The recent HFS predictions for 2020 boldly state that none of the big three RPA vendors will get acquired this year. By logical extension, this means smaller and less expensive RPA vendors have a higher chance of exiting to the comfort of bigger players with broad shoulders and deep pockets, especially where they fit a pressing market need and round out an existing integrated automation proposition. HFS also predicted the continuance of technology convergence as low-code / no-code platforms continue their surge.

Barely days into 2020, Appian, a low-code development platform vendor, announced the acquisition of Novayre Solutions SL, the developer of the Jidoka RPA platform. Appian recognized relatively early the complementary nature of BPM and RPA, establishing partnerships and agnostic no-code integrations with Blue Prism in 2017 and later with Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Now it has its own RPA and it’s talking about a compelling pricing strategy for its enterprise customers to boot. We’re curious to see how the dust will settle here with the “big three” RPA leaders.

Appian probably snagged a bargain here, in comparative RPA vendor purchase terms

Financials were not disclosed, but it’s likely this acquisition is at a very favorable price for Appian as compared to the astronomical valuations of some of its RPA brethren. Despite being on HFS’ radar in recent years, it was becoming increasingly hard to see noticeable progression in terms of Jidoka’s customer base and ecosystem development. So, it comes as little surprise that Jidoka was keen to sell. Appian is one of the low code players that actively embraced RPA as part of the overall conversations they have with customers about process automation. It describes Jidoka as the platform it would have built itself if it were building an RPA platform, citing its proven strength in unattended automation coupled with attended (albeit nascent) capabilities, along with its cloud-native development and java architecture.

Hailing from Seville Spain, with less than 20 employees, Jidoka’s customer are mostly small and midmarket firms spanning financial services, outsourcing, utilities, consumer products and other broad markets in Spain and Latin America (Jidoka robots operate in Spanish and English). A notable big logo client, Pepsico, uses Jidoka’s RPA in its finance department.

Appian RPA will come as an additionally priced feature of the Appian platform

Appian will rebrand Jidoka as Appian RPA once the acquisition dust settles. Much of rebranding effort has in fact been completed before this acquisition announcement in the months since the letter of intent was issued. There are no plans to launch it as a standalone feature or product, so don’t anticipate a pureplay RPA product coming from Appian. Existing Jidoka customers will be supported whether they are using Appian’s other products or not. One of its immediate integration priorities is with its recently launched Robotic Workforce Manager.

Appian RPA will be offered as an add feature for Appian Cloud platform customers for $5,000/month maxing out at $60,000 / year for unlimited use. This should be attractive at the enterprise level, especially to those looking to use RPA extensively. More importantly Appian can’t lose out with this pricing strategy as it is guaranteed the license revenues from the Appian platform itself, which are applied per user, per application.

The Bottom Line: Long live integrated automation. Appian’s acquisition of Jidoka is the latest example of the push towards full stack automation.

Low-code and RPA are a solid tool combination to tackle process automation, with each hitting their own sweet spots. Appian has born this out via partnerships over the past couple of years. We expect to see more examples of it in action as organizations progress their journeys beyond initial RPA-in-isolation piecemeal attempts into organization-wide impactful automation programs. While RPA has been dominating conversations around process automation for the past several years Appian is seizing the opportunity to bring low-code and RPA together. Its inherent process automation capabilities are complemented by RPA for hard to reach systems and as an alternative route instead of API development when speed is needed.

We see this acquisition as evidence of push towards what HFS terms the Triple-A trifecta of automation, AI and analytics into integrated automation. The BPM and low code players were super sane about embracing RPA rather than fighting it. And we see a lot that makes sense in this purchase if everyone can play nice and get along.

This acquisition has similarities with SAP’s acquisition of Contextor in 2018 as a technology tuck in and is closest in direct competitive terms to Pega’s Infinity platform encompassing RPA as a standard capability since Openspan opted to become part of something bigger in 2016. The essence of each is a holistic approach supplementing the rigor of low-code and APIs with the flexibility and speed of automation at the surface level as a tactical tool.

However, Appian will be bumping up against RPA vendors, and how this plays out remains to be seen. Appian says it does not intend to supplant its partners’ (e.g. Blue Prism) technology, but RPA vendor partners will have to make a call on how these relationships work moving forward with an all-important eye on avoiding customer disruption. Coopetition isn’t for everyone. Appian has been through this scenario before with Mulesoft before developing its native integration capability. The integration and shared standards live on but not the formal partnership.

Posted in : Artificial Intelligence, intelligent-automation, Robotic Process Automation