While we do of course have an actual letter you can customize and email to your boss (or read aloud in person? Morph into a slide presentation? The choice is yours, really), maybe you want the highlights first.

Here are our insider tips for convincing your boss to send you (and your team?) to CamundaCon.

1. Describe it.

CamundaCon is in Amsterdam this May 14–15 (that’s a Wednesday and a Thursday) with a preconference the Tuesday before. In a nutshell, it’s a meeting of the minds about how to implement process orchestration in business.

Process orchestration and automation is a system for ensuring that the various tools and software the company uses work in tandem without a ton of manual interference. It’s about tying your systems together so that routine chores—updates, maintenance, or customer service tasks—are handled smoothly and with as much automation as possible from the beginning of the process to the end.

2. Explain why it helps the company.

Whether your company is already experimenting with adding AI into your orchestration or is just trying to visualize the sprints it would take to migrate from a legacy monolith to a more tool-agnostic system, you can learn about optimal next steps at CamundaCon.

You could:

• Compare products leading in the market with ones that are up and coming
• Learn how to use agentic process orchestration to optimize your business processes
• Hear about specific use cases and strategies from other development and business teams that have worked with process orchestration

3. Namedrop the speaker list.

You’ll be getting insight into how to level up your business processes with speakers from companies like Rabobank, T-Systems Austria, and NORD/LB. Not to mention a few of our own knowledgeable experts at Camunda—just to give you the inside scoop into how one process orchestration platform approaches end-to-end processes.

Whatever operational complexity has your company stumped, one of these people will be able to show you how they overcame it.

4. Highlight the in-person benefits.

Our online attendees have access to a lot of the conference, but in-person attendees definitely experience the most CamundaCon can offer. Select a few in-person-only events to mention to your boss, along with how they could benefit your organization.

For example, which masterclass would you like to attend if you could: AI orchestration, SAP enablement, or migration strategy? Don’t forget to mention that participating in the hackday event always means knowledge sharing and community building. And at the participant-driven Unconference, you could bring attention to topics and questions that your organization would specifically like to know more about.

5. Offer to share knowledge afterward.

For the cherry on top of the sundae, don’t forget to promise to share. Point out to your boss that you’ll be coming back with not only big-picture visions of what the company could achieve over time, but also best practices you can implement right away.

Of course, you could point out that groups of 5 or more get a 20% discount on tickets. After all, you’re just one person, and you can’t be in multiple talks at once, can you?

Process orchestration can look intimidating when you realize what it’s capable of achieving—an automated end-to-end process complete with a modeled roadmap, anyone? But small, immediate improvements can pave the way for larger, more complex goals. And you’ll be ready to share all of that with the rest of the company, just as soon as you get back from Amsterdam.

See you at CamundaCon!

The post Convince Your Boss to Send You to CamundaCon 2025 in Amsterdam appeared first on Camunda.

If you couldn’t join in person in NYC, it’s free to join online—so you can still catch all the sessions! Just register at the link below, check out the agenda and make sure you don’t miss anything. We’ll see you there, whether online or in person!

Morning run with Bernd

Did you join Bernd and Co. at 6:30am this morning for a run through NYC? It was a refreshing day for those who made it (which, uh, did not include the authors of this post – but we’re told it was fun! :-D). See if you can spot a special guest below ????

The main event is about to start!

Welcome!

Camunda’s Amy Johnston welcomed everyone to Day 2 of CamundaCon New York 2024! After a brief reminder for the Selfie Screen (remember to tag your selfies with #camundacon and #selfie to join!), how to navigate all four tracks both in person and online that will be taking place over the next two days. Amy also shared highlights including key speakers and events (like lunch, of course, and our behind the scenes videos), our AMA and sponsor booths, the always popular Unconference, in-person AI workshops and much more going on today.

Next up, she welcomed Camunda Chief Technologist and Co-Founder Bernd Reucker, CTO Daniel Meyer, and Principal Product Manager Bastian Koerber.

Opening Keynote with Bernd, Daniel and Bastian

As he opened today’s morning keynote, Bernd jumped right in with a discussion of the spaghetti architecture that had been referenced yesterday. You all remember that? It looks… not fun. The pressure on organizations to try and improve quickly leads to a hunt for quick wins and point solutions that look good at first, but ultimately add to technical debt and just make the spaghetti worse.

The solution is not more spaghetti. The solution is orchestration so we can cut those spaghetti lines.

Live Demo

Of course, this is a Bernd keynote, so you know there has to be a live demo. Bernd walked us through a claims processing demo, which incorporated new Camunda functionality including IDP to scan the claims document with info and images, native RPA bots to enter data, DMN tables and more. He demonstrated how easily the process can be changed and adapted, even showing (as an example) how you could incorporate openAI to help decide on approval decisions automatically. His demo also included a live example of our new SAP integration in action as well.

Enterprise Process Orchestration

It won’t come as a surprise to you that Bernd (and everyone at Camunda) has been thinking a lot about how to achieve successful process orchestration at the enterprise level. In fact, along with fellow Camundi Leon Strauch, he recently wrote a book on the topic (which you can get a signed copy of if you’re here here!). He described effective strategies for, and benefits you get from, holistic change that runs from top to bottom of an organization.

A modern composable process orchestration and automation platform

Daniel then took the stage to talk about the way Camunda is looking at the changed in the market and growing the Camunda Process Orchestration and Automation platform by improving its leading capabilities like Zeebe, adding new functionality like RPA and IDP, and flexible composability that allows you to use the tools that work best for you at every step.

AI-Enhanced Process Orchestration

Next up, Bastian took center stage to talk about a particularly exciting new direction for Camunda, AI-enhanced process orchestration. He described the ways this can help you create processes faster, execute your processes more intelligently, and orchestrate more endpoints. Bastian then spoke to the power of our new Camunda Copilot BPMN Chat, and demonstrated its effectiveness live to build a process model right on stage.

Agentic AI and the future of AI with Camunda

Daniel then joined Bastian on the stage to talk about the evolution of AI, describing a journey progressing from using AI to answer questions to having AI take actions. This direction is in many ways represented by the emerging concept of “Agentic AI.” Bastian returned to the demo screen, showcasing how Camunda is already implementing agentic AI. Daniel followed up the demo off with an explanation of how this can be applied today at many levels of a business process or organizational need, the importance of a composable AI Agent architecture.

Bastian spoke excitedly about where AI will be going at Camunda, including the need for it to be very secure, provide actionable insights, and make creation effortless. Then Daniel delved into a bit more detail of a concept that Jakob introduced yesterday, “Autonomous Orchestration with Guardrails.” He showed an intriguing BPMN design showing a partially dynamic agentic area (which you can see in the box). You can see below where there are no arrows and the agent can choose, but also where there is an arrow that points to when a human needs to review. This enables you to build a flow for agentic action that is controlled, all within the context of a BPMN model that is visible, logged and provides a real audit trail of what’s going on so you can always monitor and understand it.

This is an exciting area of development for Camunda, and there will be several other talks today that get deeper into it, so be sure to check those out today to learn more. And don’t miss the full recording of this talk to see Bastian’s live demos in action and hear every word.

The Rise Of Agentic Process Management

Next up, Craig Le Clair, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, joined to bring us “up a few levels of altitude” and talk more broadly about the future of AI in the market and the world. He opened with a story about John Lennon, who supposedly when asked at 5 years old what he wanted to be when he grew up, answered “happy.” Craig noted that the development of the next generation of automation truly has the potential to make us all happier. Orchestration will play a huge role in that.

Craig spoke to the power of a new interface to really change the game. You can go back all the way to the printing press, but more recently it’s the iPhone and ChatGPT that have fundamentally changed the way people interact with knowledge. Agentic AI has the potential to be the next fundamental change. As Craig noted, it will remove the friction between people and technology.

One important note that I found helpful was when Craig defined the difference between AI Agents and Agentic AI, two very similar sounding terms. Essentially, AI Agents can perform tasks for people, and Agentic AI can perform tasks themselves.

Agentic AI and the evolving Automation Fabric architecture is going to have a massive impact on the world. Craig noted that according to Forrester’s model, there are 25 million customer facing support agents working today, but in five years, there will be five million as virtual agents take on much of this work. This will allow people to take on more complex and higher value tasks further down the chain. There are going to be a number of places where this kind of transformation may take place.

Financial services are also primed for this kind of transformation. For those of you viewing at home, this slide surely stood out.

Craig noted that DPA has a major role to play as automation evolves, particularly with task automation and for long running processes.

Craig spent some time discussing the challenges with incorporating AI into existing workflows. There is a lot of change management to work through, and a lot of trust to build. This actually raises the visibility of automation CoEs and the role they can play in enabling this across an organization. He described the benefits of an “automation strike team” to help prevent problems and help with strategy and planning, among other things.

“Analyst firms love confusion,” Craig admitted, because it gives them something to solve. Right now there is a lot of platform confusion. He pointed out the players in last year’s Forrester DPA Wave, noting that the players will be different and in different places next time this refreshes. There are a lot of options out there, and as we’ve heard elsewhere, things are likely to change and converge.

Craig closed with a brief nod to his new book, Random Acts of Automation, which aims to explain the impact of the changes in the automation world that we’ve been hearing so much about. Certainly, technology and automation are evolving quickly, and this talk gave us plenty to think about.

Unconference

At this time the Unconference is kicking off in the Green Stage. Picture below, the Deehan Brothers are ready to go and wondering why someone is taking a picture of them. They, along with other Camundi and attendees, will be driving this event with no strict agenda – just show up and make a proposal! The Unconference is in-person only and not recorded.

How Barclays transformed post-trade settlements with Camunda

Trade processing is incredibly important to a financial institution like Barclays, and it’s also very complex. Barclays leaders Shakir Ahmed, Head of International securities Settlements Tech. and Larisa Kvetnoy, Managing Director Markets Post Trade Technology, joined us next to talk about how Camunda helped them revolutionize the way they handle post-trade processing. As Shakir noted, these are a big deal, as if one trade fails, there is often a cascading series of failures, which can have disasterous results for the whole company.

The team was looking into a microservices architecture to try and improve their agility and performance, and initially weighed whether to use choreography or orchestration to manage them. In the end they settled on orchestration because it gave them the highest level of control over the whole end-to-end process.

Making use of an orchestrator like Camunda 8 brought significant benefits. Crucially, process speed and scalability significantly increased, but that was far from the only benefit. Thanks to the flexibility of the orchestration platform, Barclays was able to easily connect with legacy systems from 30+ years ago and evolve iteratively without having to completely migrate or remove all the old systems at once (which would have been nearly impossible). The ability to get a real-time understanding of the state of the process through Operate also lets them answer questions from other stakeholders across the company about performance that they never could before. On top of it all, these changes ease regulatory concerns by enabling Barclays to provide faster service (aligning with initiatives like T+1) and provide a comprehensive audit trail more easily.

This was a fascinating and comprehensive look at the way a large company with extensive legacy architecture and regulatory requirements was able to greatly improve their performance and drive real business value with Camunda. Be sure to watch the recording to get all the details and hear the Q&A.

Tracking RSM’s journey from legacy to process orchestration

“To get started, neither one of us are technical,” said Ken Koch, consultant and product owner at RSM. “So don’t ask us technical questions.” Koch and Tom Clark, principal and assurance digital services lader at RSM, spoke on the orange stage this morning about the challenges of leading a 100-year-old company with 26 legacy systems into a future of process orchestration.

Challenges with audit tools

“As you can imagine, changing the way of thinking at a 100-year-old company is super easy,” Clark said. “I had hair when I started.”

“My hair was brown,” Koch said.

To put it simply, Clark said, technology is the easy part—changing people’s minds and hearts is hard.

“To be honest, we’re probably using some of the same tools we used a hundred years ago,” Koch said. “We have a lot of legacy systems.” RSM has about 26 different systems that don’t talk to each other. “Before Camunda, I was moving client data around in my covered wagon.”

On an organizational level, no one at RSM knew where any client team was are at in its processes without going and checking in with that team individually.

How Camunda is helping RSM transform

“We just went live with Camunda in May,” Koch said. “We’ve already got 9,000 engagements running through Camunda since then. It’s working, it’s happening, but we’ve got a long ways to go.”

“We’re trying to build this ecosystem, Luca, to automate different steps,” Clark mentioned. “We’re looking at eighty hours worth of savings per engagement.” This of course introduces business changes in training and how fees are calculated with fewer hours. But the goal is not to have technical employees spinning their wheels in meetings or with administration. You want them to be working in their primary area of expertise.

“To me, technology is as much sociology and psychology as anything else,” Clark said, adding that it doesn’t matter if your technology is agile if your people aren’t.

What we’ve learned

Data integration is hard. Every one of the 26 different applications has different definitions for their data. Creating master data and standardizing process are some of the biggest challenges RSM is dealing with.

The internal fear has been a challenge to overcome. “We have IT people with 20 years of experience who’ve built these legacy systems, and they’re not sure about moving data elsewhere,” Koch said. “It’s not always easy, telling someone that the 20-year-old application they’ve poured their heart and soul into is going away.”

Other RSM business lines are waiting for this team to be successful before they buy in to process orchestration. “This can put people on guard,” Clark said. “It takes a lot of work, so we start from small processes. Then people will come out of the woodwork to support it, because it’s proven successful.”

But BPMN diagrams and real-time data updates are slowly increasing buy-in.

Clark said he’s trying to encourage leadership to build toward composability. “You have to accept that everything’s changing all the time.” In five years, it may be more efficient to swap two applications out for one new plug-in. “If you make it composable from the beginning, you can make changes without having to change everything.”

ICYMI

• Camunda Connectors unleashed – Crafting future-proof low-code solutions. At the same time, an in-person workshop was taking place over on the Purple Stage. This popular session focused on how to use Camunda Connectors efficiently in low-code environments, solving common challenges and explaining how to develop your own Connector tailored to your business. It also goes higher level to understand the whole Connector ecosystem and how to design a sustainable process architecture.
  
• Unconference continues: The Unconference will be going throughout the afternoon. We just took a quick peek and there is a lively conversation going on up there. We hope everyone attending is enjoying!
  

Book Signing, Behind the Scenes of Unconference and Lunch

Now we have a break for lunch. At the same time, you can enjoy a quick look behind the scenes of Unconference (above, Michael Sanders is inviting you to participate)!

Bernd and Leon are also signing their new book on the terrace. If you’re here, grab yourself an early access copy and an autograph!

And of course, our latest local celebrity didn’t want to miss out on the fun and mingled with the crowd at lunch as well :).

Enhancing Risk Management by leveraging workflow Orchestration and DMN at a larger scale

Capital One is one of the largest banks in the US, with hundreds of millions of customers. As Sean Webb, Product Manager at Capital One explained, managing risk is crucial for any bank (and really any person), but all the more so for an organization so large and highly regulated.

Risk management, as Sean noted, is often a decentralized discipline across an entire company. But there are benefits to centralizing it, as well as challenges. Senthilkumar Manokaran, Master Software Engineer at Capital One spoke to the kinds of best-in-class requirements that were critical for a risk management platform. Once they had these requirements around process and task management, decision management, optimization capabilities, multi-tenancy and more, they went and searched if anything in the market already met them. That led them to Camunda.

Sean went on to explain the challenge of how to distribute ownership – if it’s too centralized or too federated, there could be problems. Fortunately, Sean said, “BPMN and DMN were easy enough to use that once we got everyone over the initial hump for how tihs adds value, people were able to own these things and make changes on their own… most people ended up taking complete ownership and we could just be there for additional guidance.”

Sean talked with obvious delight about meetings with business partners where they could talk through a BPMN or DMN model together. Then at the end, when the business partner asks how long it will take to implement these changes, the answer is simply “as long as it takes to upload the model – we just did it!” Thanks to this, lag time in review cycles and communication between teams can be drastically reduced, and things can be improved in real time.

This was a really engaging session with something for everyone, exploring in detail both the technical and business value that Camunda brought to Capital One. I found it interesting that their risk management team seemed to be doing a lot of what a CoE might do, and indeed this was the first question addressed in the Q&A (short answer: they are, but they aren’t). Don’t miss the recording to hear more including the full lively Q&A.

Revolutionizing digital onboarding for financial services: Quicksign’s Journey with Camunda 8

“We are focusing on a very business approach,” Charlotte Stril, chief marketing officer at QuickSign, said of today’s presentation. “If you have technical questions, we can get you set up with our CTO.” Stril and Thibaut Ravise, cofounder and CEO at QuickSign, spoke on the orange stage after lunch today about how Camunda 8 has helped their organization easily onboard clients who are giants in the financial industry.

“We need to transform the way our clients serve their customers digitally,” Ravise said. QuickSign has three goals for providing service to their clients:

• Provide an easy user experience that enables high conversion rates
• Comply with local regulations
• Mitigate risk of customer default

But you won’t meet business requirements just by connecting a few shiny services. “Process orchestration is very important,” Ravise said, “which is why we’re here.”

QuickSign’s CTO, Frederic Guay, did a deep dive on the competition and found that Camunda 8 gave them the most scalability, the most resilience, and the best ability to meet regulatory requirements across the EU.

“About 50 percent of our workforce is working on our process orchestration pillar,” Stril said. She compared QuickSign to an oil rig. “Except we’re turning raw data into gold.” With a relatively small workforce and so much data to process, QuickSign leans on AI for wading through data and decision-making, and also BPMN modeling.

The fact that nondevelopers can use Camunda’s BPMN modeling facilitates helps QuickSign comply with strict regulations across Europe and the US. Business experts are determining processes and workflows that best suit the needs of large clients who require strict compliance but also demand the highest innovation as quickly as possible.

“With Camunda 8, it’s simple to distribute tasks to external works,” Stril said. “We have our incredibly niche expertise we provide to our clients, and Camunda is enabling us to do that efficiently.”

Features like Camunda Operate and Optimize have become indispensable for the customer care teams at QuickSign. “They allow us to deep dive into specifics,” Stril said. “And these teams are always working on high-stress problems that need quick solutions.”

Stril emphasized that QuickSign must have very high availability and a very robust infrastructure. “When we were choosing Camunda 8, we could not compromise on any of those commitments because of our compliance requirements across many countries,” she said. “The good news is we didn’t have to.”

Stril and Ravise wrapped up by noting that Camunda 8 lets QuickSign as an organization forget about administrative issues, allowing them to focus on their core business.

Building a SAAS automation platform on top of Camunda 8

Ed Perez, Head of Architecture for data and Analytics, took the stage next to present for BNY (formerly BNY Mellon). BNY is a major bank with a longstanding history – it was the first stock ever traded on the NYSE, with over 50 trillions in assets under custody, making them the largest such bank in the world. Given their central role in global finance, they think very carefully about how they operate and manage their business critical processes.

BNY uses a cloud-native platform they call their Data Vault, which allows them to model, govern, discover, visualize and connect their data. There are many vault platform services and tenancy models they need to maintain and develop, along with APIs and other interfaces to manage the UI, services and users.

To develop their vault, should they build or buy? This is a question many organizations face at one point or another. Initially BNY tried to build what they needed, but it’s a big undertaking and as Ed noted often “your eyes are bigger than your stomach” and you think something can be done quickly that takes far longer. As they began to consider the buying option, they assembled a list of requirements, including use cases (data retention, capturing statistics, client-facing telemetry), non-functional requirements (security, resilience, high availability, scalability), and integration (complete flexibility over the UI, don’t want to remap things).

Originally, Camunda 7 was used sparingly at BNY, but over time they collaborated with Camunda and learned that Camunda 8 provided something different and more modern. SaaS availability, horizontal scalability, a maintained event-stream and more were among the many reasons why it met their requirements, and pointed to a huge opportunity.

Ed walked through the resulting automation service architecture that they were able to develop, explaining why they made each choice at each step. He also covered their BPMN deployments, showing their workflow and how they run integration tests and deploy through different environments to ensure high quality.

Ed capped off his talk with a discussion of what’s next for BNY. Training and implementing more use cases are a big part of the future, but also the continued migration of legacy workflows, greater use of Connectors, priority queues and of course developing AI/Agentic flows.

This was a detailed and technical look at how BNY built their automation platform on top of Camunda 8 SaaS. Don’t miss the full session in the recording.

Innovation through transformation: Learn from Alliander’s migration to Camunda 8 to drive the future of energy

“Raise two arms if you are a Trekkie.” Floris van der Meulen, business analyst of system operations at Alliander, and Eric Hendriks, senior software engineer at Alliander, presented a love for process orchestration and Star Trek on the orange stage this afternoon. But there was plenty for nonTrekkies, too.

One of six distribution system operators (DSOs) in the Netherlands, Alliander provides energy to 300,000 homes. The energy leader currently uses Camunda to orchestrate their Autonomous Grid Manager, which handles load demands.

Challenges in the energy industry

Solar park growth, the war in Ukraine, and a need for 1.6 millon chargers for electric cars by 2030 are all challenges in the energy industry. “If we overload the grid,” Hendriks said, “we could destroy it.”

To keep up with the increasing changes, Alliander moved from Camunda 7 open-source to Camunda 8 enterprise.

Migrating to Camunda 8

The migration was not a trivial task, but “it was worth the risk,” der Meulen said. They decided against big bang and inside-out migration methods and went with new world instead, migrating piece by piece.

der Meulen used a BPMN diagram to map out Alliander’s migration to Camunda 8, and pointed out some of the challenges as well:

• Camunda 8 did not have execution listeners, “and we were using them,” Hendriks said.
• Alliander was using its own UI and layering Camunda 8 underneath it, which added another level of complexity.
• They also needed to overhaul their testing procedures.

But once all processes were migrated, Hendriks noted with a sigh of relief that they were finally able to sunset the old system. “I’ll just say don’t code. Orchestrate,” he added. They have about a dozen processes left to fully orchestrate.

“A lot still needs to be done,” der Meulen agreed, “but we are on the right track.”

ICYMI

For those here in person, a pair of very interesting in-person workshops just took place back to back on the Purple Stage that we just have to mention:

• Building AI Solutions with Camunda: A hands-on workshop: Bastian Koerber, Principal Product Manager at Camunda and Arushi Mishra from AWS led this hands-on workshop to explore how you can integrate AI with Camunda right now. They explored how to leverage Camunda Connectors and Web Modeler to build AI-driven solutions, how to create your own AI agent orchestrated by Camunda and more. This was a really fascinating session to play around directly with how you can unlock new potential with AI and Camunda.
• On the road to Camunda 8: HDI’s travel report: Uwe Koch, Architect at HDI shared the journey of HDI from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8 as they automate insurance policy processing across several business areas. Uwe explains how the decentralized, agile-deployed workflows are meant to be flexible and independent, and their design and implementation informed the migration and deployment process. Learn about their transition to C8 and how they handled showstopper events, and as a bonus attendees were asked to optionally bring their own Camunda 7 model to get recommendations for migration to Camunda 8.

Gartner’s BOAT in Action: Fueling Payter’s Global Hypergrowth Strategy through Camunda.

Payter is a tech company that develops unattended payment terminals. They are growing fast along with the growth of the self-service market in general, but they can tell that something big is coming. Andre Bal, Director of Supply Chain at Payter, borrowed a phrase from Jakob’s keynote yesterday – they know there is a big wave heading their way, and they want to be ready to catch it.

At a conference, Andre met Floris Weegink, Field CTO at Incentro, and asked him to build them a surfboard to catch the wave. His answer? “You don’t need a surfboard. You need a BOAT.”

BOAT, or Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies, is a new term that we heard about directly from Arthur Villa at Gartner yesterday. It represents a new convergence that is coming in the market, and it is critical to understand it to have a modern and future-proof foundation.

Payter had important business goals they needed to achieve, including 24/7 self service availability, a quicker response time, and scalability so they can ride the wave. Working with Incentro, they realized they could achieve these goals by adding a process orchestration layer between the user interaction level and their backend systems, allowing them to meet all their requirements while retaining flexibility and control.

At that point, Floris congratulated Andre on buying their first BOAT!

This was an interesting story, told by Floris and Andre with humor (it’s clear they work well together), of how a fast-growing company like Payter with a vision for where the market is going is taking advantage of the latest systems and technologies even before they “need” it, so they can be ready to catch the wave when others aren’t.

Enterprise Process Orchestration: A hands-on guide to strategy, people, and technology

Bernd Ruecker, cofounder and CTO at Camunda, and Leon Strauch, senior practice strategist for process orchestration at Camunda, took the main stage to highlight a few key takeaways from their book Enterprise Process Orchestration: a hands-on guide to strategy, people, and technology that will transform your business.

Why did you write a book?

“We saw a lot of organizations and customers who use Camunda on quite a huge scale,” Strauch said. “They have hundreds of processes that they automate. It’s really impressive. At the same time, we have a lot of customers who want to get to that stage.”

Interviewing several clients, large and small, revealed insight that they wanted to get into a book format. “If you cannot write it down, you cannot think it through,” Ruecker said.

And if you want to stay competitive, you have to think about automation holistically. You cannot silo your automations. Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester, wrote the foreword, stating that “organizations began to get serious about the need for broad-scale automation.” Which you cannot have without process orchestration.

Five drivers to achieve process orchestration

“A successful transformation is more than technology,” Ruecker said, highlighting five drivers in particular:

1. Technology. It has to be easily accessible to the entire organization.
2. Vision. It has to be defined and rooted in company strategy.
3. People. Your team structures have to be effective.
4. Delivery. Solutions have to be delivered effectively.
5. Measurement. It has to be quantifiable.

End-to-end processes do not belong to one department. They hit a lot of different systems and teams. “Only if that runs smoothly am I happy as a customer,” Strauch said. “That’s the architecture we sketch. It’s not about technology so much. It’s about how to build vision.”

He suggests building a vision along a wave: have a strategic goal and then focus on your first solutions. From those, you can derive best practices and move onto more solutions. With multiple solutions, you can manage them within a center of excellence and then scale solution creation.

To follow that wave, Strauch outlined specific steps organizations should consider, including solution delivery, provided infrastructure, process overview, and depth of enablement.

Use cases with US Bank and Atlassian

Prashant Appikatla, at US Bank, joined Strauch and Ruecker onstage, to talk about US Bank’s CoE. “It’s actually quite small,” Appikatla said. “Four members.” Onboarding time to production has been reduce by 40 percent, and production incidents have gone down about 90 percent.

“Any new business line or team can directly access Camunda 8 to build out their PoCs or MVPs.” In that way, Appikatla’s team can ensure quality and viability of new processes.

Sanjam Sarpal, solution architect at Atlassian, also joined Strauch and Ruecker onstage to discuss how architecture decisions are driven by Atlassian’s CoE. “We take multiple approaches to our CoE, and they look at the solutions that make the most sense. They can come up with their own recommendation for what we should follow.” Time well spent, he said, to avoid issues with delivery.

Overrides of their recommendations are of course possible, but the CoE is much closer to more systems, so their advice is valuable.

All four speakers remained onstage for the following Q&A, responding to questions like how to hire for a CoE, and whether or not a full-blown CoE is a bit overkill instead of just building solutions.

The agile enterprise: Rapid deployment with Camunda 8

Andrey Belik, senior product manager at Camunda, handled the day’s final presentation on the orange stage about Camunda 8’s new deployment reference architectures.

How does Camunda fit with agile?

Camunda is not only built on cloud-native architecture, Belik pointed out, it also allows for module scalable deployment, essential for agile dev environments. “Obviously we can still deploy on bare metal, but this provides more flexibility.” Camunda also integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, fitting well into the infrastructure as code (IaC) landscape.

Reference architecture

“If we can standardize across all our customers’ deployments,” Belik said, “it becomes less risky to test in all those environments. We know parameters, and we can define how to scale, say, VMs versus Kubernetes.”

Camunda’s reference architecture includes, among other elements, architectural overviews, deployment requirements, and infrastructure setup instructions. “Kubernetes, container services, or manual and bare metal—all will eventually get their own reference architectures,” Belik said.

Camunda and CI/CD

In a live demo upgrading from Camunda 8.5 to 8.6, Belik explained how to chain everything together into a proper CI/CD pipeline.

ICYMI

Here are the last two in-person workshops of the day that we don’t want to miss!

• Build your first low-code process with Camunda: Low-code tools can be great, but only if you know how to use them! In this hands-on workshop, Norman Lüring from Camunda guided attendees new to low-code in Camunda on how to master the tools that can streamline their workflow creation and help them develop powerful automated workflows in under an hour. A highly productive session!
• From Data to Action: Unlocking Task Automation: End-to-End Orchestration with Camunda: Bastian Koerber, Principal Product Manager and Calvin Robbins, Senior Product Manager Product at Camunda explored the latest ways that Camunda can enhance end-to-end orchestration with new task automation capabilities. This session gave attendees an exclusive glimpse into the newest innovations and the future of task automation with Camunda.
  

Closing Keynote: Leadership Guide for the Reluctant Leader

We all make mistakes. David Neal, Microsoft MVP, Software Developer, Author and today’s closing keynote speaker, is no exception. David admitted he has made mistakes, he has run away from decisions and avoided telling people things. Early in his career, he received a promotion to manager and hated it. He just wanted to write code and solve problems! He didn’t think he could or even wanted to lead, and he later left for a lower paying job.

Later, at his startup, his CTO pulled him aside and thanked him for being such a leader in his company. He was confused – he had no reports. But he was told he was a leader because people looked up to him and valued what he has to say. It turns out, everyone can be a leader. Could there be more to work than code and coffee?

Leadership is less about control and more about influence.

In this talk, David wants to give you a “bigger lens you can use to see your world.” To take a step back and ask, what do you want your legacy to be?

He reminded us all that we are awesome. You’ve been told lies by the world. You need determination, practice, and patience, and you can succeed.

One target in David’s sights is multitasking. He used the example of a lion tamer who uses a chair to confuse a lion – apparently, the trick is that lions focus very intently, but the four legs of the chair confuse a lion and make it hard for them to know where they should focus. The lion is paralyzed by indecision. That’s us, David argues, when we try to multitask. He urges us to try and keep our focus on one thing at a time whenever we can.

David then turned his attention to everyone’s favorite thing… meetings. Not always super productive. So how can you have the best meetings in your life? David suggests an interesting system called “Lean Coffee.” It’s a way of running a collaborative meeting that uses a few tools – a way to jot things down, markers, a Kanban board, a timer, and a good attitude. The meeting starts with jotting ideas down, making a quick pitch to describe what they all mean, and giving everybody two votes. Then you sort and run the most popular ones for 5 minutes. When time is up, you can vote to stay for another 5 minutes or move onto the next one. Voting and time boxing prevents anyone from dominating a meeting and keeps everyone involved.

We all have a purpose – and beyond our job. David encouraged us to leave the world better than you found it. Every day there are ways we can do this.

A believe David long supported was that “Life is too short to work somewhere that stinks.” If it’s terrible, leave and find something better. But at one point, when about to leave, he was asked – have you done everything you can do? If you left now, would you have any regrets? Reluctantly, David stayed and worked hard to fix the problems that had prompted him to want to depart. He still left the job a year later, but with pride rather than regrets. So his new believe is that life is too short to let things stay the way they are. Taking ownership and responsibility is always the right thing to do.

One example David gave is this: Why is there often a culture where we only say nice things about people when they announce their departures? Noticing this, David started an experiment by posting a public tribute to someone on Slack. The amazing thing, he noted, was not what he said, but was how many other people would pop in to say wonderful things and make someone feel appreciated. It was beautiful. It’s so important to show people you value them.

There is a concept, which David represents above, of an imaginary “line” that people are often above, or below. When they’re above it, they are open, curious, playful. Below, they are the opposite. Treat people with respect and keep them – and yourself – above the line.

Among the many gems that David shared was this quotation from C.S. Lewis, which we love: “Humility is not about thinking less of yourself. It’s about thinking of yourself less.” David asked us to be grateful each day, to look beyond flaws, to find communities and to always keep trying. You are not an imposter – there are people who would love to hear your story.

There were so many beautiful and inspiring notes in David’s talk, it would be impossible to come even close to capturing them all. But I think everyone in the room left this keynote a little lighter, and if you watch the recording later and take it to heart you will too. With David’s parting words – “Go, and be awesome” – we move onto the concluding fireside chat.

Fireside Chat & Closing

Amy welcomed Jakob and Bernd back to the stage for our closing fireside chat. After she asked how they were all doing (really good conversations, but tired!), she brought up a question – now that everyone has an “early access” copy of Bernd and Leon’s new book, how can they leave feedback? Bernd’s reply: “Any channel!” Email, LinkedIn, whatever works for you. He pointed out that they’ve come a long way in the book so far but it is not yet final and it’s not too late to incorporate feedback, and they want to hear it!

A lot of themes came up this week, including composability and “this little thing called AI,” as Amy jokingly called it. She asked if Jakob or Bernd had any suggestions for next steps that people can take away from the conference today?

We’ve heard a lot of themes, composability, this “little thing called AI,” do you have any advice on next steps? Jakob says get your hands on the product right when its ready and try things out, RPA, Copilot, all the new stuff, just use it. And get in touch with us when you want to move this to an enterprise-wide application level and we can help. Bernd added an answer shockingly close to “it depends,” noting that it depends where you are and what you’re doing. But he added that it’s important to get familiarized with the impact of process orchestration on the business and know how to tell that story.

We hit ARR $100MM… what has the road been like to get here? Do you have any reflections on the journey? Bernd shared that the motivation for improving processes and making it all work better has always appealed to him, and this interest has always been a part of his journey with Camunda, though he never dreamed it would turn into a company this successful. Jakob noted that a guiding principle has always been about “No B.S.” – which when they started applied to what they saw as overpromising by BPM vendors, and even now applies to AI. Camunda was always about doing it right, and honestly, and that has never changed. The trust in our integrity from our customers and community is so important to what Camunda is.

Amy concluded by asking where we go from here. Bernd spoke directly about the product, and how excited he is for the direction of the product when it comes to the foundation and framework they have built with Connectors, and Marketplace, and the incredible potential for the variety of things we can now build upon this foundation. It feels future-proof, no matter which kinds of solutions or technologies we layer on top.

Thank you all and please share your feedback!

With that, Amy began to wrap up the conference. She shared our now-complete “selfie screen” (above, thank you for sharing your wonderful pictures!) and thanked our generous sponsors. She also reminded everyone to look out for the recordings next week and to please share your feedback on the conference, as well as on Camunda in general in places like Gartner Peer Insights (there are even some $25 gift cards available for those who submit with Gartner Peer Insights). We really value your feedback, wherever you share it, and thank you!

See you next time!

The next CamundaCon will take place on May 15-16 in Amsterdam – you can sign up for that right here! Then we’ll be coming back here to New York on October 8-9 2025, so be sure to mark your calendar. Sign up now so you don’t miss anything, and we can’t wait to see you next time!

The post CamundaCon New York 2024 Day 2 Live Blog appeared first on Camunda.

We hope you’re as pumped up as we are for CamundaCon New York 2024, which kicks off in mere hours! Just like at the previous CamundaCon in Berlin, we’ll be bringing you the latest updates from the event live as they’re happening. Be sure to check back frequently as we’ll be updating this post throughout the day.

If you couldn’t join in person in NYC, it’s free to join online—so you can still catch all the sessions! Just register at the link below, check out the agenda and make sure you don’t miss anything. We’ll see you there, whether online or in person!

Here with us already, before the opening keynote? We’ve got a sneak peak behind the curtain for of things getting set up from yesterday. Excited for the main event to begin at 9am!

We’re almost there! The countdown is on!

Behind the scenes – sneak peek!

Our behind the scenes coverage gives you a great view into the event from a new perspective. Those of you online have the professional view of course, but even those here in person can catch our team (like Mary here) welcoming everyone here with a look behind the curtain.

Zee was also here to welcome everyone with a smile

Welcome!

Camunda’s Amy Johnston welcomed everyone to CamundaCon New York 2024! After a brief explanation of the Selfie Screen (tag your selfies with #camundacon and #selfie to join!), how to navigate all four tracks both in person and online that will be taking place over the next two days. Amy also shared highlights including key speakers and events (like lunch, of course, and our behind the scenes videos), our AMA and sponsor booths, industry roundtables, and the fantastic aftershow coming up tonight.

Next up, she welcomed Camunda CEO Jakob Freund to the stage.

Opening Keynote by Jakob Freund

Waves of AI

Camunda CEO and co-founder took the stage next and welcomed everyone to the conference. He introduced this moment as the start of a new chapter, both for Camunda and (not coincidentally) for the whole industry. Describing the waves of AI, which are coming faster than ever, he asked us all the question: How do you take action when things are changing so quickly?

Jakob talked about how you can’t just throw AI in to anything and hope it will work – not only will that not deliver optimal value, in some cases it’s actually the wrong solution entirely. This is, in fact, what happened with early waves of automation, where companies adopted things like RPA and point solutions for local automations while feeling under pressure to automate quickly. This may have seemed like a win at first, but in the end it only adds to technical debt and ultimately makes the spaghetti architecture even messier.

How can you tame all this complexity? This is where process orchestration comes in. You don’t need to throw away everything you’ve built, but you do need to tame it and bring it all together so you can understand it in the present and make changes for the future.

Jakob explored an example with Deutche Telecom, showcasing how they started with some initial successes in areas like RPA but ran into a wall of limitations as their automation architecture grew into a “spaghetti bot.” Process orchestration with Camunda helped them get their arms around it and drive further innovation for the future.

We’ve seen, as Jakob noted, how Forrester and Gartner have recognized this change in the market as well. Change is coming, and we all need to be ready to take action – the right way.

Introducing RPA and IDP

Camunda is in a great place to adapt to this changing environment, as both Gartner and Forrester place orchestration at the center of where things are going. Jakob noted that Camunda is the “uncontested leader in end to end process orchestration” in the market today, with composability and flexibility at our core. Today, Jakob also introduced that Camunda will be introducing RPA and IDP into our platform.

Jakob emphasized that no, Camunda is not trying to compete as a pure-play RPA vendor. But in some ways, RPA is table stakes these days. We’ve had customers who just want access basic capability and have even built it themselves. So we thought, why don’t we provide this for you, right out of the box?

Camunda has been investing in a number of accelerators to help organizations move faster and more effectively with process orchestration. The Camunda Marketplace has been growing, and is now filled not only with Connectors but also process blueprints that can help jumpstart your own process creation. There are also solutions created by our amazing partners like Cognizant and EY.

Process Orchestration for SAP

One exciting new development is an integration with SAP. SAP is an incredibly popular solution and this new integration makes it easy to use Camunda to orchestrate your SAP processes, without having to move them out of SAP. It’s good to be composable! There will be more information on this at another talk later today, so be sure to tune in for more details.

AI-Enhanced Process Orchestration

How does Camunda look at AI-enhanced Process Orchestration? Camunda is driving towards what Jakob called “autonomous orchestration with guardrails,” thoughtfully combining how to be deterministic with ad hoc execution. This includes things today like Camunda Co-Pilot as well as coming changes like agentic AI. Camunda aims to continue to be the premier platform for process orchestration and automation.

“Talk is cheap, let’s hear from customers”

Those were Jakob’s words as he brought speakers from leading companies to the stage. Davish Shah from Atlassian, Ed Perez from BNY and Sudipto Dey from Cigna chatted with Jakob about the business impact of process orchestration, and how they have made use of centers of excellence, SaaS, APIs, microservices and more. Each speaker has a dedicated session coming up, by the way, so check out the agenda and don’t miss them!

Jakob then welcomed everyone to CamundaCon again and encouraged everyone to learn, network and have fun. Be sure to check out Jakob’s full talk as well as this blog post for more details on everything here.

The Future of Business Orchestration an Automation: Beyond RPA, BPA Low Code

Next up, Arthur Villa, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, took the main stage. He explained that automation has clearly recognized value but is hard to recognize correctly. Arthur took us on a brief history of automation, noting that we are now in an era of convergence between automation tools, where tools that once did just one thing (RPA, BPM, etc.) now claim to do a lot more. This convergence, he noted, is important but confusing.

Gartner sees this consolidation as where the market is headed as the platforms in the newly introduced category of Business Orchestration and Automation Technology (BOAT) develop. But it has to be done the right way, and orchestration must be at the center.

Using an example of an automated auto accident response, Arthur demonstrated the complexity and how many different tools or systems might need to be involved to do it right. He shared a survey with over 200 responses from a Gartner webinar showing that orchestration was the overwhelming choice as the key factor companies were focused on.

Who needs a BOAT platform? Arthur shared that if you are brand new to automation or have minimal use cases it’s probably a bit much for you, and if you’re already demonstrating automation mastery (estimated at less than 5% of customers based on their hyperautomation maturity model), you are probably getting a lot of unique value from your best of breed approach. But for the vast majority of organizations in the middle, a BOAT platform can provide tremendous value by simplifying your automation and future-proofing your systems. Telling the story of one company’s four year migration journey, Arthur reminded us all to never underestimate the pain of migration.

Before opening things up for Q&A, Arthur closed with a message: “The future of automation is autonomous, but it needs to be orchestrated.”

Be sure to catch this full talk on the recording later to see all the details of this talk and hear the full Q&A after.

Maximizing the business impact of process orchestration: What can a CoE do for you?

Next on the main stage, Daivish Shah, Intelligent Automation Platform Architect once more joined us, along with Senjam Sarpal, Finance Tech Lead from Atlassian. The talk highlights the way Atlassian built their center of excellence (CoE) with a dedicated team, and how it drives innovation and continuous improvement across the company.

Daivish introduced their Camunda journey, starting back in April 2020 with the initial contract, followed by four large rounds of trainings, with the first high transaction volume application using Camunda launching in November 2021. This thoughtful approach has enabled them to continue growing and scaling, and today Camunda powers 16+ apps, 100M+ decision instances, and 65M+ process instances for Atlassian.

There are four pillars to the center of excellence (CoE) at Atlassian (which you can see in the image above) – communication, tools, enablement, and solution delivery. Careful consideration in terms of how they built up each of these areas and how they work together helps greatly simplify processes across the company.

Senjam stepped in next to talk about the Shoplassian business use case, and how Camunda is used specifically to drive business value. It was fascinating to hear the way the team at Atlassian was able to implement Camunda here.

Be sure to watch the full recording for all the details and the Q&A.

British Telecom: Transforming service orchestration with low-code and user-friendly process orchestration

John Wealls, a product owner for Openreach Limited (a subsidiary of BT Group), was on the Orange stage Wednesday morning to discuss how Openreach moved from monoliths to BPMN with the help of Camunda. Himanshu Nagpal, a senior manager of software engineering at British Telecom, joined Wealls online for the presentation.

Why transformation?

Openreach need to overcome product journey lifecycle challenges for supplying fibre broadband to 25 million homes. The previous system could only process 8,000 orders per week. Wealls noted that after partnering with Camunda, Openreach can process 40,000-45,000 orders per week.

Openreach conducted an extensive POC with Camunda beginning in April 2020. Camunda stood out from competitors when it came to design and collaboration and its Modeler, Optimize, and Cockpit UI features. “It offers flexibility without any outages,” Nagpal noted, pointing out this as a significant change from the time-intensity of Openreach’s previous system.

How easy to integrate?

Integration between the Camunda platform and the microservices-based architecture Openreach already had in place was seamless, according to Nagpall. “We now have a highly resilient architecture, communicating with upstream and downstream services.” In nine months and with zero service-impact issues, “and in the challenging days of COVID,” Openreach began agile development and soft-launched their strategic product.

How has BT Group benefited from Camunda?

“We’re faster to market, we’ve streamlined our porcesses, and we have very high availability under deployment,” Wealls said. He added that the real-time analytics provided by Camunda also enables rapid innovation. Financial benefits to Openreach have included enhanced efficiency, 50% reduced infrastructure cost, and again noted that deployments are happening in seconds with no downtime.

One particular use case Wealls highlighted is Openreach’s Order Manager—the tool has reduced multiple microservices for progressing an order to a simple web UI. The end result is that an engineer on the ground can identify a need to request city counsel permits to complete an order, and within seconds, that task is in someone’s desktop queue.

As a result of its increased efficiency and reduced downtime, Openreach has increased its NPS score by 20 percent since working with Camunda.

CamundaCon Hackday

As the first set of talks after the keynote were taking place, we were also kicking off our Hackday upstairs. For our in-person attendees in this room, there a new technical challenge afoot that they will have to solve in just an afternoon. Before the day is out, they will present their solutions to the CamundaCon audience in a dedicated session. This is a always great experience for anyone able to join in person and keep an eye out for updates from the presentations later today.

Lessons in implementing Camunda8 SaaS for Banking

This session opened up with Louwris Wernink, IT Lead Area Accounts, and Pascal van Puijvelde, Lead Business Analyst at Rabobank, a leading cooperative bank in the Netherlands with over 6 million accounts. They focus on consumer banking as well as food and agriculture, and have a large number of youth accounts geared in part towards financial education.

Rabobank’s journey to Camunda began with a new project – how to allow customers to have better overdraft protection. The existing method for orchestrating the process was hard to update (it was directly built into their frontend) and couldn’t meet their needs, as they sought to improve the UX and innovate faster. Pascal explained that this brought them to Camunda, which integrated nicely with their existing tech stack. They onboarded to Camunda 8 SaaS at the beginning of this year.

Louwris and Pascal then spoke to some of the things they had to learn to make Camunda work. Both IT and the business stakeholders were new to BPMN, for example. They had also not used SaaS here before, and as a major financial institution, there were a lot of security and privacy regulations they had to ensure compliance with. Ultimately, with the help of a Technical Account Manager and other support from Camunda, they were able to work through their challenges and establish a Center of Excellence that met their needs.

This talk was a fascinating look at the way Rabobank was able to reevaluate their entire process and workflows, learn and train how to use Camunda to create a BPMN-driven, flexible and scalable process for the future, and lean into innovation in a highly regulated industry. Don’t miss the great Q&A at the end, including a well-placed BOAT pun (see if you can catch it).

How process orchestration improved data governance at Walmart

Wilson Gaitan, director of data governance at Sam’s Club (a membership club owned by Walmart), took the Main Stage Wednesday morning in New York to discuss the impact of process orchestration on data governance at the global retail giant.

Explain the challenge in simple terms

For Walmart and Sam’s Club, billions and billions of records come in from customers and vendors all over the world. “All of us are very good at delivering data, but what if I need it?” Gaitan pointed out. “How do I find it? When do I get rid of it? There are tons of processes just to make sure data is private. Who’s deleting tax data after seven years?”

Data assets—tables, databases, etc.—have to have someone accountable for them, someone managing them. “How do we know who is responsible for what? Where did this metric come from that you’re trying to hit? Can you trust that number?” Gaitain noted that it’s hard to trust that data unless you have transparency and visibility into the data you’re working with.

Data governance ensures the trustworthiness and currency of data assets. But maintaining the up-to-date-ness of data is an impossible task manually.

“We don’t want people to think that data governance is something you have to do in addition to your day-to-day tasks.” Having a strong process orchestration capability helps the data owner avoid “reactive data governance.” Instead, Gaitan suggested, embed data governance processes into the everyday tasks of data management.

How Camunda is helping with Walmart’s data governance approach

Gaitan wrapped up by covering a few key ways that Camunda is ensuring the scalability and automation of data governance for Sam’s Club:

• Keeping data assets and those responsible for each asset up to date in its processes
• Enforcing good data hygiene
• Offering easy integration with other tools that support data governance and management without reinventing the wheel
• Facilitating visibility into data assets with end-to-end process orchestration
• Providing data for process refinement and reengineering
• Making it easy to change when processes need to evolve

ICYMI

While we weren’t able to cover them live, there have already been two great talks on the Purple Stage that we would be remiss not to mention:

• Camunda: From Zero to Hero: Autoscaling process orchestration with Camunda
  Nicolas Pepin-Perrault and Simon Zengerling, Engineering Manager and Engineering Tech Manager at Camunda respectively, led this session on how you can auto scale in Camunda 8, focusing on operational efficiency and sustainability. This kind of scalability is particularly critical for situations where you don’t always know what your requirements are or how they will change over time. Check it out to learn how it works and see a demo in action.
• Camunda & Ibo: A hands-on approach to measuring strategic value with top-down process orchestration
  How do you determine which metrics are most effective for measuring project value, and how to use process orchestration strategically and capture those metrics? Join Tobias Conz, Senior Product Manager at Camunda and Guido Fischermanns, CEO at ibo GmbH, as they examine the way top-down process orchestration can help both IT and business stakeholders contribute strategically to the business.
  

Lunch!

It’s time for lunch here! Those of you attending virtually were able to enjoy another look behind the scenes, and we’ll be back with more coverage soon.

Driving Success in Automation: The Power of Cross-Functional Collaboration and Stakeholder Alignment

We’re back, and in this panel discussion, moderated by Helen Park (Senior GSI Partner Director), an all-star group of leaders assembled on the stage to talk about cross-functional collaboration and alignment. Mike Hastie (Head of Enterprise Architecture at a Major Healthcare Insurer), Bhargav Trivedi (Senior Director, Distinguished Engineer at Capital One), Prashant Gaonkar (VP-Global Strategy and Planning, Enterprise Platforms at Cognizant), Frederic Meier (SVP Sales at Camunda) all had great insights to share.

There was a lot of great conversation about how to get organizational alignment. Frederic spoke to two axis of alignment, one with a well-articulated vision from the C-level that is disseminated across the organization, and another between business and IT. Prashant added that communication is key, people need to understand how it will affect them. Silos get created when people fear a loss of control and when they are not brought into the fold.

Talking about overcoming obstacles, Mike shared a story about how they were able to take an automation project from nothing to production in a few months by communicating well, getting buy-in and doing things the right way. Even though it meant a business team lost its tool for a time, and the implementing team needed to learn a new technology, having a well-understood vision made it work. In the end they were able to measure the economics of what they gained by collaborating on the project and it was a recognized success.

Bhargav mentioned the importance of demonstrating ownership to bring everyone along, and Helen asked how you go about that if you are not leadership yourself? There were a lot of great ideas shared, with Prashant noting that it’s important to understand the needs and objectives of all stakeholders, Frederic emphasizing the importance of communicating business value, and Mike highlighting the benefits of getting that first win with demonstrated value.

Helen closed with a question about predictions for how we will collaborate in 20 years. Bhargav noted how hard it is to predict like this – 20 years ago he would have predicted mainframes would be long gone by now, though they still power financial institutions, and he would never have guessed where mobile technology has gone today. But he did predict that everything would get even more real-time. Prashant shared that he thinks knowledge will be further democratized. Mike talked about how everything will have AI in it but it has to be done right or it won’t really return value, and Frederic mentioned how composable process orchestration can really help operationalize that, so you can use AI when it makes sense and other technology when they make more sense.

All in all it was a fascinating discussion. Check out the recording for the full conversation and the Q&A that followed.

Revitalizing Insurance Processes: Norfolk & Dedham Group’s Migration to Camunda

Over on the Orange Stage, Shashi Ayachitam, IT director at the Norfolk & Dedham Group Insurance, walked us through an architecture redesign—specifically how they migrated from an obsolete BPM tool to Camunda.

Norfolk & Dedham’s needs

Six months ago, this 200-year-old insurance company went live with a revamp of their claims solution. Their legacy workflow system of about 650 workflows from 2000 had been acquired and then killed with no migration plan in place. Fortunately, because it was an inhouse solution, not customer-facing, Norfolk & Dedham could delay an upgrade until they performed some market research.

Market research into BPM solutions

Norfolk & Dedham looked into several options in the market, such as Adobe Experience Manager and Oracle BPM. “We wanted a nice, decoupled architecture support. Camunda kind of checked all those boxes.” Even while Norfolk & Dedham was on the open-source license, there was no hesitancy from Camunda support.

Migration and customization

“Camunda had a great talent for helping us navigate through the whole journey,” Ayachitam said. With Camunda support, Norfolk & Dedham was able to customize Camunda Modeler to best fit their needs. “Every customer has custom requirements, and every customer needs to build something special for how they work.”

Business insights and impacts

Post-migration, their chief claims officer has better access to claims data, which in turn helps answer strategic business questions. “We’ve been able to adjust resources, increasing in this department and moving people in that department. And we’re just touching the bare surface—there’s huge potential beyond how we’re using the data now.” Ayachitam expressed that he’s particularly keen on watching the evolution of the Cockpit UI.

Currently they’re only using it for claims, but they’d like to expand into other departments in 2025. “The goal is to make the entire process more straightforward,” Ayachitam said, “with less handholding by either the policy holder or the agent.”

It all comes together: the Unified Camunda 8 REST API and the improved developer experience

Up on the Purple Stage, Felix Mueller Director of Product Management and Roman Smirnov, Principal Software Engineer at Camunda led a talk about the new unified Camunda 8 REST API and improvements to the developer experience. Roman “quickly” took us through an example process using the previous developer experience. It worked, but… it took some time.

The answer was to develop one streamlined solution. This greatly simplified the process, as Roman showed by taking us through things again. It was a great step-by-step walkthrough of how the new API makes a difference.

How does this affect me as a user? Felix stepped in next to cover this. He introduced Camunda 8 Run, designed to improve the experience for local development, and then – always dangerous – successfully demonstrated how it worked live.

This popular (standing room only!) session gave a really interesting demonstration of some powerful improvements that are now a part of the Camunda developer experience. Felix also previewed the roadmap, and it’s exciting to see where this is all going. Judging by the energy in the room, I wasn’t alone in thinking that.

Intuit: Revolutionizing workflow management at scale for mid-market businesses

Back on the main stage, Yash Agarwal, lead software engineer at Intuit, and Rishabh Surana, senior product manager at Intuit, made a case for the connection between dynamic workflow management and business success.

Workflow innovations at Intuit

“We specialize in small business and midmarket businesses. As they grow, they need to put a lot of time and money into customizing business processes.” Workflows can automate part or all of those business processes. “That’s the whole idea of why my team exists,” Surana said.

“Let’s take a customer problem,” Agarwal said, taking us into a use case for workflows. “No one wants to get paid late, right?” He walked us through a form-based workflow and the rules that might trigger it and the conditions that happen when conditions are met. Intuit was able to simplify this workflow into a build-your-own visual workflow with essentially infinite variables, so customers would not have to wait for Intuit to push out more templates.

Customers are now able to send invoices faster and pay their vendors faster. “But it wasn’t easy to get there,” Agarwal said. “So how did we do it?”

First, ensuring customizability and reusability. Second, the DMN Compiler that simplifies rule evaluation and nudges customers to avoid redundant workflows.

Scaling existing infrastructure with Camunda

With 1.5 million workflows executed per day, they faced scaling issues while on Camunda 7. Bottlenecks included external tasks, timers, and job creation. To handle these issues, they avoided timer jobs, distributed timer load, and moved from pull-based to a push-based framework.

Challenges with Camunda 8

Working with Camunda support, Intuit figured out how to tweak CPU IOPS, throughput, and memory per pod. “We might be able to scale infinitely with Camunda 8,” Agarwal said.

ICYMI

• Just before the above on the Purple Stage, Pavel Kotelevskii led a session on Inbound Connectors: Real-World Challenges and Solutions. In this packed session (seriously, people were standing), Pavel shared the latest on Camunda’s inbound connectors, showcasing practial moderling patterns and getting into the details about best practices for tackling consumer deduplication, message acknowledgment, and error handling. Don’t miss it.
  
• Over on the Orange Stage, Scott Wilger (Senior Director of Business Architecture, Field Operations, Charter Communications) and Sergiy Tsymbal (Software Engineer, BP3) led a talk on Revolutionizing construction: Charter Communications’ path from engineer-to-order (ETO) to made-to-stock (MTS). They shared how a a focus on the user experience, standardization and automation let Charter Communications implement its next-generation construction management system. See how they did this while employing cutting edge technologies such as Camunda, BPMN, DMN, Kafka, and Kubernetes.

Optimizing the pharmacy ecosystem with APIs, microservices, and workflow automation

This main stage session opened up with a story. Sudipto Dey, Senior Principal at Cigna – Evernorth, share the story of John, a cancer patient. He manages his prescriptions through Cigna, and until just a few years ago, when an issue or unexpected change came up, it would take Cigna 6-7 days to communicate with his doctor about that change. Today, it takes just one. This, Sudipto said, gives engineers a sense of pride and accomplishment, to be able to help.

Roberto Camara, Senior Software Engineer at Cigna – Evernorth, remarked on how everyone can appreciate that story, asking the audience to raise their hands if anyone had ever had their prescriptions delayed. You can imagine how many hands went up.

Sudipto covered the complexity of their world today, including a number of systems they need to interact with, and legacy infrastructure that must be maintained. He noted that one of their biggest accomplishments has been to enable end-to-end processes. Sudipto emphasized that means truly end to end – from the very beginning (ie: prescription ordered) to the very end (prescription delivered), all orchestrated in one place. Sudipto pointed out that Camunda met this need better than anyone else, delivering unparalleled composability and flexibility.

Next Roberto walked us through a few specific use case examples, including a claims submission process and a Biosimilar process. He described their requirements and what they knew they needed to get out of any orchestration platform. Visibility, reusability, composability and flexibility were key requirements. Again, Camunda was a perfect fit. The ability of the platform to change, adapt, and retry adds tremendous value, and “when we can say yes, it can do that,” it builds trust within the organization that the platform works for them.

Healthcare is a complicated but critical industry, and it was really interesting to get this look into the way process orchestration can make a real impact in the health and quality of life for people everywhere. Be sure to check out the recording to see all the details and watch the Q&A.

AI as the next UI: Driving intelligent straight-through processing at Infosys using Camunda

On the Orange Stage, Bhupesh Naik, associate vice president of business at Infosys, took us on a journey into the future with technology that’s available now.

“It may sounds like sci-fi now, but I think this is the way technology is going to move,” Naik said. AI-infused systems will look different than the typical multi-screen workflows end users have worked with for years. “You don’t need human interaction to make every decision. AI will take the front seat. We’ll see machine-to-machine prompts without a UI.”

To demonstrate his point, Naik showed us a typical system interaction for an international banking transfer as you would probably experience it now—with, say, nine different screens and 10 clicks and countless keystrokes. “Instead, we should be challenging our engineers to make something conversational,” Naik said. “With AI, we can take out multiple UIs, make sure the lead isn’t lost, and make sure the lead is closed.”

Naik is well aware that his passion for AI is obvious. “I would be challenged if I said AI is the new code,” he said, then added with a shrug, “Although someone on Twitter said the new programming language is going to be English.”

Demo with Camunda

Naik took us through a short demo for filing an auto insurance claim. “We’re fast-forwarding this part because I don’t like it,” he said with a groan. “J ust the clicks and keystrokes and screens. We’ve been doing this for years, since I learned how to use a PC.”

Instead, Naik focused on a part of the demo where a user speaks directly with an AI claims agent via one screen. AI tools were able to make multiple data decisions, such as using image analytics to document damage photos uploaded directly into the conversation.

“All this is happening with two key capabilities,” Naik said. “Conversational AI and streamlined processing.” Some dashboard is still required for the human agent, but overall the number of screens engineers must build are greatly reduced.

“You have fewer steps, fewer actions,” he said, leading to a system where the agent is making decisions, not driving data aggregation.

Taming complexity: How BeOne uses dynamic DMN rules generation for tax regulations

We all know tax rules are complex. BeOne is the leading company using Camunda in Poland, with hundreds of thousands of businesses using dozens of their ready-to-use process orchestration process templates. They knew this was a kind of complexity that process orchestration could solve. And so, as Marcin Makowski, Enterprise Architect at BeOne, and Jerzy Mikosz from Robotic Ledger explained: they built Luca.

To automate something as complex as tax regulations, first unstructured data needed to be classified and understood, and then turned into structured data. BeOne implemented this through DMN, which will be, supplemented by manual classification. This would allow, over time, a source of tax answers to be collected – especially by a community of users – that is superior to Google or ChatGPT, because it’s manually added by experts into a closed and secured model. Gradually, Luca should be able to do more and more autonomously.

They emphasized that building solutions for communities is different than doing it for organizations. But this kind of self sustaining decision model is a natural way of collecting professional knowledge, which is critical for making decisions or automations. And if they get this right, there is a massive opportunity ahead for helping businesses fill professional forms.

This was an interesting use of Camunda and dynamically changing DMN to create an ever more sophisticated set of rules – dare I say it’s a bit like creating an AI? – to solve a specific and business-critical problem.

US Bank: Camunda case management with microapps

Prashant Appikatla, a software engineer at US Bank, spoke from the main stage about the unique problem of creating templates for microapps that different business lines can plug into their own implementations.

“You can have Camunda orchestrate your microservices,” Appikatla acknowledged, “but it does create tighter coupling. If one of your microservices is down, your process has stopped.”

Most of the business teams that come to Appikatla are looking for new applications they need to build. “They have use cases but no existing tools. Or they’re taking one of our legacy systems and trying to break them down.” Those teams can pull templated microapps into a sandbox environment and get started with Camunda as quickly as possible.

“We’re trying to create small workable services where we can collaborate with existing lines,” Appikatla said, “without our team having to manage and deploy.”

Demo

Appikatla braved a live demo of a mobile payment app that was running five microapps together with a total of eight packages. He walked us through a customer dispute, which went through decisioning and finally to a fraud specialist. “As you move through the process, you migrate from one microapp to the next,” he explained.

Challenges

As with any system, microapp architecture has its challenges. “We’re trying to find a way to maintain data consistency across all these microapps,” Appikatla said, “and CI/CD has also been a little bit tough.”

ICYMI

• A bit earlier on the Purple Stage, Falko Menge, Senior Principal, Solution Architect at Camunda, led a session on The State of Performance. In this session, Falko and the Camunda consulting team show how they simulate real-world workloads to push the limits of what the Zeebe engine can do. Catch this one to see how Camunda stays inspired to keep improving performance so that they can always serve their customers, no matter the quantity or duration of the process instances they require.
• The Hackday Presentations also took place around this time over on the Orange Stage. This was a fun look at what teams of developers could accomplish in just one afternoon. Below, find a process that was built that can help you plan your birthday party ????
  
• This afternoon, Camunda also had a series of Industry Roundtables going on by the Green Stage. This was a unique opportunity for our in-person attendees to have industry-specific conversations with other attendees in their industry as well as Camunda professionals.
  

Bridging the Enterprise Gap: Integrating Camunda and SAP for Efficient Process Orchestration

Back in May at CamundaCon Berlin 2024, Volker Buzek co-presented on the work being done to drive increased business value from an SAP environment at a large car manufacturer. This was incredibly successful, reducing errors on that process through automation basically to nothing. Not only that, but it sped up the process and produced many other benefits.

But this was just scratching the surface. Today, Volker works for Camunda as a Senior Consultant, and along with Tobias Conz, Senior Product Manager, presented on the future of Camunda and SAP. Camunda and process orchestration can play a hugely beneficial role when more visibility is required, when processes are long running, and when scalability and flexibility are critical, adding significant value to existing SAP processes.

Next, Volker presented a live demo of how this could work. He showed how you can call any OData API on S4 or ECC from Camunda Modeler. Just like that, you can connect your BPMN and your SAP processes in either direction. “How does this sound?” Volker asked. “Really boring. And that’s what we want. It should just work.” With no code, partners and customers can now build templates that connect to SAP. Volker went on to show other functionality, including the ability to render Camunda forms in SAP Fiori.

Tobias concluded the talk by talking about key use cases, including the upcoming S4HANA migration, industry-specific flexible business solutions, and end to end process orchestration that includes SAP. He reminded the audience that general availability should be here with Camunda 8.7, coming in January 2025.

Be sure to catch the full recording as well as this blog post for more information on this powerful and boring (in an exciting way, if you will) new capability.

Panel: Accelerating the business value of transformation in banking and financial services

The final panel of the day took over the main stage with panelists Michael Goldverg, managing director at BNY; Parul Ghosh, executive director of engineering enablement at Wells Fargo; and Min Tha Gyaw, chief strategy officer at Mifos Initiative. Sathya Sethuraman, field CTO at Camunda, moderated. These executives put their heads together to discuss transformation trends in banking and finance, and how their individual organizations have addressed those changes.

Sethuraman opened with a comment on the diversity of the panel, including how different financial types of businesses were represented from fin tech to an emerging country open-source banking nonprofit.

What are some key drivers of finance sector trends?

“Making the customer feel well is one of the key drivers of trends today,” Ghosh said. “If you don’t make them feel special, they can hop over to someone else.” However, regulatory compliance keeps banks from iterating too quickly. “Both EU as well as US have guidance coming in about AI as well.” A third driver is geopolitics. “Banks are more worried about that than inflation,” she added. And then, thanks to ever-evolving technology, banks also have to constantly upskill people.

“Those are trends for larger banks for sure,” Sethuraman said. So how do they affect smaller banks?

The tech industry faces significant changes more often, Min Tha Gyaw said, so the likelihood of crises has gone up significantly in the last few years. And crises are always drivers for change. “But also technology has gotten more affordable. It’s easier for smaller institutions to make those changes.”

“There’s more and more demand for resiliency,” Goldverg pointed out. “Cybersecurity is getting more and more complex.” And of course, whether AI is good or not, “it’s too early to say.”

Still, it’s easier than ever to adapt to new challenges, Min Tha Gyaw said. “It allows you to address things quite quickly.”

Ten years ago, month-long development cycles were typical. Not now, Goldverg said. Weeklong dev cycles demand other solutions for quality control and security.

What are new initiatives you’re seeing in the industry?

“Regulators having more openness to new technologies.” Min Tha Gyaw acknowledge that most financial organizations think cloud-based is still too risky, but it would help transformation in financial industries.

“Fintech used to be spoken of like a threat,” Ghosh said, “but there’s a lot of symbiosis now, with things like Stripe and GS working together. This will really change how we deliver solutions to the customer.”

Goldverg highlighted cybersecurity as a hot initiative in finance. “Previously, cybersecurity was considered a perimeter around the organization. But a few years ago, companies realized there will always be holes. Instead of securing walls, now we need to secure everything within the organization. It’s a lot more work and takes a lot more education.”

“And AI is touching all of this,” Sethuraman added.

Goldverg noted that 2024 seems to have been a turning point for the usability of AI. “We’re seeing more and more practical applications of it.”

What are the major challenges currently?

Ghosh pointed out the question of build or buy when it comes to technology solutions. “A bank’s purpose is to help their customers. So is it worth it to build the solution yourself, or should you partner with someone who’s already build the solution?”

“It’s not an easy question,” Goldverg agreed. As a developer, he likes to build. But as a business leader, is it efficient to recreate something that’s already been made? “But you also have to consider how difficult it will be to integrate an external solution into your system.”

Figure out what you can’t compromise on, Min Tha Gyaw suggested. “Buy everything else. Decide who you are—are you a technology company, are you an investment company, are you a risk management company—and make your decisions based on that.” Although that self-understanding can be difficult to grasp when leadership changes direction after hearing a buzzword at a meeting.

Goldverg cautioned against choosing speed over quality. “If you start ignoring the quality of the product, your speed gain will be temporary. More likely than not, you will slow down no matter what. My firm belief is investing in quality is paramount,” Goldverg said. Investing in sales and branding may be important, but “It’s not the slide deck that fails in production, it’s the software.”

“One hundred percent agree with you,” Sethuraman said.

Aftershow and Networking Reception

We’ve reached the end – what a day! For those in person, it’s time for a networking reception where you can connect with other attendees, Camundi and partners. For those at home, enjoy your evening! Be sure not to miss all the amazing speakers and activities tomorrow, including keynotes from Bernd and Daniel and from Craig Le Clair of Forrester, our always popular Unconference, a book signing for Enterprise Process Orchestration, a morning run with Bernd and more.

See you then! ????

The post CamundaCon New York 2024 Day 1 Live Blog appeared first on Camunda.

From a business perspective, smart contracts are binding agreements (between, say, Walmart and a vendor in its supply chain) that automatically trigger tasks or functions when certain definitions are met. From a technical perspective, they are essentially lines of code deployed on blockchains. Data in a blockchain cannot be altered or deleted, making it perfect for software that needs to represent a binding agreement.

However, smart contracts can be a problem for some stakeholders, who may not have the specialized programming knowledge necessary to properly structure a smart contract. And the data they contain is usually buried across several different code bases, making visualization into their processes difficult.

Walmart’s challenge has been to decouple the “contract” part from the technology part—in other words, make it possible to create a smart contract based on a few business rules, rather than any specific programming language (such as Solidity or Rust), to ensure maximum usability and facilitate quick changes.

After all, business teams shouldn’t have to know the internal details of the technology used in Walmart’s smart contracts. Rather, they need to be able to:

• Visualize the entire process in one place.
• Analyze the impact of any change without needing to get into the nitty-gritty of the code of a smart contract.
• Quickly introduce and roll out new changes.
• Have templated business contracts at every stage in the process—for backend microservices, frontend channels, and end users.

How it’s implemented and which programming languages are used should be pretty much a black box as far as business teams are concerned. And the process as a whole should be easily changeable from a technology aspect.

As already mentioned, the challenge to achieving this lies in the fact that a smart contract’s data can be scattered across multiple microservices. It can be pretty difficult to have full visibility from end to end. As a result, it can be quite costly to implement process changes.

“When things are done at scale,” Seth said, “at a Walmart scale, it gets really difficult to do any small change.”

The challenge: Achieving end-to-end visibility

Walmart’s solution? A process model for their smart contracts.

Once deployed on the blockchain, smart contracts do what they are programmed to do without any intermediation. A BPMN (business process modeling notation) process works similarly—a sequence of activities triggered by a defined event, it automatically executes as designed.

Enter Camunda. A process orchestration and decision automation platform, Camunda connects the UI that the business teams need in order to visualize Walmart’s smart contracts with the backend technology that defines the contracts. The ability to model the contract isn’t tied to a specific programming language, but rather a simple business process model that can then be transformed into deployable code in any language to any blockchain.

There are a lot of similarities of functions, tasks, and elements (e.g., access control, external calls, conditional, loop, exception handling) between a standard BPMN process and a smart contract. With some additional functionality built on top of Camunda, Walmart can translate the workflow and the logic of a BPM and diagram it into an easily configurable smart contract.

But for any business person working with the smart contract, all that is abstracted. All stakeholders have the same business process and are able to refer to the same visualizations and statuses. Basically, everyone should be on the same page from end to end of the process.

“And that is only possible when we have one point of contact,” Seth said.

Walmart’s proposed architecture for smart contract process modeling UI is divided into three parts:

1. The process modeling panel. This is the UI panel where all the business processes can be modeled and persisted. Workflow definitions can be stored and used in the future.
2. The contract generation panel. Essentially a BPM-to-smart-contract converter, this panel picks up a business process and exports it as a Solidity file. This converted smart contract can also be stored for future use.
3. The contract deployment panel. This panel deploys the smart contract to an Ethereum network or any other blockchain. All of these elements are integrated with APIs, so they can build an end-to-end proper enterprise solution.

To watch a demonstration of this process in action, please view the presentation.

Conclusion

Walmart is leaning on blockchain and Camunda’s process orchestration and decision-automation platform to ensure the company’s core business processes are visible from end to end by every stakeholder. Previously buried in different code bases, processes are being modeled in BPMN, then converted to smart contracts, and deployed on blockchain networks.

As a composable solution, Camunda gives Walmart the flexibility to build on top of it, adding their own features on top of what Camunda provides and their own custom implementations according to their use cases.

“Camunda helps us visualize whatever we need during business implementation,” Seth said. “I would say these were the two biggest reasons we went ahead with Camunda compared to any other solutions out there in the market.”

The post Walmart Builds End-to-End Process Models for Smart Contracts with Camunda appeared first on Camunda.

While we do of course have an actual letter you can customize and email to your boss (or read aloud in person? Morph into a slide presentation? The choice is yours, really), maybe you want the highlights first.

Here are our insider tips for convincing your boss to send you (and your team?) to CamundaCon.

1. Describe it.

CamundaCon is in New York City this Oct. 16–17 (that’s a Wednesday and a Thursday) with a preconference the Tuesday before. In a nutshell, it’s a meeting of the minds about how to implement process orchestration in business.

Process orchestration is a system for ensuring that the various tools and software the company uses work in tandem without a ton of manual interference. It’s about tying your systems together so that routine chores—updates, maintenance, or customer service tasks—are handled smoothly and with as much automation as possible from the beginning of the process to the end.

2. Explain why it helps the company.

Whether your company has already established a Center of Excellence or is just trying to visualize the sprints it would take to migrate from a legacy monolith to a more tool-agnostic system, you can learn about optimal next steps at CamundaCon.

You could:

• Compare products leading in the market with ones that are up and coming
• Learn how to use AI to optimize your business processes
• Hear about specific use cases and strategies from other development and business teams that have worked with process orchestration

3. Namedrop the speaker list.

You’ll be getting insight into how to level up your business processes with speakers from companies like Wells Fargo, Atlassian, Intuit, CapitalOne, and Walmart. Not to mention a few of our own knowledgeable experts at Camunda—just to give you the inside scoop into how one process orchestration platform approaches end-to-end processes.

Whatever operational complexity has your company stumped, one of these people will be able to show you how they overcame it.

4. Offer to share knowledge afterward.

For the cherry on top of the sundae, don’t forget to promise to share. Point out to your boss that you’ll be coming back with not only big-picture visions of what the company could achieve over time, but also best practices you can implement right away.

Process orchestration can look intimidating when you realize what it’s capable of achieving—an automated end-to-end process complete with a modeled roadmap, anyone? But small, immediate improvements can pave the way for larger, more complex goals. And you’ll be ready to share all of that with the rest of the company, just as soon as you get back from New York.

See you at CamundaCon!

The post 4 Steps to Convince Your Boss to Send You to CamundaCon appeared first on Camunda.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for CamundaCon Berlin 2024, which starts today! After an incredible day 1, day 2 of the conference starts today. We’ll again be bringing you the latest updates from the event live as they’re happening. Be sure to check back often as we’ll be updating this post throughout the day.

We’ve officially sold out the venue, but if you couldn’t join in person in Berlin, you can still catch all the sessions online for free (that’s what I’m doing!) Just register at the link below, check out the agenda and make sure you don’t miss a thing. We’ll see you there, whether online or in person!

Update: Did you miss CamundaCon Berlin 2024, or just want to check out the sessions you couldn’t catch live? All replays are now available at the link below!

Morning run with Bernd

Did you join in on the morning run in Berlin this morning? Check out some pictures over on LinkedIn of our intrepid runners and share your own thoughts!

Here with us before the opening keynote? There is again a sneak preview behind the scenes to get you ready, touching on the Hackday results and more, led by our own Senior Developer Advocate Niall Deehan.

Almost time!

We’ll be starting in just a few minutes! People are taking their seats and getting ready for the opening keynote to begin.

Welcome

Mary once again formally opened the conference day from the main stage. After a brief reminder about the the Selfie Screen (tag your selfies with #camundacon and #selfie to join!), and the recordings soon to be ready (because nobody could be at all 4 tracks and 46 sessions!). Mary highlighted the on-site streaming options provided for overflow viewing for the sold out crowd (over 750 in person, plus over 2300 online!), including the streaming boat available to all. Mary also introduced our AMA and sponsor booths, as well as Speed Networking opportunities.

She then welcomed Camunda co-founder and Chief Technologist Bernd Reucker and Camunda CTO Daniel Meyer to the stage.

Opening Keynote by Bernd Reucker and Daniel Meyer

Bernd and Daniel took the stage and Daniel opened by asking an essentially rhetorical question: Is transformation optional? Of course, it’s not right? Organizations need to transform and grow regularly in order to thrive, but there are a few things holding many companies back.

One is the status quo bias. Why change? Aren’t things working now? The answer to that is, unfortunately, often no. Change is necessary, because processes fail for many reasons. Maybe regulations change, maybe you are merging with another bank and need to combine processes and systems, maybe the business environment changes. For one reason or another, processes need to be versatile and robust, because when processes fail, it’s very costly, as you can see in the slide below.

Another is what Daniel called the “shortcut bias.” Can’t we just get to the end quickly? But when you try to do this, by for example buying a product off the shelf that claims to have everything pre-built for you, it’s never as easy as you think. The pre-built functionality may not match up with your existing infrastructure, and customizations are challenging. The shortcut approach, much like the “point solutions” Jakob mentioned yesterday, appears to be a quick win but very soon becomes a complicated drag on innovation.

Camunda’s goal is to provide the best of both worlds by being composable and flexible. It makes it easy to integrate everything you already have, to build new things with our out-of-the-box capabilities, and to work with any future tools or infrastructure that you will use later.

Bernd then joined and led off with a live demo combining a form with a process model for a free trial that could be rapidly deployed and monitored through Operate. After building the demo and running it through Camunda SaaS, Bernd benchmarked it for performance—all live from the stage.

Bernd went on to talk about how you can understand process complexity and involve more teams. How can citizen developers, low-code developers, and pro-code developers work together on the right processes and be enabled for speed? Process orchestration maturity, as Bernd noted, is a journey. A Center of Excellence can often play a key role here.

Bernd (along with Leon Strauch) actually just published a book, “Enterprise Process Orchestration,” that is available to lucky in-person attendees to get signed at the next coffee break, that covers all of this in more detail.

Daniel took back over to talk about the future of AI in process orchestration. He warned that you can’t just rely on AI to “clean everything up for you” and avoid the hard work of transformation. AI is an incredible tool that can be integrated into your processes today, from form generation to our Connectors to numerous AI tools to the new BPMN co-pilot and much more. It was a really exciting overview of what AI can do today and the right way to implement it going forward. Daniel recommended anyone looking to learn more about it sign up for an upcoming webinar next week, May 22nd.

Keynote with Sarah Hsu

Next up, Sarah Hsu, Course Chair at Green Software Foundation, came onto the main stage to tell us a story we have heard before. It was about Henry Ford’s assembly line, and the way it transformed manufacturing and in fact the world. She drew the analogy to modern software development, with DevOps as the modern assembly line that transforms development into something that can be accomplished rapidly and efficiently. But how can these stretched development teams incorporate sustainability into their work?

The answer is by developing “Green Software,” which means carbon-efficient. How can one achieve carbon efficiency? There are three options. Energy efficiency, hardware efficiency and carbon awareness.

Sarah explained how the concept of “FinOps” can help us ensure that we optimize the way we use our development resources, particularly cloud costs, so that we “don’t drive a truck when a scooter will do.” Minimizing these expenses is both good for the bottom line and the environment. Just like DevOps revolutionized development, FinOps can make a huge difference in the way we approach software development. But it’s not about cutting corners in development—it’s about maximizing value and efficiency by understanding what the true development and financial costs are and optimizing them.

Sarah next introduced the concept of “GreenOps” to produce a sustainable solution for busy engineering teams. Essentially, GreenOps = Green DevOps, and in Sarah’s opinion, “FinOps and GreenOps are like sisters from another mother.” Financial and environmental optimization can work hand in hand.

An example of how this can be work is Generali Switzerland—check out this real-world example of focusing on efficiency to save costs in a highly regulated environment.

Like Bernd, Sarah also has a book coming out, “Building Green Software,” that lucky in-person attendees will be able to pick up and have signed during the coffee break. Don’t miss your chance!

Overall this was a great talk about how financial and environmental priorities, which are often seen as competing against each other, can really work together. It just makes sense, right? Let’s make this better understood and make our processes and development more efficient.

Hackday Presentations

Next up, I headed over the the Lightning Talks to see the results of earlier conference Hackday. The two challenges were to either:

• Make a model as overengineered as possible and still work
• Create an educational BPMN story

Despite the usual joy of live demos (with the screen at one point zooming in quite close on Niall’s secret Plan to Take Over the World ????), this was a fun session with a lot of creativity on display. I certainly learned a thing or two about what’s possible using Camunda and BPMN, and it was clear the community members and teams involved had a good time with the challenge.

Hackday presentations included:

• A complicated process to learn a fact about cats
• Anna and Betty’s date story (a charming interactive story told through BPMN, pictured above)
• An invoice processing and approval example
• Compensation Commando: An interactive BPMN tutorial teaching the best way to use Compensation events
• A thorough model to assemble a dating profile (including a tense moment of wondering whether the date will succeed)
• Another interesting take on assembling a dating profile (interesting to see the variations!)
• A quite convoluted process to invite someone to a birthday party, including an interactive poll to determine the crowd’s favorite ice cream flavor

The winning teams—Compensation Commando and birthday party invitation—won themselves free hats! What were your favorites?

Maestro! One story of conducting business through orchestration

Nichola Todd, a senior VP of technology at First American, opened her talk on the Main Stage with a crowd selfie and then immediately said, “I will not be talking about technology today.”

Instead, she says she’ll be talking about how First American handles 135 years of data in their workflows, particularly by consuming technology that already exists rather than creating it themselves.

Camunda was a trusted platform and a familiar name to handle these requirements. In 2022, they went onto the Enterprise plan and rolled off of about three more legacy platforms. “This was a huge change management shift,” Todd says. “We went from heavy engineering reliance to engineering not be as necessary.”

Monitoring in Camunda was huge for these changes. “These are not technical folks monitoring these workflows,” Todd says, thanks to Camunda configurability.

“The business is writing their own workflows based on features we have available today,” she adds, moving toward their goal of consuming technology rather than creating it. In Q1, 155 million decisions are made without requiring human intervention. “We are enabling the business what they need to do in a very timely way.”

Nobody became a reviewer to click buttons, she says, so this automation sets team members free to work on complex, unique, creative tasks.

By using the same BPMN tool across the organization, semantics confusion is gone from business-needs conversation. “My business cohort can advocate for me just as well as I can advocate for them because we’re all speaking the same language,” Todd says.

That’s when you know you’ve made the jump, she says during her wrap-up, when you’re no longer pushing a tool on the business. “It’s being pulled into other areas.”

Other sessions not to miss

• Introducing Camunda to a BaFin-regulated bank: Andrej Grimm, head of process excellence at the independent financial group ODDO BHF, joins Jörg Zentgraf, head of smart automation at business management consultancy ilum Informatik AG, to discuss a growing need in banking compliance—it’s becoming more critical that European financial institutions to focus on security and data protection, rather than just business processes. Strict compliance requirements can be tough to navigate for financial businesses, but Grimm and Zentgraft walk the audience through how these affect their architecture and operating model.
• How to use Camunda Modeler to move from simple BPMNs to executable processes: How can you move from a descriptive process model to an executable one that is still easy to understand and works perfectly? Join Felix Carrier, Principal Software Developer at National Bank of Canada, for this exciting Modeler-intensive session that goes through an example and outlines the steps you need to make the jump from descriptive to executable.

Excellence unveiled: Navigating success in process automation – A Center of Excellence panel

Up next I headed (well, clicked) over to the main stage, where Senior Customer Success Manager Francesca Vismara at Camunda was moderating a panel on Centers of Excellence (CoE). She was joined by Business Consultant Michael Rehfisch of Norddeutsche Landesbank, Solution Manager Souhaila Jeddi of Desjardins, BPM Expert Srikanth Tiyyagura of SDC and Camunda’s Chief Technologist and co-founder Bernd Ruecker.

Bernd was asked how common he thought CoEs were in the industry. They are “probably the most successful pattern I see,” he noted, including some form of central governance and enablement. He added that for true empowerment you really need buy-in, particularly from the C-level. If you don’t get it, “it’s a lot of chaos,” with duplicated work, lack of best practices, repeated vendor selection, and other issues.

Michael talked about how the CoE at his organization worked to create a blueprint for a project that can be easily started and run, getting over the early challenges of people trying to conform their processes to the right initial standards and requirements. His team focuses on starting with MVPs and Lighthouse projects but doesn’t implement directly.

Srikanth then discussed the importance of bringing everyone together and fostering collaboration. A fascinating challenge is aligning all the many departments of his company while still prioritizing reusability and scalability? He spoke to the collaboration and distinctions between a CoE, a CoE Advisory Team and a Community of Practice in his organization.

Souhaila explained how the goal of her CoE is to make IT teams more autonomous in process automation. They created accelerators and blueprints to make development faster and more compliant. But they also provided training for BPMN, Camunda, etc., along with promoting Camunda Academy, which hundreds of employees have trained on. The emphasis is on providing support to help make other teams more independent. Bernd highlighted that he appreciated how their CoE helps teams build a business case and then teaches self-service to get buy-in and then avoid bottlenecks.

The panelists called out communication, change management, enablement, empowerment and scaled adoption as key concepts to keep in mind when building your CoE. Check out this full session for some great Center of Excellence insights, including a lot of great Q&A at the end.

Rethinking the process creation journey & adaptation

JIT has been making use of business process automation since 2013, which means they’re familiar as a company with the challenges of the BPMN iceberg. “So let’s make this an easier and more enjoyable journey for you,” says Maximilian Kamenicky, senior developer at JIT.

BPMN promises a handful of benefits, but sometimes they aren’t easily delivered. “BPMN does sometimes create complexity,” Kamenicky notes. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be hard to read the process.” There can also be multiple ways to reach the same goal, which can create confusion.

Kamenicky proposes that a business should always emphasize the goal.

“BPMN helps us talk about perspective differences, but we need to talk,” Kamenicky says. He offers tips for how to communicate and address priorities for teams in business, solutions, development, and testing. For example, always make it easy to collaborate. Avoid creating silos and black boxes, especially for development teams. “End-to-end orchestration is a team sport.”

Elevating Connector quality: How to master the Marketplace

“Quality is never an accident,” says Stefan Schultz, a principal engineer at Consid. His lightning talk for today describes how to ensure quality for Connectors in Camunda’s Marketplace.

There are currently some basic requirements for partner Connectors on the Marketplace, like being open source and having at least one README.

However, 53% of Connectors haven’t been touched since 2023. “You can get an idea of quality from activity in the repo,” Schultz says. Other issues, like no contact info or missing documentation, can also be indicators of poor quality.

The perfect Connector should be well tested, safe to use, and well documented. “Low-code Connector development is actually pro-code software development!” Schultz notes. He encourages Connector creators to consider themselves as more like product owners. “It is your responsibility to take care of this Connector that you have brought in.” Your Connector is also like a business card, telling fellow professionals who you are and what you’re capable of.

To ensure Connector quality, Schultz had calls to action for both developers and customers—ensuring documentation for the one, checking details for the other, and so on.

Other sessions not to miss

• You can have both: Deploy fast and run safely: This presentation goes in depth into ONE’s process orchestration journey. Nicolas Homble from ONE will take you through the way process orchestration expanded from one use case to many. You’ll get to know their SDLC, how they integrate with CI/CD, enhancements to the modeling and development experience and more. Get some great takeaways on how to become more efficient and successful with Camunda.
• The State of performance: Challenging workload demands for the Zeebe engine keeps Camunda engineers on their toes. Falko Menge, senior principal solution architect at Camunda, explains today on the Purple Stage that users are always looking for new ways to push the limits of how many process instances Zeebe can execute. Menge demonstrates how the consulting team at Camunda use benchmarks and tuning tools to simulate real-world workloads.

Coffee Break and Book Signing

Next up is a coffee break! More fresh joe for our in-person attendees . Another perk of being there in person is the book signing of both Bernd and Leon’s new book as well as Sarah Hsu’s. Unfortunately we can’t sign your book virtually, but we can at least provide you with this image of the cover (and isn’t that almost as good? No, no it’s not even close. I know. Sorry.).

While folks are enjoying their caffeine, Senior Community Manager Maria Alcantara spent a few minutes talking with some of our Camunda Champions about their talks, their travel, and what they think of the conference so far. She also headed over to the signing booth to speak with Leon about his new book, who also mentioned that you can now pick it up on Amazon (so it turns out we can do better than an image, in case you were curious ????).

From pro-code to no-code, your Camunda SaaS low-code survival guide

Rob Parker, Head of Engineering & Architecture at AngleFinance, then presented on the main stage about the challenges, as well as the necessity, of low-code development. He talked about the thousands of processes and notifications they had developed and automated in their own business all using Camunda SaaS out of the box, FEEL and APIs.

There was no advanced IDE, no CI/CD pipeline, no sophisticated version control (beyond milestones in Modeler). They accomplished a great deal this way, but there were some limitations. Rob took us through some of these, including the critical need for standards and conventions to align development teams. Initially, process names, variables and model versions would proliferate. It became challenging for developers to search for and find whatever they were looking for. Thoughtful standardization helped to resolve this and boost productivity.

Connectors are also crucial to low-code development, but Rob talked about the difficulty of environment management on SaaS when compared to traditional development. How did his team solve for the lack of environment variables? They learned that by employing secrets, you can accomplish a lot of the same goals of environment management. Yet there was still a limitation, where email and SMS Connectors could not employ secrets this way. Again though, there was a solution, which was to create a “utility subprocess” that encodes environment-specific behavior in separate subprocesses.

There were a few other use cases, including document processing, batch processing, multi-instance inline subprocesses, operational errors… too many to list everything out here. It’s quite a sophisticated operation even in a “low-code” environment and, as Rob points out, needs an “engineering mindset” to do right. Be sure to check out this engaging talk from Rob that is brimming with solutions to your low-code challenges and can help you develop an effective low-code strategy while achieving a high degree of low-code sophistication.

Athlon: Roadmap to hyperautomation and beyond

“If you start right, you remove half the work,” says John Li, cofounder of MyCubes and solution architect at Athlon. When Athlon was acquired by Daimler (which owns Mercedez-Benz), the company received a new strategic roadmap to help grow the mobility industry. To begin moving along the roadmap, they implemented a pilot project for creating new process applications.

They started small, Li explains, to ensure that it wasn’t too long before they saw their first successes. “It also needs to be important and urgent,” he says, to ensure buy-in from other teams. In this case, Athlon’s pilot project was replace BizTalk, a business automation solution, rather than extending the license. Rolling the project out over 4 countries in 4 months kept things small enough and fast enough, ensuring success for the project.

With infrastructure in place, Athlon could roll out a larger lighthouse project. “All of upper management was looking at this one.”

Eventually, it was time for a more broad-scale transformation with a central portal, rather than having decentralized infrastructure that was getting quite cramped and costly.

Rutger van Dijk, implementation lead at Athlon, takes over the last half of the presentation with a live demo. Dijk walks the audience through a credit assessment portal that leverages Athlon’s process transparency and centralized infrastructure. “The portal fully supports Camunda 8, just as it was Camunda 7,” Dijk adds. “But the user interface will stay exactly the same.”

Other sessions not to miss

• Best practices & architectural patterns from the Camunda Community: A small panel with Peter Queteschiner, managing director of Phactum Softwareentwicklung; Simon Zambrovski, BPM crafter at Holisticon; and Dominik Horn, cofounder of Miragon GmbH offers straightforward advice for best practices and architectural patterns from their personal experiences within the Camunda community.
• Book signing: At this time, book signing was ongoing. Not really a session, but if you’re around and haven’t checked it out yet, now is your last chance!

Digital transformation and business process automation for banks

Banks have a number of challenges when it comes to evolving and truly bringing about digital transformation, but even more reasons to begin the process. From increased customer satisfaction to improved compliance with regulations and increased agility, digital transformation has tremendous potential to improve the way a bank operates and the success they can have in the marketplace.

Anna Ivanova from UKRSIBBANK and Liudmila Pidgorna, Head of Software Development Department from Integrity Vision, covered a lot of the problems digital transformation can solve, including a long time to market, outdated systems, lack of standardization and lots of manual work and mistakes.

Ana and Liudmila took us through examples of organizations that had dozens or hundreds of steps, many of which were not tracked and the vast majority of which were not automated. They explained how they resolved many key process issues within legacy environments, with Camunda at the center, including by redesigning processes, automating human workflows, improving tracking and communication, and more.

This was not a quick and easy project—it took planning and careful development for over a year to reimagine and reimplement these mission-critical processes, but the payoff will be more than worth it. Goals for just this year include automating 20% of sales (from none today), reducing time to money to 12 days from 28, increasing client satisfaction, and integrating new products into Camunda at a faster clip.

Check out this talk for a great overview of how a team took a holistic and deliberate approach to digitally transforming key financial processes, including an interactive poll about what the audience saw as their own biggest transformation pain points.

How Camunda ignited a revolution in city services

Ricardo Machado, head of engineering and development at Porto Digital, takes the first half of the presentation to discuss CityFlow, a city platform they’ve been working on for the past three years for the benefit of Porto, the second-largest city in Portugal. “If you haven’t visited yet, you should. It’s one of the best cities in Europe,” Machado says.

CityFlow makes use of BPMN 2.0 in an attempt to move toward an ecosystem rather than siloed processes within Porto’s city hall. BPMN also facilitates change management—remember, elected officials using the system are voted in and out. It must be easy to introduce the city hall systems to new users.

“Every gardener has a specific way of doing their jobs. The kennels have their ways of handling cats and dogs,” notes Hugo Magalhães, founder at Helppier. All of those processes in different departments can happen within CityFlow. The touch-screen user interface is built for low-tech users, so that city staff in any department with any job can easily make use of the portal.

“I think we’re the only demonstration to show cats and dogs today,” says Magalhães with a smile. “So that’s really cool.”

But CityFlow is not just a platform for internal use. “Users are of course staff, but also citizens. Never forget the citizen!” Machado says. For example, citizens can use the Issue Report feature to request resolutions to public space safety issues, for example. The Citizen Portal enables intake of requests for municipal service requests. OpenData gives citizens immediate, free access to certain datasets of the city.

Integration with Camunda reduces the need to ask every department how they handle their processes. “Camunda is helping us get rid of paperwork,” Machado says. It also helps city hall efficiently make use of its human resources, a scarce commodity in Porto.

The ubiquity of CityFlow across all city hall departments facilitates staff transfer across departments, as well. Data collected in the platform per employee can be easily used to justify a promotion rather than just I like that guy. Machado points at someone in the audience. “He’s laughing. He must be from the public sector.”

Machado wraps up the presentation by announcing that CityFlow will be open source until the end of 2024. “Join us, and if any city wants to try it, start with a small pilot and let it grow.”

Other sessions not to miss

• Orchestrating realtime data and pushing the limits: A journey in logistics: Markus Seim, Senior Manager PM eCommerce, and Lutz Kerwien, Business Specialist from GLS IT Services, explain how they introduced Camunda 8 SaaS into a legacy system at a major logistics company, which processes data in real time and manages millions of events per day. Take a look to see how Markus and Lutz have turned these challenges into opportunities to unlock greater efficiency.
• Drinking our own Champagne: Chaos Experiments with Zeebe against Zeebe: For the final lightning talk of CamundaCon 2024, Camunda’s own Christopher Kujawa, a senior engineer, explains how Camunda automates and orchestrates chaos experiments using Zeebe against Zeebe. Chaos toolkit, zbchaos, has seen significant improvements since its hackday creation a couple years ago, including BPMN models and more experiments.

Revolutionizing inline inspections: Machine learning meets Camunda 8

Mario Micudaj from Viadee and Jannes Bruns from ROSEN Group took the main stage for our last session of the day to talk about how they incorporate machine learning into their business processes using Camunda 8. Jannes explained that one of ROSEN’s key services is inspection services for pipelines—a critical service to maintain this infrastructure and make sure there are no damaging leaks into the environment.

ROSEN has sensors on pipelines that monitor status and transmit that data back to data scientists, which requires painstaking manual work to identify anomalies meter by meter. How can machine learning enhance their work?

Mario described how he handled the challenge of integrating Camunda with Kubeflow, which uses Python. Mario researched and selected pyzeebe, developed by the Camunda community, to facilitate the integration and enable job workers. It took some work, but they were able to fork this community project and customize it to their needs.

However, they came to realize that a Connector might serve their needs even better than a job worker, and be easier to maintain long term. So the Kubeflow Connector was born.

Jannes concluded by noting that with this Connector, ROSEN will begin to bring prediction scoring into production to locate defects more accurately. They will also migrate more of the job workers over to the Kubeflow Connector and introduce Camunda 8 to more business processes going forward.

Be sure to watch this one for a fascinating look at how Camunda can be flexibly integrated with a machine learning system to solve an important business problem.

Migration path from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8

The Deutsche Bahn is the state-owned railway in Germany, which consists of passenger transport, freight transport, and infrastructure. “In nearly all of these areas, you’ll find Camunda,” says Alexander Petioky, IT architect of DB Systel GmbH. He’s currently figuring out how to fully migrate several standalone applications from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8.

“Life is a b,” Petioky says, admitting that the success story he wanted to talk about today is more of an in-between story still. “So here’s what to consider on your journey from C7 to C8.”

The first stop, he explains, is migration of the models. Instead of one big step (decoupling database connection and moving to C8), Deutsche Bahn is attempting to decouple yet stay on C7 while other bumps get ironed out. Other difficulties include the requirement that Deutsch Bahn’s clusters must be self-managed; they have to be on-premises. That means container, Kubernetes, and Helm experience is required on the team.

Fortunately, he’s found inspiration for potential solutions through other presentations at CamundaCon 2024—for example, deployment via milestones, as suggested in Bernd Rücker’s keynote earlier today.

Petioky is still weighing how exactly to finish the migration from C7 to C8. One of the options he’s considering is step by step (ie, running C7 and C8 in parallel) for larger applications, and then Big Bang for smaller, less critical applications. “With every new release, we pray,” Petioky says with a laugh. “I’m the customer, I can say this. Oleg is busy with us,” he adds, referring to his customer success agent.

Thank you and see you in the fall!

It’s been a blast, but now it’s time for all of us to say goodbye. Thank you for attending, whether online or in person, and for sharing your beautiful #selfies.

This fall we’re holding another CamundaCon 2024 event, with the next one in New York City on October 16-17. After that, don’t miss the first CamundaCon of 2025 in Amsterdam!

Look out for the replays of CamundaCon Berlin 2024 to be available as soon as next week, and can’t wait to see you this fall at CamundaCon NYC 2024!

Update: Did you miss CamundaCon Berlin 2024, or just want to check out the sessions you couldn’t catch live? All replays are now available at the link below!

The post CamundaCon Berlin 2024 Day 2 Live Blog appeared first on Camunda.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for CamundaCon Berlin 2024, which starts today! Just like at the previous CamundaCon in NYC, We’ll be bringing you the latest updates from the event live as they’re happening. Be sure to check back often as we’ll be updating this post throughout the day.

We’ve officially sold out the venue, but if you couldn’t join in person in Berlin, you can still catch all the sessions online for free (that’s what I’m doing!) Just register at the link below, check out the agenda and make sure you don’t miss a thing. We’ll see you there, whether online or in person!

Update: Did you miss CamundaCon Berlin 2024, or just want to check out the sessions you couldn’t catch live? All replays are now available at the link below!

Here with us before the opening keynote? Our own Senior Development Advocate Niall Deehan and Director of Development Relations Mary Thengvall kicked us off with a “wee wander” behind the scenes to preview the event and recap yesterday’s Unconference.

The keynote itself starts in just a few minutes, at 6:30am ET, and people are taking their seats. We’re about to get started!

Welcome!

Mary returned to formally open the conference from the main stage. After a brief explanation of yesterday’s Unconference, the Selfie Screen (tag your selfies with #camundacon and #selfie to join!), and the 4 tracks (and 46 sessions!) that will be taking place over the next two days. The conference is the biggest that Camunda has ever had, to the point where Camunda had to go out and get a streaming boat to provide some overflow viewing ????! Mary also introduced our AMA and sponsor booths, as well as the aftershow networking opportunities (there will of course be a party in person, but also a cool CamundaCon Universe experience in Kumospace for those of us online).

She then welcomed Camunda co-founder and CEO Jakob Freund to the stage.

Opening Keynote by Jakob Freund

Jakob started off by setting the scene for the growth of process orchestration, starting by quoting former Forrester VP and analyst Rob Koplowitz who noticed companies start to “get serious” about broad automation about eight years ago, with Camunda as central to that trend. He spoke about the pressures fueling its rise lately, including growing expectations, disruptions faced and technical debt.

One common issue arises from the “value trap” of point solutions that delivered local automation quickly, but did not allow for full-scale end-to-end automation. Process orchestration is needed to tame the complexity and make sure that these many siloed automations become efficiencies and not enduring technical debt.

Jakob welcomed Paul Vincent, former Gartner Research Director and analyst to the stage. Paul spoke about the industry-agnostic importance of being able to not only get a handle on your complex processes with a powerful central orchestrator, but also of bringing business and IT together with BPMN and intelligent decision making with DMN, along with scaling securely in the cloud—together it is a powerful combination across a wide range of markets and use cases.

Jakob spoke about how thrilled we were to be described as a Strong Performer by Forrester in the DPA market last fall. He noted that we don’t have every feature out of the box, such as RPA, but that is by design. Camunda has prioritized a composable hyperautomation tech stack that gives you flexibility by not trying to be everything at once. Of course, we make it easy to do everything you need to from the combination of our out-of-the-box features and integrations with partners.

Now, we can’t have a keynote in 2024 without talking about AI ????, and Jakob specifically talked about the value we can all get from AI. He described AI as a brain that by itself it lacks any ability to execute and get value out of it—which is what true process orchestration can bring you.

“If AI is the brain, then process orchestration is our arms and hands. With the brain alone, you can’t actually execute. You need to put arms and hands to the brain.”

Florian Rang, Director at GLS, then joined Jakob on stage to talk about how they wanted to transform the business—which delivers millions of parcels daily—and now uses Camunda to break free from much slower legacy processes. For example, instead of taking weeks or months to make changes or additions, they can now make updates to rules and processes (like, say, adding a pickup locker to the available options) in just days. All on Camunda’s SaaS infrastructure. The changes Florian made were impressive and he had big plans for expanding Camunda in the future.

In the next part of this highly interactive keynote, Nikki Todd, Senior VP from First American, a global financial services firm, then came to the stage. She spoke to how First American uses Camunda to build feature-rich workflows that really enabled strong collaboration between business and IT—Nikki spoke to how business leaders can now make changes to processes without IT, not just in weeks or days, but sometimes in hours or nearly real-time. Nikki will be presenting on the main stage tomorrow, don’t miss it!

Souhaila Jeddi, Solution Manager at Desjardins, then joined to speak to how they use an IT Center of Excellence (CoE) with centralized governance to really accelerate and enable the decentralized scaled adoption of automation across the organization. Souhaila emphasized the importance of communication and collaboration with technical and business leaders so that everybody understands the real needs and the right goals can be achieved. Souhaila will also be presenting tomorrow, be sure to check it out!

Jakob then wrapped up his talk by speaking about the window of opportunity we have to make a substantial impact on our organizations with process orchestration. It’s important not to stay on the single solution level, as the most significant value will come as adoption grows across more projects and is distributed widely across an organization.

Co-existence of process engines and legacy systems in a distributed environment

Matthias Dabisch, Solution Architect at Commerzbank, then took the stage for the next talk on the main stage. Commerzbank is a large German bank and spoke to the need to improve their processes, which were sometimes automated but sometimes slow and human-centric across hundreds of often insular process solutions.

When they set out to update their processes, Matthias and his team had a number of goals. Transparency, modularity, technological freedom and an easy migration path from existing processes were among the critical needs. His team decided to use the “Lego Model” to create a standardized structure of process modules with uniform behavior and a standardized API—even as they have different business functionalities. To apply this across all company processes, legacy applications would need to generate a logical process model that could fit into the system.

For an ambitious pilot project, Matthias chose Enterprise Customer Onboarding—he knew if his team could tackle this critical process, they could also handle all the simpler processes across the company that they needed to. He designed a number of “Lego” modules that would integrate together to greatly enhance the process—it’s been running successfully for six months! There are lots of improvements to come and a CoE under construction as well. Check out this talk to get a great breakdown of how Commerzbank was able to add the power of process orchestration to a large organization with a lot of legacy systems and gain some huge efficiencies.

Process development at 1&1: From JBPM to Camunda 8

Software architect Georg Röver has been at 1&1 for 10 years and took a few minutes this morning to explain how and why 1&1 moved from JBPM to Camunda 8. First, Röver took us back to 2009, when 1&1’s process development used a proprietary framework: JBPM. There was no operating UI for JBPM, Röver explains, “so we had our own UI. We had to draw our own BPMN models ourselves.” Eventually, 1&1 moved from JBPM due to problems with the framework.

They opted to migrate from JBPM to Camunda 7, however there were early database incompatibilities. In 2021, 1&1 became an enterprise customer of Camunda so they could make specific feature requests of Camunda in order to ditch their own framework entirely. “Becoming enterprise saved us a lot of headache,” Röver says.

Since 2023, their process development is in Camunda 8. Now having the opportunity to scale with Camunda 8, 1&1 has made several feature requests, many of which have been completed, such as official support for Spring Zeebe and Zeebe upgrades without downtime.

Overall, “Camunda is cool,” Röver says. “It’s cloud ready, and you have a central engine, so you don’t have to worry about the database anymore, that’s very nice.” Check out this full talk to learn more about how they moved to Camunda 8, including their challenges and the key improvements they saw.

Other sessions not to miss

• Building upon DMN to automate business decisions: This lightning talk by John Christiansen and Arkadiusz Pszczolkowski of SDC covered how SDC was able to help a number of small and medium-sized banks upgrade their automated decision-making systems using DMN. Catch this lightning talk for a great technical explanation of how the team organized and implemented their project.
• Unveiling the Enigma: Elevating Process Agility with Case Management in Camunda Platform: Confused or just unhappy with CMMN, but looking for a case management solution? Thomas Heinrichs of Miragon and Victor Franca of WKS Power cover how you can handle case management using Camunda 8, don’t miss it.
• Using Camunda event data in a data engineering pipeline: Jim Collins and Andrewy Kozichev from MetaOps, along with Shiril Lukose from HMPO, talk about using data from your own internal process microservices to transform your operational oversight. Integrating Camunda event data with a customer data platform (CDP), the General Register Office (GRO) improved their data collection with an innovative new process created by A&A Digital and MetaOps. Collins, Kozichev, and Lukose showcased how data transformation packages for Camunda and data integration Connectors can simplify a data engineering pipeline.

The evolution of our workflow CoE

Business Consultant Michael Rehfisch and Florian Spata of Norddeutsche Landesbank, along with Senior Customer Success Manager Leon Strauch of Camunda then took the stage to talk about Centers of Excellence. Leon introduced the value a CoE can bring, but some common objections, including a conflict between the concepts of “autonomy” and “centralization.” However, he explained that it doesn’t need to be a choice—done right, you can have both.

After a quick selfie for social, Florian talked about the digital tranformation path for Norddeutsche Landesbank, a German bank. There are a number of challenges they needed to overcome, including complex regulatory requirements and the need to adapt to changing internal and external customer expectations.

Michael took us back to CamundaCon 2022, when Camunda co-founder and Chief Technologist Bernd Reucker and Camunda CTO Daniel Meyer talked about the journey to scaling process orchestration quickly. Michael and his team took that message, and after talking to folks like Leon and others, set out to build a CoE to achieve their scaling goals. Check out this talk to see how the CoE was designed, how they demonstrate their value through “value workshops,” their plans to move increasingly to the “right” for a more enablement-focused model over time, and goals for achieving a higher level of process orchestration maturity.

myProcess automation platform – E2E automation ordering portal

Hosting virtual machines is complicated, says Lukas Fröhlich, a senior process automation specialist at T-Systems Austria. How do you deal with compliance issues and IT processes, for example? “For a long time, most of these things were done really manually. We were doing a lot of unstructured work, and a lot of it was communicated via email.” The repetitive and tedious tasks needed to happen several times a week, which led to human error. “It just took ages,” Frölich says. “Around two weeks or longer to set up a new virtual machine, which is unbearable.” A lack of standardization also led to huge operational costs, “which is not something you want for a company of this size.”

But how do you automate things that have been done manually for years? The answer is myProcess, powered by Camunda. Lukas walked the audience through a short video of the platform. From the users perspective, the myProcess portal looks like an ordering platform.

But just having the portal in place is not enough to overcome the challenges. They invested in an enabling team, who drive standardization and operation of the platform. They also needed company support, some critical pieces of which they already had, such as access to master data from their configuration management database. Cultivating a workflow mindset was also essential—”a task someone is performing is part of an overall process,” Frölich says.

Taking over for the last half of the presentation, Benedikt Kaiser emphasizes that “we wanted to create a fully automated datacenter.” As a result, T-Systems has decreased their provisioning time for standard VMs to under two hours.

Up next is migrating from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8, but Kaiser doesn’t think much will change after the migration. “A key takeaway,” he adds, “is that Rome was not built in a day. Iteratively improving workflows is the key for success.”

Other sessions not to miss

• The challenges of automation and empowerment in the telecoms industry: Charles Praud, Telecom Business Development Director at Sopra Steria, and Stéphane Guillot of TDF, talk to the twin goals of providing a great customer experience while also reducing manual work. Learn how an automation strategy was specifically applied the telecom industry and how critical operational standardization was implemented.
• Speeding up & simplifying Camunda 8 Self-Managed installation for beginners: Lars Lange, Senior DevOps Engineer and Nathan Loding, Developer Advocate from the Camunda Infrastructure Experience team demonstrate a self-managed setup for a Camunda 8 environment. From installation to configuration, Lange and Loding demoed the process live while discussing future plans for simplification in Camunda 8.
• Journey into the implementation of process orchestration at Belastingdienst: Robert-Jan Peek from Belastingdiesnt (the Dutch Tax & Customs Agency) discusses how they transformed a complex, document-triggered registration process into a working proof of concept in just one sprint. His new ambition is to create microservices for orchestrating generic business functionality.

Coffee Break

Next up is a coffee break! For those of you in person, enjoy your coffee ! Those of us online were treated to a virtual tour of Berlin.

Online attendees were also treated to an exclusive behind the scenes sneak peek conversation with Sarah Hsu, Course Chair at Green Software Foundation, where she spoke about her mission as well as her process in recently writing a book. She’ll be giving a keynote address tomorrow on building green, sustainable software—bookmark that time slot now!

Digital Banking Transformation: A Comparative Analysis of Hyperautomation with Camunda in North America and Latin America

Marcelo Leopoldino, Specialist BPM Consultant at NTConsult and Raimundo Júnior, also from NTConsult and a , a Camunda Champion, then introduced the value of hyperautomation for the banking industry. Regulartory compliance, error reduction, and improved customer experiences are high on the list. They highlighted some of the key differences between North America and Latin America and the differing contexts for hyperautomation in the regions. This included the need to be more competitive for smaller Latin American banks (where the top 4 banks have 54% of the region’s market share) and the rapid expansion of AI and new payment technologies in North American banks.

They gave many compelling examples to illustrate the challenges faced:

• At a large Canadian bank, a big part of the solution there was achieved with a CoE.
• At a large Brazilian bank, standardization and implementing best practices helped resolve errors in customer experience and regulatory issues.
• For a large US bank, updating a legacy system enabled digital evolution through much improved automation.
• A retail/SMB bank in Paraguay used a monolithic architecture.
• A Brazilian digital retail/SMB bank needed to greatly improve the digital customer experience to compete for market share.
• A large bank in Argentina was losing customers due to slow processing times.

No matter where they were based, all saw huge benefits from embracing modern hyperautomation through process orchestration.

Marcelo and Raimundo covered a wide range of examples, and if you’re in digital banking I’m sure one or more resonate with you. Check out the full talk for details on all these examples, including the types of challenges faced and solutions that worked.

Streamlined automation journeys – Embracing solution accelerators via private & public marketplaces

“We introduced Connectors with Camunda 8,” says Bastian Körber, a Principal Product Manager at Camunda. It helps you easily connect to any kind of system; we have out of the box Connectors as well as Connectors in the Marketplace, which pulls from GitHub repos.

The Connector SDK enables you to build whatever Connector you need in Java. Körber walks us through creating a generic system connector from which you can generate a template. Since Camunda 8.3, you’ve been able to share Connector and call activity templates within your team. You can then involve and empower “less technical” people, Körber says, to use Connectors for their own needs. Team members are leveraging what already exists, rather than having separate teams build multiple similar Connectors.

Together, Pavel Kotelevskii, a Senior Backend Software Engineer, and Körber role play an engineer and a customer-facing staff member respectively who are trying to collaborate the automation of a manual process. If a Connector faces an outdated API, how can they avoid getting an engineer up at night to fix it? Can it self-heal? Does it need manual intervention? Can this subprocess be updated in the template? Finally, they demonstrate how to invoke ChatGPT to generate Markdown-formatted documentation to pop into the GitHub repo.

“Always double-check what the AI’s saying,” Kotelevskii says with a laugh.

Other sessions not to miss

• Measuring process and business KPIs: Unleashing the power of Optimize: Wondering how you can apply Optimize to improve your business? Tim Stawowski, Web Developer from WERTGARANTIE, explains how to go beyond simply adopting a solution and really use Optimize to bring business and IT together to understand and master your workflows.
• Welcome to the Formularfabrik aka the Form Factory: Joe Pappas, senior sales engineer at Camunda, explains how to use Camunda Forms to quickly create interfaces for user tasks, including adding your own form components. Pappas makes the case for decreasing time to value and increasing productivity in the Form Factory.
• From zero to hero: Live-coding a process using Camunda & RPA: Developer advocate Nathan Loding is back with a quick 20 minute demo for getting a Camunda project up and running. From a blank Web Modeler window, Loding takes the audience along on an end-to-end process that integrates with an RPA bot, deploys it, and runs it. Finally, he wraps up with tips for troubleshooting errors that could (of course) pop up.

How Camunda helps us to resolve our new business clients contracts

EDF (Electricity de France) first opted to use Camunda almost five years ago with goals that included simplifying their processes, automating use cases, connecting teams and making improvements faster. Alexis Madelin of EDF explained how Camunda helped enable a new customer-friendly process that helped save EDF a lot of time and effort. Previously, when a customer didn’t pay their electricity bill, power was cut off, requiring the customer to call in and pay their bill, followed by a technician coming out to manually turn the power back on. Today, power is simply reduced if payment is behind, improving the life of the customer and making it easier for EDF to turn it back on once the payment is complete, a win-win.

It might sound simple, but “this changed everything” from a process perspective for the IT team, Alexis noted. It took some work to get started, but he and his team knew that once they implemented it would make life easier for everyone, including their millions of customers. Alexis added that Optimize was a very important tool to enable supervision and analytics that make it easier for business and IT to collaborate using the same information. It also provided crucial benchmarks to help EDF understand where they can make improvements (such as the time to turn power back on, which they know is now reduced from four days to 15 minutes!).

EDF has both residential and commercial clients, and use cases are now being considered for the commercial side of the business. Alexis mentioned that sometimes there is resistance to Camunda when he first mentions it—oh, another tool, we have enough of those—but when he explains the benefits people are usually interested. There is a lot of room for Camunda to grow and improve processes throughout the company, and Alexis is excited to continue adding more use cases.

Catch this full talk to learn more about how Alexis implemented this solution and tries to “think Camunda” for new use cases in the future.

Process orchestration, test automation and community inspiration

Tales Mello Paiva, a Process Analyst at Kip4You, styles himself as a process aficionado. “I was fascinated by “collective intelligence,” such as with schools of fish and ants and swarms. “In an ant colony or a beehive, everyone knows what to do when and where.”

For his first steps in his journey toward optimizing process, Paiva studied robotics and automation in Japan, then returned to Brazil to study procedural engineering. Eventually he landed at Kip4You, where he got hands-on experience with process automation. This was also when he first was introduced to Camunda. A couple quotes on an early About page on Camunda’s site really stuck with him:

“Processes are the algorithms that determine how an organization runs…”

and

“Processes define how we work together within a team, across an organization, or with our customers, partners, and suppliers.”

Paiva found his hivemind community at Camunda Con 2020. “There was books and research and study, but here was the cherry on top, the red ribbon on top of it all.”

He noticed that when someone got stuck in the Camunda community, someone else would come along and offer some insight. A conference presentation inspired him to use the Robot Framework, an open-source keyword-driven RPA framework, along with Camunda and AgileKip to automate acceptance testing, which he “quasi-demos” for this morning’s audience.

“Happy tester, happy life,” Paiva jokes.

Other sessions not to miss

• Re-imagining, through process & technology transformation, the UK MODs Mapping Warehouse using Camunda 8: Toby Cook and Vicky James share how Deloitte has worked with the UK MOD to bring their mapping warehouse up to date. Specifically, they used human-centered design to address pain points. Deloitte developed a custom task list pattern with Camunda 8 to combine process and business data, using Elastic for rich searching and filtering, which vastly accelerated product delivery.
• Evolving Camunda to be a low-code SAP application platform: Volker Buzek, Development Architect at j&s-soft and Nicolas Barz, Consultant, showed how Camunda can be combined with SAP BTP to enable non-developers to participate in the development of process-driven software. This is not a simple task! Check this out for a fascinating demo that goes through developing, deploying and executing a short process.
• Modernising workload migration for an improved client experience: David Brakoniecki from BP3 and Lee Alderman from Bell Integration take us through a real-world case study of how a company can take a complex feature, modernize and streamline the processes, and create a coherent migration path the results in improved customer interactions and enhanced functionality.

Camunda as a driver to accelerate the energy transition

Niek Crasborn is a Product owner from Vendebron, an energy company from the Netherlands that is striving to get to “100% renewable energy as soon as possible.” He asks, how does Vandebron accelerate the energy transition, and how does Camunda accelerate Vendebron?

At Vendebron, a custom BPM workflow in Salesforce is a huge bottleneck. One team owns around 40 processes, and the custom technology is slow, with processes hidden in code. Innovation is slow. Instead of the black box of Salesforce owned by one team, how can Vendebron create an open and transparent toolbox that multiple teams can use?

Niek was excited to share this power with new teams… but cautioned that “with great power comes great responsibility.” While some teams were excited to have the new power and capabilities right away, others were concerned about taking on extra work and learning a new tool.

A valuable collaborative series of spark sessions helped get everybody on board with the changes that would come and the benefits that would bring.

Maarten van Veelen, Solution Architect from Incentro, then took over the presentation to talk about the technical implementation. He highlighted the complexity of the Salesforce custom workflow solution, which was powerful but so customized that it was challenging to train anyone on and to make changes. It was also not highly scalable due to Salesforce limitations.

Maarten guided us through the process of managing the migration, mentioning the primary challenges (including handling human input) and demonstrating a process that solves them, using Camunda as the central process orchestrator that keeps everything transparent and on track. He then showcased a recorded demo of the process in action, and highlighted the custom Optimize dashboard they use to gain process insights and locate opportunities for improvements.

Be sure to watch this one for a deeper look at how an innovative energy company utilized Camunda to remove a bottleneck and enable change and growth. As a bonus, if you watch until the end you’ll get to see our speakers sing :).

Future-ready decision management platform with Infosys & Camunda

“We make about 35,000 decisions every day,” says Ashok Kumar, senior industry principal at Infosys. “Decisions are the heartbeat of a business.”

Challenges to smooth decision-making include outdated languages in the code, a lack of documentation, and loss of legacy knowledge. Infosys attempts to modernize decision-making using AI discovery along with the Camunda engine.

So how do you decide between business rules and AI/machine learning? Kumar posits that the future of autonomous enterprise is business rules + AI. “Leverage AI outputs as an input into your rules,” Kumar says. “And leverage your rule outputs as a feature input into your AI models.”

A citizen developer and a senior developer walk into a bar

For Wednesday’s last lightning talk, Camunda senior community manager Maria Alcantara and Camunda software engineer Pavel Kotelevskii discuss how to collaborate between a street food vendor and a Michelin-starred chef—er, actually, make that a low-code casual developer and a professional senior developer.

“What do you think of these low-code features?” Alcantara asks Kotelevskii.

“They don’t take anything away from developers,” Kotelevskii says. “We can still do what we need to do. Low-code features are a huge enabler for communication.”

Alcantara (our low-code developer in this demonstration) shows a model she built to overcome creative block in her artistic hobbies. Alcantara is able to build a ChatGPT-created haiku prompt with low-code features, then asks Kotelevskii to collaborate on the build with her to add a feature that is not already part of the low-code Connectors. Kotelevskii builds a color palette generator and adds the Connector to the model.

“Even Michelin chefs sometimes need to prepare their food in advance,” Kotelevskii says, noting that he can use this new Connector in other models if and when necessary.

And what was the result? You can see Alcantara’s newly unblocked artistry above on the left (inspired by the model-driven ChatGPT-generated haiku on the right).

Other sessions not to miss

• Elevating digital foundations: Deutsche Telekom’s agile journey with Camunda BPMN: Oliver Webersberger from Deutsche Telekom explained their journey to agile and how it reduced time to market and enabled quicker responses to feedback. In this interactive session, Oliver goes beyond those outcomes into scaling for the future, exceeding what is expected of them and keeping their whole tech stack up to date in the process. Check it out.
• How to democratize process automation using Connectors: Karol Kukwa with ING Lease and Adam Liberadzki from Devapo discuss a new process orchestration solution for ING Lease. With Camunda 8 and the Connector SDK, process automation at ING Lease empowers product owners, accelerating the solution delivery and leading to more mature APIs.

Afterparty and networking

And that’s a wrap for Day 1! The after party and networking with DJ NICA is about to begin for those who are live in Berlin. For those online, I’ll see you over at Kumospace! For everyone, recordings of all sessions will be available as soon as next week.

Thanks for joining us, either in person, online, or right here on this post, and look out for another liveblog post tomorrow!

Update: Did you miss CamundaCon Berlin 2024, or just want to check out the sessions you couldn’t catch live? All replays are now available at the link below!

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