Global Spending on Robotic Process Automation Software to Reach $680 Million in 2018

Global spending on robotic process automation (RPA) software is estimated to reach $680 million in 2018, an increase of 57 percent year over year, according to the latest research from Gartner. RPA software spending is on pace to total $2.4 billion in 2022. Analysts Discuss Business Cases of RPA at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018, November 13-16 in Goa, India

“End-user organizations adopt robotic process automation technology as a quick and easy fix to automate manual tasks,” said Cathy Tornbohm, vice president at Gartner. “Some employees will continue to execute mundane tasks that require them to cut, paste and change data manually. But when robotic process automation tools perform those activities, the error-margin shrinks and data quality increases.”

The biggest adopters of robotic process automation today include banks, insurance companies, utilities and telecommunications companies. “Typically, these organizations struggle to knit together the different elements of their accounting and HR systems, and are turning to robotic process automation solutions to automate an existing manual task or process, or automate the functionality of legacy systems,” said Ms. Tornbohm.

Gartner analysts are discussing how to exploit robotic process automation for better business outcomes this week during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here until Friday.

RPA tools mimic the “manual” path a human worker would take to complete a task, using a combination of user interface interaction describer technologies. The market provides a broad range of solutions with tools either operating on individual desktops or enterprise servers.

Gartner estimates that 60 percent of organizations with a revenue of more than $1 billion will have deployed robotic process automation tools by the end of the year. By the end of 2022, 85 percent of large and very large organizations will have deployed some form ofrobotic process automation. “The growth in adoption will be driven by average robotic process automation prices decreasing by approximately 10 percent to 15 percent by 2019, but also because organizations expect to achieve better business outcomes with the technology, such as reduced costs, increased accuracy and improved compliance,” added Ms. Tornbohm.

However, robotic process automation is not a one-size-fits-all technology and there are cases where alternative automation solutions achieve better results. robotic process automation solutions perform best when an organization needs structured data to automate existing tasks or processes, add automated functionality to legacy systems and link to external systems that can’t be connected through other IT options.