Microsoft is set to be the only firm among the enterprise tech giants investing in robotic process automation (RPA) tools to make a significant impact, a report from Forrester claims.

The RPA market is set to be worth $2.9bn by revenue in 2021, up from $125m in 2016, while the two biggest players in the game, Automation Anywhere and UiPath, have a combined valuation of $39.2bn. UiPath, especially, appears to have convinced investors that robotic process automation is A Thing, with a $35.8bn valuation after its recent IPO in April.

However, the total RPA market is still tiny compared with the enterprise application market, worth $225bn in 2029, according to IDC. Nonetheless, vendors in the bigger market are still tempted to get a slice of the action. Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft have all made significant investments knitting RPA into their platforms in recent years, but only the Redmond OS giant is likely to make headway, Forrester said.

It predicted that two pure-play RPA vendors plus Blue Prism, which offers RPA and low-code tools, would control 32 per cent of the market by 2023, while Microsoft would command 5 per cent because it is integrating RPA with its Power platform, which includes low-code and self-service BI offerings and is integrated with Office and Dynamics application products. Read On