Blue Prism is being taken over by Texas-based private equity firm Vista Equity Partners for £1.1 billion ($1.5 billion) in cash.
Following completion of the acquisition, Vista intends to integrate Blue Prism with portfolio company TIBCO, which is an enterprise integration and data firm. As per the company, they are a “Connected Intelligence platform that seamlessly connects any application or data source; intelligently unifies data for greater access, trust, and control; and confidently predicts outcomes in real-time and at scale.”
TIBCO which stands for the Information Bus COmpany has evolved into an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that provides software to integrate and manage enterprise apps and information delivery. iPaaS automates and simplifies integration activities, making it easy to connect applications and data.
With this acquisition and integration, there is a growing acknowledgment that there is a need for both RPA and APIs for enterprise integration and automation. Just last month, Salesforce acquired Servicetrace RPA and integrated it with Mulesoft – another iPaaS player. The RPA players are also adding more integration capabilities – UiPath acquired Cloud Elements to add more API-based integration capabilities.
Blue Prism has been sold at a steep discount compared to US-based RPA providers like UiPath ( $28 billion market cap ) and Automation Anywhere, which was last valued at $6.8 billion. There could be various reasons for that but for now, Blue Prism has gone private which they think will give them greater access to capital and pursue new growth opportunities via product investment and other potential M&A.
At the end of the day, Blue Prism – the RPA pioneer could soon be history as it gets assimilated into another bigger platform.
