Automation 360: Why A Process-first Approach Is At The Heart of a Successful Automation Strategy

Praveen: Welcome everyone to yet another exciting episode of the Zinnov podcast series on Hyper Intelligent Automation (HIA). Your ultimate destination to hear industry stalwarts share their experiences, predictions, and perspectives on automation. The world of automation is undergoing massive transformation, with large-sized acquisitions and heavy investment bets being made globally. In the midst of this intensifying competition, enterprises face a herculean task of unraveling the technological nuances and selecting the right technology to work with, to ultimately achieve the desired outcomes. Today I have here with me, Eric Johnson, CEO of Nintex, who will help us answer some of the questions, enterprises are struggling with. Eric has been at the helm of Nintex’s journey towards leadership within HIA owing to its no-code workflow automation centric capabilities. Eric, we are very excited to have you with us today, and I’m really looking forward to learning more about your views and your vision for Nintex. Thank you for joining us today.

Eric: Thank you, Praveen. It’s a pleasure to be here. Appreciate the opportunity.

Praveen: Great. So, before we start Eric can you tell us a little bit about your company Nintex? How long has the company been around? What’s been the scale of operations? Who are your primary buyers? Just give us a little bit of background on the company.

Eric:So Praveen our company was founded in 2006, in Melbourne, Australia, and it was originally founded by a couple of guys who had a system consulting, integration business. And they were often helping customers build portals and intranets. Customers would say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this application I could use some help with, can you build it?’ And they were having it custom-coded, back in the days. And so, what they ended up doing was creating a workflow designer for themselves, and then later on a forms designer, so that they could quickly help build these applications, use a lower-cost resource and deliver the project faster. They then quickly realized what they had was actually a Software company. And so, they decided at that point, in about 2006 or 2007 to split it off and create its own company. And that was the early beginnings of Nintex. And we’ve had a tremendous evolution since then. I think the best way to always start describing the company is to start with our mission statement, which is to improve the way people work – through process management and automation. And as you just said, it’s a gigantic market, right? And there’s so many different components. There are multiple different platforms and capability sets. There are different user personas. And so, it’s important to understand what do we do and how is it different from what other people do? – We focus very much on the user persona of the ops professional. So think about somebody who might be in an IT collaboration team, in an IT ops team, maybe in the line of business ops team – sales ops analyst or a business analyst, process excellence professional, and people with titles like that. We also have some professional developers who want to go faster and are more of a low-code developer. These are the personas that we focus on and we’re helping people solve problems, that are anywhere from sophisticated to moderately complex. It’s often at an organization level or maybe the full enterprise-wide level. And our typical customer has several hundred to a few thousand processes that they’re managing and automating; leveraging one or more of our capabilities. And I think it’s important to note that we’ve had this long time focus on this balance between ease of use and power, right? If you’re going to help people solve sophisticated problems, but you want them to do it without having to use a professional developer; it needs to be easy enough to use, but it also needs to be fairly powerful. And that’s really where we go. And in order to do that, you got to have a complete set of capabilities.

It’s been a great journey. I think when I started with the company seven years ago, we were about 40 million in sales. We’re North of 240 million in sales today, 10,000 plus customers, our NPS score is an excess of 75. And we’ve got a phenomenal culture. So it starts with great people, great technology, treat people right, and deliver on commitments. Don’t wait, operate fast and do it the right way and great things happen.

Praveen: Amazing. From 40 million, seven years ago, when you joined to today, roughly about 250 million in a short span of time seems really good Eric. Congratulations to you and your entire organization for achieving such a feat. I think clearly it’s a big market opportunity and it seems like your timing back in 2006, when you pivoted from a custom-software company to a proper enterprise-software company and now to an automation focus company. I think these bets seem very timely in the way you have evolved your company. I just want to get started by referencing one of the tech columnists who criticized the automation industry and the whole enterprise software automation to be a form of automation that does not really create any economic value, it does not create newer jobs, unlike the physical world automation where a factory gives rise to a lot of newer jobs to move the economy forward. He also claims that this technology is not sophisticated. So, the entry barriers are not really high. I just want to get started by taking your view in terms of how you see the automation market? – in the context of economic value, job creation, and value addition to society through automation.

Eric: So Praveen, I’ve worked at seven different companies. I am by far the most proud of the work we do here and what we do to unlock value and how much we help people. In fact, I was talking with one of our team members the other day, one of our customer success managers, and she literally had tears in her eyes. And she said to me, you know, I’m so proud of the work we do because I feel like, at the end of the day at Nintex, we end up helping nearly every person on Earth somehow. And when you look at the diversity of our customers, and the applications that are used and how they touch, all the way to the last mile. I don’t know if it’s every person on Earth, but I would say there’s a lot of people on Earth. And they’re getting benefited by Nintex. And I think it’s important to look at, why is that? What is it that an automation provider like us does that really helps people? And if you think about organizations, every organization, whether it’s a for-profit enterprise or a non-profit government, they have a customer, right? There is some group they’re trying to help. And when you run your organization in a more automated fashion and you think holistically about the process and you improve and optimize the process. That improves your ability to help a customer. And so, we do a lot in the non-profit space. And I would say that what are non-profits trying to do? They’re trying to maximize the amount of money and benefit they can give to whoever they’re helping. And I’ll give you an example. We help one organization in the UK, that helps people who are in need of housing assistance. Well, by leveraging our technology, they’ve been able to help more people have home assistance and be able to get rent relief. So that’s an example of automation directly. Helping people. And then when you think about unlocking innovation, right? I think it’s a shame that in too many businesses, you’ve got smart, intelligent, well-educated people doing low-value work. Why are they doing low-value work? They’re doing low-value work because a lot of the process in the organization is poorly designed and it’s un-automated. And so, when you unlock and you automate work, then you allow people to spend time on higher-value thinking. And so I would say Praveen, I have no problem laying in bed at night. Thinking about the work we do here because it is truly spectacular. And to be clear, it’s not just at Nintex, there are other great companies out there in the industry doing great things. And so, I think for every case where we’re maybe eliminating certain roles in the short term, we’re allowing organizations to redeploy these resources, train them, and use them differently. So, I think the automation industry is doing outstanding things for the world.

Praveen: Awesome. So, talking about the industry itself Eric, and picking on from your last comment. I think the space clearly is evolving at a breakneck speed. Hyper Intelligent Automation, as we define it at Zinnov. It comes in different avatars – process mining, document-digitization, process-reimagination, RPA, and so on. More recently there’s been a lot of buzz around this phenomenon called low-code and no-code. And often, when we talk to our customers the one question, they’re asking us always is – When to choose API, when to think of RPA, and when to think of low-code/no-code. Can you help unbundle this a little bit for our audience? How should they think of API, low-code/ no-code, and RPA, and in what different context do these technologies actually make sense?

Eric:So, what I always encourage customers to do, and it’s our philosophy overall as a company is to first and foremost look at the process and understand where your process is at today. When you look at the process, then it allows you to reimagine and rethink it. And as you reimagine and rethink it, you would want to improve it, and that’s when you start to leverage one or more technologies. And so, I would recommend to customers and organizations out there in the market to not start with – ‘Hey, I have RPA, so therefore, let me go look for problems, I can solve with it.’ But start the other way around. And think about what are your processes and what are the technologies? I’ll give you an example, in many cases, we have seen RPA use because there are lots of manual forms that have been created. And then people are filling these things out. Now you need to get them inside a legacy system. And so, you’ve historically had human beings have to input these things into a legacy system. So, one way to look at that would just be, well, I want to eliminate the manual data entry. So, the quickest way to do that without really thinking it through would just be to apply RPA to it. But if you thought more holistically as to why is someone creating a manual form? So, step one is why not digitize the form and the data capture itself? That’s going to be a better customer experience. Then second, when you think about that legacy system, how hard would it be to put some sort of an API on that front end? And in many cases, especially if you’ve got technology like ours, or you can help the customer build API and leverage API very quickly. Then what we often find, it is worth the work to create the API. Once you create the API, you can use our SDK. And then you can build a nice little connector. And so now all of a sudden, you’ve got the automation you wanted, but you actually impacted the customer experience. You eliminated the manual work by the end customer. You eliminated the manual work internally. And in that case, what you really needed was some forms, capability, workflow, and a little bit of integration work. And that’s a much better answer. Now you may have other situations. Where for whatever reason, the best way to revise that process does mean you should still use some component of RPA. And so, we have many customers like SBA and the PPP lending program. We have customers using every part of our platform for that, but there are components of that process. Where for many of these banks, the right and the quickest answer was to use an RPA bot. And so, they did. I think that’s the critical reason why we see the industry really converging. I think the players who tend to only have one component, they’re in a tough spot because they’re trying to convince the customer that their solution is the answer for every problem. And realistically, that’s not true. And so, we like to think of ourselves as an honest broker, and we have all of these components so that the customer can use the right capability in the right place. And we think that’s why the industry will continue to converge and consolidate.

Praveen: Yeah just about your point on convergence Eric, one of the schools of thought we have had, and some of it is also validated by customers – the fact that the digital transformation led to modernization of technology on one hand. And then the RPA and automation led to cost savings. On the other hand, today obviously companies are spending a lot on automation and RPA, because from a macroeconomic standpoint, the cost of borrowing, and to be able to invest in digital transformation, is much higher than the cost takeout they can get by bringing automation. But is that how you see the world going forward? What happens when government provides enough incentives to borrow money to invest in modernizing systems? And in that case, what happens to this industry of automation, RPA, the whole nine yards, and the whole convergence we talked about? Is it going to still be relevant or there’s going to be some hybrid form of the two, that companies will go forward with?

Eric: Well, I think automation itself is going to be extremely relevant. I would expect the specific subcomponent of RPA to be long-term, but it becomes narrower. And it’s exactly the reason that you talked about Praveen. These legacy systems are being, and they will continue to be modernized over time. And as those systems get modernized, some of the places that it was the easiest to go create value leveraging RPA are going to go away. However, when you look holistically at what’s needed with automation, even when these systems are modernized; maybe you don’t have to leverage RPA to help create automation; you still will be leveraging other forms of automation, to extend these systems and get to the last mile work. And when we look out 5-10-15 years, I’m extremely bullish on the opportunity in the industry. But what I would tell you is I would not describe it as an RPA opportunity. I would describe it as an automation and a process opportunity. And so, it’s a much broader way to think. And I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of the RPA providers make these acquisitions. And it’s because they know if they continued to be RPA only, their long-term prognosis would not be so compelling.

Praveen: That’s a very interesting segmentation. So, in the view that I talked about, which is digital transformation and automation on the two extremes, I think what you’re really saying is that there’s a continuum and there’s modernization and digital transformation. There’s a process that is through low-code/no-code and workflow automation. And then there is RPA, which is for tactical legacy systems and unlocking value from that. I think this way of looking at things probably is more relevant than choosing one over the other. In fact, that’s where we get some other questions as well from our enterprise customers; which is to say that, for one reason or the other, most of the enterprises have gone with a multi-platform dependence, right?

They have digital transformation partners, they have process optimization partners, and they have RPA partners. In fact, when we analyze the largest of 250 companies, we realize that a significant portion of them actually work with multiple platforms. In your view of the world, how do you think of the future? Will it get consolidated to one platform? Will it be multiple platforms? How will enterprises really think about the situation going forward?

Eric: So we have the benefit of talking with a ton of the world’s largest enterprises. So, when you think of the global 1000 – over half of them are our customers, fortune 500 – over half of them are our customers. So we have a really wide base, plus we do a ton in the middle market. So, if you have at least a few hundred employees, then Nintex is relevant to you. With that in mind, we’ve got a wide range of data points to pull from. And what I would tell you is that the majority of large enterprises we see, the reality of it is they’ve had a whole bunch of purchasing decisions happen throughout their organization. Many of them have 10 to 20 platforms today. Now, do they need 10 to 20 platforms? Our answer would be no. So we do think there will be consolidation and we are seeing more centralization. I would say the more mature organizations have a process center of excellence or a digital transformation office. The names might be different but think of a centralized organization that holistically is thinking about process and transformation. That organization not only is helping get visibility to the process, but it’s also looking for and making the decisions around which platforms are appropriate for what needs. Now, what we do believe and, it goes back to what I said at the beginning. There is a pendulum of complexity. And then there’s a pendulum of who is going to be doing the work. Let’s start with the hardest part. So, there’s like 1/10th of 1% of the entire needs in an organization that is extremely complex, and they are hyper-mission-critical. So think of an insurance firm claims processing – the claims app, probably the most important application they’re going to have. That is going to be developed by professional developers. And so, there’s a set of players at the very high end of the automation and low-code market, who are really the best fit for that. Now let’s think of the next thing. There’s a whole bunch of applications that are needed, a whole bunch of processes that need to be automated in an organization, which are sophisticated to moderately complex. They’re high value. They may go across the entire company or an entire department. This though is where you can try to use a resource, like an ops professional, a business analyst, the process excellence professional, someone with a title, who could quickly build one of these complex applications, which is powerful, easy to use, and create a lot of value. So there’s a set of those. Then you get to the place where there are all these tiny little workflows that relate to an individual person, maybe three to five steps, or a small team. So think of things that are very wizard-driven, super lightweight, sold on an individual user basis. And so what we think is you need one of the really high things. Let’s call it your Appian, and your Pega, that entire market. You need one for that broad set of needs, that’s high value. That’s the Nintex. And then you need one, for every average person unlocking them, doing their own automation, for their own smaller efforts. That’s your Power Automates – your Zapier and your Smartsheet. And then, some organizations may add on a fourth or fifth, cause maybe they want to go deep in mobile or something like that. And there may be a platform that’s a little bit stronger in that area. But I would say at heart it’s really three. Because there are three distinct areas. So what we’re seeing in these larger organizations is that the center of excellence will help them know what those three are, and help people understand, when to use, which of those three platforms.

Praveen: Interesting, so what you’re saying is basically depending on the complexity of the use cases, the platform choices could vary and at least there’ll be three platforms to deal with all kinds of complexities in a system. I think one of the related questions that come always from our customers is today, most of the automation decisions for one reason or the other are not being taken centrally. In some cases IT is involved, in some cases, business is making the decision, and in some cases, there are completely remote centers not really integrated very strongly with the headquarters, like centers in India or centers in China. They are taking their own decisions in terms of how they bring automation into the way they do things. So, in your view of the World, you mentioned that you worked with many large global enterprises. What are some of the best practices you’ve observed in terms of setting the center of excellence? How do they deal with these different decision-making personas by centers that are everywhere in the organization at this moment? So how do you deal with that organizational complexity with respect to automation?

Eric: So, I would say Praveen that the organizations that are real leaders and are on the higher end of maturity, have created that centralization and they do a really good job of educating the different components of the business and create the champions. And so by having these operational champions in the lines of business, in the various divisions, they connect it back to the center of excellence; and they’re able to provide greater awareness and greater consistency on what happens. And they ultimately end up not having the proliferation of multiple different platforms that really do the same thing. They end up having a lot more efficiency, not only on the pricing they’re getting from the providers, but also just the efficiency of training everybody around the same thing. That’s what we have seen work best. We even see things in some of these organizations, now it’s a little harder with the pandemic, but they’ll have an automation conference. They’ll have an internal user conference, and they act very much as we act, but they do it for themselves and sometimes we’ll leave an asset to help them. I’d say the higher end of maturity looks like that. Now on the opposite end, there are organizations where they don’t have that center of excellence.

And everybody is off doing their own thing. And those are the places where you tend to see 15-20 different technologies. But they have no visibility into their processes. They don’t know what’s running where and they don’t know what’s connected. So imagine this scenario, when you have a core business system, like an SAP system, and maybe you’ve connected a bunch of different additional automation platforms to it. Now you make a change to it. What’s going to happen? You have no idea. But if you’re leveraging a great center of excellence, you’re leveraging technologies like ours, pretty clear our ‘Promapp’ capability. So when you go to change SAP, you know exactly what’s connected to it, you know exactly what you need to change, and you can think through all those downstream impacts. So, I think there’s a lot of value in this whole process-of-excellence, line-of-business cooperation approach.

Praveen: Makes sense. I think like we discussed that a lot of organizations have got into this mess. And they have got these 15-20 different platforms. And they have an independent decision-making spread everywhere. What is your recommendation and advice to these kinds of companies? How should they start deriving value from their automation initiatives?

Eric: There’s a couple of things. Think about the process first. Abstract yourself, one layer above, and think about the set of business problems, and challenges, and opportunities, you’re trying to solve. We really advise clients to think about the process governance, and process excellence, where often a great first step is to start out with that process center of excellence. So, set up your first CoE and step one of that is to capture what are these processes across the organization? Where are they being automated? Get a view into your actual landscape. Then what we encourage folks to do is to think holistically about your processes. What really are the needs? Then you can look towards centrally selecting your core standard platforms. If you’re in the 15 to 20 club, you’re not going to go straight down to three overnight. That’s a lot of work. So, what you’re going to be doing is really trying to first off-set. As we go forward, let’s make sure that people are using the best technology, for the best situation, that we centralized and recommended. And then you start to think about how we can transition some of this work to one of those systems that we want to rely on. And over time, you can whittle down those number of providers. And I think it is a journey and they’re not going to get there overnight. But I think with some good intention over a period of years, the organization could be in a dramatically better position.

Praveen: So, let’s talk a bit about process discovery Eric. I think you gave a lot of emphasis on that to declutter the organizational mess. I believe you made an acquisition around process-discovery in Promapp, and we also see a lot of companies, enterprises, they still continue to rely on manual techniques or tribal knowledge around automation, and they’re not really digitizing the process discovery component at this point. What has been your observation around Promapp? And what was the thesis behind making that acquisition in the first place?

Eric: So holistically for us at the end of the day, what matters most is the outcome. And what’s the outcome? – it’s around a process. When we were working together in about the 2018 timeframe, and we had started this season of our life, which we’d like to call Nintex 3.0. We had a new investor come in and we were thinking about where the market was going, and what the opportunities were? Our view was to go a step higher and help our customers first think about the process. Then it would ultimately create a lot more opportunity for automation. And it would be able to help them in a better way. And that was really where that started. And what we’ve seen over time now is that more organizations are seeing the value of that. So instead of just running and automating something without thinking about what the process really is, and reimagining what’s possible? We’re seeing more organizations now go a little slow, to go fast. And that means taking a look through the process. So, this whole notion of process discovery, which I’d say is a broad category, and the part that gets attention right now, and gets write-ups on it is the whole zone of process mining or task mining. And I would say that in a lot of respects it’s possibly a little over-hyped. This notion of auto-discovery is important. You can start out and get a notion of where you’re at and get some data on it. It makes mapping out a process a little bit quicker. But then the real value we find comes in when you’re looking at that process. And the people who know the process get the chance to look at it and then holistically think of a possible process discovery. See process discovery or task planning doesn’t tell you, what it could and should look like. It just tells you where you’re at right this minute. So then when we try to work with our customers on Promapp and where they get a lot of value from Promapp is, they’re looking at it and they’re collaborating on it, and they start to reimagine what it could be? And some of that is just process design. And it doesn’t involve automation. And some of it involves automation. And then we allow them literally using a little bit of AI and NLP. They can click a button and go straight into the automation design experience and start it much faster. So, we can take out 50 to 60% of the design work on the automation side, by all the work we’ve done on the front end.

Praveen: As a company and like you mentioned that you started with Australia, and historically you’ve made acquisitions through which you’ve gotten a footprint in Asia and in Africa. What are the geographical trends you are noticing in automation? How is a North-American market different from an African market; which is different probably from an Asian market? Are there any nuances that you’ve picked up while operating in these markets?

Eric: The first thing I would call out is, ‘focused on the cloud’. In the North American market, definitely cloud-first. We see organizations 100% prefer to go on the cloud. Even when I think about the government and some of these highly regulated industries, we’re seeing them now want to do automation, and cloud first. I think when you get to other parts of the world that would be the first difference. There are some places where the focus is on-premise or private or hybrid cloud is probably a little higher. So, when we’re in the Middle East for example, we have a phenomenal business out there, and we’re doing really well. But I would say a lot more of the customers are concerned about information, and data not leaving their country, maybe even their own company. And so, there is a little bit of a difference in what they value. I also get some differences around, what types of automation? Which processes do they want to look at? So, there are certainly differences. And one of the things about us and it’s interesting Praveen. We have our global headcount, a little over 800 team members. About a third is in America, mostly in the US, we have about a third in Europe, and we have about a third around the Asia Pacific. We’re globally diverse. Even internally, when it comes down to cultures and different ways to look at things there are certainly differences. For example, the business we have in Germany is exceptionally strong and it is definitely a mix of both cloud and hybrid, but very thoughtful on process design and often going after the harder and more complex processes. So, you definitely see a variety. But globally, tons of opportunities around automation. All of these organizations realize that they need to do it in terms of customer experience and overall competitiveness.

Praveen: Interesting. So, when you look at these different markets are you thinking of building the Nintex technology stack differently for these markets? Because the needs are very different. Or you’re taking the same platform but trying to sell the component, which is most relevant to the customers at that point in time? How are you thinking of the technology evolution in keeping with the needs of the different geographic clusters you have at this moment?

Eric:So I would say the core capabilities themselves are functionally the same. What we do think about though, is the markets we’re going to focus on have localized needs. So not every market wants to work with an English-based product. And so, we do localize and have a prioritized list of how we localize? But we certainly do things like the German language support and a few of the other most popular languages for large markets. We also think about our data center footprint. We leverage primarily Azure. And so Azure obviously has a number of data centers across the globe. And so, as we go into markets, we will often bring our capabilities into the Azure data centers, that’s relevant to that part of the world. Because we know that a lot of our customers are concerned about data residency, data sovereignty, and issues of that nature. So, I’d say there’s a core capability at heart. And it’s going to be the same. But then we’re going to do some localization, and some amount of localized data center support to answer customer needs. Now the mix of products that are sold by each of our teams in the market, can vary. And so, we may have certain markets where we’re having more success with a certain type of buyer and problem set, than other markets. For example, we do exceptionally well in the US around banking, and there’s a whole lot of reasons for that. In other markets, we might be stronger in government, for example. So, we do well across the board.

Praveen: Perfect. In Zinnov’s assessment Eric, we believe that Nintex is already one of the top three automation platforms. And you’ve come a long way. You’ve had a profitable business for a long period of time, etc. The past has been really glorious for you. And where you stand today, seems like a very strong position. Talk to us about how the next 12 months are going to look like for Nintex?

Eric: We’re going to continue to evolve super-fast. We are not resting here. You know, we have three core tenants in the business, and they guide us each and every day. Number one is – deliver on our commitments. Number two is – don’t wait, and number three – operate with respect, and consideration. And when I look at the set of things – we have to go work over the next 12 months. We know what we’re doing. We’ve got the teams across the board going flat out. We’re hiring a ton. So, we’re going to continue to innovate. We’re going to continue to push hard on product capabilities that help our customers. And I have to tell you, I can never predict which ones. But we are really active on the acquisition front. And there are a number of companies that we are interested in. We’re actively having discussions almost every single day. And I would expect that when we get to March 2022, we’re going to be bigger. We’re going to offer our customers more value. We’re going to be able to solve more use cases. We’re going to have more team members to help our customers and partners. Our partner network is going to continue to grow and be even larger. We’re going to have more capabilities, and we’re going to have done at least another acquisition or two. I can’t wait to show up in March 2022. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Praveen: Awesome. We’ve always enjoyed working with you and your team Eric. And today hearing about Nintex and the vision around automation technologies, that are forming an integral part of their digital transmission programs of several of your customers and enterprises in general. I think it talks a lot about the significance of automation, which has obviously evolved in the last few years, and how it is going to continue to evolve over the next several years. And we are confident that with leaders like you, with companies like you, the future of automation is actually in safe hands and we will have more and more progressive enterprises and will have more flexible platforms. And more importantly, it feels like we are on a path, where we will have a well-informed community as a whole, to be able to derive benefits and get outcomes out of the automation initiatives, that they are going to make. So, I really appreciate Eric, you taking out time today, and joining us on this podcast, it was a pleasure to host you and hear some stories around the industry and the company. I wish you all the best. And eagerly looking forward to what Nintex can do over the next 12 months and the period after that? I wish you and the entire team the very best. And thank you once again for being on the show today.

Eric: Well, thank you, Praveen. I really appreciate the opportunity. You guys have such a great set of thoughts on the market. Whenever your research comes out, we always read it as a team. We’re always learning from it. And we really appreciate the opportunity to be part of your zones, the opportunity to participate in podcasts like this. So, thank you for what you’re doing for the industry, and the market. It really means a lot to all of us. Appreciate it.

Praveen: Thanks so much, Eric. And with that, we come to the end of this episode. Thank you all for tuning in and watch out for more such engaging discussions, in this Zinnov podcast series. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you so much.