Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAP): How Fortra’s JAMS Fits in the Landscape
At Fortra, we consider automation a discipline, not just a singular product. Sure, individual automation tools can lead to quick wins by taking a repetitive task off your plate. But to reap the full benefits of automation across your organization—increasing efficiency, decreasing errors, and maximizing resources, both human and technological—you need to take a more holistic view.
This holistic approach to automation is what’s driving the conversation around service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAP). According to Gartner, SOAPs, “combine workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning, and extend capabilities to data pipelines and cloud-native architectures.” This coordination of automated, parallel tasks across an organization is key to driving digital transformation. All while changing your thinking away from individual tasks, toward more end-to-end endeavors.
So how does Fortra fit into this new categorization? In the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms, Fortra’s JAMS has been named a niche player. While JAMS is primarily a workload automation (WLA) solution, its features and integrations have proven powerful enough to be utilized as a SOAP. Here’s how:
Cross-Platform Data and Workload Orchestration
A SOAP can’t function without the ability to connect and integrate with every piece of an organization’s IT infrastructure—no matter the platform. WLA solutions, in their most basic form, ensure IT processes like batch jobs and workloads are executed on time and in the correct sequence. But they’re often siloed to one platform or system and find it difficult to integrate with other applications. Not JAMS. JAMS takes WLA beyond the IT department with cross-platform capabilities that power and trigger multi-step workflows, enabling workload orchestration that integrates all the environments, data, platforms, and scripting languages your organization relies on.
JAMS gives you flexibility and control to run your workloads and schedule the way you want it to run, not the other way around. Our REST API relays information to and from JAMS, and our .NET API creates custom integrations with your systems. This is key to orchestrating complex workflows because it eliminates the need for complicated workarounds, enabling more efficient, reliable automation.
Whether your data or services are on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, JAMS reliably orchestrates workflows with many dependencies and differing schedules. Event-based scheduling allows jobs to begin immediately after another designated event occurs—like the receipt of a file, job status, and other variables—taking your automation from static to reactive, a hallmark of orchestration.
Single Pane of Glass for Monitoring and Visibility
Orchestration at the level of a SOAP requires you to have full control over every aspect of your environment. It’s almost impossible to understand a workflow or job by looking at individual tasks. And logging in to multiple platform-specific tools to troubleshoot issues or understand how jobs are interacting isn’t just inefficient, it can be dangerous. Lacking visibility at this level can lead to errors or worse, costly downtime. A SOAP provides a holistic view of your entire environment.
JAMS provides a single pane of glass to monitor and manage your complex and dynamic IT environment. Through a centralized console, get a complete picture of your entire ecosystem and see all currently running and recently completed jobs. The JAMS monitor shows job relationships, definitions and triggers from job to job, dependencies, and individual tasks, allowing you to zoom in and out to see upstream and downstream job flows.
With a clear, dynamic, graphical representation of everything orchestrated throughout your environment, JAMS provides the monitoring capabilities necessary for a SOAP. This level of visibility also lets you make any necessary edits, additions, or adjustments in one spot to troubleshoot and optimize workflows quickly and more efficiently. Plus, JAMS provides a historical view that shows past jobs and actions for easier auditing.
Robotic Process Automation Integration
For true end-to-end automation, a SOAP needs to automate both front-end and back-end processes. Most WLA solutions are limited in their automation to back-end IT processes, like batch processing, file movement, database processing, and scripting. This keeps the power of automation with more technically experienced members of the IT team, when digital transformation is an all-hands-on deck effort. Business users, otherwise known as citizen developers, need low-code tools to automate their front-end tasks like data extraction, report generation, and data entry.
Through an integration with Fortra’s robotic process automation (RPA) solution, Automate, JAMS adds low-code automation to its orchestration capabilities. Business users can easily build tasks and workflows with a user-friendly solution that breaks down the barriers to automation. Job creation is simplified through drag-and-drop task building, screen recording, and native actions, for democratized automation.
Plus, these low-code capabilities aren’t just for business users. Technical users can cut down on the manual work and scripting that holds back rapid development to build automated workflows faster. All with the flexibility to use existing coding and scripts.
Utilizing JAMS as a SOAP
Service orchestration and automation platforms provide a centralized console for orchestrating across platforms, systems, and environments. And while Fortra’s JAMS is best known as a workload automation solution, it has the features and integrations necessary for its utilization as a SOAP. These capabilities include cross-platform workload orchestration, holistic and dynamic monitoring, and integration with low-code RPA. Embracing technology like SOAPs is a great way to start thinking of automation as a discipline to drive your digital transformation efforts.
See How JAMS Performs as a SOAP
Get a personalized, one-on-one demonstration from an automation expert to discuss your unique needs and see how JAMS can orchestrate your workflows.