from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to the special edition of the cube insights powered by ETR over the past several weeks we've been running breaking analysis on various market segments and today we're gonna talk about the robotic process automation market the spending data from ETR really shows that that market is poised for for continued growth it's been rocketing these segments are independent editorial they are not sponsored in any way although two of the companies that I'll be talking about today are sponsors of the cube automation anywhere and uipath both sponsor the cube we we attend their shows but they have absolutely no input over these editorial segments it's 100% data-driven based on ETR data and cube insight opinions in my opinions so thank you for watching let's get into it so Alex if you bring up the first slide I want to share with people what the robotic process automation market is and what you need to know about it it's a small but very fast-growing market according to a combination of Forrester and and Gartner data it's around one and a half to 1.7 billion dollars this year and it's growing at over 60 percent per year Gartner calls it the fastest growing software sub segment that they tracked garden just put out a Magic Quadrant on this space which was you know is always interesting reading despite what you think about magic quadrants it's essentially software robots that are automating repetitive mundane tasks and I underline tasks in this chart because it's largely tasks simple tasks that are being automated in a big way as opposed to really big complex processes they tend to be targeted at line of business users and it very popular in environments like finance and service roles and and back office areas where they're a repetitive common tasks that people frankly hate and we're going to give you some feedback from from customers there are a number of upstarts in the space uipath automation anywhere blue prism these these companies have attracted a massive influx of venture capital particularly uipath an automation anywhere over a billion and a half dollars in the last couple of years there monster valuations take those three companies their valuations are up over ten billion dollars and growing uipath for example several months ago announced that it had more than 200 million dollars in annual recurring revenue they were just at eight million dollars two years ago so you're seeing just this this massive growth a lot of influx of capital and a lot of jockeying for position now users that we've talked to will express a great deal of business impact related to the introduction and application of RPA in their business so I want you to take a look at this video of one practitioner that we interviewed at a cube event let's listen to to see what Jeanne younger has to say and then we'll come back and talk about it it's interesting because I also teach the Six Sigma courses there and one of them my slides I've had for years teaching that classes most business processes are like between 3.2 and 3.6 3.8 Sigma which is like 95 to 98% accurate and I said that's all the better we can usually do because of the expense that it would normally be to get us to a Six Sigma you look at the places that have Six Sigma it's life-threatening airline you know airplane engines you hope they're at least 7 Sigma you know those type of things but business processes 3 5 3 2 but now I get to change that because with our PA I can make them Six Sigma very cheap very cheaply because I can pull them in I got my bought it comes over pulls the information and there's no double king there's no miss keys its accuracy 100% accuracy this is a perfect example of how companies are applying robotic process automation to to improve existing business processes you would never try to get a standard business process up to Six Sigma it's just not worth it and as Jean younger explained now she can get there very inexpensively with our PA there many many other use cases but I wanted to share that one with you now the next slide I'm going to show you comes from ETR ETR is an organization that runs a panel is about a 4,500 user panel and they focus on spending intentions they do periodic surveys throughout the year they capture a fairly large number of users and what they're spending on that built this great taxonomy and we've been partnering with ETR to share with you some of that insights and what this slide shows is really spending intentions from the july 2019 survey asking about the second half spending intentions on the sector of robotic process automation you can see here the N is 1068 respondents in that July survey on the left-hand side you can see four vendors that we've chose to profile uipath automation anywhere blue prism and pega systems a company that's been around for a long time and is not exclusively focused on RPA they've got more of a business process focus and I'll come back to that but what this slide shows is really the spending intentions around four areas the bright red is we're going to leave the platform stop spending we're out of here the lighter red is we're gonna spend less in the second half the gray is we're flat the dark green is we're gonna increase spending in the lime green is where a new customer coming on so if you subtract the red from the green you get what ETR calls the net score and that is an indication of spending intentions and momentum so the higher the net score the better you can see here uipath leads the pack with an 81% next score ironically that's the identical next school net score as was snowflake in this survey we profiled the enterprise data warehouse market and snowflake was one of the leaders there so uipath and snowflake even though there are sort of different markets and different levels of maturity sort of around in the same net score so two very hot companies and you can see going down the list automation anywhere 69% blue prism 53% and pega systems 44% actually these are all very strong compared to some of the other market segments we track like for instance if you look at the disk array market and some of the legacy disk array companies some of the enterprise data warehouse companies you'll see sometimes negative scores now on the right-hand side and the black you see shared accounts what this says this is the number of accounts that were mentioned as intending to spend on or in the case of the dark red leave or in the case of the bright green add but the number of counts out of that 1068 corpus of data that mentioned these respective companies so you can see relatively small you know 68 for uipath 42 for automation anywhere 45 for blue prism and only 27% repair systems but these I remind you were still significantly statistically significant enough to at least get indications so you can see again your UI path leads but all of the companies are actually quite strong on a relative basis so the next slide that I want to show you Alex if you bring this up is a time series for some of these leading competitors over over time so we'll go back to January of 18 and the number of shared accounts back then was relatively small it was in the low double digits and in some cases the single digits but as we go to the right you can start to see it it increases in terms of the shared accounts out of that a thousand 1068 from this past survey so you can see uipath at that 81% next score of net score very high but but also automation anywhere very very strong blue prism you can see the decline in that yellow line but again very very strong with a 53% Nets so this space is is new and it's in it's very hot I say it's new and then it's been around for a while but it's really starting to take off and then you can see see Pegasus Thames you're lower than these other companies but still very very strong at 44% now we'll tell you the folks at Wycombe on the the analyst side of our house have gone out they've done some research they maybe it was about 18 months ago they they downloaded the UI paths Community Edition they tried to do the same for automation anywhere in blue prison they tried to get access to the software so they could apply it and you know run some robots against some mundane tasks they were only able to get the automation of the sorry the uipath software which was very simple to install and apply and you know some simple tasks they couldn't get the automation anywhere in blue president you had to go to resellers and it was sort of this complicated you know setup so that was sort of a red flag that we put up but but the UI paths you know claims that their stuff was easy to use some of their users that we've talked to you know talked about it in the context of low code and so we've we've clarified some of that we don't have as much data on automation anywhere in blue prism although we've covered automation anywheres events customers you know seemed quite happy and and reporting strong business impacts don't have as much information at this time on blue prisms on blue prism we have attended some of the peg assistance events just as observers I was saying before I come back to them they take more of a holistic approach to business process it's really not they're not positioning themselves as a standalone RPA vendor which you know frankly I wouldn't do if I were up against uipath and automation anywhere because they've got so much influx of capital they've got modern platforms that are ostensibly easy to use so packet system seems to be look going after our PA in a much sort of broader context around process business process engineering so in summer you just want to say so the very fast-growing market there's a book there's a lot of competition you got uipath automation anywhere blue prism there's about 15 or 20 players in this space that are sort of sizable it's a combination of as they say standalone robotic process automation players with integrated BPM players like Pegasus Thames it's important remember you're largely here automating existing procedures and tasks you know you're not doing a lot of necessarily re-engineering it so that's you know some people are concerned about that saying okay we're kind of paving the cart path at the same time practitioners are reporting that it's having a major business impact and and although they've also said that's not likely to reduce headcount rather we're redirecting resources you're not firing people because you're bringing in robots so people aren't necessarily losing their jobs over this they're just shifting away from that sort of undifferentiated heavy lifting that they hate doing mundane tasks automating that and moving on to more strategic items so a lot of discussion in the industry about artificial intelligence in in machine learning and some folks have said well AI and RP a they have nothing to do with each other I will say this that that machine learning has been injected into the RP a space via computer vision and a good example is it recognized a button like a send button if you know you're sending out you know emails or pushing a certain button every day at the you can automate that process so computer vision is a key part of this and again it's something that certain RPF Enders are touting I know uipath again talks about that a lot but the business impact is tangible and this is based on customer feedback a lot of customer feedback you know generally speaking you're seeing CFOs are hopping on to this they're seeing this is a really good way to take out some of the inefficiencies in their business refocus people on higher value activities and so we're going to continue to watch this RPA space I think it's going to be big we see big s eyes coming into this we're talking about companies like Accenture IBM Deloitte PwC Ernie Young those guys are starting to you know go after the space and I've always said this about the the big sis they love to eat at the trough so with there's money there they find it and they go hard after it so thanks for watching everybody we're gonna continue to report on this space this is Dave Volante with cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time