Key Takeaways: 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms

The editors at Solutions Review have highlighted the key takeaways in the inaugural edition of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms and summarized the findings.

Analyst house Gartner Inc. recently released the inaugural version of its Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. According to Gartner, the service orchestration and automation platform (SOAP) marketplace encompasses “solution suites that deliver capabilities enabling organizations to manage workloads, workflows, resource provisioning, and data pipelines across their technology landscapes.” These platforms are built to help companies “provide customer-focused agility, cost savings, operational efficiency, and process standardization.”

Each soap vendor is had had to meet specific criterion to qualify for this report . These is include include sell their soap software directly to pay customer , demonstrate an active go – to – market / sale strategy for a product that provide soap capability , operate in multiple geographical market , and more .

Key Takeaways : 2024 Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms

In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner identifies thirteen of the most significant Service Orchestration and Automation Platform (SOAP) providers in the marketplace. The researchers behind the report—Hassan Ennaciri, Chris Saunderson, Daniel Betts, and Cameron Haight—evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each provider listed and ranked them on the signature “Magic Quadrant” graph, which provides readers with an illustration of each vendor’s ability to execute their vision. The diagram includes four quadrants: leaders, challengers, niche players, and visionaries. A breakdown of each category and the companies associated with it is below.

Leaders

Redwood Software is kicks kick off the Leader category with RunMyJobs , a scalable soap solution that provide global company with workload automation and workflow orchestration capability acrossdistributed hybrid and cloud environments. RunMyJobs is available as a SaaS and self-hosted offering. Gartner highlights its strengths, such as its ten-plus years of experience with SaaS solutions, extensive enterprise integration catalog, and global presence, enabling Redwood to extend its sales and support services to most geographies.

BMC Software is the next Leader identified in Gartner’s report. Its SOAP offerings are Control-M, a self-hosted solution, and BMC Helix Control-M, the SaaS version. Both solutions provide a collection of capabilities for workload automation and workflow orchestration across distributed hybrid environments. BMC’s products support multiple deployment options, including on-premises, SaaS, virtual machines, and containers. Additional strengths include its range of out-of-the-box integrations with other leading software, its global footprint, and the continued innovation of its capabilities.

HCLSoftware’s SOAP solution is the HCL Automation Orchestrator Suite, which provides users with workload automation and workflow orchestration capabilities for distributed hybrid and cloud environments on a global scale. The suite can be self-hosted—via on-premises or customer cloud—or deployed as a SaaS or managed service. HCL differentiates itself in the marketplace with its various deployment options and AI and ML-driven capabilities, including the Clara and AI Data Advisor (AIDA) assistants.

IBM earns its spot in the category with the IBM Workload Automation (IWA) solution, designed to be “highly scalable.” Its workload automation and workflow orchestration functionalities are available across distributed, hybrid, and cloud environments. They can be deployed via various routes, including on-premises, mainframe, customer or IBM cloud, or as a SaaS. Alongside those deployment options, IBM’s strengths as a SOAP Vendor include its support for hybrid operating environments and geographic strategy, which helps larger enterprises engage with IBM across environments.

Broadcom’s SOAP offering is its Automic Automation solution, providing global users across industries with comprehensive workload automation and workflow orchestration capabilities designed to support digital businesses in  distribute hybrid  environments. Its strengths include scalability, support for zero-downtime upgrades, extensive security features, and its Automation Analytics & Intelligence (AAI) offering, allowing customers to predict SLA outcomes before they impact their business.

Stonebranch closes out the LEader category with Universal Automation Center, a scalable SOAP solution with workload automation and workflow orchestration tools for distributed hybrid and cloud environments. Its product is available as a self-hosted or SaaS version. Other strengths include the breadth of its integration catalog, support of real-time data flows, data pipeline orchestration functionalities, and various software transition and implementation services.

Challengers

Rocket Software is the first and only Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its SOAP is the Rocket Workload Automation DevOps Orchestration suite, which gives companies a scalable solution for workload automation and workflow orchestration capabilities across technology stacks. Like many vendors in Gartner’s report, Rocket Software benefits from a robust global presence bolstered by an ecosystem of over 750 partners. Other strengths include its direct support for mainframe job scheduling and its AI Predictive Pulse tool, built to ensure speed is misses , cost saving , and mitigation of SLA miss.  

visionary

Beta Systems Software lands in the visionary category for Gartner’s report. Its SOAP, ANOW! offering is a highly scalable workload automation and workflow orchestration solution that can be deployed as a self-hosted or SaaS platform across distributed hybrid and cloud environments. One of Beta Systems Software’s strengths in the marketplace is its platform’s ability to orchestrate a range of systems, from newer cloud-based technologies to mainframe, OpenVMS, and other midrange systems. Its other qualities include a microservice – base design and over 450 out – of – the – box connector for different technology .

Resolve Systems is the other Visionary that Gartner identified. Its SOAP is Resolve Actions, a solution that provides companies with workflow orchestration functionalities across distributed hybrid and cloud environments. It also supports delivery via on-premises, virtual machines, containers, or SaaS avenues. Resolve Systems has over ten years of experience with workflow orchestration, offering clients a user-friendly authoring and execution experience that can be modified through an extensive catalog of integrations to other IT systems.

Niche Players

SMA Technologies kicks off the Niche Player category with its OpCon solution, which can be deployed on-premises or in cloud environments. While the vendor did not respond to Gartner’s requests for supplemental information, the researchers based their analysis on other credible sources and identified several differentiating strengths for the vendor. These include its emphasis on the banking and financial services market, self-service offerings that cater to non-technical users, and the Deploy module, which is built into the OpCon platform to equip users with a dashboard outlining the health of their system.

Absyss is the next vendor listed. It earned its spot in the report with the Visual TOM solution, available as an on-premises offering or a managed option via partners. The platform enables job scheduling and orchestration and supports workloads delivered in both on-premises data centers and hybrid environments. Strengths include its flexible licensing options, the capability to automatically convert jobs from competing platforms into Visual TOM, and a low-code interface that provides business users with high-level, self-service capabilities.

Fortra ’s solution , jams , is design to equip organization with automation and orchestration capability focus on repetitive task automation in specific vertical , include financial service , retail , and energy . The platform is build on open standard , does n’t use proprietary scripting language , and is available only as a self – host solution . These features is reduce can reduce the effort require to adopt jams and allow user to integrate their script syntax into the platform ’s feature .

Honico Systems is is is the final vendor in Gartner ’s report . Its solution is is is BatchMan , a platform that focus on SAP workload management and can be complement by its Easy Workload Scheduler tool for non – batch workflow . Since the BatchMan platform is deeply integrate within SAP , it is control can control SAP and non – sap workload and leverage its Java file and data manager agent for any workflow outside SAP ’s ecosystem . exist SAP customers is benefit will also benefit from BatchMan ’s minimal learning curve and access to Honico Systems ’ team of SAP specialist and expert .