Meet the three vendors leading the way with RPA

Analyst Gartner names UK firm Blue Prism and fast-growing UiPath among market leaders

Warrington-based Blue Prism and cash magnet UiPath have been named as leaders in Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant for robotic process automation (RPA).

Joining them as a Leader is Automation Anywhere, which raised $550m (£439m) in Series A funding last year.

Gartner evaluated the vendors in its Magic Quadrant on their performance in 2018 and their completeness of vision for the coming years.

"As a market, RPA is still relatively small, with a total revenue of slightly less than $850m in 2018," the analyst said.

"However, RPA is the fastest-growing software sub-segment officially tracked by Gartner, with year-over-year growth of more than 63 per cent in 2018."

UiPath recently claimed to be the "fastest-growing enterprise software company in history", so far raising $1bn in investment and has recently hinted at an IPO.

The analyst praised its "well-structured partner ecosystem", a platform that allows intuitive use for a wide range of user profiles and its high customer satisfaction rating.

Fellow Leader Blue Prism was acknowledged by Gartner for being one of the first vendors to describe RPA as a market. It praised its marketing execution, partner engagement and strong verticalisation strategy as its strengths.

Blue Prism acquired fellow British RPA firm Thoughtonomy last month.

Thoughtonomy was given an "Honourable Mention" by the analyst firm, as it was not included in the research because it did not meet some of the inclusion criteria.

The majority of the 18 vendors included in the Quadrant are labelled as Niche Players, which includes NTT, Datamatics, Kofax and AutomationEdge.

Only two companies, EdgeVerve Systems and NICE, are considered Challengers in the space, while Another Monday, Pegasystems and Another Monday fill out the Visionaries segment.

"RPA has effectively bypassed the traditional IT buyer, appealing directly to business users, with its emphasis on resource reduction, easy efficiency and accessibility of the scripting environments," stated the report.

"Given the rapid evolution of the prevailing business climate, business executives are finding it increasingly difficult to understand why they need to wait for IT to integrate their existing technology solutions.

"The net result is a tremendous pent-up demand to democratise process automation and data integration."

Gartner recently predicted that RPA would hit $1.3bn in global revenue this year.