What is a SOAP according to Gartner?

Gartner says that Service Orchestration and Automation Platform (SOAP) "have become crucial for deploying complex workloads that deliver business services. These platforms combine workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning and extend capabilities to data pipelines and cloud-native architectures." There are six key SOAP capabilities: Application workflow orchestration simplifies recurring tasks and processes across multiple applications and environments to advance digital transformations. Event-driven automation facilitates immediate actions in response to specific events or triggers, including systems alerts and user activities. Scheduling, monitoring, visibility and alerting provides comprehensive oversight and real-time monitoring of automated tasks and workflows. Self-service automation fosters independence by giving all users the ability to manage automated workflows. Resource provisioning optimizes the allocation and management of IT resources like servers, storage and network capacity through automation. Data flow management oversees the movement and transformation of data, even big data workloads, across diverse systems. Thus, SOAPs have much more expansive functionality than limited job scheduling and workload automation tools. Traditional workload automation solutions are limited in their ability to adapt to modern use cases. SOAPs, in contrast, are versatile enough to accommodate application architectures, cloud-native infrastructure and data pipelines. They’re ideal for driving DevOps initiatives because they integrate with various toolchains. For infrastructure and operations leaders (I&O leaders), SOAPs play a crucial role in standardizing digital business processes. They empower IT teams to deploy agile business services that support customer-focused agility.

What is Gartner SOAP Magic Quadrant™?

A Magic Quadrant™ provides a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct: Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow. Visionaries understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute well. Niche Players focus successfully on a small segment or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others. Challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

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IT organizations typically adopt an “elemental” approach by having a fragmented collection of scripts and platform-specific scheduling tools. But, these uncoordinated automation solutions often result in increased IT operational costs and diminished staff productivity and efficiency.

Why IT Automation Solutions Need to be Designed for Change

Never before have IT organizations been under more pressure to accommodate change as a result of:

New Regulatory Requirements
New Technologies
Changing IT Environments
Evolving Business Requirements