17 January 2018
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From AI and software robots to new security techniques such as isolation, which hot tech start-ups could break through this year? We asked execs at 10 resellers, from cyber-security and cloud specialists to big players such as Daisy and Softcat, for their tips
Thoughtonomy
Founded: 2013
HQ: London
Field: Robotic process automation
Cheerleader: Scott Dodds, Ultima Business Solutions
Thoughtonomy may be one of the youngest and smallest firms on this list, but the cognitive robotic process automation (RPA) market in which it plays was this month touted as a potential $3.6bn (£2.6bn) market by 2026 by analyst BIS Research.
Among its proponents is Scott Dodds, CEO of £100m-revenue reseller and MSP Ultima Business Solutions, which has just begun touting Thoughtonomy to clients after completing a two-year internal rollout of its technology.
"That's the technology that's having the biggest impact on our business right now," Dodds (pictured) said.
"This is not a product we are selling, but something we are doing."
Dodds said RPA can be used to free up employees from carrying out mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex and worthwhile activities.
"RPA has been around for a while as a concept, but typically in the past it's been big on-premise systems that require a lot of heavy lifting," he explained.
"Because this is all SaaS delivered - in this case it sits on the Microsoft Azure cloud - it's much faster to deploy, test and run, so the RoI is much quicker once you've identified the right processes and activities to go after. We started this journey a year or two ago, and as we went through it we realised this is something we should be doing with our customers once we've learned how to do it ourselves."
Click onto the next page to read Trilogy Technologies' MD Edel Creely's top tech tip for 2018
