From ‘breathtaking to very good’: PwC on India’s startup scene

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According to PwC, Bangalore, India, is one of the leading startup cities that houses several blockchain and machine learning engineers, an assertion that is difficult to substantiate but one that probably feels accurate to the people on the ground in India who are working with the startup community. Focused primarily on financial technology (FinTech), driven largely by India’s United Payments Interface and its 10-plus million transactions per day, the startup community in India may need a few years to catch up to ecosystems like Boston or Silicon Valley, but the essential elements are in place, including support from large technology vendors, funding from a diverse set of resources, and assistance from experienced consultancies used to working as a bridge between small startups and enterprise-level buyers. Notably, the PwC report mentioned India startups have drawn funding from within the country, from U.S.-based investors, and from banks and sovereign wealth funds in Asia and the Middle East. Asked if PwC sees substantial differences in the size and nature of these funding streams, Talasila called out investments from Japanese investors as particularly robust in recent years, echoing a sentiment TBR heard during a recent visit to Gurgaon, India. Even with a FinTech focus, PwC said the startups have shifted from a copycat mindset to an emphasis on problem-solving and more fully developing a broad ecosystem, two elements that fit well with PwC’s go-to-market approach and overall consulting strategy. As is evident in the use cases that follow, the startup community has embraced working across all lines of business and tackling challenges beyond throwing software at a problem.

Digital potholes and drones defeating mosquitoes

Bringing the startup scene to life, Talasila described a few use cases, ranging from roads to drones to transfer pricing. One startup has developed a new means to measure road surface quality, potentially diminishing the time between a pothole emerging and concerned authorities fixing it. Another startup uses drones to measure mosquito infestations, a potentially massive-scale application across India and other parts of the world. According to PwC, the firm has been engaged, “at any given moment,” with three to five startups outside the FinTech space, including a new electric bus service that could help reduce pollution in India’s cities.

Policy, plumbing and being part of constant change

Before exploring expectations, we need to understand where things were and how much has changed. TBR’s interest in speaking at length with PwC on this topic stemmed in part from trying to better understand PwC’s role and how it has evolved along with the startup community. Talasila said the firm’s efforts around startups in India began in earnest three to four years ago, at a time when the startups were not particularly differentiated (“too many ‘me too’ startups”), and the firm sought advice from its own global member firm network on how to provide meaningful incubation and advice. While PwC US had deep relationships with some startups, the firm did not have an explicit program for early stage engagement. The Israel-based member firm, similarly, worked closely with that country’s nascent startup scene, but the lessons from Tel Aviv did not easily translate to India. As a result, PwC India relied on its own understanding of the market and the players, including the funders, to craft its own role within the startup ecosystem. Notably, according to Talasila, the firm quickly partnered with state governments and federal agencies on policy making with respect to startups, including areas like intellectual property and tax considerations. In PwC’s view, the firm acts as a valuable go-between, bringing government officials first-hand knowledge of the challenges startups face with tax, audit and compliance issues.

TBR 2020 Devices & Commercial IoT Predictions: IoT settles in for the long hual

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IoT becomes part of the digital transformation family, and conversational user interfaces become more common

IoT continues to mature. This is reflected in more powerful and easier-to-implement IoT software and cloud services as well as in a greater understanding of what IoT is and what it is good for. Vendors and customers now better understand the role of IoT and the more common use cases and expect IoT to be used where appropriate.

For most vendors, IoT is no longer a differentiating headline; instead, it is included as one of the techniques or technologies, either as part of larger offerings or as specific IoT-oriented components. An increasing number of offerings are complete packaged solutions or customizable bundles that include or feature IoT. Though IoT is maturing and growing as a percentage of vendor revenue, it is less often standing alone as a spotlighted capability.

TBR’s IoT predictions from 2019 were confirmed, and these trends will continue through 2020 and beyond:

The IoT ecosystem will sort itself out; vendors will find their niches

Increasingly, vendors are messaging their specific offerings as requiring the integration of other vendors’ offerings to create complete solutions, or they are joining with other vendors’ offerings to deliver bundled and packaged solutions.

Packaged and bundled IoT solutions will proliferate

There is an increasing number of bundled and packaged solutions on the market, offered by component vendors, integrators and operations technology (OT) vendors. One type of packaged solution is enhancements to existing software packages that tap IoT as an extension of their capabilities.

Not all data is valuable: Data economics will drive design

Several vendors, including Dell Technologies and a prominent India-based systems integrator, reported that most of the data generated in IoT solutions is discarded shortly after it is analyzed and used. We believe the challenge over the next several years will be identifying data worth keeping, condensing and summarizing, and then storing it, socializing it and discarding it according to a data life cycle plan.

In the past, IoT was intimidating to both vendors and customers, as the opportunities appeared endless while there were few demonstrated use cases. As a landscape of use cases emerged, as IoT component and platform offerings matured, and as vendors gathered experience in IoT, it has become easier for customers and vendors to identify opportunities for IoT, and to design and deploy solutions. IoT describes one broad class of use cases among the variety of possible non-IoT situation-specific solutions and has become part of the vast number of available digital transformation solutions.

2020 Predictions:

  • There will be less talk of IoT as it will be increasingly viewed as one technique among many for delivering digital transformation
  • AI in IoT will increasingly be encapsulated in specific functions like recognition and detection
  • Conversational user interfaces, based on voice or typed communication, will play an increasing role in business solutions

Register for TBR’s 2020 Devices & Commercial IoT webinar, IoT settles in for the long haul, Feb. 5, 2020.

Technology Business Research 2020 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include telecom, cloud, devices & commercial IoT, data center, and services.

TBR 2020 Telecom Predictions: Leading CSPs and webscales implement new ICT architecture to fully capitalize on digital era

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Leading CSPs tackle business and network transformation to capture value created in the digital era

Key technologies, most notably cloud, virtualization, 5G, edge computing, AI and machine learning (ML), are coalescing to usher in a new era, commonly referred to as the digital era, but also referred to as the 5G era or the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). It is widely expected that during this era, industries will be fundamentally transformed, people’s lives will be greatly enhanced, and productivity will enter a new phase of sustained growth, all of which will contribute to an economic boom and improved standard of living. Communication service providers (CSPs) have a golden opportunity to play a critical role in the digital era by providing not only ubiquitous, intelligent connectivity but also value-added services that participate in and enable this economic development.

While the future looks bright for participants in the digital era, especially for CSPs, the reality is that CSPs’ traditional business models, established ways of working and current network systems are not relevant in this new era, meaning these companies must transform into digital service providers (DSPs) and become more webscale-like in nature. As part of this imperative to evolve, leading CSPs are transitioning their networks to a virtualized, container- and microservices-based, cloud-native architecture. This cloud-centric network architecture will enable CSPs to participate in new value creation stemming from new technologies, such as 5G and edge computing, and adopt next-generation network operations based on data as well as AI and ML for continuous automation. This new architecture will also enable CSPs to take advantage of network slicing and low latency to more effectively support use cases in areas such as autonomous transportation, video analytics, robotic process automation, AR/VR solutions, advanced healthcare applications and cloud-based gaming.

TBR’s research suggests 2020 will be a springboard year for telecom industry development toward the new architecture, with spend in the key markets of 5G, network virtualization and edge computing all poised to ramp up significantly through the middle of the next decade. TBR’s research also suggests that systems integrators will play a much broader and key role in helping CSPs transform their businesses and networks and that webscales will increasingly encroach on CSP turf as they concurrently pursue new value created from the abovementioned technologies.

2020 Predictions:

  • Webscales start building out the edge
  • Leading CSPs begin commercial deployments of open RAN and vRAN in 2020
  • Systems integrators will assume prime role in new architecture build

Register for TBR’s 2020 Telecom Predictions webinar, Leading CSPs and webscales implement new ICT architecture to fully capitalize on digital era, Feb. 12, 2020.

Technology Business Research 2020 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include telecom, cloud, devices & commercial IoT, data center, and services.

TBR 2020 Data Center Predictions: Hardware commoditization pushes vendors into new ventures

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Hardware commoditization is pressuring traditional data center vendors to invest in related emerging technologies

The data center hardware market has been on a downward trend due to commoditization for years. As a result, vendors have had to get creative to maintain their financial performance. Some vendors that have not adjusted have been forced out of highly contested markets or had assets or whole organizations acquired. However, many vendors have adjusted by investing in new ventures to maintain hardware relevance. Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) and hyperconverged infrastructure are two examples of technologies that have upward potential in the declining hardware market.

Other vendors have chosen to explore entirely new areas, such as quantum computing, to maintain relevance. IBM is notorious for laying the tracks to new markets, and quantum is no exception. TBR believes IBM’s quantum computing investments might increase the longevity of the mainframe, as we see a future in which mainframes and quantum computers can work together to answer tough computational questions. IBM is also investing in high-performance computing, another technology that could fill this space for mainframes.

Change is the only thing in the data center market that is guaranteed. TBR believes 2020 will be marked by a lot of change, and vendors will either adapt or be left behind. Consumption-based pricing and quantum computing are just two examples of the types of change that are coming to the data center space, but there are many others still to come. Vendors that embrace change will be around for the long haul, and fast-followers are more and more likely to be left behind if they sacrifice research and development for quick returns for their capital investors. Vendors should encourage innovation around new ideas to maintain relevance while commoditization maintains its unrelenting grip on the data center hardware space.

2020 Predictions:

  • Cloud vs. on premises: A distinction without a difference
  • The rise of quantum services vendors
  • ODMs will progressively squeeze OEMs as cloud-centric data center environments become increasingly popular

Register for TBR’s 2020 Data Center Predictions webinar, Hardware Commoditization Pushes Vendors Into New Ventures, Jan. 15, 2020.

Technology Business Research 2020 Predictions is a special series examining market trends and business changes in key markets. Covered segments include telecom, cloud, devices & commercial IoT, data center, and services.

Nokia bets big on enterprise

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TBR perspective

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) remains in a state of transition. The company is not only addressing challenges with its 5G New Radio (NR) products but is also contending with business disruption as CSPs increasingly migrate toward a webscale-like, next-generation network architecture, which is prompting Nokia to accelerate and broaden its own internal digital transformation to remain a competitive player. Though management provided assurances that it is addressing its 5G NR issues and that they will be short-lived in nature, the underlying challenges facing Nokia, as well as all incumbent telecom network infrastructure OEMs, remain firmly in place.

TBR believes Nokia’s big bet on enterprise, which includes webscales and other industries such as manufacturing, transportation, utilities and mining as well as the public sector, is timely and critical to ensure the vendor can make the transition from relying on CSPs for the bulk of its revenue to relying on a more diversified mix of customers (CSP and non-CSP) to hedge itself from the prevailing winds of shifting CSP spend while exposing it to adjacent growth opportunities that are aligned with its offerings and capabilities. Currently, CSPs account for around 85% of Nokia’s corporate revenue with Enterprise comprising over 5% and patent licensing fees and other corporate revenue sources contributing the remainder.

Event overview

CEO Rajeev Suri kicked off Nokia’s 2019 Global Analyst Forum by addressing “the good, the bad, and the ugly” issues the company has been contending with, specifically as they pertain to Nokia’s 5G RAN kit and how these issues are impacting the company’s financial performance and investment decisions. Suri’s message reiterated that Nokia’s management is fully aware of the problems and have taken pragmatic and decisive steps to address them, most notably shifting from a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chipset to a system on a chip (SoC) in its 5G NR. Suri stressed these issues are temporary and that the company’s overarching strategy remains the right approach to grow revenue and margins over the long term. One of the key aspects of that overarching strategy, which was interwoven throughout the event, is that Nokia is doubling down on enterprise.

Suri was succeeded at the event by a mix of Nokia’s other C-level executives as well as a mix of business unit and regional heads, all of whom provided updates on their respective domains and how they are addressing new opportunities in the market. A few representatives from leading CSPs, namely Sprint (NYSE: S), Vodafone (Nasdaq: VOD) and Zain, also presented during the event. The customer presentations confirmed that leading CSPs are focused initially on the consumer use cases of 5G (i.e., enhanced mobile broadband [eMBB] and fixed wireless access) and are taking a wait-and-see approach toward enterprise use cases. This is in alignment with TBR’s broader research on the 5G market, which suggests nontraditional use cases of the network that are enabled by 5G are not imminent and that, aside from eMBB and fixed wireless access, other use cases for 5G will take time to become economically and technologically feasible before being commercially deployed. Though private networks represent a key growth area, TBR notes the vast majority of net-new private cellular network engagements to date are using LTE, not 5G.

Panel, small group and one-on-one sessions were also hosted at the event covering a wide range of topic areas. A demo bazaar was also provided for analysts to see new technology innovations from Nokia in areas such as network slicing, cloud RAN and network automation.

After the event, analysts were treated to an exclusive tour of Nokia’s RAN factory in Oulu to see demonstrations of how private networks can be utilized in manufacturing environments to achieve improved business outcomes. The tour was well received and thought-provoking, but it was apparent that 5G technology is not imminently ready to address operations transformation and that more work needs to be done in that arena before the technology is commercially ready.

Enterprise was in the spotlight at Nokia’s 2019 Global Analyst Forum. Though communication service provider (CSP)-centric topics were also widely covered at the event, enterprise and the opportunity to sell private networks to that customer segment were emphasized throughout, indicating Nokia is placing big bets on non-CSP customers to drive the vendor’s recovery and next phase of growth.

Tableau will add customers and seats with best practices, new capabilities and utilization of Salesforce’s sales teams

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Tableau aims to help enterprises create a data-accepting culture

From the opening keynote to the breakout sessions, Tableau was consistent in its message that many enterprises are falling short of their analytics goals. Part of the reason why these enterprises are falling short of their goals is because of their corporate cultures, in which people do not understand the value of their data and business users are apprehensive about manipulating data. To help chief data officers and data analytics advocates shift company culture, Tableau created the Tableau Blueprint. In the analyst breakout session “Leading to Data Culture,” Tableau VP of Product Marketing Mark Jewett defined a data culture as “the collective behaviors and beliefs of people who value, practice and encourage the use of data to improve decision making.” Tableau Blueprint is a free, 190-plus page document of best practices curated from Tableau customers that have successfully shifted toward a data-accepting culture. Shifting a company’s culture to be accepting of data necessitates an executive team that makes it a strategic priority, as well as implicit changes such as cultural habits and explicit policies and resources. Implicit changes may seem ambiguous, but TBR believes that creating an environment in which employees feel comfortable and encouraged to learn about data analytics will breed a data-literate workforce that can better utilize Tableau’s products, enabling customers to achieve a greater return on their technology investment. Tableau Blueprint incorporates this ethos into each step of the customer’s journey, from bringing Tableau onto their infrastructure to training their employees on Tableau to creating an ecosystem that can answer questions for their Tableau users. While Tableau Blueprint will largely be used by data advocates within an organization, TBR expects that Tableau’s consulting partners will also use the set of best practices when implementing Tableau for their enterprise customers.

To further ensure customers are getting the most out of their Tableau products and realizing their strategic objectives and business goals, Tableau’s customer success teams help customers throughout their journey, from acquiring licenses to post-implementation. This is a strategy that Salesforce, which acquired Tableau, has used since its inception, leveraging its customer success team to help customers — and partners — through customer management, customer support, and advisory and consulting services. Tableau collaborates with partners as well, but TBR expects that Tableau’s customer success group will become more akin to that of Salesforce in offering support to both customers and partners as the two vendors collaborate to help customer and partner ecosystems utilize their Salesforce- and Tableau-integrated systems.

Tableau Conference 2019 (TC19) took place in Las Vegas, where Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky, Chief Product Officer (CPO) Francois Ajenstat, Senior Product Manager Graeme Britz and others presented to 18,000 Tableau customers and partners as well as the analyst community. Some of the keynote topics included new augmented analytics and self-service data management features, as well as changes to the company’s strategy. These topics were complemented by success stories from enterprise customers, such as Nissan, highlighting how Tableau helped transform their organization.

Mavenir ready to prove it is possible to transform mobile network economics

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TBR perspective  

Mavenir’s message is resonating with the market, and its reputation among CSPs is strengthening. In a few short years, the upstart vendor has gone from an M&A amalgamation of disparate businesses to a cohesive, relevant vendor that is now being considered alongside incumbent Tier 1 network vendors for projects at leading CSPs worldwide.

Mavenir is a legitimate contender to supply solutions that will comprise the new webscale-like network architecture CSPs are eager to implement to stay competitive and participate in new value creation in the digital era. The vendor’s greenfield play to provide cloud-native solutions is unique and is a key differentiator from incumbent OEMs that continue to push their relatively expensive, inflexible and closed systems. CSPs are intrigued by Mavenir’s virtualization offerings, not only with the low price points and total cost of ownership (TCO), but also with the performance of their systems in trials and now, with vRAN in some select commercial production environments.

TBR believes Mavenir will become one of the leading telecom network vendors in the digital era and will take measurable share from incumbent vendors during the 5G network build cycle, not only in RAN, but also in the mobile core and digital enablement-related platforms. Though Mavenir is a small fish in a sea of goliaths, the company is able to hold its own by trumpeting its software-first mantra as a means of redefining mobile network economics.

Mavenir’s assessment of where the market needs to go is spot on. CSPs must evolve to become more webscale-like in nature, adopting a network architecture that is dynamic, agile and able to support the demands of the digital era as well as new business models that can be scaled and supported at fundamentally different economics compared to the traditional architecture. More of the same will not work anymore, and CSPs must think and act differently to stay relevant and profitable in the digital era. CSPs are intrigued by the claims Mavenir is making pertaining to radically different mobile network economics and there is desire among CSPs to hear from the vendor about how it can deliver on those promises.

TBR believes Mavenir’s biggest, most impactful play is in the RAN space, which is an approximately $40 billion market and is ripe for significant disruption. RAN is the domain that will be the catalyst to transform Mavenir from a relatively small vendor by revenue (around $500 million this year) into a multibillion-dollar global powerhouse.

Mavenir provided a corporate strategy overview and updates on each of its business units at its third annual analyst day. The vendor is well aligned with underlying trends in the telecom industry, particularly network virtualization and open infrastructure. Mavenir now claims to have product offerings across several network infrastructure domains, including RAN, mobile core, IMS (particularly, VoLTE and RCS), Unified Communications & Collaboration (Mobile Business Fabric), network security and digital enablement platforms, such as for private networks, OSS/BSS and mobile advertising (Aquto). The company’s software-first, hardware-agnostic approach is timely as communication service providers (CSP) accelerate their transformations into digital service providers.

Fujitsu, digital trust and the future of technology

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Strike a balance between the utilization of data and the protection of data

Opening the event, Hiroshi Tsuda, head of Security Laboratory at Fujitsu Labs, set the tone by acknowledging that every enterprise and consumer must understand the balance between the utilization and efficiency of data and the associated privacy and protection. Other speakers and panelists at the symposium echoed that theme of balance, each taking a different spin on how balance could be achieved and, most importantly, who bears the responsibility for striking and maintaining balance, as well as remediating any negative consequences caused by mistakes. Tsuda also presented the results of the Fujitsu Global Digital Transformation Survey Report, a survey of 900 business leaders in nine countries that provides insight into their process in digital transformation and to clarify how business leaders around the world perceive trust.

Delivering the Fujitsu Keynote, CEO of Fujitsu Labs Hirotaka Hara explained that the company’s long-standing slogan, “Reliability and Creativity” had been replaced with “Digital Trust and Co-Creation.” For Fujitsu, “digital trust” includes pushing for social acceptance of AI, which requires IT services vendors and technology companies to create “explainable AI” to overcome current reluctance among many companies and individuals to fully accept judgments made by algorithms, rather than humans. In TBR’s view, Fujitsu’s expressed appreciation of the challenges in AI adoption comes as a welcome relief from the hype heard from other IT services and software vendors. Further, the updated slogan reflects a clear evolution from basic reliability of technology and systems to more essential and compelling trust, while the shift from creativity to co-creation moves the conversation from Fujitsu acting alone in R&D to interacting with clients, creating together.

Advancing the trust theme, Hara explained that Fujitsu Laboratories “ensures digital trust through technologies, to include a wide range of solutions, ideas and competencies, such as smart contracts, authentication, compliance, data traceability management and cybersecurity — all with trust at the center.” Multiple IT services vendors and consultancies throughout 2019 have centered events, presentations and use cases around trust, but few have described the ecosystem and diverse elements as comprehensively as Fujitsu. And few have been as direct and succinct as Fujitsu, which stated, “Digital trust is the foundation to achieving digital transformation.”

In TBR’s June 2019 Digital Transformation Insights Report: Voice of the Customer, we quoted the CEO of a global healthcare company on trust and the various roles IT services vendors and their clients must play. Echoing Fujitsu’s sentiments around trust, that CEO said, “Responsibility needs to be an integral part of the overall business and technology landscape for any company, and I strongly suspect that we will see a resurgence of some of the other traditional roles and technology.” In all, Fujitsu, through Hara’s remarks and comments made throughout the day, demonstrated a grounded, hype-free understanding that the challenges of digital transformation do not come from the technologies, but from the ecosystem and the people. And the initial steps to transformation depend on digital trust.

Fujitsu Laboratories Advanced Technology Symposium (FLATS) 2019: Around 400 people gathered in Santa Clara, Calif., for a full day of presentations and panels centered on data security and the need to balance user and regulatory requirements around privacy with expectations around rich online experiences, leading to deep discussions about ethics, transparency and trust. Hosted by Fujitsu Laboratories and attended by more engineers than entrepreneurs, the event surprisingly stayed focused on applying technology for societal good, to build ecosystems of trust, and to protect consumers’ data and privacy. Fujitsu Labs showed off its ground-breaking technological advancements and innovations in an exhibit hall but kept main-stage conversation rooted in the application of technology in a messy and uncertain world.

IoT continues to contribute moderately to vendor revenue growth, as vendors embed IoT in their offerings

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IoT is becoming more deeply embedded in vendors’ offerings and messaging

IoT continues its moderate revenue and gross profit growth as vendors and customers become more familiar with what IoT is and how it can be applied. Increasingly, IoT is an expected part of vendors’ offerings, one of a set of tools that can be used to solve business problems and address business opportunities. IoT continues to be viewed more as a technique than a specific market or technology, but increasingly familiar use cases and more mature packaged solutions and components have made it easier to work with.

TBR expects the IoT market to continue to grow, gradually accelerating over at least the next five years. This means IoT will constitute an increasing percentage of vendors’ revenues. Because IoT is just one tool, however, less attention will be paid to its role. It is embedded in messages as well as in products and services, and customers have come to expect its availability.

Customers are increasingly addressing the costs of moving and storing data and are therefore beginning to migrate to a hybrid edge-cloud architecture

IoT has the potential to generate enormous amounts of data, depending on what is being measured, how often, and how precisely. Without data life cycle policy and management, data accumulates without limit and project costs increase over time. An edge-cloud hybrid architecture processes data near the edge and transmits a limited amount of summarizing data to a central data center or cloud service for further analysis and long-term storage. The hardware and software tools for this approach are available but will become much easier to implement going forward.

While IoT revenue and IoT projects are growing, IoT is less prominent in vendors’ marketing communications

IoT is transforming from a product or service line to a capability or a product or service extension. Marketing IoT as a capability or extension allows vendors to scale back marketing and sales costs to a level commensurate with lower-than-first-expected IoT revenues. Successful vendors have repositioned IoT to support their main product or service line and to reinforce, rather than confuse, their main message. This results in a simpler message that is easier for salespeople and customers to understand and evaluate. It has also resulted in more differentiated IoT offerings, because the offerings are specific to each vendor’s overall strategy.

TBR’s Commercial IoT Benchmark is a semiannual publication that highlights current commercial IoT revenue and gross profit for a select list of 28 vendors. The benchmark leverages financial models and projections across a diverse set of IT and operational technology (OT) components. In addition, it outlines the major vendor-based drivers and trends shaping the market. The benchmark examines multiple IoT segments, including business consulting, IT services, ICT infrastructure, software, security, cloud services and connectivity.

UiPath amplifies the RPA’s value that comes from scale

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UiPath’s position as one of the leading vendors defining the robotic process automation (RPA) market comes with responsibilities for managing expectations across stakeholders, and the company knows it. Enhancing its value proposition by adding the necessary layers of technologies and deploying business-led frameworks internally and with alliance partners helps it build use cases of scale, a necessary attribute to maintain growth momentum, as RPA is no longer a siloed, line-of-business-led initiative, but rather a node in an enterprisewide automation initiative. 

UIPATH’S ENHANCED AND EXPANDED TECHNOLOGY STACK PROVIDES A SOLID FOUNDATION TO REACH SCALE

Solving the productivity paradox has become the guiding light for UiPath’s product development as the company seeks to gain broader stakeholder buy-in. RPA tools continue to be largely selected and utilized by business customers, but the need for democratizing data while addressing larger IT complexities is compelling UiPath to ensure ease of use of its offerings for the broader user community. Targeting new personas beyond RPA developers, including business analysts, citizen developers and testers, expands UiPath’s core platform addressable market but also raises expectations around ROI. By enhancing and adding features including design tools (e.g., Studio, Studio X, Studio T), management tools (e.g., Orchestrator, Cloud Platform, AI Fabric), apps (e.g., Forms, Tasks, Chatbots) and insights (e.g., RPA, Business Analytics), UiPath’s end-to-end automation suite captures the entire cycle of plan, build, manage, run, engage and measure.

While the build, manage and run stages are somewhat legacy capabilities, expanding into the plan cycle, which was accelerated through the acquisition of Netherlands-headquartered ProcessGold and enabled through the launch of UiExplorer, helps UiPath act as an arbitrator of the dilemma “Should a company automate a bad process or fix the process first?” by applying a scientific plan for implementing RPA one process at a time. TBR also sees the purchase of ProcessGold as an attempt for UiPath to increase its value proposition for higher-value design thinking workshops. While we do not expect UiPath to be a threat to its consulting partners’ core expertise, wrapping advisory frameworks with AI-enabled process mining tools could address the dilemma sooner. The engage and measure pillars of the UiPath Platform suite provide the connective tissue between the deeper collaboration between humans and robots as well as pave the way for the company’s pragmatic AI vision of building intelligent systems that provide the proper tools and skills. How to measure and report the true business impact of RPA implementation, however, remains up for debate, as enterprise buyers approach automation differently. As UiPath strives to reach scale, the inevitable question of “What’s next?” is rather loaded considering the hype around AI, the possibilities of automation and the future of RPA. During the conference UiPath released the AI Fabric solution in private mode, first announced in April, to address the barriers of AI and RPA working together including in operations, technology and processes. As the notion of AI fabric is breaking down siloes between RPA and data science teams through features such as intuitive interface, operationalizing AI models and closing the RPA-AI data feedback loop, AI Fabric is a timely response to buyers’ adoption of AI, which for many is still in a pilot phase.

For the second year in a row TBR attended the annual UiPath Forward conference, the focus of which has shifted dramatically from regionally oriented in 2018 to global in 2019, reflecting the company’s efforts to build a framework and portfolio offerings developed and delivered through integrated scale. And stories of scale were not lacking: The conference hosted close to 3,000 attendees this year — twice as many as last year — and demonstrated expanded capabilities of the core UiPath Platform. UiPath also announced two acquisitions and shared four dozen client stories onstage. Under the slogan “Reboot Work,” the conference amplified the broader need for rebooting customer experience and business overall, which in many cases is easier said than done, but client stories shared during the conference showed pain points are lessening, reflecting on UiPath’s Automation First vision with “automation is the application” framework at its core.