In the fall of 2019, the information technology industry analysis firm Gartner announced its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2020. At the top of the list: hyperautomation. Now that it’s 2021, has hyperautomation lived up to its hype?

Gartner defines hyperautomation as “an effective combination of complementary sets of tools that can integrate functional and process silos to automate and augment business processes.” Among the tools in this combination: robotic process automation or RPA, process discovery, process mining, intelligent business process management systems or iBPMS, low-code and business rules engines.

Such a motley list of older and newer product categories generally leaves both enterprise process leaders and software vendors scratching their heads. Is Gartner really recommending that companies purchase several process tools with the hopes of somehow getting them to work together? Why is RPA just one item on the list, when RPA has taken the enterprise automation market by storm? And perhaps most perplexing: How can Gartner consider such a shopping list of tools strategic?

I spoke to a number of automation tooling leaders to get their take on the buzz around hyperautomation. Is this trend for real or just hype? What’s the real story?

Hyperautomation precursors

At the core of hyperautomation, of course, is automation – and automation has been available for centuries.

Within the realm of IT, automation dates back at least to the 1960s with applications such as enterprise resource planning or ERP, which automated basic accounting processes. “All business software delivers automation,” explains Sean Chou, co-founder and chief executive of Catalytic Inc.

In the 1980s and 1990s, business process management or BPM software arose, with the goal of providing a platform that enterprises could integrate with various applications, orchestrating interactions with them to support processes following flowcharts process analysts laboriously described via complex modeling tools.

Although BPM gained some traction, it was only a modest success. “BPM hit a wall,” says Saurabh Sharma, assistant vice president of product marketing for Datamatics Global Services Ltd. The technology’s complexity proved largely unworkable, and in any case, it wasn’t compatible with cloud computing.

Today we have multiple contenders looking to replace the BPM software of old – not coincidentally, the very same technologies that Gartner includes as part of the definition of hyperautomation, as well as digital process automation or DPA and some others.

Given this historical context, hyperautomation might simply be the next generation of BPM – renamed to give vendors an excuse to sell more gear. “The BPM name is a bit old school,” opines Miguel Valdes Faura,co-founder and CEO of Bonitasoft SA. “What bothers me is that we’re trying to invent a new name for the natural evolution of the BPM market.”

What happened to RPA?

In the 2010s, an unexpected thing happened to a sleepy corner of the automation market: macros. They date at least as far back as the 1980s. Back in the day, you could use these little programs to script basic interactions with a screen interface: clicking buttons, filling in forms and the like.

Reinvent macros for the enterprise marketplace, dust them off and give them a new name, and voila! RPA was born.

Just one problem: RPA wasn’t, well, RPA. “The original description of RPA was incorrect,” explains Guy Kirkwood, chief evangelist at UiPath Inc. “It wasn’t robotic, and they weren’t processes.”

Renaming simple macros as robots (or the vernacular “bots”) made them sexier, in spite of the fact that they were nothing but scripts, and they could only automate simple tasks, not whole processes. “RPA isn’t the conductor, it’s the individual musician,” quips Malcolm Ross, vice president of product strategy and deputy CTO at Appian Corp.

In spite of its humble beginnings, RPA exploded onto the marketplace. The three market leaders, Automation Anywhere Inc., Blue Prism Ltd. and UiPath, each scored massive investments with the hope of continued explosive growth – and RPA was on its way.

The big analyst firms, who had been following markets like DPA and iBPMS, were caught by surprise. “For Gartner and Forrester, RPA came out of nowhere,” says Catalytic’s Chou.

Nevertheless, RPA brought new life to an increasingly moribund market – in many cases, actually representing automation as a whole. “RPA has been the harbinger,” explains Prince Kohli, chief technology officer of Automation Anywhere. “It’s taken over the automation market.”

Even as RPA has matured beyond its macro roots, it still suffers two fundamental limitations: RPA-based automations are brittle, and RPA adds to technical debt.

Both these limitations underscore RPA’s lack of flexibility in the face of change. “When you look at RPA, it only takes you so far,” explains Ayalla Goldschmidt, head of platform product marketing at ServiceNow Inc. (* Disclosure below.) “At some point it starts getting complicated, especially when you have things that might be changing.”

There’s no arguing with the fact that RPA provides short-term relief to organizations struggling with routine manual tasks. This expedience, however, has its downside. “How do I fix issues where RPA was the quick Band-Aid?” Ross asks.

One answer: Combine RPA with another automation technology such as DPA. “In any RPA process, if a bot fails, you need to route in a human,” explains Shaun Leisegang, founder and CEO of rapidMATION Ptv. Ltd. “RPA works hand-in-hand with digital process automation.”

People and process versus technology

On the one hand, RPA caught the leading analyst firms by surprise, while on the other, RPA by itself had serious drawbacks as a replacement for BPM. Both these forces helped to drive the formation of the concept of hyperautomation. According to Automation Anywhere’s Kohli, “to Gartner, RPA wasn’t going to be good enough.”

There remains, however, a fundamental question: Is the right approach to automation to assemble different technologies? Or is it better to start with the processes themselves?

Leisegang distills this problem succinctly: “If you have a shit process and you automate it, you still have a shit process.” The bottom line: Understanding existing business processes is essential to transforming them to meet modern business needs. Such transformation, in turn, is an essential precursor to effective automation.

Technology is thus an important part of the automation story, but not its entirety. “Companies are trying to optimize and trying to become more productive,” says Marcus Torres, vice president for IntegrationHub GM and platform product management at ServiceNow. “Sometimes that’s tools, and sometimes that’s processes.”

Technology has always served as a poor substitute for difficult business transformations. The spotty successes enterprises have had with their digital transformation initiatives are testament to that fact. After all, as UiPath’s Kirkwood says, “technology is easier to understand than transformation.”

But there’s another side to this story: The right technologies can simplify transformation efforts, especially when the workforce is technologically savvy. Automation technologies are a prime example. “The skills are different now,” points out Jon Huang, director of product marketing at ServiceNow. “The next generation of the workforce is so comfortable with digital skills, so they can become the automation workforce.”

So, is hyperautomation more than hype?

The question still remains whether hyperautomation is a useful term for describing the next generation of automation technologies – or whether it’s little more than analyst hype. After all, “Gartner picked a term that actually has ‘hype’ in the name,” quips Ross.

One question is whether hyperautomation is something qualitatively new, or is it simply the natural evolution of automation. If so, do we really need a new term for it? “Why do we have to say ‘hyper’ on top of ‘automation?’” asks Chou. “There’s no one product that will solve every problem.”

Many of the people I interviewed were also concerned that layering on more tools wouldn’t improve enterprise’s automation initiatives. “There are too many tools out there,” Datamatics’ Sharma says. “You don’t need that many.”

Furthermore, no one is saying that hyperautomation is itself a distinct product category – one that might replace one of the many other automation technologies on the market today. “You’re not going to rip out technology and replace it with hyperautomation,” Ross says.

Some RPA vendors have another take on hyperautomation and its relationship to RPA. “Many things hyperautomation was supposed to add to RPA. RPA has subsumed those,” says Kohli. After all, if we expand the definition of RPA to cover all of automation, then hyperautomation simply becomes redundant.

For RPA to outgrow its limitations, expanding its definition to cover all enterprise automation would certainly improve its prospects. Perhaps this expansion has already taken place. “RPA has crossed the chasm. It’s now mainstream,” Kirkwood points out. “Other bits of automation haven’t crossed the chasm yet.”

In the final analysis, therefore, we’re left with a quandary. If we consider hyperautomation to be a collection of technologies, does it help enterprises address their business transformation priorities?

Or perhaps we should take a process and people first approach to hyperautomation – but in that case, is it really something new? Or maybe hyperautomation is really just another name for a rapidly maturing RPA market category?

Whether we add the “hyper” prefix or not, two facts are certain: Automation is here to stay, and the technologies that support it are rapidly maturing.

The analysts may be confused over what to call the various automation markets, but don’t let that confusion stop you from leveraging the appropriate technologies to address your business transformation goals.

Jason Bloomberg is founder and president of Intellyx, which publishes the Cloud-Native Computing Poster and advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. (* Disclosure: ServiceNow is an Intellyx customer, and Appian and Bonitasoft are former Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer.)

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