Part two: Why GAPs are gaining momentum in the marketplace The widespread adoption of cloud applications is Other top trends that have catalyzed the general Preference for software with good APIs the single most significant driver of the general automation platform’s momentum include: Software buyers now value the capabilities of automation platform’s increasing momentum. robust and well documented APIs. As such, The average number of Software-as-a-Service Changing buyer behaviour across many different availability of good APIs are a top requirement applications has spiked in the past 15 years, touch points and companies’ quests to offer a driving software purchase decisions. which has led to an increase in the number of cohesive customer journey. operations professionals being brought on to act Integration hiccups and a general lack of ability Building your tools around your processes instead as application administrators. to quickly and efficiently automate processes of building processes around your tools. have created far too many friction points in Additionally, the proliferation of SaaS now the customer journey. Countless organizations A tool loses its utility if you start catering to means that its competitive advantage is choose not to go with the best apps because they its capabilities as opposed to it catering to dissipating. The value of SaaS is indisputable, can’t optimize for each stage of their customer your process needs. As organizations become but even industry laggards are on board now. journeys. increasingly cognizant of this fact, the need for As a result, many organizations have a renewed General Automation Platforms becomes more interest in developing a competitive advantage Preference for selecting best-in-breed apparent. through streamlining processes to optimize the applications over all-in-one hubs performance of their existing applications. Along those same lines, General Automation Great API applications Platforms allow for easy, flexible automation APIs are enablers of a more complete, flexible between multiple best-in-breed software that enterprise resourcing architecture that allows does one thing very well. This is in contrast to all- data to move freely in any direction. General in-one tools that do many things that are “good Automation Platforms help realize this potential enough.” The result is increased overall value without creating additional complexity for users potential in the form of fewer customer friction and department heads. For all of these reasons points. and more, General Automation Platforms have risen to prominence in the past few years. 18