Blue Prism is the trading name of the Blue Prism Group plc, a British multinational software corporation that pioneered and makes enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) software that provides a digital workforce designed to automate complex, end-to-end operational activities.
Blue Prism's headquarters are at 2 Cinnamon Park Crab Lane Warrington WA2 0XP, UK with regional offices in the U.S. and Australia.[3][4] The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange AIM market.[5]
Blue Prism was founded in 2001 by a group of process automation experts to develop technology that could be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of organisations.[6] Initially their focus was on the back office where they recognised an enormous unfulfilled need for automation. The company was co-founded by Alastair Bathgate and David Moss to provide a new approach that today is known as robotic process automation, or RPA.[7]
In 2003, Blue Prism's first commercial product, Automate, was launched. In 2005, the second version of Automate was released with features for large scale processing. Co-operative Financial Services began using Blue Prism software in 2005 to automate manual processes in customer services.[8]
Robotic process automation (RPA) is the application of technology that provides organizations with a digital workforce that follows rule-based business processes and interacts with the organizations' systems in the same way that existing users currently do.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15] Blue Prism has been credited for coining the term "Robotic Process Automation."[7][16]
RPA is a growing industry and is expected to reach $3.11 billion by 2025.[17] It has been used to handle the requests generated by the General Data Protection Regulation;[18] by Tokio Marine Kiln for back-office transaction framework; by the nutrition company, Fonterra, to fix quantity mismatches in planning software SAP;[19] and by Milaha for the entry, processing and transfer of data.[20] The independent market research company Forrester Research identified Blue Prism as one of three companies that is considered a leader in the robotic process automation field both in terms of their market presence as well as the quality of their offering in a 2017 study.[21]