Published on the 25/07/2024 | Written by Heather Wright

Consolidating business orchestration and automation…

Saikat Ray is enthusiastic about the emerging trend of ‘Boat’, aka business orchestration and automation platforms, and its benefits for businesses, though he admits he might be a little biased on the matter.

“Businesses today are facing a tough choice. There are so many similar looking products and vendors who are promising the world. But with Boat there is a promise of consolidating that and reducing the software footprint within your organisation to platform software,” Ray , who is a vice president, analyst in Gartner’s enterprise applications and IT leaders practice, tells iStart.

Gartner says the rapid overlap of automation technologies is prompting organisations to seek platforms that can cater to the end-to-end needs of a wide range of automation use cases.

At the same time, vendors in markets such as robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA), integration platform as a service (IPaaS), and low code, no code, along with ‘mega vendors’ are offering common capabilities including orchestration of business processes, enterprise connectivity with any type of integration and design, optimisation and discovery of business processes, not to mention generative AI.

“They are all coalescing,” Ray says.

That points to a future where a consolidated vendor platform, combining the key elements of RPA, BPA and iPaaS such as low-code development, cloud-native architecture, autonomous orchestration and event-driven triggers, enables end-to-end business process orchestration and automation.

“Boat is not a new concept. It is giving a name to a trend that has been happening over the last two or three years,” Ray says.

“Orchestration of your business processes is very important – it’s the big O in Boat – and then essentially task automation via application agnostic integration, which we are calling enterprise connectivity, that’s also going to be an important capability.”

For businesses, it means instead of buying siloed solutions from multiple vendors, Boat could become the platform for the future where organisations can start centralising control points and the management of their business process orchestration.

But Ray says there’s more to it than that.

“These platforms are also going to be the conduit for connectivity, or point-to-point integration for business processes – getting the data from the ERP, CRM, legacy or home grown systems.

“And they’re also going to be the conduit for your AI strategy. You don’t need to build a separate AI product strategy because some of these Boat platforms are going to bring it with them. They are going to have the AI agents, the generative AI competence and LLM prompts that you’re looking for, and that’s going to help you with your productivity and what not.”

It sounds a big ask, but there’s a big market at stake – Ray is forecasting Boat to be a $50-60 billion market in three years.

“It really goes back to the outcomes for business. At the end of the day, we can talk about technology for hours, but what really matters is outcome. Business hardly cares if it is Boat or RPA, BPA or whatever.”

Ray says other automation technologies aren’t satisfying all the use cases within the enterprise spectrum, hence the need for Boat.

“Boat is one platform tackling at least 80 percent of all use cases within the business process automation world for your business operations, whether that’s finance, supply chain, HR, whatever.”

Boat is also not going to be a buy versus build argument, instead being a blended model – Ray believes it will be primarily build via composition with a lot of orchestration via composing stuff.

“A lot of blending will happen. It’s not pure build anymore, there is a flavour of low-code there. And with that, businesses will have a lot of value prop in terms of these Boats where they can rapidly start building things.

“It’s no longer just the older monolithic BPM platforms, but there is a BPM flavour because you are now able to handle long running processes, you’re able to do case management, you’re able to straight through processing – all those things you couldn’t do flat out with an RPA or maybe with an IPaaS which is a lot more IT centric.

“So it is a lot more business focused, business friendly.”

Apps will also be developed on top of the platforms, ingesting data from unstructured data sources, doing task or process mining, enabling and orchestrating AI agents.

“All these things are possible within these platforms. That’s very exciting for business.”

Ray says from his conversations with Australian clients he senses a pivot back to process orchestration and process management, like business process management, which used to be a core focus 5-10 years ago.

“I would say the Boat platforms, which will be more process-centric and more end-to-end orchestration centric, will find some good success in the Australian and New Zealand markets.”

To be clear, there are already vendors who could call themselves Boat providers – but don’t (yet) because it is a newly minted Gartner term.

Ray calls out the likes of Appian and Pega in the low-code space, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow and integration players including Workato, or RPA player UI path.

“There are so many different vendors who could easily classify themselves as a business orchestration and automation technology.”

But he notes again the importance of the ‘orchestration’ aspect of Boat.

“We are differentiating these products by their capability, or their ability to orchestrate a wider range of business processes – that’s where the main differentiation is going to be.”

With ERP and CRMs also undergoing transformation, Ray says we might see the likes of SAP, Oracle or Salesforce coming up with their own ERP-centric or CRM-centric Boats. There will also be standalone Boats, he says.

If Boat’s future looks bright, there are some caveats attached.

Key is the danger of vendor lock-in.

“Architecturally you have to be very prepared. You have to have very good integration ecosystem, you also have to have a good layer of data abstraction or separation – now you can bring in any Boat, and you can replace that with any other Boat. That should be the mindset for business.

“However, the benefit here is you are bringing in a wholistic platform instead of just an RPA as a standalone or BP as a standalone, or you could even leverage something from your existing ERP or CRM – you do not always have to look outside.”

So how does Boat play with another concept bubbling up – agentic AI?

“In my view there is a lot of AI-wash going on right now and what we call agents could be very much a bot with some AI capabilities,” Ray says. “Boat is going to be a much more mature solution for business. We can consider it as a conduit to do a lot of business operations, end-to-end orchestration and what-not, which is going to solve a lot of business problems.”

And if AI agents really are more than just hype, Ray says Boat will house and orchestrate them.

“Boat would be necessary for those agents. In essence, I don’t see contradiction or conflict between Boat and agentic automation. Boat is going to be the vehicle, or driver, for agentic automation.”