The times they are-a-changing – Technology trends in the DPA market

The Digital Process Automation (DPA) market is developing at a high pace and vendors increasingly want to bring their edge to their clients. In the last couple of years, we have seen five clear technology trends in the DPA market that strong players are driving (and those that are not, should consider);

Trend no. 1: Low code/No code enablement

Nowadays most DPA platforms are ‘low code’ or ‘no code’, so it’s hardly even a differentiation anymore. However, if you don’t have low code or citizen developer capabilities, it will take much longer time for your users/clients to realize business value and you will be perceived as a laggard. In our more recent engagements, low code is being perceived as a ‘must have’ requirement.

Trend no. 2: AI/decisioning infusion

Stronger players in the DPA market build decisioning capabilities into their platform. Strong players are using AI/ML to support use cases like advising on the next best action for a case worker (leading to higher productivity and higher quality) or advising the best way to personalize an outbound campaign to your specific needs (leading to higher hit rates and click rates). Some players have indeed been doing this for quite some years and if you’re good and aspire to lead – this is a place where you can really differentiate.

Trend no. 3: Process Mining capabilities

Most leading DPA providers have either built or acquired process mining capabilities to be able to analyse a process and automatically find bottle necks and suggest ways to improve the process. Of course, there are players that have this as their core capability, like Celonis, which is leading this space. But the DPA vendors seem to want their own capabilities. In the last year or two we have seen IBM acquire myInvenio, Appian acquire Lana Labs and Pega acquire Everflow. Interestingly, we have also seen partnerships between DPA vendors and Process AI specialists emerge, watch this space!

Trend no. 4: The enterprise platform

No big surprise that software vendors are selling their software as an all-encompassing platform. However, the same way that leading DPA platform providers, like Pegasystems, start to appear in other ‘magic quadrants’ and ‘waves’, we will also see companies more famous for other areas to appear or even obtain a leadership position within the DPA space in analysts’ reviews. Even though there is a trend to expand and scale DPA enterprise wide into other capabilities, the opposite trend is also true; compartmentalization -using different vendors for different use cases (something we’re seeing in many of our engagements currently).

Trend no. 5: Verticalization

Verticalization is not necessarily a new trend, however there is a difference to what we see now and what was mostly glorified demos and packaging, back in early 2000s. These verticalizations are more concrete and customer ready, they are more specific to smaller use cases and there are a lot of them out there. In banking and insurance for example, many suppliers are now having relevant onboarding solutions, payment investigation solutions, first notice of loss solutions and an AML solution.

It’s difficult to say what the future holds, as I don’t have a crystal ball in my possession. However, one guess is that verticalization will become increasingly important as clients are tired of getting a multi-million euro toolbox, where they still have to build it all from scratch. The clients will be looking for everything from verticalized core capabilities and data models to vertical accelerators and down to product-like (off-the-shelf) vertical solutions (more to come on this). If you want us to provide our view based on your specific situation, feel free to contact us.