Text/Wang Jiwei
On July 25, Gartner, an international authoritative analysis organization, released the 2022 Global RPA Magic Quadrant Report (Gartner RPA MQ), and 15 vendors from around the world, including UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Microsoft, were selected for the report.
This is also the fourth consecutive year Gartner has released this report, which shows its emphasis on the RPA industry. It is gratifying that there are still domestic RPA figures in this year's Gartner MQ. Hongji Cyclone was selected in this report on behalf of Chinese RPA vendors for the second consecutive year, and its position in the Magic Quadrant has jumped significantly compared to last year.
Being selected in the Gartner MQ report is an honor for major RPA vendors, and it is also the report's recognition of the comprehensive strength of each vendor. Becoming one of the 15 manufacturers in the world means that it will attract the attention of global customers and enter their technology purchasing list.
The new position of Hongji Cyclone in the MQ report also means that domestic RPA has the ability to constantly refresh and surpass overseas RPA manufacturers in the Magic Quadrant. It also means that Chinese RPA manufacturers can launch a powerful charge to other quadrants.
As a result, Hongji Cyclone has also become an RPA manufacturer that has attracted much attention in the global market. In the eyes of the majority of overseas technology procurement companies, this manufacturer is also leading Chinese RPA manufacturers to gallop rapidly in the international market.
The Gartner Magic Quadrant report (Gartner MQ) has extremely strict and fair selection criteria. The report conducts a comprehensive investigation and analysis of global RPA vendors from the two dimensions of execution capability and corporate strategy, and integrates product technology, AI, data analysis, and scenario applications. Orientation assessment.
In this year's MQ report, the most direct change is that the number of selected manufacturers has changed from 18 last year to 15, and the number of manufacturers in the four quadrants has also changed from last year's 4-2-4-8 to 5-1-4-5. . The selection criteria and changes in the operation of manufacturers also directly prevented some manufacturers from being selected. Some manufacturers were replaced by "owners" due to acquisitions, and some manufacturers' positions in the Magic Quadrant have changed significantly due to acquisitions.
Whenever Gartner RPA MQ is released, it must be the time when the industry is boiling. The release of the 2022 Global RPA Magic Quadrant report has naturally attracted the attention of people in the RPA industry. Which vendors are selected in this year's RPA Magic Quadrant? How is the specific performance of domestic RPA? Why can Hongji Cyclone achieve a leap in position?
In this article, Wang Jiwei Channel interprets this year's RPA Magic Quadrant report for you.
Domestic manufacturer Hongji Cyclone has an eye-catching performance
In the Magic Quadrant diagram, Gartner positions suppliers on two axes: the vertical axis is the ability to execute, and the horizontal axis is the completeness of vision.
Criteria for ability to execute include: evaluating products and services, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, market response/record, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations.
Vision integrity evaluation criteria include: market share, sales strategy, product strategy, business model, vertical/industry strategy and technological innovation, etc.
Gartner collects relevant information through customer surveys and customer inquiries, and invites vendors to provide data on the evaluation criteria through questionnaires and briefings. According to the manufacturer's comprehensive score, the manufacturer is placed in the four quadrants of the Magic Quadrant: Leader, Challenger, Visionary, and Niche Market Participant (Niche Participant).
According to the ranking order of leaders, challengers, visionaries, and niche players, the number of manufacturers in each quadrant of the MQ report last year was 4-2-4-8, and the number of manufacturers in each quadrant this year is 5-1-4- 5.
A total of 18 manufacturers were selected last year, but only 15 manufacturers were selected this year. These manufacturers are:
Leaders quadrant: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Microsoft, SS&C Blue Prism, Nice.
Challengers quadrant: WorkFusion.
Visionaries quadrant: SAP, Appian, Pegasystems, Salesforce.
Niche Players quadrant: Hongji Cyclone, Samsung SOS, Nintex, IBM, Laiye Technology.
Let's talk about the basic situation of this year's MQ report.
Let's first look at the changes across several quadrants. NICE entered the leader quadrant from last year's challenger quadrant. SAP has jumped from the niche market quadrant to the visionary quadrant, and WorkFusion has entered the challenger quadrant from the visionary quadrant, and is the only vendor in this quadrant in this year's report.
In the Leaders quadrant, Blue Prism moved into the middle of the Leaders quadrant after being acquired by SS&C. Microsoft, which acquired Clear Software and Minit, is already comparable to AA in the vision axis position, and UiPath is still the best.
In the visionary quadrant, Servicetrace continued to stay in this quadrant as Salesforce (MuleSoft) this year because it was acquired by Salesforce, the parent company of MuleSoft, and is located at the far right of the vision axis.
The biggest change is in the niche market players quadrant, from 8 vendors last year to 5 this year. Among them, Nintex acquired Kryon, SAP entered the visionary quadrant on the right, and NTT was not selected.
What needs to be emphasized here is that the performance of the domestic RPA Hongji Cyclone is very eye-catching, jumping to the highest position in this quadrant.
Through the change of position, it can be seen that Hongji Cyclone has continued to strengthen in terms of execution ability in the past year. At the same time, it can also be seen that Hongji Cyclone has surpassed international manufacturers such as Nitex and Samsung SOS in terms of execution ability and strategic vision, and is becoming an important force leading domestic RPA to enter the global market.
Hyperautomation becomes the focus of MQ report
The main findings of the 2022 Gartner MQ report include the following two points:
1. By 2024, 95% of RPA vendors will provide automation services through API and UI integration;
2. By 2024, 80% of enterprise customers who mainly deploy manned automation on the desktop will shift to a wider user experience, such as web, mobile and voice services.
Let me talk about the first point first.
The MQ report predicts that after 2 years, 95% of RPA products will provide automation services through API and UI integration. At present, API and integration are indeed becoming the main development trend of RPA products, which are mainly used to improve the stability of RPA operation and better efficiency.
The integration of API and UI actually points the development of RPA further towards hyperautomation. The hyper-automation that Gartner is now promoting is a collection of technologies including RPA, low-code development, process mining, OCR, NLP, etc., especially inseparable from various integrations and API interfaces to obtain data, so in this year's MQ report evaluation Among them, API and UI integration also accounted for a high proportion.
Now mainstream manufacturers are basically realizing the integration of API and integration through self-research, acquisition and ecological cooperation, among which UiPath, SAP and other manufacturers are particularly outstanding. With the strong promotion of Gartner and the practice of more manufacturers, the product architecture of global RPA manufacturers is now evolving towards hyperautomation.
Another Gartner report, "China AI Startup Market Guide", shows that in digital solutions, artificial intelligence can enhance the integration capabilities of other technologies, such as extending AI technology to include LCAP, RPA, iBPM, and industrial Internet of Things. In the field of hyperautomation, through customized platforms and composable packaged solutions, we can deliver business value for customers by reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
The evolution process from RPA to hyper-automation is also the technology and product development process of Cyclone. Among Chinese RPA manufacturers, Hongji Cyclone is one of the earliest manufacturers to deploy hyperautomation. Ever since Gartner released hyper-automation technology, Cyclone has believed that hyper-automation is a key element in realizing digital transformation, and has actively carried out layout and practice.
At present, Hongji Cyclone has an industry-leading layout of ultra-automated products. The self-developed Cyclone RPA solution integrating AI, NLP, IBPM, IPAAS and other advanced technologies implements the product development strategy of "device + platform" linkage innovation. Discovery, from process design, execution, management, to CoE empowerment, runs through the entire life cycle of enterprise digital upgrade, forming a cross-organization and cross-system business automation closed loop.
Look at the second point.
The second main finding of the MQ report is about the user experience or high availability of RPA. A better experience is actually related to the technology adopted by RPA. The web and mobile terminals mentioned here are the cross-terminal experience after RPA realizes SaaS or reconstructs with cloud native.
The voice service is a better process construction experience brought by conversational AI technology. At the same time, technologies such as process mining also make process discovery easier. Hyper-automation allows RPA to completely realize end-to-end full life cycle operation and management. . In these respects, global RPA manufacturers have the same cognition, and they are actively carrying out corresponding research and development and deployment.
The new position of domestic RPA in the MQ report
In the 2022 MQ report, last year's two domestic RPA vendors were selected again, located in the niche market quadrant.
Among them, Hongji Cyclone's performance in terms of execution ability is like a rocket, surpassing all manufacturers, and directly climbed to the highest position in this quadrant. At the same time, it is not far from the Challenger Quadrant and the Visionary Quadrant.
Overall, the inclusion criteria for this year's MQ report are stricter than last year's, including selling and marketing RPA as a standalone product stock keeping unit (SKU), selling RPA software directly to paying customers, enabling customers to become independent from software providers Deploying RPA, having an aggressive go-to-market and sales strategy for RPA software, and more is close to twenty.
In terms of revenue, it is required that in fiscal year 2021, the annual revenue of RPA software or subscription licenses sold as independent SKUs is at least US$35 million, or at least US$25 million in annual revenue comes from RPA software or subscriptions sold as independent SKUs. Judging from this standard, the annual revenue of domestic RPA is at least 200 million yuan.
Due to stricter selection criteria, only 15 manufacturers were included in the MQ report this year. Therefore, for the domestic RPA that just entered the report last year, it is already a victory to continue to be included in the report.
And the sharp jump of Hongji Cyclone on the product capability axis has indeed given us a bigger surprise.
In addition to introducing the advantages of Cyclone in technology innovation, product strategy and global market share, Gartner also highly affirmed it in the report.
According to the report, Hongji Cyclone's investment and output in the field of AI are excellent, especially the digital assistant (CIRI) and AI skill platform are amazing, not only providing a strong platform support for the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, but also It can also support the orchestration of standard business models and BPMN. The digital assistant (CIRI) integrates AI and RPA, and users can participate in the automation process at any time based on mobile or desktop.
In terms of product strategy, Gartner believes that Cyclone provides customers with end-to-end automation solutions based on standard RPA scenarios, including AI/ML capabilities, low-code construction capabilities, Internet of Things (IoT) automation capabilities, and edge automation capabilities.
As a world-leading provider of digital solutions and a leader in the hyperautomation industry, Gao Yuguang, founder of Hongji Cyclone, said:
"Hongji was once again shortlisted in the Gartner RPA Magic Quadrant and achieved a significant jump in position, which is a milestone for Hongji and even domestic RPA manufacturers. It can be said that this position has refreshed the ranking of Chinese RPA manufacturers in the Gartner MQ report. This is even more It is a full affirmation of Hongji's product technology capabilities, market leadership capabilities, and innovation capabilities."
Asia's RPA vendor with the strongest execution
The evaluation criteria of this year's MQ report, on the vertical axis of execution ability, the weights of the dimensions of product or service, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, marketing execution, and customer experience are relatively high. Hongji Cyclone can achieve this result in execution ability, which shows that it has done a good job in these aspects.
In fact, different organizations have different needs for automation, so not only the manufacturers in the LEADER quadrant are the most suitable for customer needs. Every manufacturer selected in the MQ report will enter the technology procurement list of different customers. Hongji Cyclone has the strongest execution ability in the niche market quadrant, and is currently the Asian RPA vendor with the strongest execution ability.
Execution ability reflects the existing capabilities of the manufacturer, which means that the manufacturer can provide more practical solutions for a large number of organizations that currently have intelligent automation needs.
This year's MQ report has also upgraded the necessary capabilities of shortlisted vendors. Vendors must be able to support script development using standard programming languages or vendor-specific low-code representations, be able to record tasks and convert them into deployable scripts, and support manned tasks. And unattended automation, enough to coordinate and manage users and scripts and operations, etc. Therefore, being shortlisted in this report means that the manufacturer's product capabilities are excellent.
It should be noted that Gartner analysts also attach great importance to the optional capabilities of the RPA platform. Optional features of the RPA platform listed in the MQ report include: task mining and discovery capabilities, automatic generation of workflows through task mining, intelligent document processing (IDP) capabilities, low-code user experience for building GUI front-ends for robots, and more.
In these aspects, Hongji Cyclone has strong product capabilities. For example, in terms of low-code, Hongji can provide enterprises with full-stack, integrated software and hardware AI capabilities. Through simple configuration and drag-and-drop operations, it can quickly form scene-based complex AI skills by building blocks, and RPA robots, business process, or third-party systems and applications for seamless docking.
Among them, Hongji AI skill engine uses the combination of machine learning/deep learning + knowledge engineering to effectively solve labeling and interpretability problems, which has been mentioned in Gartner MQ reports many times.
In terms of process mining (Process Mining), Hongji's "process intelligence" product restores business processes through a visual interface, not only helps customers quickly locate process bottlenecks and pain points, but also predicts process optimization results through digital twin technology, and quantifies key KPIs As a result, scientific planning process optimization needs.
Based on ML, DL, OCR/ICR, NLP and other advanced AI technologies and RPA, Hongji Cyclone has launched an intelligent document processing interactive platform - Hongji Shangshutai (IDP, Intelligent Document Processing). Fully automated operations from structured and unstructured text recognition, extraction to processing can be realized.
Products and solutions based on these technologies have been widely used in Hongji Cyclone's solutions for various scenarios. For example, in service risk warning, Hongji Cyclone can quickly and automatically read customer complaint information regularly, organize unstructured data into structured data, conduct statistics and analysis according to streets and districts, and provide service risks for high-risk areas early warning.
In cross-border trade settlement/guarantee, Hongji Cyclone can help banks quickly customize industry bill forms in a short period of time, breaking the template limit, covering about 3,000 types of bills of lading, with a model accuracy rate of 95%+, effectively reducing staff workload by 90%.
These product capabilities and application cases show that Cyclone's mature product capabilities and solutions can be widely used in a wide range of business scenarios, and can effectively solve customer pain points. With the recognition of more customers, Cyclone has also become the veritable Asian RPA manufacturer with the strongest execution.
Postscript: Leading the way to the globalization of domestic RPA
The continuous exploration of products, technologies, strategies, ecology, etc. has also enabled Hongji Cyclone to receive praise from many international authoritative reports.
On July 11, Forrester, an international authoritative analysis organization, released the first "China Market RPA Vendor Evaluation" report. Hongji Cyclone was significantly ahead of other vendors in terms of product and technical capabilities and received the highest score, and was rated as China's RPA by Forrester. "leader".
In the "China AI Startup Market Guide" report released by Gartner, Hongji Cyclone performed well in the two technical fields of NLT (Natural Language Technology) and OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and was rated as a representative enterprise.
At the same time, in the "2022 Global RPA Market Landscape" report released by Forrester on July 29, Hongji Cyclone once again represented Chinese RPA manufacturers in the global first-tier camp, and was recommended by Forrester together with world-renowned manufacturers.
A few days ago, Gartner released the "2022 China ICT Technology Maturity Curve (Hype Cycle for ICT in China, 2022)" report. With its outstanding technological innovation capabilities and market performance, Hongji Cyclone has once again become a key recommended manufacturer in the RPA field.
▲ Hongji Cyclone ultra-automation product matrix
Four international authoritative reports have highly recognized Chinese RPA manufacturers represented by Hongji Cyclone, which fully demonstrates that China's RPA has already possessed the strength of the international leading echelon in terms of product capabilities, technological innovation, market depth, and development potential.
The outstanding performance of Cyclone in technology innovation, product capability and market development has been highly recognized by Forrester and Gartner.
In terms of market development and business implementation, Hongji Cyclone has also been recognized by users in many fields. At present, its enterprise-level RPA product portfolio has provided services for thousands of domestic and foreign customers such as State Grid, Postal Savings Bank of China, CNOOC, COFCO, UnionPay, China Southern Airlines, Volvo, etc., covering pan-finance, energy, e-commerce, retail, medical care, government, Manufacturing and many other fields.
In terms of globalization strategy, as early as 2020, Hongji Cyclone established the Silicon Valley Al R&D Center and built a high-level international talent team, striving to promote Hongji Cyclone products and solutions to a broader international market.
At present, Hongji Cyclone is actively expanding overseas markets, and its business has landed in Asia Pacific, Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, accelerating its global strategic layout in an all-round way.
With multi-dimensional and all-round lean management such as product research and development, market expansion, overseas layout, and talent training, coupled with the continuous endorsement of many reports such as Gartner RPA MQ, Hongji Cyclone's globalization road will go further and further .
It is believed that under the leadership of Hongji Cyclone, more domestic RPAs will be able to break out of Asia and go to the world.