Can RPA Break Free of the Hype Cycle?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one of the hottest areas in the technology industry right now, so why would one of the biggest RPA specialists, UiPath, be laying people off rather than hiring as fast as they can? This was the surprise news when UiPath fired 400 employees (from a total of about 3,200) even when the company was valued at over $7 billion after a recent healthy funding round.

UiPath has defended the cuts by saying that they were all strategic. A comment in VentureBeat points out that there are over 90 open jobs at UiPath right now and these cuts really just reflect the end of a period of manic growth – it’s time to step back and ensure that everyone is focused on strategic growth.

Speaking to Information Age, Phil Fersht, founder and CEO at HFS Research, said: “UiPath is realising to its cost that intelligent automation is a marathon, not a sprint. It pushed the hype around RPA far too aggressively.”

There are many opinions swirling around, but as these commentators suggest, growth in RPA has been extremely fast. There are many different suppliers all competing in the same market and it’s simply not feasible to have over 20 software companies all offering the same – or a very similar service.

It’s easy to see why RPA has been hyped by the media and the software companies supplying RPA systems. There is a huge growth in interest in this technology and there are a large number of suppliers all competing for market share. The first to grab a large proportion of market share is most likely to succeed.

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Photo by Mike Mozart licensed under Creative Commons