‘Relevance of the Fittest’ will be the Hallmark of 2019

Technology and its growing influence on our daily life is a most discussed topic today. Developments related to emergence of a new disruptive technology that promise to transform our lives like never before are becoming commonplace. For instance, robots to perform medical surgeries, Artificial Intelligence (AI) to replace reporters altogether, machine learning to predict diseases are just some of such new age innovations.

While these trends mostly reflect trends related to consumer lifestyle, the relevance of these technologies and concepts remain equally high in an enterprise landscape. The year 2018 has set the right tone and momentum for the adoption of such technologies within the enterprise community.

But what in particular is actually driving this uptake? Is it blockchain or AI or Machine Learning (ML) or analytics in silos or a combination of these? Will 2019 continue to witness the same conversation around innovation or technology advancement? What really is the trigger that can help sustain the momentum for technology enablers?

A closer look will reveal that these concepts and complementing solutions are a result of a pertinent need unique to each enterprise. This need is mainly triggered by a compelling challenge that directly affects the business model of the company in an increasingly cut-throat competitive environment. The latent want is for a solution that not only helps overcome the issue at hand but also play the role of transformation enabler.

The eventual result is a revamp of business model encompassing the critical aspects of sustainable growth, profitability, competitive strategy to cite a few. And this dramatic change is rather enabled by a comprehensive and wide scale technology proposition known as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA can act as a mechanism that integrates legacy solutions with newer IT systems.

Independent industry reports peg the global RPA market to grow in the range of 75-90% in 2019 with the year 2018 witnessing the actual validation of RPA’s wide relevance. Industries such as financial services and functional domains such as supply chain/logistics turned up as early adopters of the concept. The year gone by saw multiple global success stories related to RPAs such as backend operations, accounting, inventory management, asset management being migrated to an intelligent ecosystem driving business excellence of unmatched levels.

However, there is a catch here. The true potential of RPA is marred by the tendency to link its relevance and therefore adoption, to address issues related to failure of existing processes. The need of the hour is rather to consider RPA along with IT (‘RPA+IT’) to develop out of the world innovations that are simple enough to use and leverage.

To decode the above, let us consider the new-age concept of blockchain. Technically, blockchain can be used for multiple applications associated with business value chain. However, what will differentiate it is the combination of blockchain with RPA to create disruptive innovations. The RPA bots can operate as fluidly as humans can across IT infrastructure. This means that RPA can act as an effective bridge between multiple disparate systems and the blockchain, thus making the overall adoption more holistic and fool proof.

In addition, an aspect that can amplify the benefits of such a ‘RPA+IT’ proposition is that of integrating it with the cloud. The year 2019 will witness surge in adoption of such cloud-based migration that will enhance the go-to-market and bottom line quotients of enterprises.

The above are emerging trends and the year 2019 will certainly witness next level of progression in technology advancement. While the theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ holds true in life, relevance of the fittest will hold true in case of enterprise technology.

By Gunendra Patil – Group CTO, Nihilent Ltd.