Guy Kirkwood is chief evangelist at UiPath.

The Forrester Wave™: Robotic Process Automation, Q4 2019 was released this week, and UiPath was ranked a Leader, achieving the highest possible scores for Strategy and Market Presence categories, and the highest score of all evaluated RPA vendors in the Current Offering category.

We’re incredibly proud of this accomplishment, particularly considering how far the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market has come in the last few years. RPA has matured as an industry, and we believe this Forrester Wave™ illustrates not only the strong energy of the RPA market but also the strides UiPath has taken to better meet our customers’ needs as their RPA use expands.

What do customers need from their RPA vendors today?

We see four areas of focus in this Forrester Wave:

1. Process mining and discovery

2. Attended automation, or the ability to support human and robot interaction

3. Platform openness

4. Cost of ownership

When you look at these four areas together, considering the larger picture of how RPA adoption has grown and how the market has advanced over the last three years, it makes perfect sense that these are the concepts driving the most activity among leading RPA vendors and the most discussion among RPA users.

As businesses move beyond small-scale RPA implementations to real ‘automation first’ strategies, they need more than a few RPA robots. They need tools that allow them to identify and prioritize the processes that are ripe for ROI from automation. They need the ability to automate longer, more complicated processes that require human intervention with robots. They need platforms that support artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and other external building blocks along with RPA. And they need to consider how the cost of ownership affects their ROI as they deploy RPA at scale.

What’s next for RPA?

These needs are growing pains. The RPA market is fast-growing and therefore fast-changing, which is one of the reasons we are so proud of our top ranking in the Strategy category in this Forrester Wave. At our recent FORWARD III conference, we announced the next generation of the UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform—with advancements in process discovery, attended automation, analytics, and more—just one of the many steps we are taking to prepare for the future of RPA.

Download a full copy of The Forrester Wave™: Robotic Process Automation, Q4 2019.