Hello. And welcome back to another episode of the process and automation podcast with the automation guys. This week, we are back onto the news and. Yeah, there, there’s plenty of activity in the market. Uh, as always, when we do the news Roundup, plenty to, to share you share with you on, on what’s happening in the automation space.

Um, Arno, um, do you want to kick off with were some very interesting developments in the automation space? Yeah, of course. Thanks, Sasha. Um, we’ve heard a lot about private equity play with insight automation. And, um, you know, was recently announced that, uh, um, a private equity firm Vista equity partners, um, you know, may make one of their biggest acquisitions by buying blueprint.

And of course blue prism is one of the big three RPI firms in the world. And the deal is estimated to be worth around 1.5 billion us dollars. Um, now Vista it’s interesting. They made a few acquisitions, um, in the past, in, in the sort of the low code, no code and also the health tech RPA space in the past.

Um, so I think that I probably gonna use a blue prism to. Um, you know, enhance their overall automation play now just briefly on, on the prism itself. Um, we think that, you know, if, if you look at the, the, the, uh, the Mr. Equities acquisition of it, I think it, it probably won’t come as a surprise. Um, but if you, if you look at the overall sort of.

Um, acquisition by, um, private equity firms and the sort of the, just in the last two years alone, w you know, the, the deal sizes over, over $46 billion. Um, so there’s, there’s been a sharp increase in, in, in these types of acquisitions. Um, and you know, just in that period of time, there’s about 20 private equity led, um, acquisitions of automation firms.

So it’s an incredible trend that we’re seeing. And, um, you know, I think this will probably continue into, um, 20, 22. And of course, you know, if, if you look at blue prism itself, um, there’s, uh, there’s this. I’ve been quite a few, you know, areas that’s been highlighted in terms of. Um, it’s performance and the, you know, the lack there off, um, you know, lack of holistic focus on automation.

Um, the fact that, uh, you know, uh, they’ve got a relatively sort of low market share in APAC, for example. Uh, I spend on sales and marketing, um, you know, at the pirate sort of, uh, cost for, for customer retention. Um, so, so hopefully I think what will happen is that with, with this acquisition, um, you know, the world will sort of stabilize the ship as, as, as it were.

And there will be a very interesting time, um, you know, next year in the year after that, to see, uh, where they go with with, with blueprint. Um, but yeah, 1.3 billion deal size, quite sizable. And I think, um, obviously the automation space is, is, is quite a hot space. At this point. If we look at the stats for private equity firms, you know, buying up these companies and adding it to their portfolio, Thank you for going through this one.

Um, yeah, I’m looking forward to, to, to see more, more of those things happening in the market. Um, uh, generally we, we see consolidations, uh, in the market, um, where some larger vendors are buying smaller vendors, um, but the other private equity, um, um, uh, spiel there is, um, Probably not so obvious to many. Um, so yeah, hopefully, um, blue prism can then perform better going forward.

Um, they obviously, um, there’s a, when we had our, um, sort of Forester, um, uh, review, uh, on the RPA software vendors a couple of months ago, uh, blue prism was even out of the, sort of the leaders in area. Isn’t it? So, um, so it was with, or they are still in a, in the leaders, but they, they they’re dropping the.

Uh, sort of in this area, um, and hopefully, um, they, they, they get, get to get back, uh, sort of, um, uh, really from, into the, into the lead-less, uh, quadrant. Um, so they had plenty of investments made and sort of further, further development of the product. Um, 20, 20, 20, 21, um, I guess a few of these features we will see, uh, in the, in the latest versions or in the upcoming versions, um, there’s in seven is already a big improvement in date.

Yep. Yep. Well, if you just look at blue prison stock prices, um, from January. Um, this year, till September, it has been on the pressure. I think it’s, um, roundabout 34% lower than January. So I think no doubt that there was a bit of pressure there. So, like you say, you know, hopefully with, with some of the new innovations that’s coming through, uh, this acquisition, uh, you know, when Y we might see some something stabilizing and, you know, blue presents sort of excelling again and getting itself in front of, of those, uh, those analysts waves and those reports.

It is, um, uh, around, uh, the RPA vendors. Um, uh, many years ago it was quite clear. It was blue prism, automation anywhere, uh, and, uh, your iPod pause, obviously. Uh, but now they all left and right there are new vendors popping, popping up and, uh, other bigger vendors are buying smaller vendors and suddenly they, they appear, uh, sort of more mature in the market.

Definitely lots of activities here. Um, and that’s why a blue prism is a, is being active here. So maybe we can jump in one of the, sort of most recent news on the blue prism side. Um, so, so they blue prism introduce the intelligent automation productivity solution suite for Amazon web services, um, which allows customers to, to, to build sort of more, uh, Uh, solutions for the front office sales business operations and making sort of the move to a center of excellence, um, uh, more easy and, um, to make those center of excellence, my agile and more compliant.

And. Yeah, more productive across sort of the larger enterprises. Um, so that’s, uh, yeah, that’s one of the most recent blue prism news. Um, I don’t know. Uh, you’d like to share other news on the RPA side. Yeah. So of course we’re looking at sort of RPA vendors that, um, are accelerating their cloud-based RPA capabilities and also a company called connects him also lounge announced they’re launching a new platform called the connect platform.

And that’s of course, you know, they’re the next generation of cloud-based automation technology. And, you know, this is expected to automate business processes within sort of supply chain and accounts payable, and, you know, so, so that, that, that sort of extended RPA capabilities, um, Edgeworth as well, HR assistant.

Um, you know, they have just released the latest version of the cloud-based archive platform called assess edge. Um, and of course, you know, this, this, this platform. Um, it’s, it’s designed to support, you know, large scale process automation, um, programs for, for, for global enterprises. Salesforce also announced, um, the launch of this, this new MuleSoft service trace tool called MuleSoft RPA.

Um, and of course, MuleSoft already integrates with various different systems. Um, you know, with inside Salesforce service cloud. Um, but this, this RPA, um, offering, we’ll just, you know, hat, another dimension to. That, um, you know, to these existing capabilities and then laser Finch and they are business process automation provider they’ve recently announced the launch of a cloud-based document management and process automation solution for the EMEA region.

Um, and you know, this, the supports enterprise digital resilience strategies. So just kind of a brief Roundup of, again, some of the RPA capabilities of these, these, these major vendors and what they are. Yeah. And of course we are not talking about RPA here on the processing automation podcast. So in our news Roundup as well, we look at the low-code and no-code platforms, which are very popular in the market.

And, and also in these, uh, in these specific, uh, software categories, local no-code, there, there has been plenty of activity recently in the. Um, um, acquisitions happening and, uh, you know, further investments. Um, yeah, so it’s, it’s really interesting to see, um, uh, what those platforms are adding in terms of capability.

Um, uh, and, um, they adding these new capabilities to win new customers in the enterprise feel to mainly, or the big, the big vendors, um, to increase their, their, the enterprise productivity. So, uh, The big, the big guy in the market, uh, is Appian, of course, uh, Appian announces the availability of the, the latest version of the, the Appian low-code automation platform.

And, um, the new version offers new functionalities for the automation, uh, uh, of user interfaces and connected systems. And, um, working was, was data. Um, the so-called local data these days to make, um, to make, uh, access. Accessing this data pools across several applications, much easier than it used to be.

And, um, yeah. Uh, so that’s, that’s one, one, uh, we can use here, uh, anvil, uh, paperwork, automation platform launched their workflows, uh, no code tool. Um, Yeah, that will help companies remove from, uh, the complexity and, uh, of course, a frustration from proper paperwork and PDFs, um, uh, documents. So, yeah, so that will be, um, will be interesting to see how that, um, stands out in the market going forward.

Um, the next one, um, uh, Creates you announced a new strategic Alliance with local labs, um, to, yeah. To help them, uh, it’s crows in, in Australia. And, um, yeah, so that, that new partnership will focus on, um, Uh, helping business across different industries. Um, yeah. Or was there no code workflow, automation and local no-code there’s no way you, you can ignore that going forward right now.

Yeah, absolutely. On this program about the sort of next generation of developers and Claris they a low-code platform provider. And they announced a new initiative where an they call it the low code accelerator program. And what it’s designed to do is increase diversity in technology and business ownership and this particular program from Claris.

Really aims to equip students with operational and technical training on the Claris low-code development platform, you know, which is, which is great news. I think, um, there’s a lot more space in the market to, to, you know, launch these specific initiatives, especially at universities, bring that easily, get low code into the mainstream.

Um, and there’s another company called fix. Um, and they had digital customer experience platform provider, um, and they’ve just announced a release of fixed CX. Um, automation, and this is their, um, automation platform and it focuses really on, on some of the customer experience side of thing. And you know, of course that the platform aims to empower these business users and, um, professionals alike to securely automate customer centric processes with.

Um, coding or developer support. So of course, um, and we always talking about the citizen developers. So it looks like fixes is really sort of pushing forward on that, um, with, with their latest release. Um, and then lastly, the Salesforce also announced some new capabilities for their Einstein automation solution.

And, um, you know, this will allow sort of users of various, uh, experience level. Um, advantage of offload code tools and automate these manual business processes. And of course, integrate data across their company systems. Oh, wow. Wow. So it’s plenty, plenty of stuff again. And, uh, yeah, it never continues. Um, uh, was these automation vendors, so some of them might have started just was BPM.

Some of them have been, uh, has, I have started with RPA, but, uh, yeah. Nowadays was intelligent automation and all the requirements to look at the end to end process all of those vendors. Um, clearly they want to. To add more and more capabilities to cater for sort of the whole, um, um, requirements customers have.

So they don’t have to go to several vendors to, to solve the problem. And, uh, yeah, so they are the automation vendors out there. They built, uh, specifically AI capabilities into their product. To drive. Um, uh, so that, that differentiation and, uh, one of them, uh, is well known as IBM Watson. Um, so IBM Watson launched new automation features, um, for, for customer services to get to.

To use artificial intelligence and natural language processing and more, and, um, yeah, to, to, to really make that first customer contact, uh, um, uh, more and more successful. Um, the next one is also quite not well known. Uh, recently was their 1 billion, uh, investment they have received, um, to, to increase.

Business execution, um, and, um, uh, enterprise capacity. So Solonus has established now its own center of expertise Selonas labs for, for developing new new solutions. And that. We’ll focus on new ideas technologies such as, um, yeah, so, so the AI, um, uh, technologies and, um, uh, augmented and virtual reality. So that, that will be interesting to see how that goes into that program, uh, um, into, into the application, especially augmented and virtual reality in regards to process mining quite, uh, quite interesting and looking forward to that, uh, and, um, yeah, data robot, you will see that more and more coming.

Uh, I guess in the future. Um, so they unveiled that data robot, AI cloud. Um, so they, they have built sort of the new unified environment, um, for what they say is sort of the next generation of intelligent businesses and those new capabilities yeah. Will help companies operations, uh, um, build more AI powered, uh, applications.

Yeah. So it’s always all of those, um, new capabilities we’ll, we’ll have business to, to, to do business pattern and improve all the outcomes. Yeah. And it’s interesting. I think that the scope and the market for automation is just increasing. Um, you know, and I think the evidence is there with, with private equity firms, getting in on the action with, with, with, um, all of these acquisitions that we recently seen, we can see the vendors are actually investing in, um, their RPA capabilities, their product suites.

We see even advancements still in low code with all of these programs coming out to, for enablement to become, bring it even more. And of course, you know, uh, vendors investing in AI. So I think, you know, the, the market is, is, is, is huge. And I think it will just grow. I think, you know, now that we sort of are coming out of pandemic, there’s probably a lot of lessons learned or for businesses, uh, to, to adopt automation, to embrace automation, to think automation for them.

And I think, you know, the, the news we’ve covered today is a sort of really a reflection on, um, you know, that, that, that that’s sort of, um, uh, the, the climate out there, automation and, you know, the, the, the amount of new technology that, that, that is being developed and also. Like I said with, with the private equity firms getting in on the action.

So very exciting times, I think the market will still just grow. Um, you know, we, we see a lot of, um, inquiries of automation, of, of projects, of all sizes. People curious about low code people. Curious about how, uh, robotics and digital workforce. Can help them to scale their businesses and to optimize their operations, to cut costs, you know, use of BI to make, uh, to drive better outcomes, autonomous decision-making.

Um, yeah, so it’s a very exciting time to be involved with, with automation and to be in the space. And, um, you know, I think that, you know, 2020 is certainly going to be a very, very interesting. Um, as, as we get out of the pandemic initiatives, the projects that, that, um, you know, we’ll be getting involved with and, you know, some of the customers will help to bring these automations into their business.

And if you find, uh, um, sort of the, the, the choice, um, uh, um, quite difficult, um, you know, reach out to, um, to Arno and myself on all the digital channels, um, social channels on our website, the automation guys.net, they reach out to us and, um, uh, Yeah. Ask us any question on all these vendors out there and, um, you know, can, can give you demos trials.

Um, we know the market for more than 20 years now and, um, can give you a really good understanding of what maybe is needed in your specific use case and business case. So, yeah. Thank you very much for listening.

Unfortunately, that’s it again, with this episode of the process and automation podcast. If you liked this episode, please give us a five-star rating and don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don’t miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time. And until then let’s automate.