If RPA is Dead, who pays the Insurance claim? ??
RPA is still Alive but there are few Analysts & vendor alliances will surely kill RPA with a lot of Hype!
Yes, you have heard me right RPA is still alive and if you would have seen the recent trend people started campaigning for second wave of Automation or Intelligent Automation and this is because most of the RPA projects were at standstill & Customers have started losing interest in scaling RPA.
On the other hand, Vendors & Analyst doesn’t want Customers to be left behind with their budget & interest so they say another wave is coming better gear up just to have them ENGAGED!
It all started No code/Zero Code/Low code – false expectations by RPA Vendors, the truth is RPA still needs coding – Customers were blind folded with quick POCs but they couldn’t digest with huge performance issues that RPA products were creating – main reason for such issues happened because none of the RPA companies were having experience in testing all sort of scenarios to produce fool proof solutions. Every RPA product company was growing with hype and they liked it because it gave them good MONEY.
Before customers further getting in this trap of “Second wave of Automation or Intelligent Automation” one should take a step back wait for proven use cases & take a long Proof of Concept (POC), see the results and then think of advancing – this should be a golden rule and all should follow them.
RPA needs to sustain first and customer should allow the RPA vendors to compete each other but before that there are a lot of Angel Investors/equity funding spoiling the holistic growth of the beautiful product by pumping in a lot of Funding.
Recent acquisition of Thoughtnomy by BluePrism in my opinion was not a great move but RPA vendors were in constant pressure of keeping up with the market hype & fake growth curve they made quick decisions which is completely ruining the holy trend of RPA growth.
In a recent report published by Everest , we have noticed that RPA vendor companies are having Organic growth which is totally questionable. A lot of RPA companies have started a war of devaluing each other to see what freebies they shall offer which makes others void?
SAP & Oracle have set the IT industry with right examples & fair war game – they didn’t give up each other at any occasion with cheap tactics.
How can one ensure that they are not falling in the pit of Fake promises & hype marketing gimmicks?
1) Customers should take enough time to do product evaluation – a minimum of 3 to 6 months of Proof of Concept & Proof of value (value realization)
2) Ask RPA vendors for a lot of customer referrals & real use case demonstration
3) Customers should take a cluster of Consulting opinions
4) Customers should never trust or believe SI (System Integrators) decision as it’s always biased
5) Customers should also not to be greedy of expecting ROI right from the first year – it will take its own time as the Robotics industry is still maturing
6) Customers should do transparent evaluation and should give opportunity for a minimum of Five to Six vendors
On an honest note, the opinion of Analysts in claiming a vendor a LEADER is totally wrong – it takes years of efforts for someone to become a LEADER & how shall you give that credit so easily? What is the standard of any Analysts evaluation? Is there any Benchmarking defined by any statutory organizations?
All the reports favoring so called Leaders/Aspirants & star performers are all Myth!
On a Final thoughtful note RPA is still Alive and Intelligence is just a capability to the existing components not a new product all together – Beware do not fall in to the pit of any one claiming that Intelligent Automation is a new Alien in town ??
PS:
Category 1: RPA – stand alone with Desktop Automation is a big success
Category 2: RPA + OCR (structured) interactable PDF formats is a big success
Category 3: RPA + OCR (semi-structured) PDF formats is partial success
Category 4: RPA + text extraction from scanned images (unstructured) is complete unsuccess
A lot of new & emerging Automation vendors who couldn’t compete with existing competition are trying to distract one’s attention in the name of Intelligent Automation, please beware every one still uses OCR technologies behind. Building an OCR similar product requires mammoth effort and trust me that Google Tesseract is still learning to stabilize & before any Customer is trying out with any Intelligent Automation software, my humble & strong recommendation is to try out Google’s Tesseract data extraction with all types of Documents & take a decision with any vendors accordingly – this will help a lot of Customers to understand & solve a lot of Myth in Intelligent Automation claimed by a lot of Analysts & emerging vendors.
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/
Disclaimer: Opinion expressed in the above article are purely biased by the Authors thought & his experience in the RPA industry and please read at your own discretion