In 2019, Forrester produced The Forrester Wave™: Software For Digital Process Automation For Deep Deployments, Q2 2019, and The Forrester Wave™: Digital Process Automation For Wide Deployments, Q1 2019.
In our 23-criterion evaluation of digital process automation (DPA) providers, we identified the 14 most significant ones — AgilePoint, Appian, Axon Ivy, Bizagi, Bonitasoft, Hyland, IBM, Kofax, Microsoft, Newgen Software, Nintex, OpenText, Pegasystems (Pega), and ServiceNow — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps application development professionals select the right one for their needs.
DPA Customers Want Platforms That Handle Multiple Use Cases
In 2019, Forrester produced The Forrester Wave™: Software For Digital Process Automation For Deep Deployments, Q2 2019, and The Forrester Wave™: Digital Process Automation For Wide Deployments, Q1 2019. The unique capabilities to handle the sophisticated functional requirements for deep deployments and business-centric development tools and commercial models to support wide deployments required two evaluations at that time. As the market matured, customers increasingly looked to standardize on platforms that could handle both workloads, and vendors are well on the road to meeting those customers’ demands. To that end, Forrester has consolidated the separate evaluations into one for Q4 2021. In addition, DPA platforms are increasingly relevant for general-use low-code development and must now be analyzed for those requirements.
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Handle the deepest, most sophisticated use cases. DPA has its roots in business process management, systems designed to handle complex long-running processes. These challenging scenarios have only become more complex, requiring DPA solutions to manage an increasing array of functionality like rules and decisioning for conditional logic, robotic process automation (RPA) for embedded task management, AI and ML, and content intelligence, to name a few. Managing this interplay of heterogenous technology and human states requires specialized systems.
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Scale out to handle the unique requirements of wide deployments. Many organizations will have a small number of sophisticated applications and large number of more straightforward workflows to automate. To handle both, a solution must be able to scale out through a combination of simplicity and speed of application development, pricing and packaging to encourage broad usage, and governance tools to leverage more development by a wider class of development resources.
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Offer general-use low-code capabilities. The automation imperative is not limited to workflow applications. Many organizations seek a solution that can address not only critical process needs, the core of DPA, but also general-use low-code applications that could be more data-centric. As organizations increasingly look to standardize on a smaller portfolio of development tools, a solution that can serve as both a DPA platform and a low-code platform is very appealing to many.
Evaluation Summary
The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the market and does not represent the entire vendor landscape. You’ll find more information about this market in our research on Now Tech: Digital Process Automation, Q4 2021.
We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings using the Excel-based vendor comparison tool (see Figure 1 and see Figure 2). Click the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com to download the tool.