Camunda rolls out a cloud-native platform for orchestration-powered automation

The Situation: Open-source workflow and decision-automation platform Camunda is staking its claim to becoming your enterprise-wide process orchestrator with an updated platform hitting the market in April 2022

The move to a cloud-native workflow engine places the Berlin-based business’ cloud offering front and center, and it is the first major update to the engine in seven years. It aims at serving what Camunda sees as a growing need for scalability and resilience in enterprise process automation.

Camunda adds OneOffice-centric, scalable orchestration to the automation discussion

Camunda stands out because it is not trying to force stakeholders to think in marketing-shaped pigeonholes. The company, which has a business process management (BPM) heritage, describes its goal of universal process orchestration as the coordination of individual business tasks that span people, systems, and devices. Diagrams coordinate tasks, and a workflow engine executes process instances.

The intent is to replace traditional BPM systems with a cloud-native, cost-effective, developer-friendly alternative. Camunda sees itself partnering, rather than competing, with robotic process automation (RPA) and process intelligence vendors.

Camunda banks on its business operations background to effect its intent to bring IT and business together. It links workflows to system performance and IoT (internet of things) inputs, and its incident management capabilities align with IT operations scenarios.

In all but name, Camunda is referencing a OneOffice mindset by enabling collaboration between developers and designers via strong community support and progressing toward dashboards outlining enterprise and functional performance.

Exhibit 1: Camunda built Platform 8 around cloud-native workflow engine Zeebe

Source: Camunda, 2022

As enterprises face the challenges of visualizing their end-to-end business processes, they realize task-based automation is little more than a band-aid. And with restricted views of all the process endpoints, RPA is always going to be at risk of breaking when unexpected changes occur.

A cloud-native engine opens the way to micro-services instead of bots

Camunda’s view—and its subsequent focus on cloud-native micro-services in the new workflow engine—is that services encapsulated in APIs should replace bots, moving away from bot-powered automation and toward an orchestration-powered approach.

This view aligns well with businesses with structured operations, complex processes, and typically at least 1,000 employees.

Current customers include Vodafone, Allianz, ING, Intuit, Deloitte, and Santander in an impressive roster of blue chips. Vodafone’s head of project and demand management, branded reseller business, identified Camunda’s enabling of business-process-centered communications as one of the greatest benefits of working with the software. He praised it for fostering close cooperation between business and IT.

The ability to handle high volumes will be attractive to target enterprises

Camunda’s claim to the orchestration-layer crown is based on its belief that rivals cannot compete with it on all three of its core benefits: it can orchestrate across every endpoint, it brings IT and business together, and it offers advantages in dealing with high-volume transactions.

Competitors may make similar claims about their range of connectors or approaches to bringing IT and business together (whether through low-code, drag-and-drop style visualizations or natural-language-enabled process design), but it is in the transaction volume Camunda can handle that we find an attractive differentiator.

Camunda claims unlimited transactions at low latencies and failover architecture with replication at data centers worldwide for instant backup. Its secret sauce is in its ability to handling “persistent state” challenges. Persistent state solutions eliminate the additional effort of establishing new connections every time a script needs to talk to a database, resulting in higher speed and throughput.

While automation is in the eye of the beholder, Camunda needs clearer narratives to be heard in a noisy market

Camunda has done the hard bit in building out a compelling set of capabilities. By bringing IT and business operations closer, the company demonstrates strong alignment with the OneOffice mindset. HFS hears positive feedback from partners like Infosys.

Robotic process automation (RPA) and process intelligence providers often dominate discussions in business operations. HFS believes the real value of Camunda lies in a much broader proposition of process orchestration encapsulating workforce orchestration underpinned by cloud-native workflows extended to automation.

The Bottom Line: Orchestration elevates the importance of bringing together all required elements to deliver an end-to-end process

Camunda is battling for your attention in a market awash with acronyms and “hot new things”—from RPA and low code through integration and beyond. Its focus on orchestration will help you recognize the importance of bringing together the multiple elements required to deliver successful end-to-end processes, which is further reflected in Camunda’s focus on integrating business and IT.

Customers will need to hear more about the business benefits of orchestration-led cloud processes. Camunda must bring evidence of the value of self-improving feedback loops, refinement of data’s efficacy and value, and business gained through the organization’s new agility in innovating and responding to market needs faster.