BP3 adds workload automation to its RPA-focused services

Consolidation among automation services firms continues apace. Austin-based BP3 has landed its seventh acquisition in the shape of London-based Extra Technology, building on BP3’s already-established place among the enterprise-favored 100-plus-employees club and introducing workload automation to its customer offering.

Enterprises can use workload automation to automate the IT tasks supporting a business process. It can operate across an entire system, with central management of processes across mainframes and cloud and hybrid environments, including third-party apps and operating systems.

Workload automation adds the capability to move and modernize mainframe application workloads, a capability BP3 believes many of its current customers need since many still run business-critical systems on mainframes.

Workload automation has a role in enterprise HFS OneOffice ambitions

BP3’s strength to date has been primarily in business-serving RPA. Combining front-end RPA skills with the responsiveness and IT time-and-effort-saving capabilities of back-end workload automation reflects the HFS OneOffice need for business and IT operations to converge. Other automation services specialists typically focus on the business side. Even global services providers such as IBM separate the functions. BP3 will initially operate Extra Technology as a wholly owned subsidiary, but it plans to fully integrate the business following the pattern it has applied to previous acquisitions. Carefully integrated, BP3 could establish a roadmap for genuine end-to-end process design, delivery, and management running across and beyond business and IT silos, in line with HFS’ OneOffice ambitions.

BP3 entered the 100-plus-employee club in August last year with the acquisition of Agilify. Extra Technology adds another 20 heads, taking BP3 to more than 170. HFS previously observed how scale flushes away often-unspoken client concerns about sustainable business relationships and the ability to handle sudden surges in demand.

Founded in 2007, Extra Technology brings additional expertise in Automation Anywhere (it was named the 2021 Automation Anywhere Digital Workforce Partner of the Year). Extra Technology also has relationships with ABBYY and Microsoft. Its team consists of fully certified specialists in all CA Technologies workload automation tech (it is a Preferred Service Partner for CA) and BMC Control/M, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, IBM TWS, Redwood Cronacle, and Stonebranch PXS. It brings customers from financial services and life sciences in northern Europe, including the NHS.

More acquisitions are likely as automation services consolidation continues

BP3 has been growing quickly with a funding commitment of $22 million from Horizon Capital. Last August’s purchase of Agilify came just months after BP3 acquired San Francisco Bay Area-based transformAI, which added deep expertise in Automation Anywhere’s intelligent document processing (IDP) offering, IQBot. We expect BP3 to keep acquiring in a market still ripe for further consolidation.

However, in the current market, BP3 may be as likely to continue acquiring firms as it is to be acquired. The firm has built and acquired a broad set of skills for both developing and implementing IPA (intelligent process automation), IDP (intelligent document processing), and RPA (robotic process automation) solutions. HFS believes BP3’s focus on making mainframe solutions more extensible as cloud-based solutions grow in popularity is where it is most likely to make its bones. Here, it may face significant headwinds from the likes of IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, none of which will take kindly to a plucky start-up seeking to upset their plans for growth in this space.

The Bottom Line: Few firms are on track to become cloud native so most CIOs must consider how to improve the functionality of their legacy systems in the context of high-performance, high-reliability workload automation and information processing.

Legacy systems are a fact of life, so it’s refreshing to see an automation services provider taking steps to respond to the reality many enterprises face. BP3’s acquisition strategy addresses the need to support and monetize decades of investment in legacy systems and make back-office solutions compatible with advances in process and information automation.

Ultimately, to generate a swift and accurate response to customer needs, processes traditionally seen as “owned by IT” must be managed, integrated, and automated in line with the business processes they support, delivering true HFS OneOffice outcomes. We don’t underestimate the challenge of developing a holistic value proposition reflecting both capabilities.

As BP3 acquires assets for automating and processing mainframe-led workflows centric to both IBM and Broadcom’s CA business lines, they may find themselves an acquisition target for the ever-acquisitive Broadcom. Broadcom recently announced the takeover of VMware to bolster its mainframe, AIOps, systems management strategy and offering. A company like BP3 may become a prime target as investor funds tighten.