Automation-as-a-Service Market

Automation-as-a-Services is an on-demand service that allows companies to rapidly automate their business processes, increase productivity and efficiency. The service typically involves the identification of automation use cases, the development, testing, and deployment of automated solutions.

This services are usually designed to help manage an increasing number of daily personal and professional activities, by providing improved business process management and more.

The technology can also being combined with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Process Automation (BPA), allowing companies to greatly improve how business processes are managed, solved, and delivered. This service can be used to automate several business function including IT, sales and marketing, operations, finance, and Human Resources (HR).

The demand for Automation-as-a-Services is continuously increasing as companies are rapidly automating their existing and new business operations in terms to increase productivity and reduced operational cost by eliminating routine manual tasks.

Nowadays, automation is present in each and every businesses small and large, ranging from subtle features in common business applications to more obvious implementation, like self-driving vehicles. The increasing need to automate processes and devices across various industry verticals for multiple business processes is driving the market growth.

Moreover, automation, leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies has also fueled the growth of Automation-as-a-Service market. The combination of AI and automation would not just reduces the human efforts but also removes the need for intervention altogether.

The IoT has entered the next stage of business processes, where the focus is primarily on integration and convergence across industrial verticals. According to Cisco, the global number of connected devices will reach to 29 billion by 2023. IoT is changing the future of automation engineering and manufacturing. By connecting machines and allowing them to control themselves automatically, will require lesser staff and reduces the error rate.

IoT uses several technologies and components to connect to the internet such as, sensors, actuators, gateways and many others. Automation ties all these components together and ensures that processes work smoothly without the involvement of a human being. Information is traversed between devices so that processes can be automated, without the need for human intervention.

Businesses are continuously leveraging the benefits of IoT in automation as it yields greater potential to improve productivity, agility, and efficiency.

When automation is combined with elements of AI such as machine learning, the result is known as intelligent automation. Intelligent automation empower rapid end-to-end business process automation and accelerate digital transformation.

Intelligent automation has radically changed the way personal and business affairs are conducted. The tools designed using both the technologies allows to reap both the benefits of automation — increased speed, efficiency, time-savings, and ability to scale — with the insights, flexibility, and processing power of AI. By combining these technologies, companies can automate higher-order tasks with AI assist that in the past required the perceptual and judgment capabilities of humans.

Organizations are continuously adopting intelligent automation-as-a-Services to go beyond the routine to the innovative. Organizations across all sectors are continuously adopting AI enabled automation-as-a-Services to transform their business processes, and to achieve higher speed and accuracy by automating decisions on the basis of structured and unstructured inputs.

The increased use of automation services in every sectors, has increased the demand for highly skilled professionals in the field of automation. Even in many cases where automation is economically and financially justified, a lack of skilled workers with proper technical and digital competencies to operate, upgrade and maintain such technologies may deter automation. Lack of talent skilled in automation technologies is considered as a key challenge in the Automation-as-a-Service market.

Key players such as:

• IBM Corporation
• HCL Technologies
• Automation Anywhere
• Blue Prism
• Microsoft Corporation
• Nice Ltd.
• Pegasystems
• Happiest Minds
• ITyX
• Hexaware Technologies Limited
• UiPath
• Calligo
• AVEVA Group plc
• Arista Networks

others are actively involved in offering Automation-as-a-Service for different applications.

The major vendors involved in the development of Automation-as-a-Services tools are carrying out different organic and in-organic growth strategies to increasing their market share in the global Automation-as-a-Service market. Key players are focusing towards the launching new products and upgrading their existing products by incorporating AI and ML technologies to stay competitive in the market.

In August 2020, Arista Networks has unveiled its CloudVision as-a-Service product that automates multi-domain networks spanning across the client to cloud to help customers achieve faster time-to-value, elastic scaling, and continuous network assurance.

In October 2019, Automation Anywhere has announced the launch of its AI-Powered Robotic Process Automation-as-a-Service platform. The world’s first purely web-based, cloud native, Digital Workforce platform.

Small and Mid-sized enterprises that are embracing automation are thriving. Automating repetitive and time consuming business processes help small businesses to scale-up quickly.

According to the survey conducted by Salesforce Research of 500 small business owners, found that small businesses automating their processes are 1.6-times more likely to be growing than those that don’t. Similarly, growing small businesses were found to be twice as likely to adopt artificial intelligence as stagnant businesses.

U.S. is an extremely open market for digital transformation. Digital transformation in U.S. is accelerating the push of major automation suppliers into the software business. While much North American AI innovation is coming from startups and tech giants, the country is also showing how AI can be applied in its age-old industries like manufacturing and retail.

A strong inclination of SMEs for adopting Automation-as-a-Service within their business functions such as accounting/finance, human resource-related processes, and procurement has contributed significantly towards market growth.

Moreover, North American organizations were among the earliest to launch AI programs, with 11% deploying AI as early as 2015, twice the global average. Thus, the strong presence of leading automation players and strong technical base are the major factors behind the largest market share of U.S. in North America.

Several Indian companies are increasingly forcing towards deployment of RPA and other intelligent automation technologies to address time consuming business processes and market pressures stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most global in-house centers (GIC’s) located in India are already reached to its maturity level of adoption of automation solution to enhance business processes and achieve productivity goals with a confluence of technologies like Chabot, ML and capture solutions. Thus, the high adoption of Automation-as-a-Service among small and mid-sized enterprises is likely to witness growth of the Automation-as-a-Service market.

The widespread impact of novel coronavirus pandemic is revealing a significant vulnerability in corporate supply chains. The pandemic has also forced a supply chain slowdown that has further delayed the expansion of automation technologies. As the pandemic began, the global workforce has become increasingly mobile, with work from home as a viable option for more users.

Thus, enabling Automation-as-a-Service helped enterprises to look beyond the cost of just labor arbitrage towards building resilience in their processes to meet similar uncertainties in the future. Several enterprises have started scaling their automation journey by automating several business processes, while some others have started delivering returns with automation.

The potential use of Automation-as-a-Service during the COVID-19 crisis has increased among the peoples. Over the past few year, the Automation-as-a-Service market has shown huge growth opportunities, the market has grown with significant growth rate of above 30% CAGR in the past years. Increasing lockdown periods due to COVID-19 pandemic have estimated to motivate the IT companies to procure Automation-as-a-Service during the forecast period.