The Changing Landscape of Automation Software

How Acquisitions will impact RPA, Process & Task Mining and Enterprise Software

With the acquisition of Kryon by Nintex last week, this article’s relevance moved up in importance. As more details and acquisitions are released, I will continue to post updates on this topic.

Over the last year or so, we have seen more consolidation and interest in the digital process and automation tools. Ultimately, this interest foreshadows what will be occurring in the next one to two years, as it is no longer enough to identify or automate a task – it is now expected you can do both. Taking that a step further, you are now seeing tools that are not related to process improvement realize that an efficient process is imperative for continued use and growth of their tool-set. If you are a vendor not focusing on improving your customer’s experience, you will be a vendor missing huge opportunities.

While not all-inclusive, you can see in the chart below that there are several traditional vendors making key strategic moves to round out their portfolios. Each of these tools has a core strength that needs to be further augmented to keep its market-leading position.

As with any change, this will have both positive and negative consequences for their user. With an increased focus on process and user experience, these tools will ultimately become more efficient – increasing automation, decreasing rework, and improving customer satisfaction. This reinforces my position that companies with exceptional processes will ultimately be more successful than their peers.

Looking Ahead

For uses of these platforms, it will become imperative that you either select a strategic partner or structure your process improvement/automation activities agnostic of a single tool/vendor. Which choice you make will deal with the maturity of your organization and your preexisting vendor relationships. I would caution that this is an evolving space, and it is ultimately hard to predict where technology will be in a few years. 

As such, I would recommend that organizations keep a somewhat flexible approach. Process improvement and automation will continue to go hand in hand – but you cannot wait for all these products to be fully baked. A balance must be reached where you have a short-term roadmap delivering business value but are also looking at longer-term industry trends. I would equate this to the software consolidation we’ve seen in the past where different products are slowly absorbed into a full suite of capabilities.