Laiye acquires Mindsay – And why it matters…..
So, in summary, Laiye is a new and earnest player to contend with. One we will continue to watch with great interest over the next few years.
Intelligent Process Manaagement
5 Years of Deep Analysis & Market Shifts
It’s hard to believe that I founded Deep Analysis five years ago (almost to the day). It’s hard to believe we made it this far and that we are looking forward to the next five. But maybe what is hardest to grasp is just how much our industry has changed over these past few years. …
Crossing the EX CX Divide
Those who have been around a while in this industry know that sales often grow fastest in the toughest of times, as efficiencies need to be made and costs saved. Even so, there is always an on-ramp and readjustment to remind and educate buyers and investors alike that to save money, you need to invest in the right places to make the necessary changes.
Largest single investment ever for a cognitive capture startup?
Rossum, a cognitive capture software startup out of the Czech Republic, just closed a remarkable Series A round of $100 million to ramp up what it’s calling a cloud-based universal document gateway. To our knowledge this is the largest single investment ever into a capture software startup.
Information Management & Automation – A Summer of M&A
Considering the sheer volume of startups and smaller legacy firms, there is no shortage to choose from, and the economies of scale can make many a target.
Did OCR Discover the Fountain of Youth?
In perhaps the ultimate cool endorsement, last week at WWDC Apple announced optical character recognition will be embedded in iOS 15. Named LiveText OCR, Apple describes it as “secure on-device intelligence to help you discover more in your photos, quickly find what you’re looking for, and relive special moments.”
Reframing Deep Learning
Move over, machine learning, here come the deep learning algorithms. We predict that deep learning models will disrupt the status quo of document classification over the next 12 – 24 months, as customers discover that they can train an AI classifier with as few as five samples and deploy it in a matter of hours. Without the need for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or IBM, and without the traditional massive compute costs and data sets associated with Deep Learning to date. Time will tell if we are right or not, but change is on the horizon.
Mobius & UIPath take off – Our Thoughts
All in all quite month of activity, but all of course, overshadowed by the UIPath IPO. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the enterprise automation market in the short and long term. Undoubtedly some of the money raised, possibly much of the money, will go toward multiple acquisitions.
IBM acquires MyInvenio – Our Thoughts
The MyInvenio deal follows closely on the heels of IBM’s acquisition of Brazilian RPA vendor WDG and add’s yet more practical functionality to its growing Cloud Pak services. Despite IBM being one of the largest IT vendors, its work in moving advanced automation to the cloud has received less attention than one might expect.
SAP Buys Signavio – Our Thoughts
Today SAP announced that it is to acquire process intelligence vendor Signavio for $1.2B. Considering Signavio’s revenues were around $100m, and it had raised almost $230m in funding, that’s a high price to pay. But is such a high price justified, and why would SAP contemplate paying so much in the first place?
Enterprise AI & a New Dotcom?
But, here’s the thing, a couple of years ago, everyone was talking about AI, but few were doing it. This past year things changed fast; now, there is a mad rush to embrace AI or get left behind. But its easier said than done, AI tools, models, and libraries are readily available, but skills, knowledge of specific user needs, and good data are not.
2021 – The Year of Business Analysis?
But without a sense of reality, the willingness to do some hard work, and a recognition of the need for human expertise to understand what’s going on and what you need, then they will not work. 2021 should be the business analyst’s year, the process analyst year.
Is the combination of Content and Process Intelligence greater than the sum of its parts? ABBYY thinks so…
Software companies, and analysts alike, love to come up with unique product positions, and categories, that enable them to stand out from their competition. Put a bunch of related capabilities together in a box and give it a catchy name. Hey, presto! Congratulations, you just invented a new market and, guess what, you’re the King.
AI in Digital Process Automation: It’s Complicated
Whenever we discuss trends, the conversations inevitably turn to the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in process automation and robotic process automation (RPA). Frankly, I’ve found that most vendors latch on to the idea but have very little substance behind their words in terms of strategy and product roadmaps.
Intelligent Business Automation: The Nexus for Process, Content, Data, AI/ML, and More
Increasingly, my colleague, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, and I are finding substantial convergence and common ground in our coverage areas. (Alan covers blockchain, content, compliance, and AI/ML, and I cover digital process automation, RPA, process mining, and customer experience.) The COVID-19 pandemic is pushing this trend even harder as companies struggle to get their arms around documents, tasks, processes, commerce, and customers so they can deliver products and services more rapidly across ever-morphing supply chains.
Process Mining & the Lost Art of Continuous Improvement
Have you ever wondered where all the Lean, Six Sigma, continuous improvement, and operational excellence practitioners have gone? When the BPM (methodology + software) conversation turned toward digital process automation (software and very little process methodology) much of the continuous improvement conversation went away. Poof–it disappeared, to be replaced by a lot of technical talk.
RPA in 2020
RPA, as an intelligent automation platform, will transform enterprise priorities: from a focus on technology adoption to process transformation, from number-of-bot measurement to process improvement metrics and from process output to business outcome.
The Resistance to AI
It seems like every week; a technology vendor tells me how their AI product will free workers from mundane jobs and enable them to do more exciting work. And, every week I respond the same way (though sometimes more diplomatically) ‘that is not true.’ As AI works its way through blue-collar jobs, lower-paid white-collar jobs and now into higher-paid professions, that sales pitch that falls flat. In theory, AI automation could free workers from the mundane and create new and more exciting jobs. But in reality, that will seldom happen, workers are made redundant.
Research Agenda – 2019-20
Here is our research agenda for the coming year – it may change and will certainly be updated but hopefully this provides you some insight into what we are working on. As always if you have any suggestions or feedback reach out as we want to be sure our work is relevant, timely and of value!