Blue Prism has been around for some time, having launched a commercial version of its software product in 2008 and spent four years developing it with a number of blue-chip customers, including Barclays (BARC), Co-operative Banking Group, Telefónica O2, RWE npower and Shop Direct. These enterprise-scale deployments demonstrated the compliance, resilience, scalability and security of Blue Prism's software, an “industrialisation process” that has created a significant barrier to entry into this market. It’s a market with significant growth potential too.
A 2013 study by Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, on the effects of computerisation on US jobs found that 47 per cent were at a "high risk" of being replaced by technology with a further 19 per cent at a "medium" risk. This analysis was echoed last autumn by Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England chief economist of Monetary Analysis & Statistics, who commented that 15m jobs in the UK could be at risk of automation. The impact of robotics on the workplace was the main theme of the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, which described the advent of economy-changing technologies such as RPA as "The Fourth Industrial Revolution".