Robotic process automation is growing fastest in global enterprise software market: Gartner

Robotic process automation (RPA) grew 63.1% year-on-year in 2018 to $846 million, making it the fastest-growing segment in the global enterprise software market, according to research firm Gartner. Further, the firm expects RPA to grow 54% year-on-year to $1.3 billion in 2019.

The research firm said that North America continued to dominate the RPA software market, with a 51% share in 2018, but its share dropped by two percentage points year-over-year. Western Europe held the second position, with a 23% share, and Japan came third with adoption growth of 124% in 2018, it added.

Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice-president, Gartner, said, “Competition is intense, with nine of the top 10 vendors changing market share positions in 2018.”

This shows that RPA software is appealing to organisations across the world, due to its quicker deployment cycle times, compared with other options such as business process management platforms and business process outsourcing, added Biscotti.

According to the research firm, large software companies, such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP, are partnering with or acquiring RPA software providers, which is increasing the awareness and traction of RPA software in their sizeable customer bases. At the same time, new vendors are seizing the opportunity to adapt traditional RPA capabilities for digital business demands, such as event stream processing and real-time analytics.

However, the current top players will face increasing competition, as new entrants will continue to enter a market whose fast evolution is blurring the lines distinguishing RPA from other automation technologies, such as optical character recognition and artificial intelligence (AI), added Biscotti.

In mid-June, Gartner had revealed that public cloud services revenue in India is projected to total $2.4 billion in 2019, an increase of 24.3% from 2018.

Also, in June, the research firm said that worldwide spending on customer relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6% year-on-year to $48.2 billion in 2018. Worldwide enterprise application software revenue totalled more than $193.6 billion in 2018, a 12.5% increase from 2017’s $172.1 billion. CRM made up almost a quarter of that revenue.