Aiming to expand its technology portfolio, RPA vendor UiPath has acquired natural language processing and text mining specialist Re:infer.
Founded in 2015 and based in London, Re:infer uses machine learning to identify communication messages in documents and other unstructured text.
UiPath has made several acquisitions over the past few years even as it has conducted several rounds of downsizing, including a 5% staff reduction it announced in an SEC filing on June 24. The vendor also eliminated 11% of its workforce, more than 300 employees, in 2019 after a rapid growth spurt reaching a value of $9 billion amid the rapid expansion of the RPA market.
Greater competition
By acquiring Re:infer, on Monday, UIPath showed that it is trying to move beyond being an RPA specialist and compete more effectively with the likes of tech giants such as Microsoft, said Leslie Joseph, an analyst at Forrester. Microsoft expanded its Power Platform RPA system by acquiring Softomotive in 2020.
“I don’t think it sees any of the other RPA vendors as competition,” Joseph said of UiPath. “Its eyes are on vendors like Microsoft that have very strong offerings in the market.”
Compared to other RPA vendors such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, UiPath has a strong sense of evolution in the market, which leads to expanding its portfolio earlier than other RPA vendors, he said.
UiPath’s own acquisitions include the purchase of Process Gold in 2019, which enabled UiPath to offer tools in the mining process. In 2021, UiPath acquired Cloud Elements and gained access to AI integration technology.
UiPath has also pursued strategic partnerships, including one with data and analytics vendor Alteryx.
But the RPA market has begun to slow as RPA technology has become widely available and increasingly affordable.
“It all boils down to this: ‘How do we make ourselves continue to be relevant when RPA takes a back seat or becomes more and more commoditized?’ ” said Joseph. That’s the question UiPath is asking itself as it seeks to compete on a reasonable footing with large diversified software vendors with RPA products like Microsoft, ServiceNow and Salesforce, he said.
Meanwhile, the Re:infer acquisition also makes sense because UiPath has worked with NLP vendors before, he added.
Automation fabric
However, whether UiPath can catch up with larger vendors remains to be seen.
Because the big vendors are active in many different sectors, including RPA, their main goal is to drive consumption of their cloud among their customer base, Joseph said.
UiPath needs to redefine itself as an “automation fabric” technology vendor to continue to compete with the giants, Joseph said.
An automation fabric as Joseph defines it is the use of automation tools to drive a digital culture at the enterprise level.
“It elevates automation from being this tactical thing that you apply here and there to a broad fabric across the enterprise technology stack that allows work to be done in better ways and ways,” he added.
RPA users want to integrate fabric automation technologies like AI into their process workflows, Joseph said.
They also want technology that supports not only RPA developers but also business users and citizen developers. Finally, users want scalability support for improved management capabilities, and client-centric commercial models such as pay-as-you-consume.