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Nowhere in the Business Process Services (BPS) landscape are the waves of disruption as potentially high as in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), where software robots remove the need for humans to perform routine rules-based back office tasks.
RPA tools can also do away with the need for traditional ERP system integration (SI) projects that aim to get systems ‘talking to one another’ by enabling data to be extracted from and into different systems automatically.
In both cases, the addressable spend to BPS providers and systems integrators is vast – worth over £10bn in 2015 according to our estimates. RPA is small in revenue terms today, but it is already having a disruptive deflationary impact on manual BPS operations spend, and this looks set to extend into the SI arena too.
In our initial report into the BPA sector Business Process Automation – a brave new world for BPS providers we introduced RPA, and highlighted how it had caught many incumbent BPS providers by surprise. Two years on, we now see a huge fight-back by BPS players via partnerships - e.g. Sopra Steria, Accenture, HCL and IBM partnering with industry pioneer Blue Prism (see here and work back) and Capgemini, HP and Deloitte with UiPath - to show that they are ready and willing to deliver the kind of step change in productivity and performance for their customers offered by RPA.
RPA poses significant threats to incumbent BPS providers. But there is also huge opportunity too as we see RPA broadening its application over the coming years, becoming more strategic in tackling system interoperability and process silos across the enterprise.
Subcribers to TechMarketView's BusinessProcessViews research service can read our analysis of the who's who in RPA and opportunities and challenges for suppliers in Part Three of our series into BPA here: Business Process Automation: Opportunities in the Robotic Revolution.
If you don't yet subscribe please contact Deb Seth dseth@techmarketview.com who will be happy to help.
Posted by John O'Brien at '15:48' - Tagged: robotics
