Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms: What They Are and Why They Matter
There’s a new categorization in the enterprise automation world that is creating quite the buzz: Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs). SOAPs are considered by consultants as the forward-looking, transformative classification for workload automation solutions that orchestrate across platforms, applications, environments, and infrastructures.
According to Gartner, for Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams, this new categorization of SOAPs will ‘minimize the complexity of automation workflows that span diverse application and infrastructure domains.’
Essentially, SOAP automation empowers I&O leaders to boost efficiencies across the enterprise, while meeting the demands of cloud-based and hybrid digital environments as well as big data workloads.
Perhaps most shocking, Gartner predicts that by 2025, ’80% of organizations using workload automation tools will switch to Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms to orchestrate cloud-based workloads.’
This means legacy job schedulers and limited workload automation solutions that do not keep up with the complexity of the heterogenous IT environment will have a diminished role and lose relevance for delivering across complex infrastructures.
With this in mind, let’s take a deeper dive into what Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms are, examine why SOAPs are essential for the modern enterprise, and explore some of the most common characteristics and capabilities.
What Are Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs)?
The Gartner report defines SOAPs as automation and orchestration solutions that ‘design and implement business services through a combination of workflow orchestration, run book automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure.’
SOAPs, including the JAMS solution, enable I&O teams to reduce the complexity of enterprise automation by centralizing workflows, expanding capabilities for cloud infrastructure, and shifting from time-bound scheduling to event-based, or event-driven automation, which we’ll discuss in more detail later.
According to Gartner, Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms ‘represent the evolution of workload automation tools that aim to manage and automate a complete business process…by adapting to cloud-native infrastructure and application architecture.’ The expansion of workload automation (WLA) solutions into the modern classification of SOAPs more richly develops these cloud-based capabilities and demonstrates the progression of automation platforms into automation orchestration tools that reflect the complexity and diversity of IT infrastructures today.
How are SOAPs Different from Workload Automation Platforms?
The main difference between SOAPs and workload automation platforms are their capabilities and what they can accomplish. At its most basic level, workload automation handles tasks that are more repetitive and narrowly defined. While SOAPs coordinate and oversee the execution of parallel tasks across an organization.
Some workload automation solutions are powerful enough to be used as service orchestration tools if they have the cross-platform capabilities to power and trigger multi-step workflows. And if a WLA solution offers a single pane of glass to give full visibility to your IT environment, you can utilize it as a SOAP.
Why Are SOAPs Essential for Modern IT Environments?
Organizations with modern infrastructures require increasing amounts of orchestration compared to what was needed previously when simply scheduling batch processes that generated end of week reports. Today, business demands real-time information, data, and insights that depend on cloud-based platforms, services, and applications.
The radical digital transformation during the past few years has made it challenging for IT and I&O teams to keep pace. As Gartner indicates, ‘digital business requires multiple teams, both within and outside of IT, to take advantage of real-time, event-driven orchestration of business services’—and this is virtually impossible with more limited automation strategies. SOAPs are intended to serve as the next-generation solution—the hub of automation and the cornerstone for organizations in managing their automation approach in a complex IT environment.
Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms enable organizations to integrate and orchestrate across all platforms, across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments, and across all scripting languages. By streamlining management of dependencies and data, SOAPs significantly increase efficiencies, and according to Gartner, they ‘not only eliminate repetitive manual tasks, but also enhance business agility.’
Ultimately, this new breed of automation platform saves considerable time and resources, brings together disparate workflows, systems, and applications, and optimizes how the business runs to reach new levels of performance and delivery.
Six Key Capabilities of Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms
The Gartner Market Guide identifies six key capabilities of SOAPs, including workflow orchestration, event-driven automation, self-service automation, scheduling, monitoring, visibility, and alerting, resource provisioning, and managing data pipelines. Let’s review each of these areas briefly:
- Workflow Orchestration: This capability provides a centralized and graphical view of workflows, so they can be easily designed and orchestrated across applications and platforms. The graphical flow designer shows interdependencies and enables separate tasks and data to be connected visually.
- Event-Driven Automation: This characteristic of SOAPs involves event-based triggers that enable organizations to shift from time-based scheduling to event-based automation, providing more control based on clearly defined events. Automated workflows can be triggered when a defined event happens, increasing reliability and decreasing manual effort.
- Self-Service Automation: This feature enables business users beyond I&O teams the ability to more effectively manage their own processes, making use of role-based access controls to ensure security and visibility. This allows IT teams to focus on more value-added, strategic tasks, while empowering self-service for the lower-level tasks of other users.
- Scheduling, Monitoring, Visibility, and Alerting: This capability provides visibility for monitoring workloads and scheduled jobs and services in real-time, providing alerts if any issues arise. SOAPs with these types of capabilities ensure transparency into processes across platforms and environments, improving SLAs.
- Resource Provisioning: This feature of SOAPs ensures resources are correctly provisioned and deprovisioned across cloud-based and hybrid environments without manual involvement to optimize allocation based on demand.
- Managing Data Pipelines: This characteristic ensures data pipelines are managed effectively—whether it involves ingesting multiple data streams or automating file transfers. SOAPs offer programmatic creation, scheduling, and monitoring of these data flows to integrate with other tools across the business.
Best Use Cases for SOAP Implementation
- Prologis, a global leader in logistics real estate, implemented a SOAP to transform its infrastructure into a more modern platform that optimized their data management approach, and supported a new data warehouse and data lake for self-service business intelligence and reporting. Read the Case Study >
- Gold Eagle, an automotive chemicals company, uses orchestration to minimize system downtime and streamline task timelines–including JD Edwards processing–to provide efficiency through the whole organization. Read the Case Study >
- Household appliance manufacturer SharkNinja relies on SOAP workload automation to provide a single pane of glass that orchestrates and monitors data refreshes, and ETL process, import, and export across their entire IT infrastructure. Read the Case Study >
- Seminole Electric has eliminated scheduling conflicts caused by batch processes running long and orchestrated a chain of dependencies across their environment so cross-platform tasks and jobs easily flow through their organization. Read the Case Study >
Start Learning More About What a Leading SOAP Solution Can Do in Your Business
JAMS is one of the top Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms available today. We can help you achieve higher levels of optimization and orchestration across your complex and diverse infrastructure. JAMS offers end-to-end automation software that centralizes your workflows to support your critical business processes. And that empowers you to increase efficiencies and boost productivity across your entire enterprise.