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Australian robotic process automation (RPA) software revenue is forecast to grow at a faster rate than the global market off the back of an international surge due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In Australia, RPA revenue is expected to reach $90.4 million by the end of 2021, an increase of 20.8 per cent from 2020.
By comparison, global RPA revenue is forecast to grow by 19.5 per cent, to US$1.89 billion, over the same period, according to data from research firm Gartner.
Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at the firm, said the key drivers behind RPA projects are the improvement of process quality, speed and productivity, with all three considered to be important as organisations look to cut costs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Enterprises can quickly make headway on their digital optimisation initiatives by investing in RPA software, and the trend isn’t going away anytime soon,” he said.
At a global scale, Gartner claimed the global market is being "dominated" by UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.
Despite this dominance, global average RPA software prices are expected to fall, with 2020 forecast to see declines of 10 per cent to 15 per cent. This trend is expected to continue in 2021 and 2022, both forecast to see annual decreases of 5 per cent.
With RPA software prices expected to fall, Gartner also predicted that demand is set to grow, with 90 per cent of large organisations around the world anticipated to adopt RPA in some form by 2022 due to the impact of COVID-19.
“The decreased dependency on a human workforce for routine, digital processes will be more attractive to end users not only for cost reduction benefits, but also for insuring their business against future impacts like this pandemic,” said Cathy Tornbohm, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.
Furthermore, by 2024, large organisations are expected to triple the capacity of their existing RPA portfolios and nearly half of all new RPA clients are forecast to come from outside IT organisations.
“As organisations grow, they will need to add licences to run RPA software on additional servers and add additional cores to handle the load,” Biscotti added.
“This trend is a natural reflection of the increasing demands being placed on an organisation’s ‘everywhere’ infrastructure.”
This is the latest research that there is an opportunity for RPA solutions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with analysis from firm GlobalData coming to a similar conclusion for the Asia Pacific region.
