from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation we've been reporting that the Kovan pandemic has created a bifurcated IT spending outlook legacy on print on-prem infrastructure in traditional software licensing models they're giving away two approaches that enable more flexibility in business agility automation initiatives that reduce human labor labor that's not value add has really been gaining traction for the past 18 months the pandemic has only accelerated to focus on such efforts and robotic process automation or RPA along with machine intelligence have been the beneficiaries relative to other segments of the IT stack welcome to this week's wiki Vaughn cube insights powered by ETR my name is Dave Volante and in this breaking analysis we're gonna update you on the latest demand picture for the red-hot RP a sector will also focus on two main areas today first we're gonna review the basics of the RP a space for those that may not be as familiar with the market next we'll share with you the spending data and outlook in the RT ARPA space from ETR and we're really dig into the kovat impact on this market segment and take a look at the competitive outlook we're gonna pay particular attention to the leaders in this space and then we're gonna wrap up so let me start with kind of the RPI basics if you're not familiar with our PA here's what you really need to know happy hour PA gained traction by taking software robots and pointing them at existing applications to mimic human behavior and automate repeatable and well understood processes keyboard behavior that is now a challenge with early RPA implementations is that most customers chose to point these bots at legacy backend office systems now that the open emails and fill out forms and the like so that's great because it digitizes processes around legacy systems awesome ROI but the problem is that these bots will they interact with a user interface of that application and many of these apps they really don't have an API so any change in data or the interface breaks the automation down now more recently automations are interacting to apps through api's that makes them less brittle but of course you know the quality of api's as you well know will vary so enter your machine intelligence into the equation there's been a lot of discussion around the intersection of our PA and AI and that's allowed organizations to automate more processes that do so in a way that takes an augmentation approach using things like natural language processing or speech recognition and machine learning to iterate and improve automations and you know this trend holds a lot of promise and is a lot of talk about it in the marketplace particularly in the form of really trying to understand which processes to automate and where the best ROI can be achieved for organization but it's important to note it's really still early days with this AI intersection nonetheless investors you know they're ahead of the game they've they've poured money into this space as we've been reporting now for you know well over a year or two uipath an automation anywhere have raised close to two billion dollars and have been growing very very rapidly we're gonna talk more about that existing players like blue prism they've actually benefited from the automation tailwind and other you know process business process players take for example like Pegasus Toombs I mean they started in the early 80s they've added our PA to their platform as have many others by the way including Microsoft who has barely been trying to crack into this market for a while in fact Microsoft just bought a small company called soft emotive and to really try to shore up its RP a game but you know just a quick aside in our view Microsoft is their well behind the leaders it's gonna take years for them to get where the leaders are today yeah but it's Microsoft so you don't want to ignore them now the big buzzword here is hyper automation evidently it's a torrent a coin term coined by Gartner and uipath has picked up on this in a big way and so is automation anywhere now those both those companies are in hyper growth so it plays more established companies for example pega yeah they look at the term differently you know of course their vision is Rp a is a small portion of their their their vision these established firms they want to incorporate their business process automation z' that have been built over decades into a systems view of the organization using existing platforms the upstarts of course they want to build from new platforms what's really happening in the marketplace and like in many situations is this emergence of a hybrid you know quasi-equilibrium here we saw this in mainframes who certainly you know saw it in middleware enterprise data warehouses and we've seen it in the cloud you know where most companies don't just throw away the investments that they've made in legacy systems now they're stable they're operationalized and rather what they do is they overlay the more modern technologies and they kind of create an abstraction layer of their business that incorporates the old and the new but the growth is much much higher in the new as we know it and that leads me to the TAM the total available market let's look at the RPM you know we think the TAM expansion opportunity is pretty substantial we put this chart together awhile back that really underscores that the progression of our PA from you know simple BOTS automating back-office functions to really infusing automations in virtually all applications you know if you expand the definition beyond our PA software into the broader automation opportunities the other thing about it this this could be a much much larger than depicted here maybe well over a hundred billion dollar Tam as a I powered automation becomes fundamental to every organization in their operating model anyway it's a big opportunity and the data suggests that it's growing rapidly so let's turn to the data let's look at the spending and bring ETR into the equation so which technologies are showing new adoptions in tech on balance the tech sector has done pretty well despite this pandemic at the time of this video the Nasdaq Composite is up about a point and a half year to date and as we know from previous surveys that heading into 2020 there was a pullback in a narrowing of new technology adoptions as organizations began to operationalize their digital initiatives and place bets this chart shows new adoptions across three survey dates the gray is April last year the blue is January which is pre-pandemic really and the survey of more than 1,200 IT buyers is really the latest one which is the April so this survey took place at the height of the US lockdown and you can see look at all PA it's got 22% new adoptions what does that mean it means that 22% of the customers in the survey we're planning our PA spend there that are planning for our PA spend are planning new adoptions now that's a figure that says hi as machine learning and artificial intelligence and of course as we said these two technologies are increasingly playing a role together so our PA adoptions more than containers more than videoconferencing which has had this tailwind from work from home and more than cloud more than mobile device management so it's really one of the hottest sectors in terms of new adoptions now let's look at some of the players in our PA and try to really better understand their positions here's a chart that uses the two primary met work net metrics that we've been sharing over the past year net score or spending momentum is on the y-axis and market share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set is on the x-axis the chart plots are PA players in the et our data set and you can see uipath in automate anyway our the to market leaders they show both spending momentum and market awareness then you see blue prism and peg is in there and the rest of the pack and I'll say this about pegye systems I recently spoke to their CEO Alan trifler he's an amazing self-made billionaire he's got a great business you know peg that really doesn't see you know itself anyway as an RPA play and I don't either our PA is really a small part of their story but they're in the data set and certainly automation related so it's what's showing but it's a bit of an oranges and tangerines comparison now notice in the upper right of this chart you can see that the net scores are in the green shade and there's a little bit of red in there but remember net score is a simple metric sort of like Net Promoter Score in PS it subtracts customer spending less from those spending more and that's the difference and you can see very very strong net scores for both uipath in automation anywhere and I'm gonna discuss that more in a moment but there's lots of green in the chart and even pega or as I said it's really not an RPA specialist they've got a solid net score now let's look at a time series of this net score in the spending momentum what we do here is this chart takes the three leaders uipath automation anywhere and blue prism and it plots their net scores over time goes all the way back to the January 18 survey now let me make a couple of points here uipath in automation anywhere 70% plus net scores is very impressive and amongst the highest in the data set even though you see some of the Lawson momentum in the UI path line and the convergence with automation anywhere they're both very very strong and you can see in the upper right you can see the shared end which is an indicator of the presence of the company in the data set how many response is out of the 1200 plus so you might say well wait a minute you I passed the I had they had layoffs last fall and automation anywhere they more recently just recently had layoffs how can they show such strength well I make a few points first fast-growing companies like this that have raised you know nearly a billion dollars each they've got investors to serve and they're going to course-correct when they feel like there's some slack in the system yet to me it's not a sign of fundamental trouble second both of these companies are going to continue to invest heavily on research and development uipath has 60 openings on its website mostly in engineering automation anywhere they only have nine openings but I would expect both companies to up their engineering hiring especially given the Microsoft acquisition today third remember this is not an indicator of the amount of money spent in absolute dollars rather it looks at spending momentum of the doll in dollar terms as well if you were to cut the data by larger companies let's say the Fortune 1000 where the average contract values are higher you'd see that you I pass a net score jumps to 77% automation anywhere would drop into the 60s and blue prison would stay about the same where it is today today so let's look for example in the global 2000 so we'll expand that notion of a fortune 1000 let's go to the global 2000 where there's more of an end slice and you can see the picture changes from the overall data sample this chart shows the net scores in the global 2000 where the ends are more than 25 responses across all the three surveys gray as last April blue was January yellow is April 2020 and you can see the year-on-year decline and the modest step down during the the Colvin lockdown which again surveyed in April but still very elevated net scores for uipath and automation anywhere and respectable for the other so the point is Co vyd has not really crushed the RPA market I mean if anything is witnessed by the new adoptions it's maybe it's certainly better off than most IT sectors now let's dig into the net scores of the two leaders a little bit more uipath and automation anywhere remember net scores of very important metric and I want to spend the moment explaining how we use it you see this wheel chart this red green gray it really shows how the net score method is applied now we've taken the UI path example from the April survey net score works by asking buyers relative to last year are you adopting new that's the 28% are you increasing spend by 6 percent or greater that's 51 percent are you expecting flat spending that's 15 percent or a decrease in spend of 6 percent or more or finally are you replacing the vendor checking them out so look at this you can see for UI path added up 79 percent of respondents expect to increase spending in 2020 relative to 2019 and again remember this survey was taken at the height of the kovat lockdown let me show you the data for automation anywhere same exact methodology 72 percent of automation anywhere a customer's plan to spend more only 1 percent plan to spend less with zero replacements so very strong fundamentals as it relates to spending momentum for both UI path and automation anywhere now how is presents or what we call market share in the data set changing on a year-on-year basis well this is the last data point that I want to show and it relates to that metric of market share which again is the measure of pervasiveness it's calculated by dividing the number of mentions of a vendor in a sector by the total mentions of that sector in this case RP a and this chart shows the year-on-year change in customer growth comparing market share from the April 20 survey with that from the April 19 data and you can see the yellow line at 11% is the sector average uipath has the fastest growth automation anywhere is growing faster than the market average and blue prism is below the average now this looks back to last year and it'll be interesting to see how this picture changes with the next survey based on what we're seeing with the next net scores which is a forward-looking metric all right let's wrap so we're seeing that the bifurcated market is high that the automation trend generally is real and that the RP a drill down specifically shows us an example in action we think that kovat 919 not hit these numbers would actually be higher by maybe as much as 10% but in the near near to mid term we would expect a pretty fast return to normal patterns of demand if I put normal and air quotes for our PA in fact you know we don't expect a real v-shaped recovery across the board but our PA is you know one of those areas where we actually may see such a rebound the pandemic really underscores the need to accelerate digital transformations our PA we think is going to be a central player in that movie along with AI the cloud all right we have to leave it there for now so remember these episodes they're all available as podcasts just all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts please subscribe to the series would appreciate that and check out ETR dot plus for all the data I also publish a full report every week on wiki bound comm tons of data there as well and Silicon angle comm has all the news and I published there alright this is Dave Volante thanks for watching this episode of the cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time [Music]