#43 The latest from Appian, Blue Prism and celonis, The Automation Guys Intelligent Automation...

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. This week we are back onto the news and yeah, there's plenty of activity in the market as always when we do the news roundup. Plenty to share with you on what's happening in the automation space. Arno, do you want to kick off with were some very interesting developments in the automation space.

Yeah, of course. Thanks, Sasha. We've heard a lot about private equity play with inside automation, and it was recently announced that the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners made one of their biggest acquisitions by buying Blue Prism. And of course, Blue Prism is one of the big 3 RPA firms in the world. And the deal is estimated to be worth around $1.5 billion. Now Vista, it's interesting, they made a few acquisitions in the past in, in the sort of the, the low-code, no-code, and also the, the health tech RPA space in the past. And so I think that they're probably going to use Blue Prism to, you know, enhance their overall automation play. Now, just briefly on Blue Prism itself, we think that, you know, if you look at the Vista Equity's acquisition of it, I think it probably won't come as a surprise. But if you look at the overall sort of acquisition by private equity firms in this sort of the just in the last 2 years alone, you know, the deal size was over $46 billion. So there's been a sharp increase in these types of acquisitions. And, you know, just in that period of time, there's about 20 private equity-led acquisitions of automation firms. So it's an incredible trend that we're seeing. And, you know, I think this will probably continue into 2022. And of course, you know, if you look at Blue Prism itself, there's been quite a few, you know, areas that's been highlighted in terms of its performance and the, you know, the lack thereof, you know, lack of the holistic focus on automation, the fact that, you know, they've got a relatively sort of low market share in APAC, for example, high spend on sales and marketing, you know, higher sort of cost for customer retention. And so hopefully, I think what will happen is that with this acquisition, you know, the Avista will sort of stabilize the ship, as it were. And it will be a very interesting time, you know, next year or the year after that to see where they go with Blue Prism. But yeah, $1.3 billion deal size, quite sizable. And I think obviously the automation space is quite a hot space at this point. If we look at the stats for private equity firms, you know, buying up these companies and adding it to their portfolio.

Well, yeah, thank you, Arno, for going through this one. Yeah, I'm looking forward to see more of those things happening in the market. Generally, we see consolidations in the market where some larger vendors are buying smaller vendors, but the other private equity spiel there is probably not so obvious to many. So yeah, hopefully Blue Prism can then perform better going forward. They obviously— so when we had our sort of Forrester review on the RPA software vendors a couple of months ago, Blue Prism was even out of the sort of the leaders area, isn't it? So that— so it was with Gartner, they are still in, in the leaders, but they, they're dropping down sort of in this area. And hopefully they get back sort of really firm into the leadless quadrant. So they had plenty of investments made in sort of further development of the product, 2020, 2021. So I guess a few of these features we will see in the latest versions or in the upcoming versions. Version 7 is already a big improvement indeed.

Yeah, well, if you just look at Blue Prism stock prices from January this year till September, it has been under pressure. I think it's around about 34% lower than January. So I think no doubt that there was a bit of pressure there. So like you said, you know, hopefully with some of the new innovations that's coming through this acquisition, you know, we might see some, something stabilizing. And, you know, Blue Prism sort of excelling again and getting itself in front of those analyst waves and those reports.

It is a very busy market around the RPA vendors. Many years ago it was quite clear, it was Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath obviously. But now they are left and right, there are new vendors popping up and other bigger vendors are, yeah, buying smaller vendors and suddenly they appear sort of more mature in the market. Yeah, definitely lots of activities here and that's why Blue Prism is being active here. So maybe we can jump in one of the most recent news on the Blue Prism side. So Blue Prism introduced the Intelligent Automation Productivity Solution Suite for Amazon Web Services, which allows customers to build sort of more solutions for the front office, sales, business operations, and making sort of the move to a center of excellence more easy and to make those centers of excellence more agile and more compliant and more productive across sort of the larger enterprises. So that's one of the most recent Blue Prism news. Do you like to share other news on the RPA side?

Yes, of course. We're looking at sort of RPA vendors that are accelerating their cloud-based RPA capabilities. And also a company called Connexium also announced they're launching a new platform called the Connexium Platform. And that's of course, you know, their next generation of cloud-based automation technology. And, you know, this is expected to automate business processes within sort of supply chain and accounts payable, you know, so that sort of extended RPA capabilities. Edgeworth as well, Edgeworth Systems, you know, they have just released their latest version of their cloud-based RPA platform called AssistEdge. And of course, you know, this platform is designed to support, you know, large-scale process automation programs for global enterprises. Salesforce also announced the launch of this new MuleSoft service trace tool called MuleSoft RPA. And of course, MuleSoft already integrates with various different systems, you know, within Salesforce Service Cloud. But this, this RPA offering will just, you know, add another dimension to that, you know, to these existing capabilities. And then Laserfinge, and they are a business process automation provider. They've recently announced the launch of a cloud-based document management and process automation solution for the EMEA region. And, you know, this, this supports enterprise digital resilience strategies. So it's just kind of a brief roundup of, again, some of the RPA capabilities of these, these, these major vendors and what they're up to.

And of course, we are not talking about RPA here on the Process and Automation Podcast. So in our news roundup as well, we look at the low-code and no-code platforms which are very popular in the market, and, and also in these In these specific software categories, low-code, no-code, there has been plenty of activity recently in the market, acquisitions happening and further investments. So it's really interesting to see what those platforms are adding in terms of capability and they're adding these new capabilities to win new customers in the enterprise field mainly, or the big vendors to increase their enterprise productivity. So the big, the big guy in the market is Appian, of course. Appian announces the availability of the latest version of the Appian low-code automation platform. And the new version offers new functionalities for the automation of user interfaces and connected systems and working with data, the so-called low-code data these days, to make, to make access accessing these data pools across several applications much easier than it used to be. And yeah, so that's, that's one, one big news here. Anvil, a paperwork automation platform, launched their workflows no-code tool that, that, yeah, that will help companies remove from the complexity and of course the frustration from proper paperwork and PDF documents. So yeah, so that will be, will be interesting to see how that stands out in the market going forward. The next one is Createio announced a new strategic alliance with Low Code Labs to, yeah, to help them, it's growth in Australia and Yeah, so that new partnership will focus on helping business across different industries. Yeah, always there, no-code workflow automation and low-code, no-code. There's no way you can ignore that going forward, right, Arno?

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we talk a lot on this program about the sort of next generation of developers and Claris, the low-code platform provider. And they announced a new initiative where, and they call it the Low-Code Accelerator Program. And what it's designed to do is increase, you know, diversity in, you know, technology and business ownership. And this particular program from Claris really aims to equip students with operational and technical training on the Claris low-code development platform. Which is great news. I think there's a lot more space in the market to launch these specific initiatives, especially at universities, bring that into the curriculum, get low-code into the mainstream. And there's another company called Fix, and they are digital customer experience platform provider, and they've just announced the release of FixCX Automation, and this is their automation platform, and it focuses really on sort of the customer experience side of things. And, you know, of course, the platform aims to empower these business users and professionals alike to securely automate customer-centric processes without coding or developer support. So of course, we always talk about the citizen developer, so it looks like FIX is really sort of pushing forward on that with their latest release. And then lastly, Salesforce also announced some new capabilities for their Einstein Automation Solution. And, you know, this will allow sort of users of various experience level to take take advantage of low-code tools and automate these manual business processes and of course integrate data across their company systems.

Oh wow, so it's plenty, plenty of stuff again. And yeah, it never continues with these automation vendors. So some of them might have started just with BPM, some of them have been, have started with RPA. But yeah, nowadays with intelligent automation and all the requirements to, to look at the end-to-end process. All of those vendors clearly they want to, to add more and more capabilities to cater for sort of the whole requirements customers have so they don't have to go to several vendors to, to solve the problem. And yeah, so the other automation vendors out there, they built specifically AI capabilities into their product to drive so that, that differentiation. And one of them is well known is IBM IBM Watson. So IBM Watson launched new automation features for customer services to help business to use artificial intelligence and natural language processing more and to really make that first customer contact more successful. The next one is also quite well known. Recently was their $1 billion investment they have received to increase sort of business execution and enterprise capacity. So Celonis has established now its own center of expertise, Celonis Labs, for developing new solutions. And that lab will focus on new ideas, technologies such as, yeah, so the AI technologies and augmented and virtual reality. So that, that would be interesting to see how that goes into that program, into, into their application, especially augmented and virtual reality in regards to process mining. Quite, quite interesting, looking forward to that. And yeah, DataRobot, you will see that more and more coming up, I guess, in the future. So they unveiled the DataRobot AI Cloud, so they have built sort of the new unified environment for what they say is sort of the next generation of intelligent businesses. And those new capabilities, yeah, will help companies' operations build more AI-powered applications. Yeah, so as always, all of those new capabilities will, will help business to, to, to do business better and improve all the outcomes.

Yeah, and it's interesting. I think that the scope and the market for automation is just increasing, um, you know, and I think the evidence is there with, with private equity firms getting in on the action with, with, with, um, all of these acquisitions that we recently seen. We can see the vendors are actually investing in, um, their RPA capabilities, their their product suites. We see even advancements still in low-code with all of these programs coming out for enablement and to become— to bring it even more mainstream. And of course, you know, vendors investing in AI. So I think, you know, the market is huge, and I think it will just grow. I think, you know, now that we sort of are coming out of pandemic, there's probably a lot of lessons learned for businesses to adopt automation, to embrace automation, to think automation first. And I think, you know, the news we've covered today is sort of really a reflection on, you know, that sort of the climate out there for automation and, you know, the amount of new technology that is being developed and also like I said, with, with the private equity firms getting in on the action. So very exciting times. I think the market will still just grow. You know, we, we see a lot of inquiries of automation, of projects of all sizes. People curious about low-code, people curious about how robotics and digital workforce can, can help them to scale their businesses, to optimize their operations. To cut costs, you know, use of AI to make, to drive better outcomes, autonomous decision-making. Yes, it's a very exciting time to be involved with automation and to be in this space. And, you know, I think that, you know, 2020 is certainly going to be a very, very interesting year as we get out of the pandemic, you know, some of the initiatives, the projects that that, you know, we'll be getting involved with. And, you know, some of the customers will help to bring these automations into their business.

And if you find sort of the choice quite difficult, yeah, reach out to Arno and myself on all the digital channels, social channels, on our website theautomationguys.net. Reach out to us and Ask us any question on all these vendors out there and we can give you demos, trials. We know the market for more than 20 years now and can give you really good understanding of what maybe is needed in your specific use case and business case. So yeah, thank you very much for listening. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!

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