Robotic process automation (RPA) software revenue grew 63.1% in 2018 to $846 million, making it the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner expects RPA software revenue to reach $1.3 billion in 2019.
"The RPA market has grown since our last forecast, driven by digital business demands as organizations look for 'straight-through' processing," said Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner. "Competition is intense, with nine of the top 10 vendors changing market share position in 2018."
The top-five RPA vendors controlled 47% of the market in 2018. The vendors ranked sixth and seventh achieved triple-digit revenue growth (see Table 1). "This makes the top-five ranking appear largely unsettled," Mr. Biscotti added.
Table 1: RPA Software Market Share by Revenue, Worldwide (Millions of Dollars)
| 2017 Rank | 2018 Rank | Company | 2017 Revenue | 2018 Revenue | 2017-2018 Growth (%) | 2018 Market Share (%) |
| 5 | 1 | UiPath | 15.7 | 114.8 | 629.5 | 13.6 |
| 1 | 2 | Automation Anywhere | 74.0 | 108.4 | 46.5 | 12.8 |
| 3 | 3 | Blue Prism | 34.6 | 71.0 | 105.0 | 8.4 |
| 2 | 4 | NICE | 36.0 | 61.5 | 70.6 | 7.3 |
| 4 | 5 | Pegasystems | 28.9 | 41.0 | 41.9 | 4.8 |
| 8 | 6 | Kofax | 10.4 | 37.0 | 256.6 | 4.4 |
| 11 | 7 | NTT-AT | 4.9 | 28.5 | 480.9 | 3.4 |
| 6 | 8 | EdgeVerve Systems | 15.7 | 20.5 | 30.1 | 2.4 |
| 7 | 9 | OpenConnect | 15.2 | 16.0 | 5.3 | 1.9 |
| 9 | 10 | HelpSystems | 10.2 | 13.7 | 34.3 | 1.6 |
| Others | 273.0 | 333.8 | 22.2 | 39.4 | ||
|
| Total | 518.8 | 846.2 | 63.1 | 100.0 |
Due to rounding, numbers may not add up precisely to the totals shown
Source: Gartner (June 2019)
North America continued to dominate the RPA software market, with a 51% share in 2018, but its share dropped by 2 percentage points year over year. Western Europe held the No. 2 position, with a 23% share. Japan came third, with adoption growth of 124% in 2018. "This shows that RPA software is appealing to organizations across the world, due to its quicker deployment cycle times, compared with other options such as business process management platforms and business process outsourcing," said Mr. Biscotti.
Gartner expects the RPA software market to look very different three years from now. Large software companies, such as IBM, Microsoft and SAP, are partnering with or acquiring RPA software providers, which means they are increasing the awareness and traction of RPA software in their sizable customer bases. At the same time, new vendors are seizing the opportunity to adapt traditional RPA capabilities for digital businessdemands, such as event stream processing and real-time analytics.
"This is an exciting time for RPA vendors," said Mr. Biscotti. "However, the current top players will face increasing competition, as new entrants will continue to enter a market whose fast evolution is blurring the lines distinguishing RPA from other automation technologies, such as optical character recognition and artificial intelligence."
