Specialist
Former EVP at Automation Anywhere Inc
Agenda
- Assessment of the total addressable market for RPA (robotic process automation)
- Product evolution, roadmap and sustainable value proposition across the three main RPA vendors – UiPath, Blue Prism (LON: PRSM) and Automation Anywhere
- Threat of new entrants such as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and potential threat of disintermediation for the core RPA vendors
- Potential impact of task mining and BPM [business process management] vendors entering the RPA market
Questions
1.
UiPath values its TAM at around USD 60bn. What are your thoughts on the TAM for RPA? Do you think it differs across the main RPA vendors, given how their product sets have evolved?
2.
Do you think the TAM differs across UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, given the areas of automation they are focusing on?
3.
How do the build, buy and partnering decisions of the three main RPA vendors impact their sustainable value propositions, based on RPA demand evolution?
4.
What do you think about the threats from outside players? How defensible are the positions of the RPA vendors? How disruptive do you expect Microsoft to be to the three main RPA vendors?
5.
Why don’t you think the outside players will be hugely disruptive to the established RPA players? Why won’t they just come in and take a significant amount of market share from the main RPA vendors?
6.
What is the continuous value-add of the main three RPA vendors as new platforms enter the market? Is it having an agnostic RPA vendor to tie in the different components of a single process?
7.
How significant is the threat of other, wider automation tools and platforms building out their own internal RPA capabilities and disintermediating the RPA vendors themselves? Appian says that it displaced a 40-plus bot Blue Prism installation with its RPA solution.
8.
To what extent is scalability a problem for RPA vendors? Do you expect more scenarios whereby customers who initially made a deployment of Blue Prism or another RPA vendor increasingly realise the barriers there, implement BPM [business process management] providers to map out those processes and decide they can use the RPA embedded in those BPM products?
9.
You mentioned 80% of implementations are still 10 bots or fewer and there are scalability issues with customers understanding the business processes themselves. Do you think that puts the power into the hands of the BPM or process mining providers who may acquire and build out the RPA side? Are BPM or process mining deemed higher value-add because customers understand the processes? If they can just wrap on internally built RPA, it that a higher-value proposition to a customer than using BPM or process mining from one vendor and then using UiPath or Blue Prism?
10.
How significant a threat do you think BPM or wider automation tools are for RPA? Are any of the RPA vendors in a more defensible position? UiPath acquired ProcessGold. Does that put it in a better position than others who may partner with BPM and process mining providers? Do you expect the process mining and BPM vendors to become direct competitors, or do you expect coopetition?
11.
What proportion of the customer bases for RPA vendors were acquired on a very quick basis? Do you think the growth of these RPA vendors’ customer bases will be confined to the top few customers who are able to deploy at scale? Will it be hard for RPA vendors to truly scale within the bulk of their customer bases?
12.
Do you think the net revenue retention figures you mentioned are sustainable? Is the net revenue retention on the bulk of the customer base a lot lower than for the top few customers? How sustainable is that?
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