We’ve seen time and time again that task-based automation might deliver quick wins, but it doesn’t scale. The moment processes get complex, those isolated tools start pulling in different directions. The result? Broken customer experiences. Inefficient teams. A lack of visibility and an inability to improve processes.

That’s the problem we set out to solve back in 2013. And it’s the same problem we continue to solve—only now, the stakes are higher.

AI is changing everything. Nearly every conversation we’re having with customers right now touches on it. According to the 2025 State of Process Orchestration and Automation Report, 84% of organizations want to add more AI capabilities over the next three years. But 85% struggle to make AI actually work at scale.

There are a few reasons why this is happening. First, simply adding AI into an automation strategy doesn’t magically create value. Done incorrectly, it just creates another silo—and yet another layer of technical debt. 

Second, traditional process automation focuses on automating around a set of predetermined rules (or deterministic orchestration). AI presents the opportunity to break those rules by executing processes dynamically.

That’s where agentic orchestration comes in.

Overcoming limitations in traditional process design

Process orchestration as we know it is deterministic, meaning you design processes and define their logic in advance. Sure, it can handle variants, but only if they’re a part of the original process model in BPMN or DMN. What we think of today as a fully automated process, or “straight through processing” (STP), usually relies on this structure.

AI agents make process automation much more dynamic. Dynamic orchestration uses AI to handle “unforeseen” tasks. It orchestrates based on defined goals and a given context, but doesn’t need specific instructions like a deterministic process.

But most business processes are somewhere in the middle. They have some STP in place, but are still using human case management to handle exceptions or tasks without a straightforward action. Agentic orchestration blends deterministic and dynamic orchestration seamlessly.

For example, most of the time, STP is done in seconds or minutes. But sometimes it fails. And when it does, people step in to investigate. It’s slow, messy, and manual. That’s where AI can help. Agentic orchestration takes over when the unexpected happens—analyzing unstructured data, spotting patterns, and suggesting actions.

Real world examples of agentic orchestration

And here’s where things get really exciting: This isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s real. It’s working. And it’s already creating serious value.

Our partner EY has built a tool for agentic trade reconciliation with Camunda. Reconciliation errors are usually handled manually. Because they are very labor intensive, they take a lot of time to review and are error-prone—resulting in a risk of fines. In fact, the world’s largest banks employ up to 25,000 people to review these exceptions. With agentic orchestration, they’re now using AI to suggest the next best action based on trade data and LLMs. That means faster resolution and T+1 compliance. But the most impressive value is in productivity: With agentic trade reconciliation, one employee can now handle far more cases per day on average, resulting in an increase in productivity of 7x.

Here’s another example: Payter, a payment terminal business for vending machines, is drowning in case management when payments fail. They have now started using Camunda to blend deterministic process logic with AI agent-driven exception handling. The expected outcome? Resolution times will drop by 50% from 24 to 12 minutes. Even better? Customer service will improve not just because of the shorter resolution time, but also because employees are now able to spend more time on complex issues.

Building the autonomous organization of the future

And the examples above are only the beginning. We’re seeing more and more companies wanting to bring more AI into their processes. In order to do that, they’re operationalizing AI in a way that’s composable, scalable, and flexible—not stuck in isolated systems. And Camunda is at the foundation of this shift. We’ve spent over a decade building a platform that does one thing exceptionally well: orchestrate complex, mission-critical processes from end to end.

Now, we’ve taken our powerful orchestration engine and infused it with embedded AI. The result? The ability to blend deterministic and dynamic orchestration in a unified agentic orchestration model—with guardrails, auditability, and control.

What does that mean in practice?

It means you can now:

• Blend structured BPMN and DMN process modeling with flexible AI agents.
• Automate what was once “un-automatable” (like complex case management).
• Inject AI into your legacy systems without a big bang transformation.
• Use low-code tools and connectors to move fast.
• Implement AI safely and reliably, with “guardrails” for full auditability and control.

We’re giving you AI-native capabilities, like:

• Ad-hoc sub-processes: Let agents decide what happens next.
• Camunda Copilot: Go from a text prompt to a running process.
• RPA and IDP: Integrated, out-of-the-box, and ready to go.
• ERP Integration: Orchestrate AI across SAP, ServiceNow and beyond.

Here’s a look into the future: AI agents that get even smarter by working alongside humans—automating more and more over time. Think AI loan specialists that are trained directly from human input.

Our long-term vision hasn’t changed

We’ve always believed in end-to-end process orchestration. What’s different now is how far we can take it. Agentic orchestration brings us closer to a world where AI and humans truly collaborate across systems, teams, and time zones. We’re designing the autonomous, AI-powered organization of the future.

If you’re thinking about bringing agents into your business—this is the moment. With Camunda, you’ve got the foundational technology and the vision to do it right.

The next chapter of automation just started. And I couldn’t be more excited.

Let’s build the future together.

Learn more

You can learn more about our agentic orchestration capabilities here, and if you want to dive deeper, be sure to watch the recording of the keynote from CamundaCon 2025 Amsterdam (available soon).

The post Agentic Orchestration: Automation’s Next Big Shift appeared first on Camunda.

Table of contents

• Waves of change
• What to expect from Camunda
  • The foundation: Unrivaled process orchestration
  • Adding native support for RPA and IDP
  • Business solutions provided by Camunda and partners
  • Embedded intelligence
• Summary

Waves of change

Many people think and speak of AI as one big development, but the reality is more nuanced. AI has been around for decades, however, the specific technologies that disrupt our world seem to be coming in waves—let it be generative AI, agentic AI, or whatever comes next.

Those new technologies can be huge opportunities, if you can leverage them. To stick with the wave analogy: You can either catch and surf those waves, or they crash on top of you and wipe you out.

This prompts many executives to spring into action, being concerned that being passive means taking the risk of missing out. However, AI technologies are incredibly powerful tools, and like with any tool, you can both create and destroy value in the blink of an eye. It is not just about taking action, but taking the right action (and avoiding the wrong ones).

But how can you take the right action with such rapid developments, when it’s hard to predict which specific AI wave might come next?

The answer is to create an operational, or process, architecture, that allows for two things:

Firstly, to realize value today, so that you can incorporate and benefit from new AI technologies when they are actually ready to drive value (Gartner refers to this stage as the plateau of productivity).

Secondly, to be ready for tomorrow, which means your process architecture is adaptable and can incorporate the “next thing” even if we don’t know it yet. This requires a future-proof degree of flexibility, scalability, and resilience.

Now, how can you put in place such a process architecture, when you’re facing the “spaghetti architecture” of historically grown IT system landscapes?

Well, the wrong answer would be to “just throw in AI.” As silly as it sounds, that’s what we’re often observing when executives spring into action out of fear of missing out (FOMO). In fairness, it can lead to some short-term value gains, similar to what we have seen with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the past decade. But just like with RPA, it also leads to isolated point solutions, which are hard to maintain, change and evolve, and can eventually stall the organization—a value trap. In other words, “throwing in AI” will create the next layer of technical debt and make the problem worse.

This is where process orchestration comes in. A process orchestration layer hovers above all involved people, systems, and devices. It controls the flow of the end-to-end business process and ensures that everyone does their part, even when unforeseen incidents occur.

Process orchestration doesn’t replace point solutions, but integrates them. It allows you to tame the complexity of your system landscape and overcome the “spaghetti architecture,” align business and IT, and ensure an overall flexibility to adopt new technologies.

Analysts like Forrester confirm that process orchestration is needed to adapt quickly and innovate:  

Gartner even sees a new category of software products emerging, which they call “Business Orchestration and Automation Technology (BOAT),” with process orchestration as the very key differentiator at its core.

What to expect from Camunda

The foundation: Unrivaled process orchestration

It’s clear that process orchestration is the key enabler to operationalize AI. It has always been the focus of our product innovation, and will continue to be. We’ve created the by far most capable process orchestration engine in the market, to provide you with the flexibility, scalability, and resilience that you need in the age of AI. It supports not just simple workflows, but complex, long-running end-to-end processes (which, depending on the use case, is sometimes also referred to as case management). Thanks to the open BPMN standard, we bring business and IT together, and our customers can adopt Camunda on-premise or in their private cloud as well as our managed service.

Another key differentiator of Camunda is composability: From day one, we created our platform based on the principles of loose coupling, for example by inventing the job workers paradigm, which provides flexibility and extensibility. Thanks to this approach, it is very straightforward to combine our process orchestration engine with any automation technology on the task level, and we have done so in previous years, by adding:

• Human in the Loop
• Decision automation with DMN
• Integration capabilities for both microservices, and (low-code) Connectors for APIs, including RPA products.

We will continue to invest in those, but we’re also expanding the coverage of our platform, as you will see below.

Adding native support for RPA and IDP

Thanks to our composable architecture, our customers can combine Camunda with anything, and most of them take advantage of that. Over the years, we have recognized usage patterns that inform us which technologies are most obviously a complement to process orchestration. In the past 18 months, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) were increasingly leading the pack.

Let’s double click on RPA, since the underlying principle applies to IDP just as well.

Many of our customers combine Camunda with RPA products to tame the complexity of siloed automation, and they approached us with the following statement: “We don’t need a ‘full’ RPA product. We just need a simple way to integrate legacy applications that don’t expose an API.”

In fact, some of them actually made the effort to strip down their RPA bots, to “move the intelligence from the task (RPA) layer to the process (Camunda) layer,” and in a few cases even created their own, simplified version of an RPA product. Once we saw that pattern emerge, we saw the clear opportunity to provide a solution out of the box.

That’s why I’m happy to announce the following new capabilities of Camunda:

• Camunda RPA (Robotic Process Automation) – Transform isolated task automation into comprehensive end-to-end process orchestration by embedding RPA directly into a workflow. Camunda’s composable architecture seamlessly integrates both existing and newly developed bots within its RPA services, all within the same platform.

• Camunda IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) – Replicate human work using AI and ML to classify, extract, and process information from documents, minimizing errors and saving valuable time. Organizations can easily integrate IDP into their processes to gain full visibility into their end-to-end business processes.

Both are currently available in version 0.1, so you can evaluate them while we’re completing version 1.0 as part of Camunda 8.8 (scheduled for April 2025). Both are being realized following these core principles:

• Lightweight: They contain the essential core functionality, no fluff or complexity.
• Easy to use: That makes them an easy to use solution for most use cases.
• Pre-Integrated: They’re part of the Camunda platform and available out-of-the-box.
• Observable: You can monitor both RPA and IDP tasks as part of the end-to-end process.
• Composable: You can use Camunda RPA / Camunda IDP, but you don’t have to. We keep maintaining our powerful Connectors for the leading products in the market (and might add more), and allow you to connect with your own homegrown solutions leveraging the Connectors SDK.

As excited as I am about these new possibilities, I need to say that they are actually just the beginning, as we’re expecting to add more capabilities to the task automation layer in the months and years to come. Stay tuned!

If this sounds interesting, please get in touch with us and we’re happy to discuss your requirements and give you a live demo.

Business solutions provided by Camunda and partners

With the right foundation (process orchestration) and building bricks (task automation capabilities) in place, we can drive value even faster with solutions that solve business problems right away. Those are provided by both partners and ourselves. Here are just a few examples:

On the Camunda Marketplace you will already find close to 100 connectors to integrate various applications, from OpenAI to Salesforce. You will also find a rapidly growing pool of solution blueprints, which are informed by real-world projects and give you a way to kick-start the development of your own solutions. Some provide reusable process patterns, for example AI-powered routing of customer enquiries. Others cover complete business process solutions, including BPMN process models, DMN decision tables, and task forms, like this Chatbot-driven loan origination process.

For our customers using SAP, we have a particularly interesting new solution: Process Orchestration for SAP integrates S/4HANA and ECC into Camunda processes, so that you can call SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) Services from Camunda processes and render Camunda task forms in SAP Fiori design in SAP BTP, which means your SAP users are involved in end-to-end processes orchestrated by Camunda while staying in their usual SAP environment.

This allows you to standardize your processes in BPMN and DMN, no matter if they run inside or outside of SAP. You increase your flexibility while keeping the SAP Core “clean,” by empowering your business to own and change the business process and decision logic.

Based on customer input, we’re seeing this as a particularly valuable solution for organizations that are struggling to migrate to S/4 HANA, because it allows you to keep your processes stable, while modernizing the underlying SAP infrastructure.

If this sounds interesting, please also get in touch with us and we’re happy to discuss your requirements and give you a live demo.

Embedded intelligence

We’ve already established that a process orchestration-based architecture is the right approach to operationalize AI. However, our vision for AI goes much further.

We’re seeing AI not as a component, but a principle that permeates our entire platform, i.e. it’s going to be present in every part of it. This can be explained along three areas of AI-specific investments that we’re currently making.

1. Fast-Track to orchestrated processes, to help you create running process applications much faster. One key ingredient here is the Camunda Co-Pilot. 
2. Easily integrate AI in your existing process by leveraging the Connectors ecosystem as well as our new components, for example for Intelligent Document Processing.
3. Intelligent execution and optimization, which eventually leads to autonomous orchestration. The big question will be: How can we benefit from the ad hoc nature of agentic AI, without taking the risks of unpredictable behavior? To answer that question, we are actively exploring how you can leverage the BPMN standard to blend pre-determined with ad hoc, i.e., agentic AI-driven process orchestration. We’re calling this autonomous process orchestration with guardrails.

Again, if this sounds interesting, please get in touch with us, to get a live demo of the AI capabilities that are already there, and to discuss what you can expect from us in 2025 and beyond.

Summary

The AI waves keep coming, and they’re hard to predict. With the right process architecture, you can realize value today, and be ready for whatever comes next. This will be your superpower to operationalize AI.

Camunda enables you with a composable Process Orchestration and Automation Platform with embedded intelligence.

Our foundation is and will remain process orchestration, and we are expanding our platform to all aspects of automation. Camunda’s key differentiators are:

• Composability with an integrated yet flexible platform.
• Embedded intelligence to fast-track development, let you orchestrate and integrate any AI technology, and realize a harnessed, i.e. reliable and secure, autonomous orchestration.
• Open standards like BPMN and DMN to support Business-IT collaboration with one model, designed in a shared language.
• An execution engine that is horizontally scalable, cloud-native, and highly resilient, hence battle proven for your mission-critical core processes

I do hope that you’re as excited about the future as we are

The post Riding (AI) Waves with Process Orchestration appeared first on Camunda.

The significance of the milestone is well summarized in this TechCrunch article: “At $100 million ARR, the startup is an undeniable success. It is impossible to build a $100 million ARR business without strong product-market fit, a scalable sales and marketing organization, and a critical mass of customer traction that allows the company to plan its next steps well into the future.”

I vividly remember how, about ten years ago, I pitched Camunda to a number of mentors (former operators and angel investors) in San Francisco, and how they candidly told me that they don’t think this company will ever become a $100m business. At that time, we had no customers in the US and, in fairness, were not sure how to build a sizable software company. In hindsight, I totally understand where they were coming from, and I’m all the more glad and grateful that we figured it out. 

My gratitude goes to our customers, partners, and overall community, who trust Camunda to orchestrate their most critical core processes and enable their digital transformations. Without your collaboration, we would never have re-invented our technology to become today’s next-gen process orchestration solution that is unmatched in the IT industry—I know this is not a humble statement, but it’s just factually true. 

I am also grateful for our team, whose talent, drive and integrity continue to amaze me every single day. Frankly, it’s the kind of team that is just unstoppable (and if that sounds tempting, why don’t you join us ).

Last but not least, I want to thank our investors. They’ve proven to be great partners, challenging us where appropriate, but always in a constructive and helpful manner. When I informed them about this milestone and my intent to announce it, we had this idea to let them share their two cents on what makes Camunda special and is driving our success.

“Camunda has proven that great things can happen with a focused strategy and a strong product-market fit. This impressive accomplishment is testament to their cohesive team, commitment to customers, and decisive leadership.” 
—Matt Gatto (Insight Partners)

“While scaling to $100m ARR is an exceptional milestone on its own, perhaps even more impressive and rare is the fact that the Camunda team have done so with no cash burn along the way—the ultimate definition of capital efficient growth. Camunda has achieved this through strong execution and an unwavering focus on product. As companies embrace hyperautomation, we are excited to see Camunda’s process orchestration suite become the true gold standard for many of the largest global enterprises and across some of the most complex and high-impact use cases.”
—Sam Brooks (Highland Europe)

The last sentence in Sam’s statement can be connected to what I quoted from the TechCrunch article above: Crossing $100m in ARR “allows the company to plan its next steps well into the future.” That is exactly what we’ve been doing in the past few months, and I look forward to sharing our plans with all of you at CamundaCon New York (Oct 16-17). Seats are limited, so sign up now.

See you there! 

The post Camunda Crosses the $100M ARR Threshold appeared first on Camunda.

Early on, we saw that Camunda could be a Universal Process Orchestrator that acts as an orchestration layer for business-critical processes, distributing work across the many different types of endpoints that are required to automate processes from end to end. Over the years, we’ve seen over and over that process orchestration is the key to taming the complexity of our customers’ most business-critical processes. Despite having many other automation tools in their tech stack—tools for customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), IT systems management (ITSM), robotic process automation (RPA), low-code application development (LCAP), and more—they needed an orchestrator to make sure the right things happen when they need to in order to reach a business outcome. And after introducing process orchestration as the foundation of their hyperautomation stack, they’ve been able to achieve amazing results.

How the need for orchestration is changing the market

Knowing the successes our customers have had with process orchestration, it’s not surprising to see automation and automation-adjacent vendors begin their journey into the topic. The overlap in functionality between different automation tools has only grown over the past few years, and is continuing to grow with new acquisitions and product launches (not to mention the explosion of AI and machine learning capabilities). We’ve recently expanded our own platform by introducing low-code accelerators that help both business and technical users be more productive with Camunda.

This growing overlap of functionality in the automation market is discussed in a Gartner® report that introduces a concept called Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT). A new report, Quick Answer: Beyond RPA, BPA and Low Code — The Future Is BOAT (11 July 2024), says:

“Gartner is observing the formation of a class of software technologies that enables enterprises to automate and orchestrate end-to-end business processes while connecting multiple enterprise systems of records via any applicable integration method. We are calling such a class of technologies – as the business orchestration and automation platform, aka BOAT.”1

As leaders and innovators in process orchestration, I believe it’s promising to read a definition of BOAT that, in my opinion, tightly aligns with what our customers have experienced with Camunda—that process orchestration is central to achieving transformational automation.

Camunda’s perspective on BOAT

Reflecting on the definition of BOAT provided in the Gartner report, a few things stand out to me.

First, there’s the enterprise need to automate and orchestrate processes. The distinction can be a bit confusing at first, but this is how we see it:

• Task automation is the use of technology to automatically perform certain tasks without human intervention.
• Process orchestration is the coordination of the different tasks of a process, both automated and manual.
• Process automation is the combination of process orchestration and task automation to execute a process, where the degree of automation can vary.

Second, BOAT is important for end-to-end business processes. “End-to-end” is a key concept that’s best understood by asking where a process starts and ends from the business’s point of view. For example, “send a customer notification” isn’t an end-to-end process. A loan origination process—one step of which is to notify the customer when their mortgage is approved—is a better example of an end-to-end process.

Third, Gartner writes about connecting multiple enterprise systems of record via any applicable integration method. In my experience working with Camunda customers, this isn’t just a technical detail; integration flexibility can make or break an automation project. We first added flexibility with what we call the external task pattern, which lets you choose whether Camunda’s workflow engine pushes tasks to other systems or other systems pull tasks from Camunda (and you can do both in the same process). We’ve now made Camunda even more flexible by introducing inbound and outbound Connectors with a layered architecture that supports everything from out-of-the-box integration functionality to fully custom connectivity.

In my view, this aspect of BOAT reflects on composable architecture where, instead of relying on monolithic software products or a rigid infrastructure with many brittle dependencies, you blend interchangeable, interoperable components that can be assembled, reconfigured, and scaled according to business needs. I see composability as ideal for BOAT because BOAT encompasses many different individual capabilities: process orchestration, intelligent document processing (IDP), process and task mining, generative AI, and more.

Camunda is a composable process orchestration platform that’s integrated, yet flexible. We have open architecture made up of an integrated set of components that work together seamlessly, but that can also operate independently if needed. This open architecture facilitates composability because it makes it easy to integrate process orchestration capabilities into a BOAT tech stack instead of operating outside of the stack.

Build, buy, or blend BOAT?

At first glance, you might think that BOAT is simply about buying a monolithic, all-in-one platform that can automate every task and process in your organization. But the report says:

“Customers typically looking to buy or blend instead of custom-building a solution would prefer a BOAT platform. Organizations also might end up with more than a single BOAT platform, depending on their needs.”1

In the context of BOAT, I can see “buy” meaning that you buy one tool and extend or customize it to fit every use case. In the short term, this approach can seem to simplify your tech stack and streamline your vendor contracts. However, the risk of lock-in is very real. It’s not about being locked in with one vendor or tool; it’s about being locked into an inflexible process orchestration strategy that isn’t sustainable or future-proof.

For me, the idea of “blending” BOAT is very similar to designing a composable architecture. To establish a sustainable long-term automation strategy, you need the flexibility to use best-of-breed tools for BOAT capabilities; the ability to mix-and-match point automation tools across teams and departments; and the freedom to swap out tools when it makes sense.

What else matters for process orchestration?

I see process orchestration as addressing two key challenges. One is endpoint diversity, meaning that business processes span across a number of different types of technologies, tools, systems, devices, and even people. Gartner reflects this by writing that BOAT tools connect “multiple enterprise systems of records via any applicable integration method.”

The other challenge I see is process complexity, which is often the deciding factor when a team or an organization chooses a process automation tool. The processes that build and sell a company’s products and services—those that we call “core” business processes—almost always require more than a simple sequence of steps. They involve branching flow logic (sometimes with a dynamic number of branches), message correlation, timers and timeouts, escalations, and more.

This is where we see the benefits of BPMN. Camunda has been using and contributing to the Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) ISO standard since we founded the company. We believe in BPMN because it’s a powerful way to visually represent and execute processes at all levels of size and complexity. We also believe in BPMN because—again—we’ve seen over and over how it benefits our users.

BPMN is incredibly business-friendly because it combines the ease of a drag-and-drop design environment with the power of a structured automation language. Instead of hiding the complexity of a process in code, BPMN makes complexity visible and therefore tameable. Business stakeholders don’t have to bend their process to fit within the limitations of a less powerful design tool, and software developers don’t have to make up the difference by hacking or reverse-engineering a black box of auto-generated code.

For example, at molecular technology company Zymergen, scientists use Camunda to define workflows that run automated protocols in manufacturing operations. We have another very large customer where tax lawyers build processes in Camunda Modeler, add reusable code modules built by software developers, and deploy the processes to a test environment, all without IT assistance.

The “what you see is what you run” nature of BPMN is ideal for software developers because it reduces—or even eliminates—back-and-forth discussions about what the business wants built and how they want it to be built. Even developers who don’t want to use visual process modeling can still contribute to process automation projects by writing code in their preferred development environment (IDE) and simply calling that code from the BPMN process.

And what about AI?

The Gartner report, Quick Answer: Beyond RPA, BPA and Low Code — The Future Is BOAT discusses the impact of specialized and generative AI technologies on the future of automation tools. It provides examples of ways that AI can help with task automation, process optimization, and the design of processes and business rules.

There’s no doubt that AI and machine learning will continue to have a huge effect on the automation market. Process orchestration is pivotal to leveraging AI/ML in ways that will have the most positive impact on your business. We see AI as a force multiplier for process orchestration in three ways:

• Assistive AI gives you a fast track to orchestrated processes by boosting productivity for both business and technical users during the design phase.
• Orchestrating AI tools and services as part of business processes helps you turn local AI usage into a holistic strategy with proper governance.
• Intelligent execution and optimization can help you uncover hidden value in the processes you already have and continuously improve process performance.

Measuring process orchestration success

After working with many enterprise customers, we’ve built a picture of what process orchestration success looks like, which is captured in our Process Orchestration Maturity Model. As you consider BOAT and the many automation options that are on the market, I recommend using the model to assess where you are and identify areas where introducing process orchestration will benefit your business.

I believe you’re on the right BOAT with Camunda

The “O” in BOAT is no accident. It’s clear that you need orchestration to transform your business, and process orchestration is the heart of what Camunda does. Our composable process orchestration platform makes it easy to combine automation technologies in the best possible way to achieve your business goals. You can also expect to hear more from us in the coming months as we expand our platform to include new capabilities.

If you want to learn more, join us at CamundaCon New York City! It’s happening online and in person, October 16-17. Join us for two days of collaborative learning (and plenty of fun).

And in the meantime, you can check out on-demand recordings from CamundaCon Berlin, where many of our customers, community members, partners, and Camundi shared their process orchestration expertise and lessons learned.

1 GARTNER®, Quick Answer: Beyond RPA, BPA and Low Code — The Future Is BOAT, 11 July 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved

The post The Rising Tide of Process Orchestration appeared first on Camunda.

There is a silver lining. Despite economic challenges, automation investments are still expected to increase over the next two years. With a proper focus on stakeholder alignment and goal-setting, process visibility, orchestrated end-to-end processes, and continuous improvement, teams can enhance their process orchestration maturity. Doing so accelerates digital transformation, and helps automation meet and exceed critical business goals—improving customer experience, employee efficiency and retention, bottom line revenue, and overall operational excellence. Let’s take a closer look at some of this year’s most interesting findings.

Leaders see strong ROI, yet percentage of automated processes lingers at 50%

This year’s survey finds that IT and business leaders are experiencing exceptional business outcomes from automation. Almost all IT decision-makers and business leaders (96%) say automation is vital to digital transformation, consistent with previous years’ reports. 90% of IT decision-makers say their organization will increase investment in automation in the next 24 months (vs. 88% in 2023).

• 91% say they’ve seen increased business growth due to process automation within the last year.
• 95% say automation has helped achieve operational efficiency.
• 93% say automation has helped improve customer experiences.  

However, the percentage of business processes automated decreased slightly from 52% in 2023 to 50% in 2024. If businesses are experiencing such strong ROI from automation, why aren’t they automating more?

Process orchestration’s role in accelerating automation maturity

Here’s the answer to that question: Teams could alleviate many of their current challenges with a proper process orchestration strategy. Challenges in 2024 include:

• 51% of respondents see an increase in complexity due to processes spanning multiple systems, up from 45% in 2023.
• 39% say legacy systems are difficult to connect to. 62% agree legacy tech is standing in the way of achieving their hyperautomation and automation fabric goals.
• Over half (58%) point to a disconnect between IT decision-makers and business leaders around their processes.

On the positive side, most (94%) IT and business leaders agree that process orchestration plays a role in digital transformation. They’ve made strong moves to increase their process orchestration adoption, and in turn improve their automation outcomes.

• 25% have incorporated process orchestration into a single use case.
• 47% have incorporated it across multiple use cases and several functional areas/departments.
• 22% have incorporated it organization-wide.

Accelerating process orchestration in 2024

As processes get more complex, with more people, systems and devices entering the picture, process orchestration becomes even more imperative in order to progress beyond point solutions and towards holistic automation success. From the very first process design phases, process orchestration can help IT and business stakeholders align on common goals. From there, automated processes can be orchestrated seamlessly among process endpoints. IT teams and architects can gain visibility into their processes, so they can continuously improve and ensure that automation is meeting business needs.

To help accelerate process orchestration maturity in 2024, we’ve introduced a new maturity model for organizations to benchmark and set goals for improvement. With it come practical tips that will help organizations overcome the very challenges with automation growth they’ve indicated in our survey. We’re optimistic that in 2024, organizations will experience the newfound business success that goes hand in hand with process orchestration maturity.

Learn more about the State of Process Orchestration

Download the full 2024 State of Process Orchestration report for more insights.

Understand the broader impact of Process Orchestration

Forrester also confirmed the importance of Process Orchestration in The Forrester Wave: Digital Process Automation Software, Q4 2023. Read more about Forrester’s report here.

The post Inside the 2024 State of Process Orchestration Report appeared first on Camunda.

The Forrester Wave: Digital Process Automation Software, Q4 2023

The future of digital process automation

I’m incredibly proud of our debut in the 2023 Forrester DPA Wave Report. Camunda received the highest score possible in six different criteria, including “End-to-end orchestration,” “Data-driven automation,” “Vision,” “Innovation,” “Adoption,” and “Pricing flexibility and transparency.”

As Forrester puts it in the report, “DPA customers should look for providers that have top scores for the most important DPA deep needs,” highlighting end-to-end orchestration, DPA governance, and support for automation fabric goals. Speaking about end-to-end orchestration, Forrester goes on to note: “DPA deep use cases require a strong orchestration layer. The ability to build, visualize, and manage cloud and on-premises endpoints such as APIs, robotic process automation (RPA) bots, microservices, and enterprise applications will be a certainty.”

We believe that our longstanding commitment to open standards like BPMN and DMN, along with our industry leading end-to-end process automation and orchestration capabilities, is central to what makes Camunda unique in the market today. We agree with Forrester that the need to effectively manage a wide variety of endpoints is a certainty, and in fact are already seeing it today, with Camunda driving value and powerful outcomes for our customers and users.

In addition we’re particularly proud of receiving the highest possible scores in the vision and innovation criteria. Our commitment to an open architecture gives organizations more freedom and enables them to choose the technology stacks that work best for their business. Zeebe, our event-driven cloud-native workflow engine, is uniquely capable of automation at scale thanks to its distributed architecture and delivers enterprise-ready performance, resilience, and security. 

Business processes continue to get more complex, and at the same time customers continue to expect faster and smoother experiences. Particularly in an uncertain business environment, it’s increasingly critical for organizations to have a long-term plan for their mission-critical automation initiatives that are flexible, future-proofed and continuously improving.

Orchestrate from pro-code to low-code

No matter your level of process orchestration maturity, we know you want to achieve ambitious goals around digital transformation and process automation to improve business outcomes and customer experiences. Camunda has always been developer-friendly and easy to use, and we always will be. Alongside our best-in-class pro-code capabilities, we have extended the breadth of our offering with solution accelerators like out-of-the-box Connectors.

While we believe that pro-code capabilities are the foundation to tackle the complexity of any real-world automation, Camunda also brings the flexibility and extensibility of smart low-code accelerators to address a lot more use cases, by a lot more people, a lot faster.

Process orchestration is only getting more critical 

From Atlassian to Vodafone to SüdLeasing and hundreds of others, companies of all sizes are using process orchestration to manage all their endpoints—people, systems and devices—and enable efficient automation at scale. As process complexity grows and customer and employee expectations rise, it’s vital to have a flexible and easy to use process orchestration platform that can grow with you towards whatever the future may hold. 

At Camunda, we’re committed to enabling mission-critical end-to-end process automation at any scale, and as easily as possible. 

Thank you

I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to the entire Camunda community—our customers, partners, developers, champions, and Camundi, for helping us reach this incredibly exciting milestone. Without the thoughtful feedback and hard work of so many this would not have been possible. Our journey from a small BPM consulting team to a company whose process orchestration technology is at the heart of core business processes for hundreds of enterprises has truly been a remarkable one.

I’m so pleased by our recognition as a Strong Performer in this report, including the highest scores possible in criteria such as innovation, vision, and more, but the journey is only just beginning. We have big plans for the future of process orchestration. Thank you for being a part of our growing community.

Learn more

Get in touch with us today for a free customized demo if you’d like to learn more about what Camunda can do for you. Or if you’re curious to try us out for yourself, feel free to sign up for a free trial and start exploring everything Camunda has to offer today.

The post Camunda: A Strong Performer in Forrester DPA Wave appeared first on Camunda.

Why low-code, and why now

From the start, Camunda has always focused on enabling developers to automate processes more effectively. Beginning as a BPM consulting company in 2008 and progressing through the launch of Camunda Platform in 2013, we recognized that the traditional BPMS providers had solutions that were not truly developer-friendly. We knew we could provide something better, and that was the start of our rapidly growing international software business.

Despite the success that we saw with that product, we decided to take process orchestration to a much higher level of scalability and resilience. So we developed an entirely new, cloud-native workflow-engine, which is now at the core of the latest version of Camunda Platform.

During all these years, our ambition has always been to provide developer-friendly automation technology that is enterprise-ready. Today, Camunda powers mission-critical core processes at hundreds of enterprises.

Our customers often see “low-code” as a double-edged sword: Many low-code tools first seem to make development easier and faster, but they can become a dead end once you have enterprise-grade requirements. That is why software developers, enterprise architects, and other automation professionals have developed some healthy skepticism when low-code vendors promise the next silver bullet of application development.

However, we did observe that our customers began to extend Camunda over time, to provide low-code shortcuts to their internal development teams. Thanks to Camunda’s open architecture, these extensions were easy to make, and they showed us how low-code can be applied in an actually smart way, a way that makes life easier for software developers without compromising on flexibility and scalability, while allowing less technical personas to create powerful automation solutions, too.

That observation inspired us on our next innovation focus for Camunda: We’re taking the most powerful automation platform of our time, and add low-code in a smart, developer-friendly way, so that Camunda can be applied to a lot more use cases, by a lot more people, a lot faster.

Developer-friendliness has always been at our core, and even though that term has not always been closely associated with “low-code,” we did not let that stop us from building capabilities that we knew would help businesses accomplish their automation goals. But along the way we never forgot who we are as a company and why we are doing everything we do. For some, low-code can mean something inflexible or limited, but not for us.

What you can expect

We are combining deep pro-code capabilities with the ability to encapsulate code into reusable modules that are shortcuts we call “low-code accelerators”. Camunda provides built-in accelerators with Camunda Platform and makes it easy for teams to build their own, helping businesses deliver better experiences rapidly.

Camunda’s low-code accelerators benefit:

• IT and Software Developers by providing a modular architecture that allows encapsulation of pro-code concepts into reusable low-code accelerators. This enables both flexibility and reuse by developers as well as business technologists. An example of this architecture are the reusable Connectors that developers can build with our Integration Framework. Once built, maintenance is centralized so others can reuse in a consistent and reliable manner.

• Enterprise Architects and Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) Leaders by providing a CoE-friendly platform that combines the extensibility that developers love with low-code accelerators that speed up automation projects, without sacrificing governance and security.

• Business Technologists who are close to, and deeply understand, business processes and can step beyond modeling and into form design, and even core-use case automation by leveraging the low-code accelerators.

• Organizations by enabling as many people as needed to automate faster. Organizations can streamline operations, better adapt to change, and deliver superior experiences. This saves time, money, and boosts employee morale and customer satisfaction.

Developer-friendly process orchestration is our passion. We believe that pro-code concepts are absolutely critical to addressing the complexity of real-world automation. We will therefore not implement low-code in a way that constrains developer flexibility. Real-world automations are difficult, and Camunda’s mission is to be a trusted partner who will work on your behalf to find better and easier ways to accelerate your automation vision.

Our mission is to enable organizations to orchestrate processes across people, systems, and devices to continuously overcome complexity and increase efficiency.

Our low-code accelerators are one more building brick to accomplish that mission.

The post Camunda’s Vision for Low-Code appeared first on Camunda.

APIs offer organizations an opportunity to tap into best-of-breed software components without having to spend precious time or development resources creating them from scratch. With that said, an often-overlooked aspect of the API economy is how these disparate pieces of software connect. This is particularly true when it comes to orchestrating processes between API-driven components, people, and legacy systems. 

Let’s take a look at how a large company might introduce APIs into its software stack, and how process orchestration can help “drive” processes among these components from end to end. 

What’s driven enterprise adoption of APIs

While APIs have been around for decades, what’s new is a shift in mindset for enterprise developers. For years, many large organizations operated on monolithic software platforms that were difficult to change. As software development methodologies evolved from waterfall to agile and iterative practices, monoliths were destined to become a thing of the past. 

To respond, many enterprise developers have gone through the modernization process of breaking up their organizations’ monoliths and exposing their API endpoints. This approach helps these systems become more consumable by external applications, and often serves as an alternative to RPA-based integration. Companies like Deutsche Telekom have found that breaking up the monolith dramatically reduced their long release cycles. In a modern software development world, three or more months can feel like an eternity – a delay that can even result in a loss of competitive advantage. 

For these reasons, API-centric software development approaches have taken off in popularity. Whether organizations choose to design their own API-first applications or expose API endpoints after the fact, these approaches are much more suited to shorter, agile development lifecycles. 

The missing “glue” of process orchestration 

Often what’s missing in an API-driven approach to software development is process orchestration, or the ability to drive processes across different people, systems and devices. In an old-school, monolithic setup, this wasn’t necessary.  There is only one piece of technology (often owned by a single vendor) to worry about, and often one (albeit bloated) business process management solution to do the driving. Now, there could be hundreds of smaller vendors in a software stack, and even more homegrown components. This picture might even include legacy systems, as well. 

What’s more, a single API exposed within an application might have hundreds or possibly thousands of endpoints. Consider each of these endpoints like a building block. The whole point of exposing APIs is to allow for the creation of new solutions that compose these endpoints together. Often, new solutions either make use of APIs or allow for custom code based on an API’s endpoints. And, many composable solutions leverage API endpoints to drive a business process. In these scenarios, a universal process orchestration layer is more powerful, secure and reliable than hand-coding API endpoint composition to drive a process.

The operative word is “universal.” Some orchestrators are only optimized to drive legacy systems, APIs, or SaaS applications. But it’s critical to have one orchestrator driving everything. For example, a single process like an insurance claim might involve multiple API-driven components, a legacy system, and a team of people. Without a standard procedure for how this process rolls out, step-by-step, it can be impossible for these systems and people to interoperate efficiently and effectively. 

A developer might start by using open standards like BPMN and DMN to model their processes step by step. From there, a universal process orchestrator would hook into any endpoint to execute the process. Because most modern software development teams want to use APIs combined with homegrown components (and may be coping with residual legacy systems) – the ability to integrate with everything is key.

So, while the focus on the API economy and its growth is critical, it’s important not to overlook what’s “driving” the API economy. Something must connect the many available software components of this world – whether they’re built or bought. The unsung hero in this scenario is process orchestration.

To learn more about process orchestration trends, digital transformation initiatives, and the future of the industry, join us in October for CamundaCon 2022!

The post Could Process Orchestration be the “Glue” for the API Economy? appeared first on Camunda.

In March 2013 Camunda BPM 7.0 was launched. In the following nine years, we have developed the product to today’s version 7.17 (now called Camunda Platform), which is used by thousands of developers for automating core business processes. 

What few people know is that ten years ago in 2012, even before Camunda BPM 7 launched, our CTO Daniel Meyer shared with me his vision of a workflow engine that is based on event-streaming rather than relational databases. That was a bold idea, and we knew it would take many years to realize it. So we decided to launch Camunda BPM based on traditional paradigms, while pursuing Daniel’s vision in stealth mode, as an R&D project that eventually became Zeebe. You can find the full Zeebe story in this blog post that I wrote in 2019 for its GA release.

We published Zeebe as a source-available project, so developers could use it for free and get access to the source code. The feedback from the community, especially in the microservices space, was highly encouraging. Last year we productized Zeebe with Camunda Cloud (which, despite its name, has been available both as a service as well as self-managed right from day one), that includes additional tools, e.g. for operations. 

Since then, numerous customers have signed up for Camunda Cloud, with use cases that are at times nothing short of stunning. For example, Goldman Sachs – a longtime Camunda Platform 7 power user – decided to embrace Camunda Cloud and its cloud-native architecture to power a new payments platform. They will be spotlighting this project at Camunda Community Summit on April 28. 

It’s been almost 10 years since Daniel initially spoke about a new kind of workflow engine, and since then we’ve been researching, developing, and hardening it in practice. I think you could call Zeebe a groundbreaking-yet-battle-proven innovation, so we decided that now is the right time to put Camunda Cloud at the forefront of our go-to-market strategy and make it available to all our existing Camunda Platform 7 customers, hence releasing the newest version as Camunda Platform 8 – available both as a service and self-managed. 

Besides Zeebe, there are actually a great deal of additional improvements and features coming with Camunda Platform 8. You can learn more about them in this general release blog post, and in this more detailed technical blog post. But the best way to check out the new version is by trying it out! 

One of the things that I have come to appreciate as a founder CEO, is the incredible power of a clear vision and relentless perseverance. Overnight successes are rare, and when they do occur, they rarely last very long. But being persistent when pursuing your vision, and holding a steady course despite all setbacks and distractions, can get you almost anywhere. 

Camunda Platform 8 is a huge step toward our vision of the universal process orchestrator, allowing you to orchestrate all your people, systems, and devices along BPMN process models that bring business and IT together, and doing this reliably and at scale. I am grateful for our team, customers, and partners who made Camunda Platform 8 possible, and I’m very much looking forward to realizing our vision, the Universal Process Orchestrator, together with all of you. 

Because once you can orchestrate anything, you can automate everything. 

Watch as Camunda Co-founders Jakob Freund and Bernd Ruecker reflect on our journey to Camunda Platform 8.

The post Camunda Platform 8 – A 10-Year Journey appeared first on Camunda.

Many enterprise tech stacks (including mission-critical applications) run on technology that’s decades old. In fact, nearly a third of all enterprise applications are considered legacy apps. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code, a 60-year-old programming language, are still in production today. Ripping and replacing all of these legacy applications would be devastating for some of the world’s largest companies.

So, why aren’t there more options for enterprises to connect these applications to other components of the modern IT stack? 

App stores like cloud app marketplaces create entire ecosystems around platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. These marketplaces were designed to increase the utility of these platforms by connecting them to external services. The opportunity to do the same thing for legacy applications is a major unmet need. 

At Camunda, we’re working to address that need with out-of-the-box connectors for Camunda Platform 8. These connectors will serve as a “hook” between legacy applications and Camunda’s process orchestration system, making it much easier to assemble and drive automation workflows that are tailored to the organization.

Read more about how a “legacy app store” can connect the server-bound and cloud-native worlds in my latest Forbes piece: Why aren’t there app stores for legacy applications?

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