The 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA: Kofax Intelligent Automation Challenges the Status Quo

Gartner has released their 2020 Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Report and we’re proud to say—there’s a new Challenger on the block. Gartner moved Kofax RPA from “Niche” in the 2019 RPA Magic Quadrant report to “Challenger” in 2020, acknowledging that our unique and innovative approach, which reframes RPA as one element of a broader intelligent automation platform, has gathered market momentum.

When we announced the industry’s first and only integrated Intelligent Automation platform in 2019, Kofax was the first provider to recognize RPA’s limited value as a standalone solution. Instead, we focused on its importance as an essential component of a broader approach, necessary to achieve enterprise scale, reduce time to value and increase ROI. And since then, it’s become clear to the market that standalone RPA solutions cannot enable true end-to-end digital workflow transformation at scale.

Challengers Think Differently

Magic Quadrant Challengers possess value above the competition, which eventually shapes the future market. This allows customers to meet current automation expectations while having access to advanced Analytics and AI features that will drive digital transformation value well into the future.

While the status quo RPA vendors compete on a feature-function basis, dictating how they were placed in the Magic Quadrant, Gartner assessed Kofax differently, viewing our value proposition much more broadly than just RPA:

“Kofax targets the automation needs of large organizations with a portfolio of capabilities including RPA, intelligent document ingestion, ML, process discovery, an intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS), analytics and more. When bundled together, these capabilities can deliver greater end-to-end automation than most of Kofax’s competitors requiring application partners or third-party solutions to deliver similar functionality.”*

I recently shared thoughts on the how consumerization of enterprise software driven by easier to use software coupled with more sophisticated users is leading to increased expectations from RPA investments. Long gone are the days of believing transformative value can be achieved by automating simple rules-based use cases. Boards and c-level executives expect seamless RPA plus AI-powered automation to create digital workflows that bridge back and front office activities resulting in increased efficiency, growth and resiliency. And this is more important than ever as COVID accelerates digital transformation across every region and industry.

Intelligent Automation Benefits

Earlier this year, we announced the latest Kofax RPA innovations, including process discovery to identify and visually map automation opportunities, enhanced AI and Machine Learning for document understanding and citizen developer tools to connect to existing applications and optimize workflows. We continue to invest in our RPA capabilities, and understand that when RPA is built into a platform of pre-integrated capabilities, organizations can:

• Enable the Innovators: Empower citizen developers, administrators and professional developers with a low-code experience to solve business problems and scale innovation across the organization.
• Unlock Document Intelligence: Achieve greater efficiencies and harness value in documents, data and content to drive business transformation outcomes.
• Develop Digital Workflows through a Connected Ecosystem: Drive productivity and governance using pre-built connectors in its SmartHub to common applications, including SAP, Oracle, Box, Google and other RPA vendors to transform siloed tasks into digital workflows.
• Automate Today, Scale Tomorrow: Combine the most agile Intelligent Automation platform with Kofax’s global ecosystem, governance capabilities and security to quickly solve today's problems, and still grow and scale to meet tomorrow's needs.

*Gartner Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation, 27 July 2020