What doesn’t get talked about enough is that this shift isn’t primarily about tools. It’s about us as humans.

That’s why I find the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) so relevant as both a technology lens and a talent and operating-model conversation.

SOAPs aren’t simply better schedulers. They orchestrate end-to-end business services with precision, context and intelligence. And when an organization adopts one, it doesn’t just modernize its automation stack, but reshapes how teams work together, learn and create value.

From my perspective, this isn’t a skills gap problem. It’s about how roles are naturally evolving. With the right guidance, encouragement and space to grow, people can thrive in change rather than just adapting to it.

The shift from task execution to service ownership

SOAPs dramatically expand the surface area that automation touches. We’ve moved from “run this job” to “run this entire business service — with events, conditions, dependencies and real consequences.” 

That evolution changes the nature of the work. You’re no longer optimizing isolated workflows inside a single system. You’re orchestrating processes that span ERP, SaaS applications, cloud platforms and external services. That requires broader thinking and deeper collaboration. The work itself becomes more strategic.

People are still central, but they’re now enabling resilience, business agility and real-time orchestration, not just maintaining automation.

What high-performing automation teams think differently about

The first real shift has to happen in how teams think about automation. Over time, I’ve seen successful teams move from:

• “Automate the task” → “Orchestrate the service”
• Siloed responsibility → Shared, cross-functional enablement
• Versioned scripts → Reusable templates and modular components
• Maintenance thinking → Platform thinking
• Support role → Strategic enabler
  

This mindset shift is subtle, but it changes everything from design decisions to how people collaborate across SAP and non-SAP landscapes.

How automation responsibilities are being redistributed

As SOAPs reshape operational models, new roles naturally emerge. Many organizations already have the talent; they just haven’t named or empowered these roles yet.

Some patterns I’m seeing more often:

• Process architect/Orchestration designer: Connects workflows across business services, APIs and cloud-based environments
• Automation data translator: Bridges operational logic with analytics, logs and business context
• Workflow monitoring and exception manager: Manages signals, dependencies and upstream/downstream impact
• Adoption lead or Change champion: Drives orchestration consistency across business ops, IT operations and development teams
• Automation culture steward: Shapes shared norms around reusable assets, platform thinking and feedback loops

Revisiting how automation work is distributed can unlock capacity you didn’t realize you had.

The conditions that make orchestration stick

Technology expands what’s possible. Culture determines what actually sticks. As automation spans more of the business, shared ownership becomes essential.

That starts with a shared vocabulary. If one team calls it “dependency mapping” and another says “event chaining,” you’ll end up with silos — not orchestration.

It continues with a learning loop that goes beyond training. People and teams need space to experiment, compare patterns and refine their instincts. As a leader, your job isn’t to prescribe every step but to create the conditions for repeatable learning that scales naturally.

And all of the above depend on clear ownership. Without visible leaders accountable for process optimization, templates and tooling standards, automation efforts remain reactive.

How to help your team thrive

If SOAPs unlock new levels of human potential, your team’s job is to take that and run. The environment you create — and the initiatives you choose to prioritize — will bring the shift to life.

At a minimum, I’d focus on the following.

1. Build capability with intention

Capability building can’t be accidental. It should be purposeful. Help teams build fluency in event-driven automation, API integration, cloud orchestration and monitoring patterns. Give legacy automation specialists room to evolve into orchestration designers or platform operators.

The goal isn’t to turn everyone into a developer. But everyone should understand how services fit together and how dependencies behave. You’ll be designing for resilience when your teams understand the “why” behind SOAP-driven workflows.

2. Create a structure that supports orchestration

Orchestration doesn’t thrive without structure. Establish an automation Center of Excellence as a guide for standard workflow patterns, exception handling and reuse. Make ownership explicit for templates, connectors and observability.

Most importantly, bring your practitioners into governance conversations. That’s how you remove friction between process design and automation design.

3. Equip teams with tools that let them excel

People do their best work when technology reduces complexity instead of adding to it. Choose platforms that make dependencies visible and support both low-code and advanced design approaches. Each persona should be able to contribute at their level.

I often ask one simple question: Will this tool make it easier for my team to design, understand and maintain end-to-end processes? If the answer is yes, the value shows up quickly.

4. Avoid the usual traps

Automation stalls when it’s treated as an IT-only scripting exercise, when adoption is an afterthought or when success is measured by output instead of outcomes. You can avoid these traps by formalizing enablement, designing for orchestration — not tasks — and tying KPIs to reliability and business impact.

Your people = your differentiator

SOAPs raise expectations for how work flows across the enterprise. But it’s your people who turn those expectations into outcomes.

When you make space for teams to think bigger about how data, work and ideas move across the business, you unlock something far more powerful than automation alone.

If you’re building that kind of culture, it helps to understand where the market is headed. The 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs report offers a grounded view of the Leaders and orchestration capabilities shaping the next chapter of enterprise automation — and the teams that will thrive in it.

Yet, in my conversations with plant managers, operations leaders and CIOs, a familiar theme keeps surfacing: progress feels harder than it should. Automation initiatives keep getting approved, but then momentum slows. Improvements arrive in pockets rather than end to end.

The data in Redwood Software’s new manufacturing automation research backs that up. Seven in ten manufacturers report automating 50% or less of their core operations. Only about a quarter say they’ve automated more than half.

This isn’t a failure of manufacturing automation or a lack of commitment. What the data points to instead is a structural limitation. You reach a plateau in automation maturity because automation often stops at system boundaries, not because you lack the right tools. Over time, your organization may have built an impressive collection of automation technology, but the connective tissue between those systems never quite materialized. Returns often flatten in this scenario because automation stops compounding, not because it never worked in the first place.

The middle-stage trap

When manufacturers described their automation maturity, the pattern was striking. Nearly half — 47% — placed themselves in the “Managed” stage, where automated processes exist but orchestration is partial. Another 26% identified as “Controlled,” with most tasks automated and orchestration present. Only about 2% described their operations as fully autonomous.

In other words, nearly three-quarters of manufacturers sit squarely in the middle automation maturity stages.

That clustering isn’t random. It reflects a ceiling most organizations hit after automating the obvious, self-contained processes. Early automation wins are straightforward: scheduling jobs, triggering reports, running batch processes, stabilizing equipment routines. These improvements deliver immediate value and reduce human error on the factory floor. But once those gains are captured, what remains is harder. 

The next level of improvement depends on workflows that span multiple systems — ERP, MES, supply chain platforms, quality systems and control systems built around programmable logic controllers. That requires orchestration, not just automation.

The challenge is that middle-stage maturity feels like success because dashboards are green and production rates look healthy. But the manual work hasn’t disappeared; it’s shifted into the gaps between automated processes, where people compensate with spreadsheets, emails and workarounds.

Where automation delivers and why connection matters

Automation delivers its strongest results when applied to processes contained within a single system. The report shows that about 60% of manufacturers have reduced unplanned downtime by at least 26%, with a meaningful share reporting reductions beyond 50%. Uptime, throughput and quality control consistently emerge as areas where automation excels.

These results are real, and they matter. They represent reduced risk, stabilized high-volume operations and improved consistency across production processes.

Challenges tend to emerge when outcomes depend on coordination across systems. 

• Inventory turns remain difficult to improve even as automation improves uptime, highlighting the limits of siloed execution 
• Data accuracy also lags, especially when information must move quickly between planning, execution and supply chain functions using real-time data

Lack of coordination isn’t limited to automation initiatives. Recent McKinsey research shows that broader disruptions — from supply chain volatility to shifting manufacturing footprints — are exposing the same structural weaknesses, where disconnected systems and fragmented decision-making limit performance even in otherwise well-run operations.

You can optimize maintenance schedules inside an MES or improve machining efficiency with CNC and control systems. Those are bounded workflows with clear inputs and outputs. But improving inventory performance requires synchronized data and decision-making across forecasting, production planning, material handling, warehouse operations and supplier networks.

When automation stops at system boundaries, single-system metrics improve, while cross-system outcomes lag. Orchestration addresses this gap by connecting existing automation into workflows that span the entire manufacturing environment.

The top bottlenecks between systems

When we asked manufacturers about their automation challenges, three issues arose most often: 

1. Forecasting accuracy gaps
2. Manual exception handling
3. Lack of integration between ERP, MES and PLM systems 

Together, these account for roughly 66% of reported bottlenecks. What’s notable is what isn’t on that list. Manufacturers aren’t pointing to weak automation technology, but to breakdowns between systems.

Exception handling is a clear example. Only 40% of manufacturers have automated it, even though 22% cite manual exception handling as a top disruption. Exceptions don’t respect system boundaries. A supply delay affects production schedules, inventory positions, customer commitments and financial forecasts simultaneously. Resolving that requires coordinated action across systems, not isolated scripts.

The same pattern appears in forecasting. Forecasts depend on timely, accurate data from many sources. When those systems aren’t connected through event-driven workflows, forecasts rely on stale information. By the time data is reconciled, the window for action has already closed.

These aren’t edge cases. And they persist not because automation has failed, but because automation alone was never designed to solve them.

Fragmented data automation 

Most manufacturers automate inside systems, not between them. The data shows that 78% have automated less than half of their critical data transfers. More than a quarter still move sensitive information through email or manual methods. Nearly 30% rely on scheduled scripts rather than event-driven automation that responds to conditions as they change.

Over time, this fragmentation compounds. Each new automation initiative delivers value in isolation, but also introduces another boundary that someone must manage. Complexity increases and manual handoffs multiply. Each additional project adds less incremental benefit than the one before it.

Manufacturing environments span decades of technology: legacy MES platforms, modern cloud applications, IoT and data collection layers and enterprise systems from multiple vendors. Connecting that landscape requires orchestration that can coordinate workflows across it all, based on events and business rules rather than schedules.

Reframing the challenge

Automation hasn’t failed the manufacturing industry. It has delivered real, measurable value where workflows remain contained. Fixed automation works. Flexible automation works. Individual automation solutions continue to advance.

What needs to change is the focus.

The next phase of automation maturity will be about connecting what’s already automated rather than adding more tools. Exceptions and handoffs — the points where risk and cost accumulate — need to become primary targets for improvement. Workflows must adapt in real time. How well you handle this shift will determine whether your manufacturing automation investment plateaus or continues to scale.

🠆 See a demo of what orchestration could look like using RunMyJobs by Redwood for SAP production planning.

What gets automation moving again

Manufacturers that climb beyond mid-stage maturity share common characteristics. 

• They automate exception handling across systems
• They connect data flows between ERP, MES and supply chain platforms
• They rely on event-driven workflows instead of scheduled scripts

These organizations are also more likely to explore artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases — not as a leap into the unknown, but as a natural extension of orchestrated operations. AI models are only as effective as the data feeding them, and orchestration ensures that data is timely, complete and actionable.

Orchestration changes the question from “What should we automate next?” to “Which workflows still depend on manual coordination?” It shifts success metrics from the number of automated tasks to the reduction of human intervention across the manufacturing industry.

The plateau is real, but it isn’t permanent. Changing your outcomes starts with changing how systems work together.

Get prepared for an orchestrated future now. Download the full “Manufacturing AI and automation outlook 2026” to see how your organization compares — and what it takes to move beyond the middle.

This points to a deeper issue: Many organizations have automated tasks and implemented point solutions, but they haven’t fundamentally changed how work flows across their ecosystems.

Understanding why so many teams stop short of autonomous automation requires looking behind the technology curtain to examine how automation is governed and embedded into the operating model. It’s the accumulation of structural constraints that can quietly but consistently slow progress. These constraints show up less in tooling decisions and more in people and process issues.

Automation advances faster than operating models

If you introduce automation into environments that weren’t designed to support it at scale, your processes will be automated without being restructured. The risk is that ownership stays distributed and decision-making feels unclear.

There’s a practical ceiling you’ll reach in this scenario. Dependencies and exceptions will multiply, because what worked for a handful of workflows is difficult to extend across end-to-end processes. At this stage, automation won’t be slowed by technical limits, but by uncertainty around who can change what, when and under what conditions.

Autonomous automation is driven by shared accountability across IT, operations and the business. That doesn’t mean everyone owns everything, but it does mean no critical process lives entirely within one function’s control. Decisions about logic, exceptions, risk and change management have to be made in the open with a clear operating model behind them. Without that, automation can move quickly in pockets but will always stall when it reaches the seams between teams.

Complexity becomes institutionalized

The report shows that workflow complexity is the most commonly cited barrier to automation adoption. Such complexity is generally unplanned or accidental — the result of years of layered systems and incremental fixes.

Rather than being addressed directly, complexity is often worked around. Teams automate what they can without disturbing upstream or downstream dependencies. Over time, automations inherit the same structural complexity as the environment they operate in. This increases costs and makes change progressively harder to justify.

It also creates a troublesome paradox. You’re introducing automation to simplify execution, but it becomes embedded in architectures that are stuck in the proverbial mud. Autonomous automation depends on the opposite condition: predictable, observable systems designed to adapt without constant intervention.

Governance keeps automation in a holding pattern

As automation’s surface area expands, governance typically becomes more restrictive. Controls are added to reduce risk, but many times without a corresponding increase in transparency or coordination.

In practice, you end up performing cautious automation. Your teams avoid automating processes that cross organizational boundaries because changes require lengthy approvals. The automations you do have may be reliable, but they’re static and siloed.

The research shows that only 10% of organizations prioritize automation adoption at the enterprise level. This can manifest as a focus on preventing failure instead of enabling evolution. Your governance framework should support change in addition to stability.

Utilization plateaus before autonomy emerges

Most organizations own capable automation platforms, but only 27.5% fully utilize them, according to the same study. Underutilization isn’t simply a matter of missing features. It reflects how automation is positioned. Is it treated as a strategic capability or simply supporting infrastructure?

It’s common to only automate what’s immediately visible or urgent, then leave broader opportunities unexplored. You hit a plateau when you continue to do only this, normalizing automation but not expanding its reach. And it’s difficult to overcome without explicit goals tied to utilization and scale.

Autonomy requires confidence and capability

A less visible barrier to autonomy is confidence in automation itself. Many leaders hesitate to allow systems to operate without human oversight, especially when outcomes have financial, regulatory and operational consequences. That’s understandable, but only a true risk if you don’t have strong observability, auditability and recovery mechanisms in place. In which case, you have to default to manual checkpoints.

Redwood’s data suggests that organizations achieving higher levels of automation maturity tend to pair execution with visibility and control. Autonomy becomes possible only when trust in the system is established.

Be among the few that move forward

Those who progress toward autonomous automation behave differently long before they reach it. They treat automation as a coordinated capability, not a collection of tools. And they invest in simplification and accountability across IT, operations and the business — early, not after complexity has set in.

The “Enterprise automation index 2026” provides deeper insight into where most organizations stall and what differentiates those that continue to advance up the ladder of automation maturity. Use this data as a practical lens for evaluating and reworking your organization’s automation trajectory.

Few organizations achieve that kind of orchestration consistently, because their automation is fragmented. One team might manage batch jobs, and another might script data pipelines. A third could rely on manual interventions and shared inboxes to keep business processes moving.

The value of a Service Orchestration and Automation Platform (SOAP) lies in its ability to unify these silos and support the workflows that actually run the business. In its 2025 Critical Capabilities for SOAPs report, Gartner® outlines five Use Cases that demonstrate this value in action. Here’s how, in my interpretation, those capabilities show up in real operations across industries.

IT workload automation: Still essential

No matter how much technology evolves, the reliance on routine workloads never really goes away. Nightly ERP updates, hourly job chains and critical data movements between systems are fundamental processes that keep your business running.

But those workloads aren’t confined to a single mainframe or on-premises scheduler anymore. They span hybrid environments, connect to cloud-based APIs and carry tighter service-level agreement (SLA) expectations than ever before. The hard part isn’t the workload itself but the web of dependencies and recovery paths that stretch across different systems.

A robust SOAP solution lets you orchestrate all these elements in one place: SAP jobs, custom scripts, data movements and file transfers, for instance. You gain centralized control with distributed execution — the perfect balance for hybrid IT environments. I feel Gartner points to this as a foundational Use Case because it tests how well a platform performs under enterprise pressure — securely, reliably and with minimal manual intervention.

What this unlocks: With dependable workload automation, your IT teams can start each day with confidence that core batch processes ran cleanly and dependencies resolved in the right order. Not to mention, any failures were isolated and didn’t cause unwanted ripple effects. Your operational tone can shift from checking for surprises to reviewing a clean audit trail and planning ahead.

Workflow orchestration: Running the business, not just jobs

Behind every business outcome is a complex chain of tasks, approvals and exceptions that span multiple systems and departments. Take the month-end financial close: it happens thanks to finance systems, spreadsheets, validations and cross-departmental collaboration. Or consider onboarding a new hire. Beyond provisioning accounts, it requires scheduling training, initiating background checks and activating access across multiple systems.

With a SOAP platform, these workflows can be orchestrated end to end. Instead of managing each step separately, you create a unified process that flows across boundaries. You get steadier execution and cleaner handoffs, which cuts down on the small errors that tend to compound over time.

It seems Gartner emphasizes this Use Case as a marker of maturity: it’s not about more automation, but using the right automation to move the business forward. By linking actions into cohesive workflows with decision points and exception handling, you transform fragmented activities into streamlined business processes.

What this unlocks: If your workflows run end to end, you’ll feel the difference immediately. Approvals and handoffs will happen without manual nudges, and any exceptions will surface early. The work is to oversee processes instead of managing dozens of micro tasks.

Data orchestration: Automating movement and storage

Analytics live or die on the reliability of the pipeline behind the dashboard. At 3 AM, your retail data might need to move from SAP to Snowflake, be validated, then trigger an update to executive dashboards before the morning meeting. That kind of flow can’t rely on spreadsheets, email notifications or ad hoc scripts — it requires systematic orchestration.

SOAPs plug into managed file transfer (MFT) solutions, ETL tools and data lakes to manage the full lifecycle of data movement: ingestion, transformation, validation and delivery. You can build flows that validate data quality, handle exceptions and ensure downstream systems receive accurate, timely information.

I believe Gartner calls out data orchestration because the stakes are high. Poor data hygiene slows decisions, introduces risk and devalues analytics investments. With proper orchestration, your data pipeline becomes a strategic asset rather than a constant challenge.

What this unlocks: Reliable data flows remove the daily uncertainty that slows decision-making. Your analysts don’t have to wonder whether today’s numbers are safe to use. And by the time business users open a dashboard, the underlying pipeline has already done the hard work.

DevOps: Coordinating pipelines across teams

It’s relatively easy to automate a deployment, but it’s much harder to orchestrate everything that comes before and after. When your infrastructure team needs to provision environments, QA needs to run tests and compliance needs to log every step, a simple webhook or CI/CD pipeline isn’t sufficient.

SOAPs can coordinate across your entire development lifecycle, trigger event-based actions and integrate with ITSM and monitoring tools. This coordination is especially valuable when different teams use different tools but need to work together seamlessly.

In my view, Gartner includes this as a distinct Use Case because orchestration here is a force multiplier: it aligns developers, operations and compliance without slowing velocity. By automating handoffs between teams and tools, you reduce waiting time, eliminate manual coordination and maintain an audit trail of all activities.

What this unlocks: Orchestration that supports the DevOps lifecycle ensures your release cadence reflects your engineering velocity. Your dev team doesn’t have to worry whether upstream tasks are complete, and your operations team gets predictable workflows they can trust.

Citizen automation: Putting control in the right hands

Not every routine workflow warrants an IT ticket. An HR manager initiating onboarding or a supply chain planner adjusting inventory levels need their workflows to be accessible without sacrificing governance. As your organization scales, the ability to distribute automation capabilities becomes crucial.

SOAPs support low-code interaction, reusable templates and full audit trails. Users get what they need when they need it, and IT maintains oversight of the entire automation ecosystem. Gartner likely highlights this Use Case because it balances empowerment and control: you reduce shadow IT while still enabling business agility.

What this unlocks: Governed self-service changes how work gets done. You can move faster without losing control because every action runs through the same orchestrated backbone with full visibility.

Your SOAP unifies it all

Every Use Case in the Gartner report points back to a simple truth: orchestration is how you scale automation without multiplying complexity. The best SOAP platforms make that orchestration real across jobs, data, workflows and teams, providing the connective tissue that binds your digital ecosystem together.

As you evaluate your options, look for platforms that support all five Use Cases with equal strength. Your business doesn’t operate in silos, and your orchestration platform shouldn’t either. The right solution will grow with your needs, adapt to new technologies and continuously deliver value as your organization evolves.

RunMyJobs by Redwood offers comprehensive, enterprise-wide orchestration, with deep integration into SAP environments and support for hybrid cloud architectures. Download the full Critical Capabilities report to see an extended analysis of the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ and learn why Redwood was recognized as a SOAP Leader two years in a row.

It’s a fair question. And the answer isn’t just focused on why you should add another automation tool. Instead, considering a Service Orchestration and Automation Platform (SOAP) means you’re ready to think about the operational model behind how work moves across your organization.

A scheduler triggers tasks, an iPaaS connects applications, but a modern SOAP coordinates end-to-end business processes across systems, teams and environments in a way that maintains reliability at enterprise scale. That difference shows up directly in operational resilience, business agility and cost control.

The 2025 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for SOAP report is the clearest framework I’ve seen for tying platform strengths to financial outcomes. Here’s how I help leaders like you use that framework to build a credible business case.

The framework: Mapping Use Cases to your P&L

The Critical Capabilities report doesn’t start with architecture diagrams or methodology. It starts with how platforms perform against five operational Use Cases, each representing a measurable part of your business. I find these especially useful because they line up almost perfectly with the major categories of cost, risk and productivity that executives care about:

• Operational resilience
• Business agility
• Cost optimization
• Risk management
• Speed to insight

Instead of thinking of them as technical buckets, think of them as the five pillars that determine whether your automation investments actually return value. A SOAP that scores well across all five transforms automation from a technical initiative into an engine for enterprise performance.

Pillar 1: IT workload automation and the ROI of unbreakable operations

The business challenge:
A pervasive pattern I see is IT teams stuck in a reactive mode. Excessive time is spent on firefighting and manual monitoring, which draws focus away from strategic process improvement. This reactive posture results in costly consequences, including missed service-level agreements (SLAs), silent failures in critical overnight processes and a constant backlog of expensive incidents.

What this Use Case measures:

Gartner considers this the foundation of SOAPs: Can the platform run critical workloads reliably across hybrid and multi-cloud environments? Think financial close, inventory syncs, regulatory reporting — with real-time awareness and automated recovery. This means it must offer dependency management that understands system context, recovery paths that prevent cascading failures and observability that lets operators diagnose and resolve issues quickly.

Where the ROI shows up:

• Reduced downtime costs: Preventing failures before they hit the business
• Lower operational overhead: Fewer hours spent monitoring or intervening
• Strategic consolidation: Eliminating multiple schedulers, licenses and skillsets

This is the first place most organizations find real cost savings, because reliability is expensive when you’re compensating for it manually.

Pillar 2: IT workflow orchestration and the value of cross-team agility

The business challenge:
Most delays don’t come from individual tasks. They come from the handoffs: the approvals that get stuck in someone’s inbox, the data that wasn’t validated, the system that didn’t trigger the next step. Teams often automate inside their own domains but leave the gaps between them unmanaged.

What this Use Case measures:
Gartner looks at how well a SOAP can coordinate entire processes, not just tasks:

• Cross-application workflows (ERP + ITSM + SaaS + custom apps)
• Conditional logic and exception handling
• Orchestration spanning on-premises and cloud environments

Where organizations see ROI:

• Shorter cycle times: End-to-end processes move without waiting on human intervention
• Higher throughput: Fewer restarts, errors or duplicate work
• Greater adaptability: Workflows that adjust as business requirements change

The payoff is simple: people get hours back. Not to mention, change doesn’t feel risky anymore.

Pillar 3: Data orchestration and the payoff of faster, smarter decisions

The business challenge:
Analytics teams can only move as fast as the data feeding them. Many organizations are still juggling multiple disjointed ETL solutions, insecure file transfers or inconsistent handoffs between systems. The result is predictable: delays, inconsistent data and missed windows for decision-making.

What this Use Case measures:

Gartner evaluates a SOAP’s ability to orchestrate reliable, governed data pipelines:

• Event-driven movement from systems like SAP to data warehouses like Snowflake
• Managed file transfers with dependency tracking
• Data validation, reconciliation and exception handling
• Automated triggers to BI, AI or other downstream applications

Where organizations see ROI:

• Faster time-to-insight: Data arrives validated and on time
• Improved compliance: Centralized audit trails remove the risks of custom scripts with no single source of truth
• Eliminated bottlenecks: Analytics teams spend less time waiting and more time analyzing

This is where organizations often unlock value they didn’t realize they were losing.

Pillar 4: Citizen automation and the advantage of empowered teams

The business challenge:
IT teams become bottlenecks when every routine request — from report generation to onboarding steps — has to be manually actioned. The backlog grows and the business slows.

Yet handing automation directly to business users without governance isn’t an option.

What this Use Case measures:
Gartner evaluates this capability by looking at how well a platform can distribute automation safely without losing control. It’s essentially a test of whether your Operations team can create guardrails that let business users trigger approved workflows on demand without introducing risk. A strong score here reflects a platform that supports low-code execution, reusable templates and full auditability, so non-technical users can initiate routine actions while IT retains oversight. This Use Case ultimately measures how effectively a SOAP can push automation closer to the edge of the business without allowing fragmentation or shadow IT to creep back in.

Where organizations see ROI:

• Faster turnaround: Teams get what they need without waiting days or weeks
• Reduced IT ticket volume: Freeing technical staff to focus on higher-value work
• Fewer errors: Standardized workflows eliminate risky and error-prone manual steps

When done right, citizen automation is not “shadow IT.” It’s a controlled extension of enterprise automation.

Pillar 5: DevOps automation and the competitive edge of continuous delivery

The business challenge:
Software teams often automate their CI/CD pipelines but leave the surrounding processes — environment provisioning, test data setup, dependency coordination — untouched. Those manual steps are what slow releases and introduce inconsistencies.

What this Use Case measures:
For DevOps automation, Gartner focuses on how deeply the platform can integrate into modern delivery pipelines and how reliably it can coordinate the steps surrounding deployment. It’s about assessing whether automation can move at the same pace as engineering, from provisioning and testing to promotion and release. High-performing platforms demonstrate support for automation-as-code practices, event-based triggers and consistent orchestration across environments. Use these parameters to gauge a provider’s ability to remove bottlenecks from the software lifecycle so teams can deliver changes quickly without compromising reliability or governance.

Where organizations see ROI:

• Shorter release cycles: Faster, safer path from commit to production
• Higher developer productivity: Fewer manual tasks around the deployment lifecycle
• More reliable deployments: Consistency enforced across environments

This is increasingly a strategic differentiator for teams moving toward cloud-native delivery models.

An undeniable case for a strategic investment

A scheduler reduces manual effort, whereas a SOAP reduces friction across your entire operating model. When a single platform delivers across all five Gartner Use Cases, you’re not just buying automation capabilities — you’re buying:

• Fewer outages
• Faster decisions
• Higher team velocity
• Lower integration costs
• Stronger risk posture
• A future-proof automation foundation

This is the business case every CFO wants: clear outcomes tied to operational, financial and strategic value. The next time you evaluate platforms, don’t ask, “What does it automate?” Ask, “Where does it impact my P&L?”

That’s the difference between a tool and a transformation partner.

Evaluate SOAP vendors with our scorecard, and download the full Gartner Critical Capabilities report to compare how leading platforms perform against these five essential Use Cases.

Similarly, in the IT world, your organization cannot leap overnight from task-level automation to full enterprise orchestration. You must build the capabilities carefully.

The 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms report flags that we are at a pivotal inflection point: what was once the domain of job schedulers and workload automation is now evolving into enterprise orchestration fabrics that span IT, business services, data pipelines and multi-cloud ecosystems. The vendors leading this shift are not just automating but orchestrating. And the business consequences could not be clearer.

We’ll walk through five stages of evolution, from manual operations to autonomous orchestration, framed in the language of orchestration, and pull insights from the Magic Quadrant™ on what to watch for as you chart your next move.

Stage 1: Manual operations

The pre-automation era

Before any driver-assist features, the human driver handled everything: steering, braking, monitoring blind spots, judging distances. In this phase, your automation may not yet be formalized. Work is isolated. Dependencies are hidden. Risk is unmanaged. 

As Gartner notes, the shift away from purely workload automation is driven by exactly this: organizations finding that scheduling jobs and hoping they succeed is no longer enough. 

Key action: Inventory the manual work: what processes are being run by hand, what dependencies are invisible and which handoffs are subject to errors or delay? Capturing the map of manual operations is the first step toward orchestration.

Stage 2: Assisted automation

The rise of workload automation

Just as cars added features like cruise control, lane-keeping or adaptive cruise assist, organizations added scheduling tools, workload automation platforms and event-driven triggers. At this stage, you’re automating within domains: IT ops can schedule jobs, data teams can automate transfers, Finance may have some back-office automation — but it remains siloed.

In Gartner’s framing, however, this stage is no longer sufficient, considering the future of automation will be AI-driven. The market shifted to SOAPs precisely because these assisted workload platforms cannot orchestrate across hybrid, multi-domain, service-oriented environments. 

Key action: Push beyond individual automations. Ask: Which tasks are being automated but still reside in silos? Which workflows span applications and teams and, yet, are still manually handed off? Start identifying cross-domain opportunities for integration, handoffs and orchestration.

Stage 3: Coordinated orchestration

SOAPs transform the enterprise

Now, we reach the point in automotive evolution where vehicles begin to talk to one another, sharing speed, position and intention. It’s no longer isolated, driver-assist features but real coordination. 

In enterprise terms, this is where orchestration comes into play. A platform can integrate across multiple domains (IT operations, business services, data pipelines), across environments (on-premises, cloud, edge) and across organizational boundaries (business users, DevOps, operations).

This is exactly the space Gartner defines for SOAPs:

“Service orchestration and automation platforms are essential for delivering business services through complex workloads. SOAPs unify workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning, extending across data pipelines and cloud-native architectures.” 

In the 2025 Magic Quadrant™, vendors who sit in the Leader quadrant are those who already deliver across those boundaries. One of the key shifts is moving from automation as tasks to orchestration as services. Workflows are no longer just sequences of jobs but deliverables to the business. 

Key action: If you’re in this stage (or aiming for it), your focus should shift from “How many tasks are automated?” to “Which end-to-end services do we deliver, how well are they orchestrated and how visible and responsive are they?” Define service-level outcomes, identify orchestration gaps and consider a platform that supports orchestration rather than just job scheduling.

Stage 4: Intelligent orchestration

Where SOAPs are heading

The next generational shift in driving is full autonomy, when cars not only sense lane, distance and speed but adapt to traffic, make decisions and even anticipate hazards. The comparable shift in orchestration is when platforms begin to embed intelligence, analytics, machine learning and predictive capabilities, turning from reactive to proactive.

Gartner’s commentary on SOAPs points to this evolution from scheduling. Orchestration enables business outcome optimization, real-time responsiveness, hybrid execution and data-driven insights. 

What makes this stage distinct:

• The platform monitors SLA slippage, process deviations and event patterns and intervenes automatically
• It adapts workflows based on business outcome metrics, not just runtime metrics
• It integrates across domains (IT, business, data) with a unified observability and orchestration layer

Key action: Ask whether your orchestration approach is still reactive (executing defined workflows) or becoming intelligent (monitoring, adapting, optimizing). Consider adding observability dashboards, SLA tracking, anomaly detection and business-metric alignment. Ensure that your orchestration platform supports and surfaces these capabilities.

Stage 5: Autonomous orchestration

The inevitable destination

In the automotive metaphor, this is fleet-wide coordination, vehicles and infrastructure orchestrating together — with no human driver in the loop. In enterprise automation, this is where orchestration spans entire business ecosystems: external partners, supply chains, digital services and beyond. Platforms anticipate demand, compose new service flows, self-heal and self-optimize.

The Gartner report points toward this future: by 2029, Gartner predicts “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.” 

Thus, the destination is a space where orchestration is the only way to stay competitive. Businesses that stay in scheduling or siloed automation risk being outpaced.

Key action: Visualize not just automation within your walls, but orchestration across your value chain. Consider how automation fabrics can link partner systems, customer-facing services, external data flows and more across business functions. Begin constructing the operational model for autonomous orchestration: monitoring, governance, AI-assisted workflows and outcome-based orchestration.

Accelerate your journey

Gartner is signaling that this shift has already arrived. The question isn’t whether enterprises need orchestration platforms but who will have them and how effectively they’ll deploy them. The vendors in the Leader quadrant have already embraced the orchestration fabric, not just automation modules. 

For CIOs, heads of infrastructure and operations (I&O) and automation leaders, here are the implications:

• Siloed automation tools (task → script → schedule) are no longer sufficient for scale, complexity or agility
• A SOAP platform becomes the anchor for hybrid, cloud and business service-oriented orchestration
• The technology investment moves from standalone tools to orchestration fabrics: connectors, observability, low-code orchestration and event-driven services

Your roadmap must reflect the above stages of automation and orchestration maturity to ensure you can deliver business outcomes at speed. Use analyst frameworks (like the Magic Quadrant™ and Critical Capabilities) as strategic lenses — not just vendor checklists — to benchmark your progress and maturity.

Just as automakers gradually moved through mechanical driving, driver assist, autonomy and vehicle-to-vehicle coordination, enterprises must traverse these orchestration stages deliberately. And the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP provides the framework for what good looks like today and which vendors are leading the charge.

Download the full report now and use it to choose a partner with a proven track record of enterprise orchestration.

In my view, the Magic Quadrant™ isn’t a scoreboard. It’s a strategic map that reflects thousands of product decisions, customer outcomes and architectural bets. Reading it strategically can help you make smarter investments in automation, extensibility and long-term innovation.

This year’s report reinforces something we’ve known for some time: not all Leaders are interchangeable. The quadrant tells you where vendors are positioned. Interpreting why they are there — and how that aligns with your own transformation priorities — is where the real insight lies.

Two axes, one strategy lens

The two dimensions Gartner evaluates — Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision — each reveal a different layer of vendor maturity. Together, they create a framework for interpreting platform relevance not just in the present, but across the lifecycle of enterprise automation strategy.

Ability to Execute: A test of operational resilience

I believe high placement here reflects sustained operational performance under enterprise conditions.

Leaders on this axis tend to demonstrate:

• Scalable performance across hybrid and multi-cloud systems
• Deep integrations with complex applications like SAP, mainframe and proprietary tools
• Operational simplicity that reduces total cost of ownership, not just task count
• Clear expansion momentum across customer accounts

As Gartner notes, Leaders “execute strongly at scale and offer deep capabilities across a breadth of use cases.”

Execution strength is, essentially, a measure of enterprise trust. It answers the questions: Can this vendor reliably orchestrate critical business processes at scale? 

Completeness of Vision: A proxy for architectural longevity

A forward-leaning position on the Vision axis, in my opinion, speaks to how well a provider anticipates market direction and whether its platform investments are aligned with that trajectory.

Strong positioning here suggests:

• Future-ready architecture — cloud-native, API-first, event-driven by design
• Flexible, extensible capabilities that allow teams to adapt without vendor lock-in
• Alignment with ecosystem shifts, including AI, data fabric and digital ops strategies
• Strategic investment discipline, not reactive product expansion

Vision matters because today’s innovation is tomorrow’s technical debt. A platform that lacks architectural foresight may soon be outpaced by your organization’s needs.

Interpreting quadrant dynamics

In my experience, reading quadrant by quadrant makes it easier to identify tradeoffs and risks. Here’s the breakdown of each quadrant position according to Gartner methodology — and my interpretation of these positions.

Extract maximum value by connecting quadrant insights to tangible outcomes: reduced cycle time, improved SLA performance or lower integration overhead, for example. Ask vendors to demonstrate how their execution and vision translate into business impact, not just platform metrics. By tying evaluation to outcomes, you transform an analyst framework into an instrument for performance accountability.

SOAP Leaders today

Leaders who share space in the top right quadrant may take fundamentally different approaches to orchestration, extensibility and AI integration. I feel a strong Leader in 2025 is defined not only by breadth of capability but by the ability to remain competitive through:

• AI-driven operations
• Composable, event-driven architectures
• Autonomous remediation and continuous optimization 

The most important question isn’t “Who leads today?” but “Who is building for what’s next?”

Enduring leadership depends on both continuous architectural evolution and current market momentum.

How to use the Magic Quadrant™ in your vendor evaluation

Position within the Leaders quadrant should not be viewed as a stamp of parity. Vendors may share a quadrant, but not a philosophy, architecture or roadmap. 

The most strategic organizations treat the Magic Quadrant™ not just as validation, but as an input in a broader due diligence process. Map vendor placement to your operating model maturity to turn the quadrant from a static chart into a living framework for modernization. Over time, this mindset shifts the focus from comparing vendors to clarifying enterprise priorities.

Ask questions like:

• How does the platform align with our current tech stack, business model and operating environment?
• Will this vendor support our transformation roadmap — or limit it?
• What aspects of execution or vision earned the placement? Are those priorities aligned with our needs?
• Do case studies and references indicate expansion, innovation and long-term value?

Use the quadrant to inform your next questions, not to answer them outright. Read our guide to choosing the right SOAP solution for a more detailed analysis.

Strategy, not symmetry

We’re all searching for simplicity in a fast-changing world of automation tech, so it’s tempting to view proximity on the Magic Quadrant™ as a sign of equivalence. It’s not.

Go beyond the dot — use this year’s Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP as your starting point. Consider the rationale behind each placement. Investigate the executional proof points and architectural investments. And above all, choose partners who will not only deliver results in the current environment, but evolve with you as strategy, scale and complexity accelerate.

The quadrant gives you a map. The next move is yours. Download the full Gartner report to examine the landscape and learn why Redwood Software was named a Leader for the second consecutive year.

The problem isn’t a lack of automation. You have scripts, schedules and tools. The problem is a lack of orchestration. And that gap is putting your business outcomes at risk.

Modern Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) exist to solve this. When you look at the leaders in the latest Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP, you’ll find they aren’t just job schedulers with a prettier UI. They connect disparate systems. Understand business events. Anticipate outcomes and manage the mind-numbing complexity of a hybrid cloud world without increasing your team’s cognitive load.

Here are the new rules defining the modern orchestration platform.

Rule #1: Automation that listens

Time-based schedulers are still everywhere, but they’re tuned to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Business runs on events now, not clocks.

A supply chain workflow, for example, doesn’t need to run at 2 AM. It needs to run after the fulfillment file hits your cloud bucket and the payment clears and the inventory check validates.

Modern orchestration listens instead of waiting for time to pass. In other words, it sequences jobs based on the triggers that matter. Those might be external events, upstream outcomes or system states.

Rule #2: Integration is deeper than connectivity

Every platform says it “integrates.” But in my experience, that often means little more than a basic API handshake. Real orchestration is understanding what connection means in the context of a process.

For example, did the SAP job finish successfully, or did it hit a soft failure? Is the returned dataset complete? Does the next system require a transformation before ingesting it?

Modern orchestration is built to manage this kind of nuance. It adapts to API changes, handles schema validation, triggers follow-ups, reroutes based on conditions and preserves dependencies across platforms.

Rule #3: Failure is a scenario instead of an anomaly

Legacy tools treat failure like an edge case. If a job fails, they send a generic alert and might retry once or twice. But in distributed cloud architecture, failure is expected. It’s just a matter of how you recover.

Modern orchestration platforms treat failure paths with full auditability — and no panic. They track SLAs, anticipate delays, escalate intelligently and reroute automatically. It’s not mere incident avoidance.

Rule #4: Orchestration is no longer a solo role

You don’t build processes in a vacuum. DevOps is managing CI/CD, IT Ops is overseeing runtime, Finance is owning the close — everyone needs orchestration. But that doesn’t mean everyone should write scripts.

Modern SOAP platforms make orchestration collaborative. Devs work in YAML or code. IT manages by exception. Business users trigger workflows safely via self-service portals. Meanwhile, centralized controls keep everything governed.

Rule #5: Observability must trace outcomes, not just steps

Most platforms can tell you a job ran, and some can tell you it failed. Very few can tell you why, though. Not to mention which business outcome was affected and who needs to fix it.

Modern orchestration gives you end-to-end visibility, so you can trace a late report all the way back to the missing data file and see the ripple effect through every dependent system.

Legacy automation vs. modern orchestration

Rule #6: AI only works when automation does

Enterprises are rushing to embed AI into operations, but smart models are worthless without smart orchestration. A demand forecasting model can’t adjust inventory unless the right workflows gets triggered, and an LLM can’t summarize reports unless the right data lands in the right place. If your data pipelines are fragile or manual, your AI outputs will be dead on arrival.

Orchestration is that invisible engine behind AI-powered operations. It feeds the model, triggers the action, verifies the outcome. Without that layer, your AI is like a disconnected lab experiment.

Evaluation criteria have shifted

If you’ve read the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report, you’ll notice the bar has been raised. At Redwood Software, we believe the evolving contents of this report are a clear signal that the market has shifted. Hybrid control, event-driven design, persona flexibility, business outcome alignment … these are now table stakes.

If you’re evaluating your next orchestration solution, use the Magic Quadrant™ as a starting point. Download your complimentary copy of the report and ask whether your current platform — or the one you’re considering — is built for the world as it is today or the world as it was a decade ago.

That’s because most systems and teams just aren’t built for AI yet. The hype is running ahead of the architecture. According to Redwood Software’s “Enterprise automation index 2026,” nearly 40% of organizations admit they’re not ready to adopt or implement AI-driven automation. 

This isn’t about getting access to a model. It’s not even about building one. Readiness is the boring stuff under the hood: data quality, process consistency, orchestration, exception handling. That’s what makes AI useful (or useless).

Redwood’s data shows that fewer than 6% of companies have reached autonomous automation in any major business process. Most are still crawling, even in high-stakes areas like quote-to-cash. So when an AI tool misfires — maybe it reorders the wrong part, flags a non-issue or misroutes a service ticket — the real problem isn’t the AI. It’s everything feeding into it.

You invested in automation, but did you stabilize it?

More than 73% of companies say they increased automation spending last year. Only 36.6% feel ready to apply AI. That should tell you something. A lot of teams bought the tools, but the groundwork isn’t there.

If your workflows are still rule-based and brittle, your exception handling is half-human, half-spreadsheet and your APIs are duct-taped together from three systems ago, using AI won’t solve that. It’ll just scale the mess instead. This is what stalls pilots: not bad models — broken environments.

About your workflows…

You’ve got platforms everywhere. CRM, ERP, maybe a ticketing system for customer support or field service. They work (sort of), but they’re not exactly talking to each other.

You’ve got automation, but it’s scattered across tools. And it’s hard to know what’s actually happening when something goes wrong. Now imagine dropping AI into that mix and asking it to make decisions, in real time and with real impact. 

We’ve seen this movie. The pilot works, and the chatbot answers a few questions. The predictive model makes a recommendation. But there’s no feedback loop, no clean handoff, no way to measure if the output actually helped. So the pilot ends, and nobody wants to own it anymore.

Here’s what you’re skipping — and shouldn’t

Most AI efforts start with the use case. 

• Let’s automate onboarding
• Let’s forecast demand
• Let’s personalize support

Fine goals. But what about:

• Who owns the outcome when AI makes a choice?
• Can you see — and explain — how it got to that choice?
• What happens when something breaks at 3 AM?
• Can the system ask for help? Does it even know it needs to?

Governance. Data orchestration. Exception flows. Alignment with actual business outcomes.

These are boring, but when you skip them, you end up with a demo, not a system.

What the mature teams are doing

They’re not chasing shiny tools; they’re tuning the engine. Here’s what we see from the AI-ready crowd:

• End-to-end workflow automation that connects systems, not just apps
• Clean, version-controlled datasets that support real-time decision-making
• Clear governance rules that define what AI can (and can’t) do
• Exception handling that doesn’t depend on someone checking their inbox

Redwood customers who follow this approach are:

• 2x as likely to cut manual workloads by 50%
• 1.6x as likely to improve operational efficiency
• More likely to reduce costs by over 50%

These teams aren’t more enthusiastic about AI-powered solutions. They’re just more prepared.

Are you actually ready for AI?

It’s a fair question. Before you deploy another chatbot or predictive model, take a hard look at what’s underneath:

1. Are your business processes clearly mapped and automated?
2. Can your systems handle complex tasks — or just repetitive ones?
3. Are your AI models getting data they can actually trust?
4. Do your outputs link back to measurable outcomes?

AI won’t magically fix disorganized operations. But it will accelerate what’s already there — good or bad. If you haven’t mapped your exceptions, validated your inputs or built real-time visibility across systems, you’re not ready yet. And that’s okay. That’s fixable.

But don’t plug in AI and expect it to clean things up. Clean first, then scale.
Want to know how your automation foundation stacks up? Download the full report and benchmark your AI readiness.

One way to tell is to look at integration. The best SOAPs aren’t just job schedulers with APIs. They truly connect every system and application you need, below the surface.

“SOAPs empower infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to streamline and accelerate the delivery of business services. These platforms integrate workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid IT landscape.”

2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP 

According to Gartner, two of the mandatory features for a SOAP speak directly to extensibility:

• Management of workflows spanning the operating environment: This includes request management, integration between IT software platforms and end-user enablement, data pipelines, citizen developer enablement and DevOps pipeline integration.
• Broad integration capabilities: This includes the ability to integrate with and incorporate software and infrastructure technology landscapes that span from the cloud to enterprise applications.

If integration is limited, orchestration is limited — and so is your business.

Beyond features: What can a SOAP connect?

In hybrid enterprises, orchestration must cover the entire IT landscape, from on-premises systems and private and public cloud applications to team collaboration. Gartner analysts’ focus has evolved accordingly. They don’t just score platforms on job throughput or UI polish, but on their ability to:

• Span hybrid infrastructure 
• Enable real-time event triggers
• Extend orchestration to non-technical users

That shift mirrors what I’ve seen in the field. Over the years, I’ve worked with organizations that started with a basic scheduler and quickly hit a wall. When a new SaaS tool or cloud platform entered the mix, the scheduler couldn’t keep up. It usually had no connectors, no agentless support — no way to adapt without workarounds. So, it wasn’t truly extensible.

I see extensibility as the real test of future-readiness and a core marker of the long-term value of your investment in a SOAP. Deep integration capabilities aren’t just nice to have. A SOAP’s ability to integrate with new systems quickly impacts how fast your team can innovate.

3 dimensions of integration readiness

Think of integration as a multi-layer capability, not as a yes/no checkbox. A mature SOAP handles three levels of integration. When all three are supported, you gain the flexibility to scale orchestration across teams and technologies without constant rewrites or custom workarounds.

Infrastructure 

At the infrastructure level, a mature SOAP platform should connect flawlessly to both modern and legacy systems without relying on fragile, agent-based setups. It must support a variety of hybrid environments, including virtual machines (VMs), containers, on-premises systems and multi-cloud deployments. It should also offer centralized orchestration that doesn’t compromise on control or security. This level lays the technical foundation for stability and reach.

Application and service

At the application and service level, extensibility means being able to orchestrate workflows across critical business platforms: ERP, CRM, ETL, analytics, ITSM, iPaaS, MFT and more. Integration, in this way, goes beyond surface-level connectivity. The strongest platforms offer certified or pre-built connectors that are actively maintained, scalable and designed to handle the nuances of enterprise-grade data and complex processes.

Developer 

Finally, at the developer level, extensibility should empower both IT teams and business technologists. That means it provides rich APIs, SDKs, scripting support and webhook capabilities for creating programmable workflows that interact with modern CI/CD toolchains. It also means allowing teams to compose automations using templates, scripts and event-based triggers, without being boxed into rigid frameworks. This layer ensures that orchestration can adapt and evolve as teams innovate.

What extensibility looks like in practice

A SOAP with mature extensibility will contribute to outcomes across many functions of your business.

• Connectivity and integrations: Expand with a library of pre-built connectors while empowering users to create their own integrations with intuitive, low-code tools.
• Custom application development: Support scripting languages and integrate with modern development environments, enabling developers to build custom automation and applications on top of the platform.
• API and data integrations: Provide robust inbound and outbound APIs for custom interactions and seamless data exchange with third-party systems, such as observability platforms.
• Event-driven architecture: Power real-time, dynamic automation with a flexible architecture that triggers workflows based on events across the hybrid enterprise.

The trap: Automation tools that don’t scale

Many automation tools start strong with slick UIs, low-code builders or decent job scheduling, but then a new system is introduced, a use case shifts or a citizen developer needs access. And suddenly, you’re blocked with no connector — thus, no agility. 

The most telling sign of SOAP maturity isn’t what the platform can do out of the box, but how well it adapts when your tech landscape changes.

SOAP Leaders stand out

The best SOAP isn’t the one with the longest feature list; it’s the one that plays well with others. I believe the Leaders recognized in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report demonstrate:

• Broad integration with cloud-native and enterprise systems
• Rich APIs and partner ecosystems
• Support for diverse roles, from DevOps to business users
• Proven hybrid-readiness and extensibility

Gartner research continues to show that extensibility separates platforms that automate from those that truly orchestrate. The SOAP that will best serve your enterprise will be the one that grows with your tech stack, your users and your business.

Redwood Software’s SOAP solution, RunMyJobs, is built for deep, future-ready integration with SaaS-native, agentless delivery and a growing connector library. It’s also the only workload automation solution that’s an SAP Endorsed App, Premium certified, which indicates deep integration with SAP systems, apps and technologies.

Make integration your organization’s superpower. Download the full analyst report to see why Redwood was named a Leader two years in a row.

Together, the two reports give a comprehensive view of the SOAP market landscape, but they remain market-level research, not an assessment of your specific business priorities.

Here, we offer a practical framework for how to translate Gartner’s approach into your own scorecard to evaluate SOAP platforms against your organization’s needs and goals.

Why capability-based evaluation matters

The Magic Quadrant™ is invaluable for seeing which vendors are positioned strongly in the market. It shows who’s executing effectively today and who has the vision and roadmap to meet tomorrow’s demands. But it’s not a detailed interrogation of product features or a guarantee of fit for your particular requirements.

That’s why the Gartner Critical Capabilities companion report is so useful. It zooms in on differentiators — why the SOAP software providers were recognized in particular areas. It asks: How well does this platform execute real-world tasks? How usable is it? What outcomes does it enable?

In the report, Gartner recommends, “When selecting a SOAP vendor, conduct thorough due diligence to understand their specific strengths in innovation, integration and responsiveness to emerging trends, rather than assuming parity in a mature market.”

Inspired by this approach, we’ve built a scorecard you can use to evaluate vendors for your particular purposes, for both functionality and fit,  based on the five SOAP Use Cases.

Key capability domains to score

Each domain aligns with a Use Case from the Gartner report. Below, you’ll find:

• What the domain measures
• Traits to look for
• A 1–5 scoring rubric

1. Operational resilience and IT workload execution 

Inspired by the IT Workload Automation Use Case

Can the platform orchestrate and safeguard large volumes of complex, time-sensitive IT workloads?

What to evaluate:

• SLA monitoring and escalation dashboards
• Automated failover, retry and recovery mechanisms
• Volume throughput and performance under stress
• System auditability and job history tracking

How to score:

2. Hybrid orchestration and workflow flexibility 

Inspired by the IT Workflow Orchestration Use Case

How well does the platform support both business and technical workflows across hybrid environments (on-prem, multi- cloud, SaaS)?

What to evaluate:

• Breadth of pre-built integrations across legacy and modern systems
• Ease of orchestration across teams and technologies (e.g., low-code)
• Flexibility to design, trigger and adapt complex workflows
• Support for both technical and non-technical users

How to score:

3. Data movement and pipeline governance

Inspired by the Data Orchestration Use Case

Can the platform reliably orchestrate large-scale, rule-based data flows across warehouses, lakes and BI systems?

What to evaluate: 

• Availability of connectors for major data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, SAP Datasphere)
• Orchestration of rule-based, event-driven data flows
• SLA tracking for data jobs and throughput performance
• Guardrails like validations, retries and logging

How to score:

4. Empowering business users

Inspired by the Citizen Automation Use Case

Can non-technical users safely create, edit and trigger automations with the right controls?

What to evaluate:

• Guided self-service tools for workflow design and execution
• Guardrails and governance features (e.g., approval workflows, role-based access)
• Training resources and onboarding ease
• Audit logs and rollback capabilities for business-created workflows

How to score:

5. DevOps readiness and automation agility

Inspired by the DevOps Automation Use Case

Does the platform integrate with DevOps toolchains and support agile release cycles? 

What to evaluate:

• Native plugin availability for CI/CD tools
• API maturity and extensibility
• Support for version control, branching, rollback and parallel pipeline execution
• Ability to deploy and manage automation as code

How to score:

Constructing your SOAP scorecard

You don’t need a complex spreadsheet to evaluate SOAPs. Just build a simple table:

Adjust weights based on your priorities. If you’re focused on business agility, you might weigh citizen automation more heavily. If uptime is paramount, prioritize IT workload execution.

This approach doesn’t just tell you which provider offers what you want but the depth to which that capability goes.

Interpreting your results

• 4.5–5.0: Top-tier platform fit, capabilities with depth
• 3.5–4.4: Strong candidate, likely meets core needs with some tradeoffs
• 2.5–3.4: Mid-tier and may require customization or compromise
• <2.5: Unlikely to meet enterprise orchestration needs

Where Redwood leads — and what that signals for you

Redwood Software ranked #1 in all five Use Cases in the 2025 Gartner Critical Capabilities for SOAP report. We believe that reflects more than just functional breadth and confirms Redwood’s ability to deliver real-world orchestration across IT workloads, business workflows, citizen development, data movement and DevOps. This aligns with our mission to unleash human potential through automation fabric solutions.

A SOAP platform is not just a feature set but an enabler of better business outcomes. Use the scorecard above, and download the full Gartner Critical Capabilities report to optimize your search for the right SOAP.

Intelligent orchestration ensures business processes execute reliably, securely and without unnecessary manual intervention. As hybrid environments expand, data pipelines multiply and digital initiatives accelerate, unified orchestration platforms have become mission-critical.

This leap is reflected in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP. Vendors are being evaluated on execution in addition to how well they support end-to-end processes, hybrid environments and governance at scale.

If you’re in the process of selecting a SOAP solution, use this practical guide to evaluating your options, with insights inspired by Gartner’s criteria and industry trends.

What is a SOAP — and why does it matter more than ever?

According to Gartner, “SOAPs unify workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning, extending across data pipelines and cloud-native architectures.”

SOAPs represent the evolution of traditional workload automation beyond job scheduling. These platforms are crucial for bringing order to complex IT environments that span on-premises, multi-cloud and hybrid environments. They matter because they provide a centralized hub to coordinate workflows across diverse systems — both within an organization and across an ecosystem for suppliers and distributors. They reduce risk by providing end-to-end visibility and control and improve business agility by reducing manual intervention.

A modern SOAP coordinates dependencies, enforces service-level agreements (SLAs) and triggers workflows based on events, making it essential for:

• Digital transformation in finance, supply chain and IT operations
• Cloud modernization initiatives
• AI and machine learning (ML) adoption that requires governed data movement
• Compliance with security and regulatory frameworks

The “right” SOAP solution should reduce human error, free up IT to focus strategic priorities and streamline how automation is designed, maintained and governed. It should support faster response to business and market shifts, break down silos by connecting legacy systems and cloud services and enable seamless coordination across your technology ecosystem. Most importantly, it should enhance visibility, control and auditability with a unified view of every process, so your automation is as trustworthy as it is efficient.

Key evaluation criteria when choosing a SOAP solution

Here are six areas to include in your evaluation, inspired by trends surfaced in the Gartner report and common attributes among SOAP Leaders.

Scalability and performance

The platform should be able to handle high volumes of automated tasks without performance degradation. Ask whether it can support millions of jobs per day and how it performs under peak loads. A SOAP must be resilient and elastic enough to accommodate sudden surges in workload without compromising execution times or reliability. Scalability is about sustained performance, not just capacity.

Cloud-native architecture and SaaS delivery

When evaluating a SOAP solution, start with how the platform itself is built and delivered. A truly SaaS-native platform doesn’t just “run in the cloud;” it’s designed for elastic scale, multi-tenant performance and frictionless updates. Look for characteristics like agentless architecture, stateless services, zero-maintenance provisioning and high availability built into the core. These reduce operational overhead and speed up onboarding.

Deployment flexibility and hybrid orchestration support

It’s not just how the platform is built but also how it operates. A SOAP platform must support orchestration across your entire environment, from legacy mainframes to modern SaaS apps, cloud services, containers and DevOps pipelines. Seek flexible endpoint support, native connectors and the ability to run across multiple clouds, regions or tenants without custom scripting or duplicate workflows.

Ease of use and low-code accessibility

Automation should be democratized. Your SOAP platform should provide a low-code interface that enables IT operators, developers and even power users on the business side to design and modify workflows. Features like drag-and-drop workflow designers and reusable templates make it easier to build, test and share workflows. Integrated documentation and governance reduce training time and increase adoption. 

Observability and monitoring

It’s not enough to execute a job. You need to know what happened, why, and what could go wrong next time. Real-time dashboards, job dependency maps, SLA monitors and predictive alerting help teams quickly isolate failures and understand upstream/downstream impact. A strong observability layer turns the SOAP into a diagnostic tool, not just a transaction engine.

AI-powered productivity

It’s key to empower your teams with specific and valuable assistance for using the product and operating the platform to deliver efficient, reliable and observable automation fabrics. AI is now embedded into how automation platforms help users work faster, smarter and with greater confidence. AI features can significantly reduce time-to-value and operational risk. Whether you’re troubleshooting a failed job or optimizing a business-critical process, AI-powered diagnostics accelerate root-cause analysis, helping your teams resolve issues before they cause downstream delays. Equally important is AI’s role in design-time productivity. Context-aware configurations and AI-optimized change management can reduce the friction involved in building new workflows.

Security and governance

Security and compliance should be built in, not bolted on. SOAPs must support enterprise-grade authentication and authorization, including single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access control (RBAC). They should also be able to encrypt data in transit and at rest and offer detailed audit logs. Look for support for compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA, depending on your industry. Governance features should also enable fine-grained control over who can modify, execute or monitor workflows.

Extensibility and ecosystem

No SOAP platform operates in a vacuum; it must integrate cleanly with your existing infrastructure, applications and cloud services. Look for out-of-the-box connectors, a rich library of APIs and support for event-driven triggers. The more extensible the platform, the more value it will deliver as your tech stack evolves.

Trends shaping the SOAP landscape in 2025

“By 2029, 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.”

2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report

SOAP solutions are evolving rapidly. Let’s examine a few trends shaping enterprise automation strategies this year.

• Convergence with adjacent tools: Modern SOAPs increasingly overlap with iPaaS, managed file transfer (MFT) and IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms. Expect tighter ecosystems and fewer isolated tools.
• AI-enhanced observability: Predictive analytics, anomaly detection and proactive SLA risk insights are fast becoming differentiators, especially in high-volume scenarios. The report notes that, “By 2029, 75% of SOAP workflows will leverage generative AI (GenAI) to increase troubleshooting efficiency by 50% — up from less than 10% in 2025.”
• Orchestration for analytics workloads: Data must flow faster and more reliably. As AI becomes operationalized, orchestrating data is just as important as model performance.
• Citizen automation: Business users want self-service tools without compromising governance, and IT needs to enforce guardrails. SOAPs now must deliver both to enable scalable citizen automation.
• Centralized control across domains: Fragmented platforms are falling behind. SOAPs that serve as a control plane for hybrid IT, cloud, data and business workflows are rising to the top.

What sets Leaders apart in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™

According to Gartner Magic Quadrant™ research methodology, “Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow.” Choosing a Leader as your SOAP vendor doesn’t guarantee success, but it does reduce risk, accelerate ROI and align you with those invested in long-term innovation.

Why organizations are turning to RunMyJobs by Redwood

When enterprises outgrow reactive automation, they turn to RunMyJobs. It’s purpose-built for orchestrating complex, enterprise-wide workloads.

RunMyJobs helps global organizations automate with confidence through:

• SAP Endorsed App, Premium certification — SAP’s highest standard for performance, security and integration
• Robust hybrid connectivity to seamlessly connect on-premises systems (e.g., ERP, WMS, MES) with multiple public cloud services
• Event-based triggers and integrated data management
• SaaS-native, agentless architecture built for scale, with no infrastructure maintenance
• Built-in observability via Redwood Insights with pre-built dashboards and the ability to customize
• AI-powered productivity enhancements that range from knowledge access to troubleshooting to actual design and development of automation workflows
• Low-code workflow design for both IT and business users
• Enterprise-grade security and compliance
• Decades of automation expertise and two consecutive years of being named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP

Choosing the right SOAP solution means choosing the foundation for your automation future. Make the investment count — for what your business needs today and what it will demand tomorrow. Read the full analyst report today.

A message from Kevin Greene, Redwood Software CEO

This week, we announced that Gartner® named Redwood Software a Leader, positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision and highest in Ability to Execute, in the 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAP) report.

In addition, I’m excited to share that Redwood was ranked first in all five Use Cases in the 2025 Gartner Critical Capabilities for SOAP report.

I believe these #1 rankings are a powerful validation of our product strategy and investments. In our opinion, they reflect our singular focus on building automation fabrics that deliver transformative results for our customers, no matter the challenge.

Redwood’s recognition in the Gartner Critical Capabilities report

“As an essential companion to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, this methodology provides deeper insight into providers’ product and service offerings by extending the Magic Quadrant analysis. Use this research to further investigate product and service ratings based on key capabilities set to important, differentiating use cases.”*

The Critical Capabilities research includes rankings for Use Cases: IT Workload Automation, IT Workflow Orchestration, Data Orchestration, Citizen Automation and DevOps Automation.

Redwood ranked first in five out of five Use Cases. 

IT workload automation

For the second year in a row, Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.33 out of 5. 

Gartner defines IT workload automation (IT operations persona) as follows: “Automating planning, execution, management and reporting of IT workloads across enterprise systems.”

We believe this ranking reflects the broad power of our composable automation platform to integrate and manage diverse technologies across the hybrid enterprise. Available as native SaaS for the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) or self-hosted on-premises or in the cloud, Redwood’s flagship workload automation platform delivers the deployment flexibility enterprise customers require. Extensive auditing capabilities, an expansive connector catalog and comprehensive APIs ensure unmatched reliability and business continuity for even the most complex workloads.

IT workflow orchestration

For the second year in a row, Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.43 out of 5.

Gartner defines IT workflow orchestration (IT operations persona) as follows: “Defining, executing and reporting on IT workflows across diverse IT and enterprise systems.”

We feel this score highlights our strength in orchestrating intricate dependencies across disparate systems. Redwood’s extensive library of pre-built certified connectors eliminates custom scripting, enabling users to visually build and manage complex, end-to-end workflows while centralizing control and visibility. This is further enhanced by the advanced monitoring and observability capabilities: a unified view of process health and performance with built-in AI troubleshooting. Extending this functionality via Redwood Insights, teams can view their entire orchestration ecosystem, from performance to configuration, to diagnose root causes, optimize workflows and track compliance. The result: seamless service delivery and optimal operational control.

Data orchestration

Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.43 out of 5.

Gartner defines data orchestration (DataOps persona) as follows: “Planning, executing, managing and reporting on data-focused workloads like ETL/ELT and reporting for data use cases.”

We believe our #1 score in this Use Case demonstrates the power of Redwood solutions to unify and manage complex data pipelines from ingestion to reporting. Redwood provides the flexibility to connect to any data source or application and gives DataOps teams the end-to-end visibility required to ensure effective data management and that key information is timely, accurate and readily available for the business.

Citizen automation

For the second year in a row, Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.45 out of 5.

Gartner defines citizen automation (business user persona) as follows: “Enabling end-users to develop and execute curated automations under IT governance.”

We feel this score represents Redwood’s commitment to empowering business teams and subject-matter experts to create and manage their own automation solutions safely. Our customizable and intuitive user interface includes a visual, low-code automation design studio, which allows teams to abstract away complexity, while centralized IT governance ensures every user-built automation is secure and reliable. To further accelerate this process, Redwood’s new AI assistant provides instant, context-aware guidance, allowing users to find answers and build processes faster than ever.

DevOps automation

Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.35 out of 5.

Gartner defines DevOps automation (DevOps/SRE persona) as follows: “Developing and testing automation workflows to support product delivery via DevOps tools and practices.”

We believe this recognition highlights how seamlessly Redwood integrates into the software development lifecycle (SDLC). DevOps teams can define, version, test and promote automation workflows just like any other application code, accelerating release cycles and improving collaboration between development and operations.

Boost your digital transformation strategy: Get your copy of the full analyst report here to empower your decision-making process. Demo our suite of workload automation, file transfer and finance automation solutions to start unleashing the human potential in your organization.

*Source: Gartner Critical Capabilities research methodology

Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. Hassan Ennaciri, Daniel Betts, Cameron Haight, Chris Saunderson, etl. 26 Aug 2025.

Gartner, Inc. Critical Capabilities for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. Chris Saunderson, Cameron Haight, Daniel Betts, Hassan Ennaciri, etl. 26 Aug 2025.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.These graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from https://www.redwood.com/resource/gartner-critical-capabilities-soaps/.

A message from Kevin Greene, Redwood Software CEO

I’m thrilled to announce that, for the second consecutive year, Gartner has named Redwood Software a Leader in its 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAP) report. This year, we are proud to be positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision and highest for Ability to Execute.

We believe this consistent recognition validates our strategy and the immense value of our automation fabric solutions. Our mission is to unleash human potential by empowering customers with end-to-end automation for their mission-critical business processes, enabling them to maximize efficiency, enhance agility and build a future-ready enterprise.

We see lights-out automation as the engine for continuous growth and success for our customers. This acknowledgment from Gartner further energizes our team as we continue to support enterprises globally.

Understanding the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP

The Gartner Magic Quadrant™ is a culmination of research in a specific market, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Magic Quadrant™ helps you quickly ascertain how well technology providers are executing their stated visions and how well they are performing against Gartner’s market view. 

According to Gartner Magic Quadrant™ research methodology, 

“Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow.”

“Service orchestration and automation platforms are essential for delivering business services through complex workloads. SOAPs unify workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning, extending across data pipelines and cloud-native architectures.”

2025  Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report

Ability to Execute: How well does the vendor deliver today?

Gartner positioned Redwood highest for Ability to Execute. Redwood feels the Ability to Execute axis assesses the “here and now,” measuring the tangible quality of the vendor’s products and services today.

Our view is that it’s a holistic measure of the entire customer experience and the vendor’s organizational maturity. It’s not just “Does the product work?” but “Is this a well-run company that is easy and reliable to do business with?” 

Gartner evaluates Ability to Execute based on seven criteria:

• Product or Service
• Overall Viability
• Sales Execution/Pricing
• Market Responsiveness and Track Record
• Marketing Execution
• Customer Experience 
• Operations

Completeness of Vision: Does the vendor have a plan for tomorrow?

Gartner positioned Redwood furthest in Completeness of Vision for the second year in a row. In our view this category assesses the “what’s next.” It evaluates the vendor’s strategy, innovation, understanding of the market’s future and if the product will evolve to meet your future needs.

For Redwood, this category is not just about ideas; it’s about the credibility and plausibility of the vendor’s strategy. We believe a “complete” vision is one that is not only forward-thinking but also grounded in a realistic plan that the vendor is capable of executing. 

In our opinion, the evaluation evaluated whether the vendor has the foundational ability to deliver on its promises by assessing their product architecture, financial model and track record of past innovation.

Gartner evaluates Completeness of Vision based on eight criteria: 

• Market Understanding
• Marketing Strategy
• Sales Strategy
• Offering (Product) Strategy
• Business Model
• Vertical/Industry Strategy
• Innovation
• Geographic Strategy

Vision and execution: Why Redwood was named a Leader

Redwood believes being named a Leader doesn’t happen by accident. In our opinion, it’s the result of a clear formula: listen to customers, build for the future and execute flawlessly. We feel this reflects our singular focus on automation fabrics, fueled by innovation and a deep customer obsession. Our strategic roadmap isn’t created in a vacuum; it’s forged in partnership with our customers through advisory boards and user groups. 

We deliver on that formula with our enterprise SOAP solutions, available self-hosted, on-premises or through a highly reliable, true-SaaS platform. We believe our position as a Leader speaks to the maturity of our workload automation (WLA) solutions, which offer composable automation purpose-built for the hybrid enterprise. We deliver a unified platform that gives customers the strategic advantage to adapt faster and outpace change.

Redwood feels our forward-thinking approach empowers customers to move beyond simple, custom scripting and siloed tools. They can embrace a fully governed business and IT automation platform that prioritizes the entire digital infrastructure, managing everything from core job scheduling and complex data pipelines to orchestrating event-driven workflows and integrating with DevOps tools. This ensures their critical operations and IT automations run without interruption, meeting the needs of their organization.

We believe our commitment to innovation is clear in our latest platform advancements, which demonstrate a relentless focus on creating a more powerful, intuitive and intelligent automation experience enabling customers’ automation strategies:

• Redwood Insights: We’re moving beyond simple monitoring to provide true orchestration observability, turning complex data into actionable knowledge that helps users predict and prevent issues.
• AI assistants and co-pilots: Our embedded AI tools are already saving users hours by accelerating development and troubleshooting.
• Modern UI: A completely redesigned user interface makes the platform more intuitive and powerful for all users.
• Continuous integration and connectivity: We’re constantly expanding our library of pre-built connectors and advanced no-code wizards, making it easier than ever to create custom integrations and automate any process across the enterprise. Redwood offers unmatched integration with SAP applications and technologies, validated by RunMyJobs by Redwood’s SAP Endorsed App Premium certification.

Redwood believes our position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP is a testament to our commitment to turning cutting-edge technology, from multi-cloud orchestration to AI-driven insights, into real-world results for our customers.

Insights from the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report

In our opinion, the 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report offers an in-depth analysis of the SOAP landscape and highlights the critical role of process automation in driving digital transformation. The report notes that,

“By 2029, 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.” 

Get your copy of the full report here, and demo our suite of solutions to envision what your business could achieve with Redwood behind you.

Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. Hassan Ennaciri, Daniel Betts, Cameron Haight, Chris Saunderson, etl. 26 Aug 2025.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

These graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from https://www.redwood.com/resource/gartner-soaps-mq/.  

While 73% of companies increased their automation spend last year, less than 30% are fully utilizing their tools. The data is clear: the issue isn’t a lack of investment or technology — it’s a stubborn execution gap.

In a climate where every budget line is under the microscope, automation is still getting the green light. That’s because the business case is solid.

• 37% of organizations report that automation reduced costs by over 25%
• 43% have cut manual workloads by at least a quarter
• 49% say it increased efficiency by the same amount

Those are meaningful results, but they’re not the norm. The data also reveals a widespread failure to scale. 

From where I sit, working alongside enterprise teams on automation migration and orchestration every day, I can tell you this isn’t a technology issue. It’s a stubborn execution gap.

The 4 traps of underperforming automation

Too many organizations treat automation like an arms race, adding new tools to plug gaps and hoping for the best. My team sees the consequences of this approach daily, typically in these four traps:

1. Ad hoc tool sprawl: Marketing, Finance and IT all buy their own automation tools, creating “shadow automation.” These siloed, ungoverned processes don’t share data, follow security protocols or align with a larger strategy, undermining enterprise-wide visibility.  
2. Stopping at the task level: Teams often automate the simplest, low-hanging fruit and then declare victory, ignoring the cross-functional processes where the real value lies. This technical debt accrues until a critical process, like month-end close or supply chain fulfillment, inevitably breaks, leading to frantic, manual interventions.
3. Legacy tech dependency: Many enterprises still run their most important processes on outdated schedulers or basic scripts. These tools lack the visibility, error handling and security features required for today’s business. When they fail (and they do), the business impact is immediate and severe, but migrating off them is perceived as too difficult.
4. No automation strategy: Without a plan to consolidate, migrate and optimize, the collection of tools becomes a digital junkyard. The organization has technically invested in automation, but operationally, nothing has changed. The tools are there, but they’re underutilized, misaligned or completely isolated.

These execution pitfalls are symptoms of a deeper issue, one that consistently derails even well-funded automation projects.

Complexity: The #1 blocker to automation ROI

According to Redwood’s research, the top challenge isn’t budget, talent or tools — it’s complexity. Nearly 20% of professionals point to complex workflows as their number-one barrier to scaling automation. 

That echoes what I see in the field. Enterprises are sitting on decades of custom scripts, legacy architecture, fragile integrations and undocumented processes. And every time someone says “We’ll automate that later,” the mess grows.

When you delay migration or fail to redesign around orchestration, you lose the ability to scale. You automate the easy stuff and stall out at the first sign of friction. If you want automation to deliver, you need to:

• Standardize before you automate. Don’t just pave the path. A chaotic manual process will only become a faster chaotic automated process. Take the time to map, simplify and standardize workflows first. This initial investment pays dividends in scalability and resilience.
• Migrate strategically. A simple “lift-and-shift” of old jobs to a new platform just moves the problem. Strategic migration involves analyzing, consolidating and redesigning workflows to take full advantage of a modern orchestration platform’s capabilities.
• Orchestrate across systems. True value is unlocked when you manage processes end to end, from the mainframe to the cloud and across all applications. This breaks down the silos between IT operations, data pipelines and business applications, which the report identifies as a key challenge for industries like finance.
• Align to business outcomes. The goal isn’t just to run jobs successfully; it’s to reduce costs, accelerate innovation and improve data visibility — the top three business priorities cited in the research. Frame every automation initiative around these goals.

The path to mature automation: A call to action 

If your automation investment isn’t delivering, it’s a critical warning sign. Don’t fall into the trap of simply adding more tools. The path forward requires a shift in mindset: focus on orchestration, elevate automation to a C-suite priority and build a cohesive strategy. It’s the only way to transform it from a tactical fix to a genuine growth lever for your entire organization. 

Download the full report to get:

• Automation maturity benchmarks across industries
• Barriers and drivers of automation success
• What separates top performers from the rest
• Guidance for aligning automation with business goals

69% of organizations call automation “mission-critical,” but only 10% are actually prioritizing it at the executive level.

That gap isn’t theoretical — it’s operational. And for leaders trying to move the needle on cost, innovation or speed of execution, it’s a red flag.

I’ve spent my career scaling technical and product teams, supporting global platforms and helping businesses modernize their operations. Here’s what I’ve seen consistently: Every business outcome is the result of process mechanics. If you’re not looking at automation through that lens, you’re missing the point.

Spending more ≠ Doing it better

It’s easy to assume more investment equals progress. But the data shows otherwise:

• 73% of organizations increased automation spending in the past year
• Yet only 28% say they fully utilize their tools
• And less than 6% have achieved autonomous automation in a single critical process

That’s not a funding issue. It’s a prioritization and ownership problem.

Too often, automation lives in a silo: owned by IT, disconnected from business outcomes and fragmented across departments. When that happens:

• It lacks alignment to core strategy
• It can fail to connect to key operational insights to drive better results
• It lacks the exec-level sponsorship required to scale the impact

The result? Your investment in tools doesn’t translate into an operating capability for the business.

Automation works — when it’s an aligned operating capability

Done right, automation delivers measurable results:

• 37% reduced costs by 25% or more
• 49% improved efficiency by at least 25%
• 43% cut manual workloads by a quarter

These aren’t marginal improvements. They’re operating-model shifts. But they only show up in organizations that treat automation as an integrated operating capability — not a patchwork of IT point solutions.

What do they do differently?

• They don’t just ask “What can we automate?”
• They ask “What outcome are we optimizing?” and work backward
• They measure process volume, yield, throughput and cycle time
• They build automation architectures that span systems and teams to focus on value-stream processes and outcomes
• They begin with operational objectives, identifying where current processes underperform, why those gaps exist and how automation can significantly improve the outcome.
• They treat automation not as a siloed initiative but as an embedded capability that works across Finance, Operations and Product to drive measurable improvements.

Your automation strategy should reflect your operating model — not just your tech stack.

It needs ownership.
It needs a business case.
And it needs to be framed as an operating capability, not a toolset.

I’ve seen firsthand how teams unlock transformative value when they integrate automation as an operating capability at the strategic level.

Get the full story

If these findings resonate with you, I encourage you to dive deeper. Redwood’s “Enterprise automation index 2026” unpacks:

• How teams across industries are investing in automation
• Benchmarks for tools utilization and maturity
• The most common barriers to adoption (Spoiler: It’s not budget!)
• How leaders are preparing for AI-driven automation
• What sets top-performing organizations apart

Download the full report to learn how you can move from fragmented tasks to orchestrated outcomes.

No matter the size of your organization or the type of infrastructure you prefer, you need to care about where you store your data — data residency — and who controls it — data sovereignty.

What are data residency and data sovereignty?

The truth of shared responsibility

You must understand data residency and sovereignty to achieve seamless and compliant data orchestration, especially if you run a global and/or remote-first company. If your data infrastructure relies on SaaS solutions, you inherently have less direct control over data location and access compared to on-premises deployments. 

While on-premises software allows you to house and control data as you see fit, SaaS comes with limitations and a shared responsibility model. Your provider manages certain components of data security and infrastructure, but critical compliance responsibilities fall back on you. This can be an overwhelming burden if, like the average enterprise, you use 473 SaaS apps!

Many SaaS providers offer limited guidance on how to remain compliant, expecting you to understand complex regulations and how they apply to you and your use cases. This is why it’s crucial to vet providers and find one that not only prioritizes data residency and sovereignty but also understands it well and designs for it in consultation with customers. 

At Redwood Software, our focus is on providing customers with confidence that their data is both secure and compliant, without the ambiguity that typically surrounds shared responsibility. That means providing clear guidelines and taking proactive steps to handle residency and sovereignty.

Top data management concerns of a global enterprise

Data protection is a multi-faceted problem, as regulations and risks are continuously evolving. Rapid growth in data volumes, changing global mandates and the shift toward cloud adoption and remote work have made achieving protection tougher than ever.

Managing a vast amount of information presents problems for storage and governance. It’s no longer enough to have basic storage solutions; you must make conscious, informed decisions about how you’ll manage and store data in a place and in a way that complies with applicable regulations. To keep your data accessible, secure and compliant, you need to have a deep understanding of data residency and sovereignty requirements.

Making the picture even more complex, localization mandates continue to grow in scope and severity. Governments worldwide are enacting stricter laws that dictate how data must be stored, accessed and transferred. Regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and China’s Cybersecurity Law are prime examples of how specific regions enforce varying regulations. Navigating these mandates well is an absolute must if you hope to operate efficiently with no data flow interruptions. You may need to make comprehensive updates to organizational policies and practices to ensure every transfer and access point is up to par.

Organizations also have to face the challenge of increasingly decentralized data. Widespread cloud adoption and remote workforces have dispersed data and created a demand for cross-border access. The result? A complicated ecosystem that requires advanced data management strategies to reconcile the need for accessibility and sometimes conflicting regulations.

Your employees expect to have quick and reliable access to the information they need, but each data transfer presents a potential legal and regulatory risk. 

Why security can’t be an afterthought

Data breaches are on the rise, and with each incident in the news, the stakes grow higher for your business. The frequency and severity of breaches have created an environment where privacy is not just a compliance issue but a critical differentiator.

Customers and stakeholders expect companies to go above and beyond mere regulatory adherence and actively protect sensitive information. A loss of trust is nearly impossible to regain.

Remote work has increased both risks and expectations. Employees may sometimes use unsecured networks or personal devices, increasing vulnerabilities. Yet, they need seamless data access, regardless of location. Securing data without disrupting productivity is no small task.

One of the most concerning aspects of data security today is the risk of exfiltration — when malicious actors gain access to your information via emails, file downloads, malware or cloud vulnerability exploits. Sophisticated cyberattacks are becoming more common, and strong data protection measures are non-negotiable.

Thus, while automating your data management should be a priority, it’s important to have a solid plan incorporating residency and sovereignty. 

Building a compliant data automation strategy

The best data strategies consist of:

• Defined regulatory requirements and data boundaries
• Resilient, yet malleable, workflows
• Strong monitoring
• Awareness of policy updates

Begin by seeking a clear understanding of the regulatory environment in which your business operates. Then, for each jurisdiction, identify the specific laws and mandates governing how and where data can be processed, stored and accessed.

Document and integrate these requirements into your operational processes. An up-to-date, customized regulatory map can be invaluable as you try to prevent costly compliance failures. 

From there, you’ll want to start building adaptable data workflows. If they’re too rigid, they can leave you vulnerable when unexpected changes occur (which is quite often in the world of data protection laws). Choosing a flexible automation solution will help you design flexible workflows from the start. In a SaaS model, data processing locations may change dynamically due to load balancing or disaster recovery. Design your workflows to handle these changes — reroute data and load during outages — without breaking compliance.

Monitoring and continuous oversight are also crucial components of your strategy. Breaches and non-compliance events happen quickly, and having a clear audit trail of every interaction with data can keep you from getting swept away in the chaos. Alerts for suspicious activity or deviations from protocols are the new norm for mitigating risk.

Finally, keeping your team informed with training and dedicating resources to staying aware of the latest regulations that impact your business are proactive ways to take on the data responsibilities of today and tomorrow.

Use a compliance-aware data automation platform

The right data automation tool can minimize costs while helping you manage technical complexity. Look for a solution with strong SaaS encryption, robust access controls and best-in-class security policies and certifications. 

Redwood’s certifications include: ISO 27001, ISAE 3402 Type II, SSAE 18 SOC 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type II, TX-RAMP Provisional Certification and Cloud Security Alliance STAR Level 1.

These factors, plus a commitment to getting data residency and sovereignty right for customers, will enable you to minimize fines and data transfer restrictions, reduce latency and increase resilience in crisis situations.

Choose a recognized workload automation provider

Gartner named Redwood a Leader, positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision and highest for Ability to Execute, in the 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) report. In evaluating providers for Completeness of Vision, Gartner heavily weighed geographic strategy, stating that SOAPs with this distinction “meet complex international requirements, including data sovereignty options and compliance with region-specific regulations (e.g., GDPR).”

In its companion analysis, the Critical Capabilities for SOAPs report, Redwood was ranked first in all five Use Cases, including Data Orchestration.

I believe these achievements represent Redwood’s ability to provide top data protection and responsive support for all geographies — a significant differentiator when you’re looking for a provider who won’t leave you wondering how to handle and protect data without their guidance.

Get a glimpse of our superior data automation features and security standards by booking a demo of RunMyJobs by Redwood.

The dual pressure to integrate multiple cloud computing environments with business and IT systems while implementing new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), makes it challenging to meet evolving business requirements while simultaneously addressing resource constraints and filling skill gaps across new and legacy systems. 

These elements struggle to co-exist harmoniously, leaving your team mired in troubleshooting issues while attempting to integrate new technologies. To enable transformation without impacting business services, you must adopt a strategic approach to scaling your IT workload management.

Read on to explore IT workload automation as a solution — its applications in a Service Orchestration and Automation Platform (SOAP) capacity and a step-by-step guide to using it to scale effectively.

Gartner SOAP Critical Capabilities: IT workload automation 

In its 2025 Critical Capabilities for SOAPs report, Gartner® spells out five top Use Cases for these advanced workload automation tools, one of which is IT workload automation. According to the report, this use case is defined as the “automating planning, execution, management and reporting of IT workloads across enterprise systems.”

An IT workload is any program or application that runs on a computer — anything from a simple script to move some data around to a complex chain of tasks in a remote system (e.g., SAP ERP, AWS, Databricks or Informatica). A SOAP that successfully automates these functions must enable teams to:

1. Plan: Assess IT processes to identify those with high impact for performance and reliability improvements from automation.
2. Define: Map processes to workflows, set schedules, establish run and failure conditions and align them with service-level agreements (SLAs) and business outcomes.
3. Execute: Implement workloads according to predefined parameters.
4. Manage: Oversee IT operations, adjust for performance and resolve issues.
5. Report: Generate detailed insights to guide ongoing optimization.

IT processes: Quick wins for targeted scalability 

To fully capitalize on the opportunities offered by an orchestration platform, it’s important to know which processes are most suited for scaling. Depending on your current resource availability and the potential impact on your business operations, you may prefer to prioritize the simplest processes first.

Look for:

• Tasks that span multiple systems. Coordinating these can deliver efficiencies and reliability improvements. Perhaps identify achievable but challenging hybrid cloud processes or ones that span on-premises and SaaS cloud services to build on for future phases.
• Tasks that are dependent on business events. Connecting IT and business systems with workload automation means activities happen more quickly from the end-user’s point of view. Starting with IT services that are triggered in a customer-facing system can deliver demonstrable benefits in early phases.
• Tasks that are interdependent or have complex dependencies. Verifying that all the pieces are in place maximizes the likelihood of success. Workload automation allows us to do this using methods that align with skills and other solutions, reducing technical debt. Choosing tasks that often fail due to dependency on employees can show immediate benefits and are incredibly cost-effective.

The following examples are in order from simplest to most complex:

1. Backup and archival of data from across the business
2. Setup for new employees or customers across different systems
3. Automatic scaling of cloud environments up and down during company downtime
4. Disaster recovery replication management, ensuring all requirements are met
5. Data center management, managing control of physical and digital systems
6. Disaster recovery testing and activation 

Automate your way into the green: How to scale IT workloads

While there will be some variation in how you pave the way for growth and efficiency, here are some general guidelines if you’re not sure where to start.

1. Assess your current automation landscape

The first step is to perform a thorough audit of your existing automation environment. Begin by identifying solutions with automation capabilities, stand-alone automation tools, resource-intensive tasks, critical dependencies and workflows that have high latency or delays between steps.

Then, determine key performance indicators (KPIs) to establish a baseline. For example:

• Automation success and failure rates
• Process completion speed
• Manual intervention and labor costs

Or, more specific to your processes, considering our examples above:

• Data restoration request response time?
• New employee request resolution time?
• Reduced cloud computing costs?
• Disaster recovery failover testing success rates?
• Time to shut down an on-premises data center for maintenance?

Potential challenges at this stage: You may have to tackle outdated scripts and grapple with fragmented tools. Without centralized visibility, you’ll also likely face insufficient monitoring. 

Note your issues early to lay a solid foundation for the upcoming steps.

2. Build a scalable IT automation strategy

Once you’ve assessed your current automation stage, it’s time to define a true strategy for scalability. 

• Set clear, measurable goals. Do you want to reduce manual interventions by 50%? Cut job failure rates by 30% within six months?
• Prioritize high-impact cloud workloads. Focus on those that:
  • Often involving file transfers or high-volume, repeatable jobs
  • Require batch processing power
  • Cloud resource management
• Configure your workload automation for load balancing. Distributing tasks evenly across your available resources gives you the best chance of preventing bottlenecks as you take on increased demand.

3. Manage and monitor workloads in real time

Effective real-time management is essential when scaling. Dashboards can give you instant visibility into job statuses and system health. Alerts are also key for being able to rapidly respond to issues despite an increase in volume.

Set up automatic failure recovery protocols, such as job retries, failovers and escalations, to maintain continuity even when issues pop up.

The insights from your real-time monitoring are only as valuable as what you do with them. Take quick action when it becomes clear you need to adjust computing resources or dependencies to streamline execution.

Keep in mind that real-time workload management isn’t a one-and-done process. Continuous adaptability is what will make your automation efforts successful.

4. Report on and communicate automation successes

You need support from your entire leadership team and all stakeholders to keep up with the backend needs that support changes in the business. IT scalability contributes to broader business growth, but this correlation is not clear to everyone.

This means generating comprehensive reports that highlight the business impact of IT process automation. How have your workload adaptations contributed to greater efficiency in routine tasks, improved service delivery and/or a better customer experience?

If you can also use your data to help forecast your needs, you’ll be more likely to expand quickly with new automation tools and integrations, which will allow you to handle even more complex workflows and perhaps support new services. Scalability could be a self-perpetuating cycle!

Why a ranked SOAP solution should be your scaling companion

More than just running scheduled tasks, you need to strategically orchestrate automated processes to ensure your operations continue to be error-free as you grow. A SOAP solution, especially one that’s been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SOAPs, is an indispensable partner along this journey.

With a Redwood Software solution, you’ll get:

• Centralized control
• Measurable efficiency gains
• Unparalleled adaptability
• Easy enforcement of compliance and governance

Redwood ranked #1 in all five Gartner Critical Capabilities Use Cases for SOAP in 2025. Download the full analyst report to find out why and envision the resilience you could achieve with all types of workloads by using a leading SOAP solution as you scale.

Effective workflows aren’t just task sequences. Set up properly, they comprise the groundwork for consistent, adaptable and seamless IT operations. Resilient workflows minimize downtime, reduce the risk of task or process failure and help your organization quickly respond to unexpected challenges or opportunities. They support uninterrupted IT service management and boost productivity in areas of business that can otherwise be overrun with time-consuming, repetitive tasks.

Workflow health and Gartner SOAP Use Cases

Accessible and dynamic workflows are so important in the world of modernization that Gartner® names IT Workflow Orchestration one of five Critical Capabilities Use Cases for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs). 

As businesses across industries prioritize process automation, ensuring that workflows are well-designed and capable of quick recovery becomes even more crucial than it has been thus far. SOAPs address this need by providing a unified platform for orchestrating complex workflows across varied apps and environments.

Incorporating workflow health into your automation initiatives gives your business processes a better chance of standing up under the pressure of scaling or integrating new technologies, fostering continuous improvement.

Use the following strategies to build workflows that work in all conditions.

1. Take advantage of low-code, drag-and-drop design.

Low-code/no-code interfaces streamline the automation design environment to help you build, edit and deploy workflows faster than with traditional development methods. With user-friendly, drag-and-drop tools, non-specialized IT professionals or business users can make adjustments to workflows as needed, which reduces reliance on your specialized IT team members.

The resilience factor: It’s possible to recover more quickly from failures or process changes since editing is easy. Low-code gives you the flexibility to react promptly to both demands and unforeseen issues.

2. Use event-based scheduling.

Many workflows operate on time-based scheduling. While effective in some cases, this method assumes that actions will occur at the same intervals without variation, which isn’t always realistic in complex operations. Event-based scheduling means your workflows are triggered by specific events rather than time-based assumptions. 

The resilience factor: Your processes align with real-time operational conditions, and your workflows respond accordingly.

3. Set up intelligent exception handling.

Exception handling is vital for addressing errors or unexpected circumstances. Basic exception handling often focuses on technical errors, but truly resilient workflows can anticipate and address more intricate, process-level exceptions. A workflow automation solution that’s deeply integrated with your ERP can make this a possibility.

The resilience factor: You get automatic issue detection and resolution without human intervention, going beyond surface-level errors. The capability to maintain continuity and adapt to emerging problems is priceless.

4. Communicate using top-of-the-line encryption.

Communication within workflows often involves data transfers, which can expose your processes to security risks. Effective encryption is critical to maintaining data integrity and protecting your business from external threats. Utilizing top-tier encryption methods, such as TLS 1.3 and SSL, ensures your workflows stay secure, even when you’re sending communications across potentially vulnerable networks.

The resilience factor: It’s easier to shield your workflows from breaches or attacks and reduce the downtime caused by security incidents.

5.  Integrate data transfer.

Data in motion adds unpredictability to your processes. When they’re not managed effectively, data transfers can cause delays, bottlenecks or even failed workflows. A managed file transfer (MFT) solution integrated with your workload automation (WLA) platform gives you control and visibility over your data movement.

The resilience factor: Workflows are stabilized — they’re more predictable and trackable. Therefore, you won’t create bottlenecks due to delayed or missed file transfers.

6. Centralize your automation controls.

Managing workflows across multiple platforms can lead to confusion and an increased risk of errors. Streamlining gives you oversight and makes it easier to detect and resolve issues across disparate systems. 

The resilience factor: There are fewer points of failure with deliberately coordinated automations. Centralized controls create transparency across your workflows.

7. Choose truly extensible workload automation.

As your organization evolves, you introduce new tools and technologies. Workflows that rely on rigid, non-extensible automation solutions will struggle to keep up with demands and lead to disruptions or outdated processes. Instead, a WLA solution with built-in connectors and APIs will enable you to connect all your key systems and tools without compromising security or efficiency.

The resilience factor: When your workflows stay relevant, your organization stays agile.

8. Utilize the full functionality of your WLA solution.

Your WLA platform could offer advanced features that go unused in daily business operations. Educate your team on how to put protections in place to keep your end-to-end processes running smoothly.

For example, in RunMyJobs by Redwood, we advise:

1. Setting system-wide and partition-wide defaults for chain and process definition and job retention at the highest level.
2. Configuring automated alerts for housekeeping processes.
3. Keeping one month of events, operator messages and audit data.

The resilience factor: You can continually monitor and optimize workflows, and checks and balances will prevent small issues from becoming major failures.

Choose winning SOAP solutions for workflow management

Redwood Software ranked first in five Use Cases, including IT Workflow Orchestration, in the 2025 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for SOAPs report. Get your copy now to learn how workflow automation software with SOAP capabilities can support your workflow resilience.

These graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from https://www.redwood.com/resource/gartner-critical-capabilities-soaps/.  

As we move further into the digital age, IT leaders are becoming more focused on automating business processes that allow their companies to operate seamlessly end-to-end. In this blog, we will explore the six trends that IT leaders have deemed essential for 2023.

1. The pace of automation continues to accelerate. According to HFS, 70% of executives say that automation has increased priority, even post-pandemic. Over 50% plan to invest in I&O automation within the next 12 months, according to Gartner. EMA reports that 87% of organizations have significantly increased the number of processes automated within the last two years.
   
2. Orchestration is key. According to Forrester, 83% of respondents want to drive end-to-end automation. Gartner reports that 17% ranked Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms as the first-priority investment. EMA reports that 92% believe that workload automation should be expanded to orchestrate automation across the enterprise.
   
3. Timeliness of data becomes more valuable. Digital business requires teams, inside and outside of IT, to embrace the real-time, event-driven orchestration of business services, according to Gartner.
   
4. Automation enables better agility and reliability. During COVID-19, the more automated organizations adapted more quickly and effectively, according to Forrester. 80% use automation to drive process standardization and optimization, according to Forrester.
   
5. Increasing strategic role of automation. Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms are “force multipliers” to maximize returns on ITSM, SaaS, and CMDB, according to Gartner. Forrester reports that 77% automate for strategic reasons, and EMA reports that 36% have become very creative in the use and adoption of automation compared to “old school” or status quo approaches.
   
6. More automation based on low-code/no-code platforms. EMA reports that significantly less code will have to be written and tested for new automation projects.
   

At Redwood, we are the leader in automation and provide the first full-stack automation platform, bridging applications and infrastructure, enabling business and IT teams to achieve end-to-end process outcomes. Full-stack automation is required to deliver on advanced requirements, and Redwood is the industry leader in full-stack automation. 

Our platform includes advanced requirements, such as full-stack automation that achieves end-to-end business process outcomes, a SaaS platform with guaranteed performance and availability, deep and broad support of major application portfolios, low-code visual process design, wizards and reusable automation components, auto-recovery for mission-critical automation, and monitor, predict and manage SLA achievement.

Additionally, our platform includes basic requirements, such as automating and orchestrating core IT processes, time and event-based scheduling, standard connectivity and monitoring and basic workflow management.

Let’s take a look at some of the business impacts from our case studies:

1. Grainger: The company had a time-consuming order process with suppliers, leading to errors and inconsistencies in the order-to-cash cycle. This caused customer orders to be delayed, inventory and forecasts to be inaccurate, and sales revenue to not be booked. By automating the order-to-cash process and integrating suppliers with in-house ordering and fulfillment, Grainger was able to reduce its order-to-cash cycle by six times and operating costs by 20%.
   
2. Ryder: The company faced a similar challenge of a time-consuming order process with suppliers and errors in the order-to-cash cycle, resulting in delayed customer orders, inaccurate inventory and forecasts, and unbooked sales revenue. By orchestrating data ETL and BI flows, Ryder eliminated billing errors and manual processing and achieved on-time delivery up to 99%.

Ready to discover what full stack automation can do for your business? Request a personalized demo today!

But one of the most awe-inspiring parts of the tower is something you can’t see — its foundation. Built deep into the ground, the concrete and steel foundation supports 450,000 metric tons of weight, which is the equivalent of about 800 fully loaded jumbo jets stacked on top of each other. With that immense amount of weight to shoulder, there’s no way architects could have successfully built something that expansive without getting the foundation just right.

The importance of a strong foundation may seem obvious when thinking about a building like the Burj Khalifa, but what about when thinking about workload automation? It may not come to mind for most people, but you’re here reading this blog, so I think it might for you.

Just as we continue to generate taller and taller skyscrapers, we also continue to generate more and more business processes that need to be managed through automation. And the ability to orchestrate the automation of these expanding processes is needed more than ever. But with the need for more sophisticated automation outpacing many of the technologies out there, how do you keep up without risking your automation “skyscraper” falling over?

From the ground up

To begin answering that question, you have to go back to when ground was first broken with workload automation. As many automation developers started creating their platforms, they built solutions for what was needed at the time. Many of those solutions were able to keep up for a while, albeit with costly on-premises servers and system-draining updates needed along the way, and some of them never could handle more than a set range of integrations. But, now, companies are seeing more and more limitations with those solutions as demands continue to grow because they just weren’t built with the best architectural foundations from the start. This is where Redwood Software is different.

Redwood developers made sure to respond to the needs of the time when they created their workload automation solution, RunMyJobs by Redwood, but they also saw a chance to build something smarter — something with a foundation that could handle future needs that weren’t even realized yet. So, they built RunMyJobs with an architecture that allows for limitless extensibility and vast customization, all while keeping customers in control of monitoring and updates, and cemented the foundation for workload automation success. But what makes a foundation like Redwood’s so special?

Built strong to last long

There are two key pillars of RunMyJobs’ architecture that serve as the foundation of the solution, keeping even the most towering automation “skyscrapers” standing tall: being SaaS-native and being cloud-native. And, unlike other platforms out there, RunMyJobs was built with that strong foundation from the beginning, meaning you don’t have to question if it’s like having some extra concrete slapped on the foundation after the building got too tall and needed more support. With Redwood, that foundation is solid — and ready to hold up whatever you build on top of it — right from the start. This matters more than some may think because critical components of an automation solution, like updates, security, scalability, resilience and more, are enhanced when you have a SaaS- and cloud-native foundation. You want to get all of the functionality out of your automation software, with any mix of technology and without any of the hassle of on-premises limitations.

SaaS-first

First things first — there’s a difference between starting out as SaaS and moving to SaaS down the line. There just is.

When you construct your product with a SaaS foundation like RunMyJobs, you build in all the capabilities, including administrative ones, and have a fully functioning, feature-rich product available to you out of the box. This doesn’t mean you won’t need updates eventually, but we’ll get to that part in a minute. What it does mean is that you don’t have to worry about your product being stripped down or not operating efficiently because it wasn’t planned for SaaS. Other providers may have moved from on-premises to SaaS now that it’s the way of the future, but it doesn’t mean they necessarily did it well.

And, as far as security goes, the same drawbacks rear their ugly heads with platforms not initially envisioned as SaaS. RunMyJobs was built with a very light footprint, which means the automation of jobs filled with customer data occurs in the cloud, but the actual data itself stays with the customer. Because other products weren’t planned to anticipate the shift in how data would need to be transferred when moving from on-premises to cloud, they have to punch holes in security firewalls and install heavy agents on the customer end to manage the data flows.

This is also true when circling back to those always-needed updates mentioned before. SaaS-native RunMyJobs has built-in, continuous auto-updating, with updates taking only minutes and happening on the customer’s timetable, not the provider’s, meaning they can be done efficiently during the middle of the day if so desired. Other providers sometimes require teams of people, hours of time and heavy agents to do updates because they weren’t designed to be seamlessly SaaS from the get-go like RunMyJobs.

Ahead in the cloud

The idea of a cloud foundation may sound a bit odd to those not thinking in tech terms. You can fly right through clouds in those weighty jumbo jets from earlier, so building on top of a cloud seems almost silly. But a cloud foundation for workload automation is exactly what you want.

The strength of being cloud-native is part of what sets RunMyJobs apart. The depth and breadth of integrations, with even the most varied blueprint of ERP, on-premises, cloud and/or legacy systems a customer rolls out on the table, is unparalleled with RunMyJob’s architecture for scalability. The cloud-based setup means the whole lot of your applications, services, workflows and other processes can stack up on that foundation because it was always designed to have the capacity for all those things, along with the flexibility to adapt to changing environments to boot. Other solutions not built for the cloud may have been reworked to be in the cloud now, but they were originally built to only go so far. You can try to keep adding floors to make a regular building a skyscraper, but, if the foundation isn’t there to support them, you know you’ll run into problems.

Speaking of needing the right support, a good skyscraper foundation actually anticipates shifting in the structure above and is able to withstand it. A good automation foundation is no different. An automation solution designed for the cloud has the flexibility, and, therefore, resilience, to adapt to potential shifts in the system, including when things go wrong. RunMyJobs has that resilient foundation as a whole and also takes it a step further by empowering the business processes it automates to be resilient themselves. A shift in your automation structure, including full-on job failure, doesn’t crash the entire system. Self-healing processes are smart enough to fix themselves because there’s room in that cloud foundation for that shifting. Non-cloud-native providers are still spending time just getting their platforms moved over to the cloud and aren’t set up to achieve the autonomy that comes with having that resilient foundation from the beginning.

One commonly seen shift that many businesses see happening with automation nowadays is the need for increased capacity on the fly. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get the extra oomph, without extra add-on, server and licensing costs that others might charge, and you could even build in automation so your system automatically extends your capacity when needed? RunMyJobs does all of that. The cloud-based architecture allows you to be nimble with resource provisioning without disrupting your business processes. It’s like having a retractable balcony on your automation “skyscraper” that you can just pop out whenever you want to have free processing parties. I think we can cheers to that.

Looking toward the future

As the world continues to become more reliant on self-service and remote practices, your workload automation solution will need to be able to adapt, and having the right foundation under your solution will matter more than ever.

A recent EMA survey on enterprise automation culture asked companies the same question about their postures toward automation that they asked two years ago, and the results were enlightening. 74% of respondents said they are “somewhat or very creative in our use of automation,” which is up from 51% the last time. This change in numbers is a reflection of the rapidly growing need for customizable automation that can handle the complex infrastructures and hybrid environments of today’s working world. Companies need creative flexibility to be more fluid and responsive as automation becomes increasingly decentralized, but they need to maintain control over their environments in a central location to keep their automation orchestration working harmoniously.

What companies need is an automation orchestration solution that can grow and adapt alongside them as the need to be more creative with managing workloads expands. With its SaaS- and cloud-native architectural foundation, RunMyJobs is that solution. So you can keep building, changing, expanding, contracting or otherwise growing your automation “skyscraper” however you want, and Redwood will be there to support it. Holding up 800 jumbo jets is no sweat.

Want to hear more about automation architecture’s role in your business success? Join our experts as they discuss just that in our on-demand webinar, “The Sky’s Not the Limit with Redwood: SaaS Automation Architecture Built for the Cloud.”

Changes to IT environments and processes have continued to skyrocket in recent years. Digital transformation initiatives are now characterized by cloud adoption, workload automation (WLA) and process orchestration across complex ecosystems.

As a result, the automation strategies and tools you choose for enterprise use cases must evolve. Traditional approaches and cloud automation solutions can’t meet the needs of the new IT environment and the changing face of business.

Let’s take a look at the future of automation, according to Gartner, and the key role of SOAPs.

A new world of IT operations

Organizations have embraced new technologies to deliver the cost reduction and improved operational performance promised by digital transformation. Self-contained on-premises data centers have shifted to containerized infrastructures and multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments. New business applications and services have also expanded the breadth of most companies’ digital infrastructures, as APIs and web services enable easier and faster connectivity with traditional ERPs and other enterprise applications. And many organizations have increased their use of big data for machine learning, artificial intelligence and analytics.

These technological changes also reflect a shift in business and IT team priorities, as CIOs, IT professionals and automation software all play a big role in improving customer experience and competitive differentiation. Organizations need greater agility and innovation from their IT and Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders for IT process optimization and to achieve value-based KPIs, rapid time-to-market and profitability.

Business leaders are reacting by making significant changes to IT automation strategies and workflows. In the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report, Gartner analysts Hassan Ennaciri, Chris Saunderson, Daniel Betts and Cameron Haight state:

By 2029, 90% of organizations that currently deliver 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.

They also share that the SOAP market is expected to grow to an estimated $4.9 billion by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.7%. 

Why workload automation must evolve

Traditional WLA solutions evolved from job scheduling tools. While WLA delivers on the key values of operational efficiency, human error reduction and cost savings, its initial design still carries many limitations in functionality.

In traditional workload automation, workflows are still managed by careful coordination of scheduled tasks. However, customer expectations for responsiveness and competitive differentiation require business tasks to run in near-real time. 

Workload automation capabilities have also traditionally been focused on core workflows around ERPs or other siloed technical or operational domains, with many organizations operating multiple workload automation tools independently. This type of automation leaves gaps that lead to inefficiency, errors and manual processes, with no clear visibility into the performance of the overarching business processes the automation is intended to support.

The inability to deploy flexible WLA strategies also impedes business growth. Without collaboration and automation inside and outside of IT, business and IT teams face siloed capabilities.

In all these cases, the limitations of the traditional approach to workload automation prevent IT and I&O leaders and teams from shifting their automation strategy to focus on the higher-value goals of innovation, agility and customer service.

Gartner SOAP model for workload automation

According to Gartner analysis, the model for workload automation must adapt to address these strategic and operational shifts. 

Fundamentally, they believe that the scope of workload automation must expand both horizontally and vertically to deliver automation of a full business process, where each business process is viewed not as a set of discrete tasks but a complete cross-platform service coordinated from end to end.

SOAPs adapt to new use cases for data pipelines, application architectures and cloud-native infrastructure. This expands the role of traditional workload automation and complements and integrates with DevOps toolchains. The result? Enhanced operational efficiency, standardized processes and cost savings, all while providing customer-focused agility.

In the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report, Gartner identifies five mandatory features that differentiate SOAPs from traditional IT workload automation and will be essential for business and IT operations.

• Management of workloads in complex technology and deployment topologies: This includes supporting mission-critical workload automation of business processes in various combinations and configurations of internally developed applications. It also involves supporting commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and infrastructure deployments, including on-premises, cloud, colocation, software as a service (SaaS) and edge locations.
• Management of workflows spanning the operating environment: This includes request management, integration between IT software platforms and end-user enablement, data pipelines, citizen developer enablement and DevOps pipeline integration.
• Broad integration capabilities: This includes the ability to integrate with and incorporate software and infrastructure technology landscapes that span from the cloud to enterprise applications.
• Workflow design: This includes providing a visual workflow designer, a code-based designer and a library to create and reuse workflow templates. Additionally, it needs to support version control and collaboration, allowing multiple users to work on workflows simultaneously and track changes.
• Error handling and recovery: This ensures workflow stability by detecting errors, triggering recovery actions such as retries or rollbacks, and minimizing disruptions. Robust logging and alerts enable rapid diagnosis and resolution, maintaining reliability and data integrity.

The report also notes that “SOAP providers are rapidly expanding beyond IT task automation by embedding intelligent automation into their platforms. Most vendors now offer integrated GenAI assistants to accelerate development, and some are deploying AI agents to support proactive, problem determination and remediation. As more vendors continue to develop and improve their agentic AI capabilities, SOAPs will increasingly enable orchestration of complex, end-to-end business workflows across the entire enterprise.” 

Gartner 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report

Get the complete 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report to learn more about the SOAPs market and why Redwood was named a Leader, positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision and highest for Ability to Execute.

A unified view of the automated enterprise

The new requirements for workload automation extend its role and value beyond its traditional scope and use cases, but SOAPs do not replicate or replace other specialized IT automation software. Rather, they become a central hub that orchestrates business processes through integrations and other complementary forms of IT automation technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), DevOps and infrastructure management toolchains.

However, IT organizations with multiple workload automation tools can and should consolidate them into a single business process automation platform to eliminate the costs, inefficiency and fragmented views that result from these separate tools.

Workload automation performs a critical role within IT operations, but it must evolve to adapt to technological advancements and changing business needs to deliver more value to the organization and its customers.

Read more about the growing importance of SOAPs — get your copy of the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report.

Magic Quadrant is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

For a digital business to be competitive, it needs workload automation technology that goes beyond the traditional capabilities of legacy workload or scheduling tools to effectively deal with the range of systems and applications and the growing number of technology types being used.

An emerging reliance on advanced automation

In 2022, a Gartner® survey concluded that 80% of executives think automation can be applied to any business decision. This is reflective of a supportive culture behind automation, especially in how it will be interwoven with artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the burden of daily decision-making.

Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs), which Gartner believes are the new model for workload automation platforms, are becoming non-negotiable for large enterprises needing to automate complex business processes.

In the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs report, Gartner states: “Service orchestration and automation platforms are essential for delivering business services through complex workloads.”

According to the same report,

SOAPs empower infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to streamline and accelerate the delivery of business services. These platforms integrate workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid IT landscape. By automating and optimizing these processes, SOAPs enable organizations to rapidly deploy workloads, enhance operational efficiency and achieve significant cost savings while ensuring high availability and business continuity.

SOAPs enhance traditional workload automation by supporting use cases in data pipelines, cloud-native infrastructures and application architectures. They complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains, enabling organizations to achieve customer-centric agility, reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and establish standardized processes across their entire IT landscape.

Choose a Gartner SOAP Leader for hybrid IT workload automation

From an IT perspective, the infrastructure-led transformation enabled by SOAPs should make the complex job of managing a hybrid enterprise more manageable and deliver more effective business outcomes. Finding the right SOAP solution is key — and one that’s offered as a service, like RunMyJobs by Redwood, gives you the ability to run processes reliably with less effort from your IT team.

Redwood Software was again named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAPs, positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision and highest for Ability to Execute. Read the full report to find out why.

To learn more about Redwood’s SOAP solutions, book a demo.

Time consumed by workarounds, patches and daily management, along with costs for on-premises hardware and licensing, can quickly spiral out of control. Complexity increases the risk of downtime, which erodes customer trust and drains profits. According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of downtime to businesses is a whopping $8,851 per minute.

Fortunately, the current generation of cloud technology has some answers. Leading cloud platform providers have proven they can deliver over 99% availability with comprehensive security that surpasses what most companies can provide through their own, on-premises data centers. Scalability is also easier when solutions are delivered as a service through the cloud. Oracle has predicted that 80% of all enterprise (and mission-critical) workloads will move to the cloud by 2025, and other analysts and industry leaders predict the same.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) goes beyond what the cloud alone can offer to provide the greatest benefit to business and IT with significantly less manual effort. SaaS solutions eliminate the need for all management of the application, its data, runtime, middleware, operating system, virtualization, servers, storage or networking involved in delivering a service. Users and customers get the results they expect. IT professionals get the reliability and scalability they need to focus on innovation without the complexity, cost and effort.

With recent rapid changes in our global workplace, workload automation (WLA) has now joined SaaS in the spotlight. WLA has always been at the core of all IT activities that support business. Now, organizations are rethinking the importance of WLA in maintaining and developing a resilient enterprise.

WLA and scheduling tools clearly offer benefits that come with process automation itself, such as accuracy and predictability. When automation is delivered as a service it provides even more. WLA provided via SaaS gives organizations the strength to adapt automatically with significantly less manual work. And most importantly, it makes business technology more reliable and scalable to support superior customer experiences.

To learn more about this, watch the live recording hosted by Enterprise Management Associates® (EMA™). I present with Dan Twing, President and COO of leading IT research firm, EMA.

Dan shows the latest research on how modern WLA supports the best use of resources and alignment for reduced IT complexity and cost. I’ll show you how RunMyJobs by Redwood, the only WLA and scheduling solution provided as a service, enables an elegant, high-tech, low-touch approach to give your customers exactly what they want.