Why is RPA meant to be License Free?

RPA technology is on a hypergrowth path; but it’s also moving quickly towards commoditization in the marketplace. The current dominant pricing model is based on the number of Bots needed to evolve as RPA commoditizes. We see this trend happening with vendors offering developer seat-based licensing and others offering free bot studios and cloud orchestration with pricing tied to bot utilization.

To better understand these trends, let’s look at the commoditization of operating systems in the market two decades ago. During the dot.com boom, all the big dot.com companies were running their data centers on Sun Solaris and UNIX based server farms which were not only expensive to license, but also very costly to maintain. Even though it was written off in the early days as not a scalable solution for enterprise grade dot.com applications, things started to change when Microsoft introduced the Windows Server. It only took a couple of years after launch for Microsoft to start capturing the market share causing Server and OS pricing to fall quickly. The concept of an open source OS (Linux) was also introduced during these times and although it took a bit longer for Linux and Microsoft Windows to mature, the OS market quickly commoditized. Linux really took off when companies like Red Hat and others started to offer alternative support and a value-add product-based model to the OS market. Red Hat was later sold to IBM in 2019 for $34Billion.

We see the similar trends happening in the RPA market where some of the vendors have introduced zero bot license model for the core RPA Bot building studio as well as on-prem orchestration. What hasn’t been done until recently was the offering of completely free process discovery, bot development, and bot orchestration. OpenBots is currently the only RPA vendor in the market with a completely free and zero-license tool suite that provides complete end-to-end automation tools at no charge for all users. With OpenBots Studio and OpenBots Server as the core products, OpenBots has differentiated itself in the market by providing scalable and affordable RPA for all. The OpenBots business model is based on Enterprise Support and other SAAS based tools. OpenBots makes it easy for anyone to start and scale their enterprise RPA program with the option to purchase an affordable support program once the RPA program starts to scale.