The future of workload automation: Insights from Gartner®
Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) represent a pivotal evolution in workload automation, offering a unified approach to orchestrating complex tasks across varied IT landscapes. This shift pushes workload automation solutions to be more agile and efficient, enabling businesses to meet dynamic market demands and drive digital transformation.
Initially released in 2020, the Gartner Market Guide for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) revealed a new category to recognize the evolution of workload automation, SOAPs, extending traditional capabilities to new technologies like event-driven business models, cloud infrastructure and big data workloads.
To recognize advancements in this technology category and provide analyst insights for those considering a specific investment opportunity, Gartner released its first Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) in 2024. In this report, Gartner named Redwood Software a Leader, positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision. Download the full analyst report to learn about SOAP features, market predictions and more.
Read on to explore how SOAPs expand workload automation, their key capabilities and how Tidal by Redwood is equipped to empower I&O leaders, streamline business services and catalyze digital business growth.
The significance of SOAPs for workload automation
Since the release of the Gartner 2020 Market Guide, businesses have changed their approach to workload automation technologies and strategies. The focus is now on agility and efficiency, and SOAPs provide the architectural backbone for orchestrating complex tasks across diverse IT environments. Organizations are better equipped to respond to business demands, leveraging automation to streamline operations and foster innovation.
“SOAPs enable infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to design and implement business services. These platforms combine workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure … SOAPs expand the role of traditional workload automation by adapting to use cases that deliver and extend into data pipelines, cloud-native infrastructures and application architectures. These tools complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains to provide customer-focused agility, cost savings, operational efficiency and process standardization.”
– 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs report
At the core of SOAPs’ impact is the ability to integrate and coordinate workloads across various platforms and technologies. Businesses looking to optimize their operations in line with DevOps initiatives and the continuous deployment of applications and services need seamless integration across systems. Companies can use SOAPs to quickly adapt to changes in the market, ensuring that they remain competitive in a fast-paced digital landscape because SOAPs facilitate a more connected and responsive IT infrastructure.
The role of workload automation in achieving the benefits of SOAPS
Workload automation (WLA) plays a pivotal role in realizing the full potential of Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. WLA solutions simplify complex workflow management, making it easier for businesses to implement effective automation strategies. They provide a layer of intelligence that can predict and respond to IT infrastructure needs, optimizing resource utilization and minimizing downtime.
Organizations can free up valuable resources by automating routine tasks and orchestrating workflows across various environments, allowing them to focus on innovation and growth. Machine learning and analytics within provide insights into performance and potential improvements, further enhancing the effectiveness of automation strategies.
“By 2027, 90% of organizations currently delivering workload automation will be using service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAPs) to orchestrate workloads and data pipelines in hybrid environments across IT and business domains.”
– 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs report
6 key differentiating capabilities of Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms
Gartner identifies capabilities of SOAPs to help differentiate them from traditional IT workload automation essential for business and IT operations. Let’s review each capability and how Tidal aligns with its evolving capabilities and integrations.
Workflow orchestration
Workflow orchestration assists in automating and streamlining complex processes across various IT systems. It provides a centralized and graphical view of workflows, making designing and orchestrating applications and platforms easy.
Tidal offers a variety of ways to plan, design and manage workflows. One of those is the Business Views feature, an easy-to-use graphical flow designer with drag-and-drop, point-and-click functionality. Users can define and view the entire flow of a job stream graphically, including compound dependencies.
Event-driven automation
Event-based triggers enable organizations to shift from time-based scheduling to event-based automation, providing more control based on clearly defined events. Organizations can automate IT processes that involve manual steps (or require scripting) and trigger automated workflows when defined events happen, increasing reliability and decreasing manual effort.
With Tidal, organizations can orchestrate events and actions across a multitude of target applications and systems without custom scripting. The event-action approach supports the idea that an event can have many effects and result in multiple actions.
Self-service automation
SOAPs provide users with a self-service administration console with role-based access controls (RBAC) to manage the visibility of their automation workflows. They make IT operations teams more responsive to business needs while allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks.
Tidal makes self-service easy to deploy and provides self-service automation to users across your organization without compromising schedule integrity or security. Administrators can apply fine-grained RBAC to give teams privileges to just the capabilities they need and limit the parts of the schedule they can view and change.
Scheduling, monitoring, visibility and alerting
Ensure visibility into IT processes and help meet SLAs with real-time service monitoring, alerting and scheduling capabilities. Users can monitor the status of scheduled workloads in real time with trigger actions should failures be observed, improving SLAs.
Tidal supports a “plan-predict-optimize” approach to your scheduling, providing real-time monitoring and alerts to optimize and protect critical paths. This level of visibility and control makes it possible to take proactive measures quickly, keeping processes functioning as intended to meet their SLAs, no matter how complex.
Resource provisioning
Accurately provisioning and de-provisioning resources in cloud-based, on-premise and hybrid environments without manual involvement is valuable for allocating resources based on demand.
Tidal lets you provision a multitude of operating systems, applications and devices with pre-built agents and adapters. Schedule activities to manage resource utilization within your overall business processes and gain control over how and when valuable resources are used across the enterprise Tidal’s resource provisioning and management is supported by an extensive set of integrations covering legacy resources with no scripting required.
Managing data pipelines
Programmatically create, schedule and monitor data flows using a data pipeline. These pipelines must be defined as code to maintain, version, test and integrate with other tools.
Tidal simplifies the complexities of creating, scheduling and monitoring enterprise data flows. Tidal seamlessly orchestrates data management, movement, processing and storage to ensure data gets where it needs to at the right time for each step of a business process.
A new era of IT automation
By integrating complex tasks across varied IT landscapes, SOAPs enhance operational efficiency and business agility and drive digital transformation. Highlighting capabilities such as workflow orchestration, event-driven automation and resource provisioning, the guide predicts a significant shift toward SOAP usage by 2027, emphasizing their importance in streamlining business operations and fostering innovation.
The Tidal mission closely aligns with the insights and trends highlighted in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs report. Tidal Automation is 100% focused on workload automation with an unmatched customer-centric approach. Designed to offer a unified automation tool for the centralized management and control of job scheduling across various business, operational and IT processes, Tidal can revolutionize your IT operations. Learn why you should make the move and migrate by signing up for a demo today.