue that, if you don’t have a commercially viable cloud solution, your days are numbered; it’s like peak oil. Then there are others that argue that what goes up, invariably comes back down and it’s an ongoing process. So cloud migration becomes hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, so you want to have dual capabilities, in that instance.

{audio:0:19:28} I can’t say, definitively – and I don’t think anyone can – what the right solution is. I think, having more capabilities is probably better as long as you can, effectively, control your costs and scale both accordingly and that remains to be seen. To your point, regarding the Blue Prism acquisition, acquisitions have a 50% success rate. I think it is to be determined what the ultimate fate of that integration looks like. But I do think, strategically, it was probably the right move, because now they are in contention in many more RPA type competitive situations. In the past, they would have, necessarily, been black-boxed out of specific RFI or RFP situations, because they didn’t have that capability.

{audio:0:20:25} How do the big cloud providers compete with the RPA vendors?

{audio:0:20:27} I think, what invariably happens is that the Microsofts, the Amazons and the Oracles will either end up building their own capabilities or they will acquire a start-up or maybe even one of these companies. If you’re Amazon, you can buy Automation Anywhere. Typically, what I’ve seen in the market is that those type of M&A activities are dependent on clear, demonstrable market demand, over time. These vendors and solutions have been in the market for 15 years and the demand has gone up. Obviously, if you look at the cohort and the market cap and share of all of them, it’s a very large market. I can’t quite say when or if an Amazon, a Microsoft or an Oracle will get into the game, but presumably they will, because they are all in the AI game. If you are in the AI game, then RPA is a solution capability that you want and, perhaps, even need, if you’re trying to become a full stack, end to end, AI capabilities provider.

{audio:0:21:53} Is the industry heading more towards cognitive analytics or AI type solutions, where you really end up creating new processes, rather than just replacing old ones, which is, obviously, a bit more machine-learning AI based, rather than the old on-prem solutions which, as you said, have been around for the last 20 years?

{audio:0:22:17} Yes; I do think that is the ultimate trajectory. I think that’s another reason why Automation Anywhere is increasing in market awareness and adoption. The analytic capabilities that the platform provides, are very much in tune for IT executives who want to monitor their bot or app ecosystem and then refine or optimize towards greater automation. But greater automation done insightfully, through bottoms up analytics, that you are able to generate from the bots, coupled with the analytical capabilities that your platform provides.

{audio:0:23:05} Over time – I can’t speculate on the exact timeframes – if you look five or 10 years down the road, what we see right now, in front-end automation, with UiPath type capabilities, is going to become total table stakes. Most of those processes will, probably, already have become obsolete in most organizations. In that respect, what UiPath is enabling, right now, is essentially, a stepping stone towards more app automation. The concept in the industry is as follows: a bot is like a service; it’s a discrete unit of code. An app is more like when you have multiple bots strung together, that have a more robust functional capability in aggregate.

{audio:0:24:02} What we currently see with bots is going to evolve into app automation and that’s not that far off. I think, in a couple of years, we could very well see many of these unattended bots being strung together into functional apps, that come either out of the box or are very easy to build and deploy. The same way that UiPath is enabling these process workers to augment their capabilities, those process workers won’t be there. The starting point, for UiPath, will be at the app level. A lot of the bot automation will just be subsumed in the app dynamics and ecosystem.

{audio:0:24:54} This is the really difficult part of this industry, where you have to understand the core intellectual property, within the businesses, to understand where they are going to fit in, in this new automated app world, or AI based world, in five, six, seven years?

{audio:0:25:12} Agreed. Which is why the Automation Anywhere toehold in the IT domain, I think, is pretty sound. It’s the knowledge workers, in the IT domain, that understand the technology landscape, the migration paths, the innovations in various technologies. They have an idea of where these RPA solutions are meant to drive their organization. Whereas end users, that are augmenting themselves or their departments or teams, with bots, it’s a very short-term utility type play. The strategic focus is probably more important, as far as general market direction is concerned, because that is where you have greater business value and outcomes and that’s also where these vendors are making their strategic investments, as to how to scale and grow their platforms.

{audio:0:26:13} So, typically, you have these basic, back-office processes, which are almost like the equivalent of an Excel Macro, effectively, from the old solutions of Blue Prism. But then you have a shift towards more complex, automated app and AI solutions, where vendors like Blue Prism could be at risk of being leapfrogged by new players or the existing cloud provider?

{audio:0:26:48} Correct. One analogy I would use is, if you look at what Google and Microsoft are doing, right now, on the machine learning side, they are the two juggernauts. They’ve got the best MLAI for their own software and now they are commercializing those algorithms, for consumption by customers. They are genericizing them and creating AI utilities that people can buy off the shelf. That solves one set of problems for customers that need AI capabilities which, I would argue, is increasingly more and more of the market and everyone is moving in that direction.

{audio:0:27:32} The RPA vendors play a key role in domains, right now, where Microsoft and Google – actually, Microsoft is a little different because they have got PowerBuilder AI, so they play in that space, as well; but Google certainly doesn’t play there – have a lily pad in the pond, that is carved out and unique and it is a necessary component, if you are moving towards automation and cognitive computing, in general.

{audio:0:28:06} There are two or three huge elephants in the room at all times for these vendors where whoever owns the ML or the AI in the industry can, effectively, roll out somewhat similar or good enough solutions, at some point in time.

{audio:0:28:26} Yes. In industry parlance, it’s called transfer learning. If you have a machine-learning algorithm that Google has optimized, they’ve spent lots of compute resources, petabytes of data, refining those algorithms. They’ve got to the point where it’s embedded in all their technology and they are stripping it down and commercializing it for resale as APIs and ML solutions, as an accelerator to other companies. Basically, that is their way of spawning transfer learning, where an algorithm that has been optimized by them, they are just reselling it and it’s somewhat commoditized, at that point.

{audio:0:29:20} It’s good and it’s bad. It’s good because now more companies have access to that advanced capability and the cost of developing the R&D is significantly lower and they are all competing. The problem is, as everyone starts adopting these solutions, what’s the point of differentiation? This is a bit like the Salesforce.com dilemma. They have market penetration into almost every large enterprise you can think of, as well as many SMBs. If everybody is on Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, how do they differentiate, in terms of their CRM offerings, to either their customers or their prospects? I think, long term, that is the bigger problem. But we’re nowhere near that yet in the RPA space, in my opinion, so there is a little bit of time to iron out those kinks.

{audio:0:30:15} Would enterprises use multiple RPA players?

{audio:0:30:20} No, I don’t think so. There is really no conceivable scenario where you would pay more than one provider, outside the political dysfunction of having different business units that have different CIOs and different technology platforms. But if you are a cohesive, integrated, highly functioning enterprise, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where you would have more than one RPA solution, because it’s redundant, at that point. It would be like having Google Docs and Microsoft Office as your office productivity tool; no one would really do that.

{audio:0:31:01} Can we just walk through a hypothetical process, of how a healthcare payer would they choose between RPA vendors?

{audio:0:31:13} The basic process is, RFI/RFP. I will use the example I actually did. The healthcare payer is looking to accelerate efficiency and cost take out, in their claims processing systems. They detail half a dozen to a dozen key use cases that they are looking to enable, through RPA technology. They do market research, to see vendors that have basic functionality in those areas. Again, they will do Gartner, Forrester, web searches and, invariably, they will come up with the list that we have been discussing and maybe a couple of outliers or innovators and they start engaging with them. They will talk to the vendor; they will start watching product demos and they start doing shortlists. Then it gets to the point of actually doing the business case. How much does an annual license cost? What does the renewal fee look like? What is the cost of implementation, if any? How easy is it for my teams to use and manage? As with any sort of business case or value case, there are many facets and dimensions that you can use. Basically, it’s like an enterprise software type evaluation process, on par with if you were doing a CRM implementation and you were trying to vet between Salesforce, Microsoft and SAP. It is almost comparable and, in some respects, as technically sophisticated as some of those more commercially evolved solution domains, such as CRM.

{audio:0:33:04} How does the relationship with the system integrator work, between the vendor and the client?

{audio:0:33:11} This is somewhat different because, in the RPA space, you don’t really need a system integrator. This is not a type of solution, like an ERP or SEM deployment, where you need to hire Infosys or Accenture, to come in and help you deploy it. The whole point of RPA solutions is that you should be able to do it internally, with your own IT resources and, in some instances, you don’t even need an IT resource.

{audio:0:33:40} UiPath covets themselves as being so user friendly that a tech-savvy business analyst can get up and running in no time. So it’s a different sort of commercial model, where these models are going to have strategic partnerships, but it’s not an SI-based model, like with other commercial software of the past.

{audio:0:34:03} So how does the commercial model, between the reseller or the tech partner work? I think a large part of Blue Prism’s business comes from an indirect or resellers channel.

{audio:0:34:35} I don’t know whether I can say, definitively, whether most of the business comes through referrals or resellers. I think there are definitely opportunities for SIs, to help midwife the deployment of RPA capabilities. But there are many organizations that can just go directly to the vendor, go to their website, reach out to a sales representative and just obtain the solutions directly. It’s slightly different, I think, in that respect.

{audio:0:35:11} If it was going to go via a consultant or an SI, it would really be just a reseller fee rather than a larger integration fee?

{audio:0:35:20} Correct. But what typically happens is, the resellers get a discount off the list price. If it’s $4,000 a year, for a UiPath license and you’re Accenture, you’re going to get a 20% markdown on that and then whatever sort of add on you do is what your cut is. The whole point of RPA is that you want to be able to stand this up pretty quickly. If you had to get an Accenture involved and it was a three to six-month affair, to get it up and running, I think you’d see the adoption curve just plummet; that’s not how it works, right now.

{audio:0:36:08} Going back to the healthcare payer example, comparing the major solutions, how does the pricing work, from UiPath versus Blue Prism, for example?

{audio:0:36:21} It’s not a SaaS model. For Blue Prism, if I remember correctly, it was something in the order of magnitude of $15,000 per year, per user. For UiPath, I think it was significantly cheaper and was something like $4,000. I think Automation Anywhere is higher, but they have more of a IT bent, so they can get away with the premium. Partly, the pricing of Blue Prism is probably one of the bottlenecks to their slower market adoption, compared to UiPath. There is a premium that you pay and I think if you do a functional capability analysis between the two vendors, you just end up getting more for less, if you go with UiPath.

{audio:0:37:11} Currently, there is still market demand for it. For Blue Prism, they have the advantage of being the only player that has a client server architecture, as a dominant mold. If that is the DNA of your IT infrastructure and organization, you will naturally go with Blue Prism. In that respect, they have a protected moat in that area. I’m not familiar with Automation Anywhere having anything comparable, so that’s a point of differentiation for Blue Prism.

{audio:0:37:50} And I’m the healthcare payer, I pay an implementation or upfront fee, and then a recurring license fee, annually?

{audio:0:37:58} It’s like a maintenance fee. Traditionally, in the software industry, it’s about 10%; it’s single digits and, at most, it’s 10%. That includes patches and software upgrades and so on. It’s like the overhead cost of the vendor providing you with the latest and greatest version. If you’re SaaS, you get it every day. If there is an upgrade, it’s seamless and whatever version you’re using, it’s always the latest and greatest.
{audio:0:38:32} But if you have a Blue Prism on-prem solution, that maintenance fee covers the cost of those upgrades and patches and so forth.

{audio:0:38:47} It seems pretty expensive. $10,000 to $15,000 per seat, per robot or per license which, I assume, then needs to be assisted, to some extent, by an employee?

{audio:0:38:59} No, it doesn’t have to be. With any RPA configuration, you can develop either attended or unattended bots. In an attended scenario, either the creator of the bot or some other resource, is monitoring more complex human tasks and workflows and is, basically, approving them. The bot is doing everything that it can, autonomously, and then it has to wait until you, the master, says, it looks good; you can move on. You can develop attended or unattended bots with any of these platforms.

{audio:0:39:38} Obviously, the better ROI is in the unattended space. But the problem with that is, it’s the long tail argument. The only services that you feel comfortable completely automating, in an unattended manner, are low-level, low-complexity type functions. It would be things like form transcription and entering claims data information on a web interface; doing business rule validations and things like that. It’s not quite table stakes, but it’s not advanced technology solutions, by any stretch of the imagination.

{audio:0:40:21} How do you look at the difference in price between UiPath and Blue Prism? The gap seems very wide.

{audio:0:40:28} Yes; it’s a pretty big variance, based on my experience. Again, if you are a mid-market healthcare company and you have an on-premise infrastructure and that is the nature of your tech stack, currently, it is the only game in town. I think that is what has kept Blue Prism afloat, over time, even though I would argue that, in aggregate, their functional and technical capabilities are not as good as UiPath or Automation Anywhere.

{audio:0:41:04} The fact that Blue Prism is almost built for on-prem architecture has given them a strong position in that market but the user interface and functionality is just not as strong as UiPath?

{audio:0:41:21} But UiPath does have an on-prem solution too?

{audio:0:41:25} You can do on-premise and cloud. They are cloud native, built for the cloud, but they have an on-premise version.

{audio:0:41:35} So UiPath is really the cloud native solution in the market?

{audio:0:41:40} Cloud native and on-prem. The same way that Blue Prism bought their way into a cloud solution, UiPath developed theirs organically. I think, when you do that, you have a more tightly integrated overall solution. In addition to the other factors that we’ve discussed, this partly explains UiPath’s popularity and greater market positioning, relative to Blue Prism.

{audio:0:42:09} How sticky are the customer relationships, once they sell in to a customer?

{audio:0:42:16} It’s pretty sticky. Once you build a bot and you deploy it and it’s functioning as you intended, you don’t go back. I have yet to come across a scenario where you deploy a bot and you roll it back, for any reason. In terms of efficiency, costs, scalability, it’s a pretty compelling value case and, as long as you get it to work – barring some sort of astronomical fee structure change, where the value of the solution would come into question because the vendors are price gouging – from a functional and capabilities perspective, you don’t go back. It becomes the new starting point for an organization, as far as their technology enablement is concerned.

{audio:0:43:08} Which is why the solutions are somewhat attractive for companies because, as you said, it might cost you $10,000 to $15,000 per robot, but if you get to replace 20%, 30% or 40% of your workforce with a bunch of these robots, the ROI is huge. You almost have that solution permanently, in workflow?

{audio:0:43:32} Think of it this way: if you’re one of the larger P&C insurers, you could, potentially, have hundreds, if not thousands, of claims processors and claims adjusters. If you could use a handful of bots, to even just take very low hanging fruit and table stakes tasks, and replace that for all of those claims processors and adjusters, in aggregate, it’s a huge business benefit. That is why you are not going to scale back and, if anything, you are more likely to dial up the consumption. You are going to look for more areas to create bots and automate processes, because the business case is almost self-justifying.

{audio:0:44:27} In your experience, do you believe that those insurers or payers will look to shift some of those processes to the cloud and leapfrog the potential solution that the likes of Blue Prism could offer?

{audio:0:44:44} When it comes to back-end data processing, yes, it’s very likely that, once the cloud capabilities are mature and there’s actually a user solution that they can use to manipulate and manage and design those processes; I think that’s a potential threat. That is why you have always got the Microsofts and the Googles lurking in the background. But it’s not there yet. You still need to have these front-end components. Right now, there is plenty of market share and opportunity there.

{audio:0:45:28} If we all believe around 25% or more of workload will migrate to the cloud, what would be the scenario for the RPA vendors? Do the enterprises just get rid of the old on-prem licenses? Or would they adopt the cloud version of them? How do you see that playing out?

{audio:0:46:05} If I’m a salesman for Blue Prism, what I’m going to tell you is, we can support both environments now. What you should probably do is just deploy bots, as necessary, in your organization, to the respective environments that you need, and allow us to scale the solution for you. You don’t need to worry about an inevitable migration. That’s the whole point and probably one of the compelling value props of Blue Prism is that they can support dual environments, regardless of your evolutionary path, maturity curve, as far as cloud adoption goes. We can support you sufficiently and adequately, in both domains, however you need. You don’t even have to think about migration; you just have to think about support and functional capabilities being properly aligned.

{audio:0:47:02} Going back to that persistent risk, I imagine that, as these companies do move to the cloud and Azure, GCP or AWS is the offering, they might have something that would be much cheaper or even just bundled into the infrastructure price; there could be a good enough solution?

{audio:0:47:26} Amazon always does that. They always have a much cheaper solution. But they are very cryptic and not user friendly. The whole notion of an end user, independently standing up a bot, just by signing up and logging in, it’s not on the radar and there is no past precedent of Amazon, for example, having done that.

{audio:0:47:56} Google, in comparison, in the enterprise domain, they have a pretty limited market penetration. Microsoft, obviously, is the larger consideration and if Oracle were to get into this space or certainly Salesforce, they are more worrisome in that respect. In fact, if you look at what Salesforce is doing with their whole Einstein initiative and Customer 360, they are full bore moving towards an AI-based platform, so it is only a matter of time, as these vendors go to market with them right now, before RPA capabilities are somehow embedded in a Salesforce type solution.

{audio:0:48:41} How do you see vendors upsell customers more licenses or bigger contracts? Is that a natural evolution of the product?

{audio:0:48:51} By and large, what I’ve seen is that it is a self-fulfilling business case. Once you start deploying bots, they work. They absolutely work, they are easy to use, easy to manage. It’s a solution that sells itself, just based on the value and the utility of the actual functions. They will get a toehold into a specific department or business unit or product area and then it’s an organic land and expand type model for these vendors, where the actual functional capability of the solution sells itself.

{audio:0:49:36} What do you think is the biggest risk for a company like Blue Prism?

{audio:0:49:40} Right now, for Blue Prism, their primary issue is that there are clear market leaders ahead of them and they don’t have a differentiated and innovative solution, in comparison. They only have a couple of options, I think, as far as securing longevity. They have to acquire another company, to leapfrog a new capability or they are going to have to throw a Hail Mary and hope that they innovate something that gains market traction. Currently, I see them as being in a precarious situation, in that respect.

{audio:0:50:29} You are referring to the likes of UiPath and Automation Anywhere having some kind of advantage in functionality or being cloud native, that’s easier to adopt?

{audio:0:50:39} I think, first to market, as an innovator, is always a coveted position. There is a reason why we use Google Search, as opposed to AltaVista or Excite. Google built the best mousetrap and they developed a head start that you just couldn’t catch up with. I’m of the opinion that UiPath and Automation Anywhere probably have a sufficient lead on Blue Prism, right now, that if I were an investor, I probably wouldn’t invest in Blue Prism. The opportunity for customers and prospects, however, is different. You don’t care about their stock price; you care about functional capability and total cost of solution. That’s where you have to weigh that balance.

RPA Software: Blue Prism, UiPath, & Automation Anywhere

How RPA software is deployed at the client

The difference between on-premise and cloud-native solutions

Why UiPath has an advantage over Blue Prism

Pricing differences between Blue Prism and UiPath

What drives differentiation in RPA software

Potential competitive risk from cloud providers

RPA Software: Blue Prism, UiPath, & Automation Anywhere

Former VP at Accenture and EPAM Systems

inpractise.com/articles/rpa-software-prsm-uipath-aa

Why is this interview interesting?

RPA Software: Blue Prism, UiPath, & Automation Anywhere(September 25, 2020)

Daniel Song

Former VP at Accenture and EPAM Systems

Interview Transcript

Daniel Song

Former VP at Accenture and EPAM Systems

Audio

RPA Software: Blue Prism, UiPath, & Automation Anywhere(September 25, 2020)