Part eight: The future of general automation platforms There are several general automation trends to look out for over the horizon. Use them to your advantage. Trend #1: GAPs are spreading within Trend #3: GAPs have the potential to replace one- organizations as companies mature from trick-pony software. point-to-point integration to company-wide With the explosion of single-use case software automation. over the last five years. Former buyers realize that Organizations typically start-off with GAPs they have too many applications and are looking as a way to solve one pain point. As their for ways to replace multiple software with one understanding grows of what GAPs can do, broader, or more generalized software that can then we see an acceleration in the number of accomplish many use cases. For example, GAP use cases that they are used for. Before too users have successfully replaced lead scoring long, we’ve seen companies standardize all software, marketing automation software, lead- automation on a GAP. to-account matching software, and multiple point-to-point integration software. Trend #2: The office of the CIO are embracing GAPS as a way to empower business users. The CIO of a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company remarked that he needed a way to handle the growing volume of integration and automation requests originating from business users. He realizes that his IT team isn’t big enough to deliver on all the demands and that the tools used in IT are too technical and not appropriate for use by business users. 48