Technology cloud report original.
In recent years, RPA has become an out-and-out "tech outlet" in China, setting a historical record of attracting billions of dollars a year and hundreds of RPA companies pouring into the track.
However, there will inevitably be bubbles under the wind, but also the "leader" of the track will be born in the fierce competition.
Recently, IDC's "China RPA+AI Market Share Report, 2022" report shows that Yisaiqi ranks second on the list with a market share of 10.0%, which is almost the same as the top 10.9% market share.
At the same time, its business revenue bucked the trend during the epidemic, with a growth rate as high as 78.03%. It is the fastest growing manufacturer in China and has become an out-and-out leader in the RPA+AI track.
Looking back at last year's IDC report, the explosive power of Yisaiqi can be described as amazing. Why can Yisaiqi achieve such impressive results? In the process, what correct choices did Yisaiqi make?
RPA industry "veteran" technology leader
Those who have a little knowledge of the RPA field must have heard of Yisaiqi. This intelligent software R&D and service company, which was born in 2011, is the earliest RPA manufacturer in China and can be called an "industry veteran" in the RPA field.
At the beginning of its establishment, the concept of RPA had not yet entered the country. At that time, Yisaiqi relied on its original graphic video text technology to launch UEBA (User and Entity Behavior Analytics) products based on graphic operations to obtain data and perform behavioral analysis, helping enterprises Conduct operational compliance and work efficiency analysis of employee desktop computers.
Unlike many screen recording and monitoring products at that time, the recorded video files were large and difficult to store. Yisaiqi launched its own patented compression storage technology, which reduced the storage usage of 1-hour screen recording from several G to 10-20MB, leading the way A technological breakthrough for the entire industry.
This also established the advantage of Yisaiqi in UI recognition, thus laying a solid technical foundation for the launch of Yisaiqi RPA.
With the increase in the number of enterprise customers, Yisaiqi found that many customers have a lot of simple and repetitive work in the business process, resulting in low operating efficiency and error-prone problems, especially in the BPO (business process outsourcing) call center field.
In 2015, Yisaiqi keenly grasped this market demand and developed an intelligent assistant robot by using its own technical advantages in UI recognition.
The robot can simulate and analyze the process of operating graphics and data flow in the business, and help users complete their jobs by reminding, assisting, and replacing them. This has also become the earliest prototype of RPA products in China.
The background data shows that after a certain operator's customer service call center adopts Yisaiqi intelligent auxiliary robot, the time for manual customer service to handle a business is reduced from 1 minute and 28 seconds per capita to 48 seconds, and each manual customer service needs to handle more than 200 calls a day The telephone demand, converted into time, saves at least 3 hours of repetitive work for each manual customer service, which doubles the work efficiency of the enterprise.
The cost reduction and efficiency increase brought by intelligent auxiliary robots has made Yisaiqi very popular in the field of customer service, and it has also allowed it to have a number of top customers such as finance and operators.
In the domestic market at that time, few manufacturers had launched intelligent assistant robots, and the concept of RPA had just been introduced into China. To some extent, Yisaiqi can be called the "originator" of domestic RPA.
In the subsequent market expansion, Yisaiqi has seen more and more user process automation needs, and has gradually learned about the development of RPA in overseas markets. Since 2017, it has officially started the independent innovation stage of RPA.
Unlike most domestic manufacturers who only set foot in the RPA field after 2018, Yisaiqi launched the self-developed RPA robot in 2018, and took the lead in using the native python language as the underlying driving language, using drag and drop to Orchestrate low-code processes.
This original technology of "business flow + data flow" dual-stream visualization brings users a more convenient experience, and also kills a lot of manufacturers who can only do business visualization or data visualization.
**With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, Yisaiqi once again has a keen insight into the huge potential brought by the integration of RPA and AI technology. **If the key technology of early RPA products is screen capture and business process automation, then the key technology of RPA at this stage has evolved to AI.
As Wu Xin, co-founder and co-CTO of Yisaiqi, said, in the past, RPA products focused on simulating mouse and keyboard operations on the PC side, which is like giving a robot a hand, but after integrating AI technology, an RPA robot has eyes and brain.
With the blessing of AI technology, RPA products can begin to process unstructured data such as OCR and NLP. Invoices and documents that originally existed in the form of pictures and incomprehensible natural language texts can be intelligently recognized and included in the scope of data analysis, thus Further broaden the application scenarios of RPA.
In the research and development of AI technology, Yisaiqi also always insists on independent research and development, focusing on technological research and development innovation.
Based on the technology development strategy of "one generation of research and development, one generation of pre-research, and one generation of reserve", in 2018, Yisaiqi cooperated with Nanjing University to establish an artificial intelligence research institute, and hired Professor Li Ming, a professor of Nanjing University and deputy dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence, as the company's chief executive. Scientist, began to specialize in computer vision, machine learning, process mining and other technologies.
This step forward also made Yisaiqi one of the very few manufacturers in China that could develop RPA and AI technologies simultaneously.
Today, these AI achievements have been applied in many fields such as process mining, business modeling, scenario modeling, recommendation, and automated process generation.
In terms of automatic process generation, Yisaiqi Artificial Intelligence Research Institute first proposed a new automatic process generation paradigm "Think Before You Write", and proposed the Pachinko model to complete the transition from "problem description" to "process configuration idea" to "possible Executing process tasks" process automatic generation technology makes the application of deep learning in automatic process generation more extensive.
It is not difficult to find that Yisaiqi maintains technological innovation at every stage of RPA development, continues to lead the development of the industry with forward-looking technology, and stands firm in the stormy waves of the RPA field with its solid technical barriers.
"Easy to learn and easy to use" productization capabilities
If technical capability is the cornerstone of an enterprise, then product strength is the key to the sustainable development of the enterprise. How to create a product with stable performance, rich functions, and excellent user experience is a question that all enterprises must think about.
In fact, RPA seems to be a simple automation tool, but in fact it is not easy for industry users to understand. The important reason is that the process is a highly abstract process, and the processes summarized by people from different perspectives may be different, and those who do not understand the concept of RPA cannot even summarize the process that can be simplified.
As a result, when promoting and configuring RPA products, manufacturers need to communicate frequently with users to understand the real demands, and a large amount of communication and delivery costs will eventually make it difficult to advance the project.
At present, most RPA manufacturers, including well-known foreign RPA companies, adopt a manpower-heavy method of "consulting + delivery service" and a project-based approach to modularize and customize packaging to solve the problem of high barriers to RPA use. problem, but Yisaiqi did the opposite.
Focusing on the product strategy of "cloudization, standardization, and localization" and the core product concept of "easy to learn, easy to use and more stable", Yisaiqi has invested a lot of effort in the productization of RPA to minimize user learning and The threshold for using RPA.
Based on various automation technologies such as UI+AI+API, Yisaiqi's RPA product (iS-RPA) has many features such as dialogue generation process, dialogue generation code, intelligent recommendation components, drag-and-drop interface, and low-code design. You can complete the RPA process design without specialized learning, and truly achieve "everyone can learn and everyone can use it".
Wu Xin, co-founder and co-CTO of Yisaiqi, said that for large enterprises, even in the same industry, the business processes of each enterprise are different. If each enterprise uses hundreds of RPA products, each All products require manufacturers to do consultation and delivery by themselves, so the project cycle will be very long and the project cost will be difficult to control.
Therefore, in the face of large corporate customers, Yisaiqi adopts the method of "teaching a man to fish is worse than giving him a fish" to solve this problem.
Focusing on the customer ecology, Yisaiqi jointly formulates the enterprise internal training certification system, process operation management norms, emergency management plans, safety management systems, etc., to help enterprises realize the self-delivery of RPA.
Wu Xin gave an example. In the Pacific Insurance Group, Yisaiqi needs to invest about 15 people in the early stage to cooperate with its business department in process configuration and product delivery.
After a period of establishment and operation of the operation system and training certification system, Pacific Insurance has formed a customer operation and developer ecology. More than 500 of its business personnel have successfully transformed into RPA developers. The standardized application of the process has laid the foundation.
Today, Pacific Insurance Group has formed a "black light factory" that is unattended and operated automatically by hundreds of RPA robots, and has become a well-known RPA demonstration site in the industry.
At the same time, considering the increasing number of RPA robots deployed by large enterprises and the need for unified management, Yisaiqi has launched a robot factory to help enterprises systematically manage a large number of RPA robots and integrate the original single RPA The task is converted into RPA full-process automation, thereby further promoting the enterprise to realize comprehensive process automation and reducing the difficulty of RPA management.
Facing the vast number of small and medium-sized enterprise customers, Yisaiqi has implemented the product concept of "easy to learn and use" to the end, and launched a series of standardized RPA products to allow customers to use it out of the box.
For example, through Yisaiqi online banking robot and multi-channel reconciliation robot, a series of automated operations can be realized, including flow download, receipt download, data processing and business system entry, etc., which greatly improves the efficiency of financial work.
Overall, the highly advanced product capabilities have greatly lowered the threshold for the use of Yisaiqi RPA, enabling its products to be quickly introduced to the market and accepted by users.
At the same time, this kind of productization ability also determines that users can learn easily. Once the RPA self-delivery system is formed, the implementation of Yisaiqi RPA projects can be carried out lightly and run faster and faster in the later stage.
Positive circular business model
As the RPA track is becoming more and more popular in the Chinese market, more domestic users are beginning to know and accept the application of RPA. After seeing the growing market demand, Yisaiqi made a bold change again in 2018, changing the business model from a one-time software sale to a subscription system of the SaaS model.
Traditionally, selling software is a one-shot deal, and the cooperation is over from the moment the product is sold to the customer. In this case, the only way for the company to grow is to continuously acquire new customers.
But for the SaaS model, customers subscribe to products, and the service has just begun. Customers need to pay an annual fee to rent the service, so the growth of the enterprise comes from the continuous renewal of customers every year.
In the United States, a mature SaaS company's customer renewal rate can reach 90%, but most SaaS companies in China cannot reach this level.
There are several reasons: the product itself is faulty; the customer success service is not done well; the sales department simply finds the wrong customer. In summary, renewal rates are the most important indicator of a SaaS company's business health.
As the first RPA manufacturer to implement the SaaS subscription model in China, Yisaiqi pays attention to technological innovation, product capabilities and customer service at the same time. Help corporate customers obtain greater value from products and services to truly achieve customer success.
Through the accumulation and training of customers in the past three years, Yisaiqi has successfully achieved a high-speed growth rate of more than 200% in the compound annual growth rate of RPA subscription revenue.
**With the expansion of the subscription model, the market performance of Yisaiqi has also had a "snowball effect". The longer the time passes, the faster the revenue will grow. **This is also an important reason why Yisaiqi has been able to achieve a great leap forward in market share in the past two years.
Another reason that cannot be ignored comes from the multi-product operation of Yisaiqi, which increases combined income through the product matrix.
Unlike most RPA manufacturers who only focus on a single RPA product, Yisaiqi has launched three core product lines based on past technical advantages:
**iS-RPA: **iS-Studio, iS-Robot and iS-Console are composed of multiple packages, and users can complete the RPA process design without professional learning.
**iS-CDA:** Automatically record computer screen tasks, integrate computer vision analysis process, and effectively solve the problems of low data quality, difficult integration, and invisible steps in process mining technology based on log analysis.
**iS-RPM: **Analyze, optimize, and reconstruct the end-to-end process through process mining, aim at process blockages and abnormal points, combine task mining, automatically identify automation opportunities, and greatly improve the level of RPA hyper-automation.
Through this product matrix, Yisaiqi combines RPA and process mining, and has a complete "discovery-assessment-build-run-operate" hyperautomated solution, which can help customers optimize and solve problems while discovering them.
Wu Xin, co-founder and co-CTO of Yisaiqi, gave an example. After solving the automation problem of a single process, an iS-RPA customer wants to further improve work efficiency, so he can use iS-CDA to find previously undiscovered , Behaviors that can be optimized, and iS-RPM can also be used to discover whether there are blocking points that can be optimized between multiple processes.
At present, Yisaiqi's process mining products have achieved results in large groups that adopt RPA. It has achieved full automation from problem discovery to problem solving. This effective product combination has also brought more revenue to Yisaiqi. .
Now, relying on the SaaS subscription model and a comprehensive product matrix, Yisaiqi has formed a positive feedback on the business model, and thus obtained high returns from the market.
Competitive advantages established by ecological cooperation
If technology, products and services build the core competitiveness of an enterprise, then ecological construction is a powerful means for enterprises to expand and build competition walls.
Different from most of the manufacturers that flooded in after the RPA trend, Yisaiqi started to build its ecology step by step, steadily and steadily, and developed its own ecology around "system ecology, application ecology, customer ecology, scientific research partner ecology, and service partner ecology". strategy.
In 2019, Yisaiqi launched the first domestic application robot mall, opening the era of Yisaiqi's openness, cooperation and win-win.
The first company in China to launch a free Internet community version quickly fermented among the developer community. The platform and user opportunities provided by Yisaiqi attracted a large number of developers, who actively carried out ecological construction and win-win cooperation around Yisaiqi's products.
In just a few years, the developer community of Yisaiqi has grown rapidly, attracting hundreds of thousands of users to join, forming a developer ecosystem that is enviable by peers and difficult to surpass.
At the same time, Yisaiqi's influence in the RPA field has also attracted more high-quality partners.
In 2022, Yisaiqi and Kingdee jointly released the KQ RPA public cloud version, and in 2023 jointly launched a cloud-native architecture RPA standardized robot based on the public cloud platform, mainly providing a series of RPA standardized application products for the financial field.
Through the RPA standardized robot in the SaaS mode, users do not need to worry about software installation and upgrades, and can access and manage it through the cloud anytime, anywhere, and automatically complete tasks with huge data, clear rules, and high repetition in the financial field, such as online banking in finance. account operations, etc.
For financial personnel of small and medium-sized enterprises, this standardized product is flexible and easy to use, can be easily configured and customized, and has a good user experience, so it has also attracted many small and medium-sized users to subscribe to this RPA standardized robot.
As a strategic investor of Yisaiqi, Kingdee has tens of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprise users in the field of "personnel, wealth and taxation" in the form of RPA+ERP. The ecological cooperation between the two has also left a huge potential for the further market expansion of Yisaiqi imagination.
Today, with the acceleration of localization in the domestic software market, Yisaiqi, as a domestic RPA manufacturer that insists on independent innovation and safety and controllability, has also established extensive ecological cooperation in localization adaptation, and completed the , Kylin operating system, Dameng, Renda Jincang and other domestic mainstream ecological enterprise products and system adaptation, closely following the pace of national credit creation.
epilogue
The enterprise level is a long-distance race of professional competition. As Tang Qisong, the founder and CEO of Yisaiqi, said, "The competition of the SaaS business is a marathon. We have been running on the RPA track for twelve years."
In the course of more than ten years of development, Yisaiqi, with the attitude of an industry veteran, has gone through one after another digital storm, and built a comprehensive competition barrier in terms of technology, products, business models, and ecology. The well-deserved leader of the RPA track.
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