Business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS) is a relatively new concept. It combines business process management with one or more aspects of cloud deployment, whether that’s SaaS (software-as-a-service), IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), or PaaS (platform-as-a-service).
Business process management is an approach that can help to make a company’s workflow more effective, efficient, and adaptable to new developments. These solutions reduce operational expenses while eliminating the need for capital expenditure and thus reducing total cost of ownership. This has helped to drive more competitive prices, as the industry now offers outcome based and gain sharing revenue models in place of simply charging for licenses or time and material.
With such promise for its applications, Google is diving in head-first to take advantage of the demand for these types of services. Chief Executive Officer of Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, spoke about this at length at Imagine Digital 2021, the industry’s premier cloud-native and AI virtual event. Kurian said that a shift in focus to BPaaS will define future cloud migrations for enterprises.
Now, Google is set to focus on automation and business process improvement as the company seeks to gain ground on cloud computing competitors. Speaking at the virtual conference, Kurian said that the traditional path to the cloud was all about technical integration. That means migrating enterprise applications to virtual machines, data to cloud databases, and refactoring applications to scale more efficiently with microservices.
“By abstracting the underlying technology and making it easier and more efficient to get to the business process, you can speed up time to value,” he said. “People really want to find places where they can generate value. And the places where they unlock value are at every point of contact with the customer.”
The BpaaS market has grown exponentially within the previous couple of years and this trend is projected to continue following an equivalent trend until 2025. The market is expected to reach $103.72 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 9.9%.
Current major players in the market are Accenture, Wipro, Capgemini, Fujitsu, and Genpact, however, Kurian’s interest in BPaas signals that Google is hoping to join these ranks and will likely look for partnerships and acquisitions in key tech areas like robotic process automation.
