Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT): A Guide for Automation Leaders
How consolidating automation technology is driving an exciting emerging market — and enhancing automation maturity
Introduction to BOAT
As automation becomes more prevalent, it’s also becoming more complex for enterprises. According to the 2024 State of Process Orchestration Report, more than half of IT and business leaders see an increase in complexity due to processes spanning multiple systems. What’s more, 62% say legacy technology is standing in the way of achieving their automation goals.
Between legacy systems and the many other technologies involved in automation, it can be difficult to gain visibility and control over the end-to-end process. That’s where process orchestration works to coordinate the various endpoints involved in a business process. Process orchestration often integrates common tools for automating tasks, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), robotic process automation (RPA), IT service management (ITSM), and more. It can also orchestrate human tasks, alongside other devices and systems (including legacy systems).
What is a task vs. an end-to-end business process?
Most automation tools (e.g. RPA) are designed to automate single tasks, or a small subset of tasks. To contrast, a more complex business process involves a series of tasks orchestrated across multiple endpoints (e.g. people, systems, and devices). Think of a mortgage approval business process. It involves tasks such as collecting a mortgage application online, verifying identity and financial information, checking credit, assessing risk, applying human checks, and more — before the customer receives a decision on their application at the end of the process. Some tasks within a fully orchestrated end-to-end business process may happen in parallel with one another, and they typically follow a certain logic.
Enterprises need to think holistically about their end-to-end business processes to improve their own internal efficiency and the customer experience. If a process is broken or inefficient, it could result in lost revenue or customer churn. Process orchestration plays a vital role in ensuring that business processes operate successfully.
What is BOAT?
Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT) are defined by Gartner as “a class of software technologies that enables enterprises to automate and orchestrate end-to-end business processes while connecting multiple enterprise systems of records via any applicable integration method. We are calling such a class of technologies — as the business orchestration and automation platform, aka BOAT. ¹”
As the market for automation tools consolidates, a BOAT platform integrates the capabilities from tools such as business process automation (BPA), RPA, and integration platforms-as-a-service (iPaaS) into a single solution. BOAT platforms can also help to operationalize AI via the orchestration of AI endpoints across an end-to-end process. In some cases, a BOAT platform can incorporate deterministic processes (where the outcomes are mapped in advance and clearly defined) with non-deterministic AI agents (which can take action, or make decisions with or without human approval).
¹Gartner, “Quick Answer: Beyond RPA, BPA and Low Code — The Future Is BOAT,” by: Saikat Ray, Keith Guttridge, Akash Jain, Sachin Joshi, Arthur Villa, July 11, 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
A BOAT platform is a powerful way for enterprises to orchestrate a wide range of business processes and automate them using their tools of choice. However, not all orchestration technology is created equal. True process orchestration capabilities are critical for delivering end-to-end automation — helping teams avoid both the management complexity and silos that typically exist within disparate automation technologies.
Let’s take a closer look at BOAT, why it’s important, and how to decide if it’s right for your enterprise.
The Convergence of Automation Technology
What are the benefits of Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies?
BOAT platforms transform how organizations approach automation by providing a framework for managing and scaling business processes. Process orchestration lies at the heart of BOAT, seamlessly integrating diverse automation methods including APIs, RPA, microservices, AI/agents and more. This orchestration ensures more effective end-to-end automation, reducing the complexity that comes from juggling multiple tools. By orchestrating connectivity across an end-to-end process, BOAT improves process efficiency and agility, and can even accelerate automation implementations.
Another key advantage of BOAT is its focus on consolidation. It brings together fragmented automation tools into a unified platform. This reduces the operational overhead, lowers the application footprint, and minimizes licensing costs. Consolidation also improves the user experience, since having a single platform is much simpler than working across disparate systems. For businesses struggling with the inefficiency of managing multiple disconnected tools, BOAT offers an integrated approach that can drive major efficiency and cost savings.
BOAT as a Catalyst for AI and Future Growth
BOAT platforms also excel in AI enablement, acting as a repository of unified metadata that fuels advanced AI capabilities like agentic AI (we’ll talk more about that later). BOAT consolidates data and process insights across systems, making the goal of intelligent automation easier to reach. Over time, the objective for many businesses is to adopt smarter, more autonomous workflows. For organizations that face challenges with integration, scalability, and strategy alignment — BOAT can provide the structure to advance their automation efforts. That’s because BOAT gives teams the ability to manage both human and machine tasks within a unified process orchestration and automation platform.
Finally, BOAT is a tool for future-proofing. As the automation landscape shifts toward intelligent, autonomous systems, BOAT gives organizations the infrastructure to evolve. Its blend of orchestration, connectivity, and AI features ensures that enterprises can stay competitive as the business environment (along with its underlying technology) changes. It’s important to note that a composable architecture is essential for organizations that want to advance their automation maturity. These teams often gradually adopt the best-of-breed capabilities they need to meet their business objectives, and demand the flexibility of a composable platform.
What Shifted the Market Toward BOAT?
Most automation challenges today stem from a combination of rapid technological advancements and the compounding technical debt teams face when attempting to integrate and scale diverse automation tools. These challenges underscore the need for holistic, orchestrated approaches like BOAT.
Siloed automation tools
Over years, organizations have accumulated a patchwork of tools — including RPA, iPaaS, BPM, and low-code platforms — resulting in disjointed, siloed implementations. These systems lack cohesion and create a “spaghetti architecture.” Custom AI solutions or standalone automation tools within SaaS products also operate independently, making integration challenges even more complex.
Pace of innovation
New developments like generative AI and agentic AI occur in rapid, unpredictable waves. Organizations often struggle to determine which innovations will provide sustainable value. Their existing automation infrastructures often lack the adaptability to incorporate cutting-edge AI technologies. In other words, the option to simply “add AI” into an existing automation system may be too complex, deepen technical debt, and limit the value of AI to that system.
Management and governance
Updating disparate automation tools consumes significant IT resources and adds to their maintenance burden. Not to mention, automation spread across multiple tools makes it difficult to achieve end-to-end visibility into workflows and business processes. Without proper governance, AI and automation tools can lead to unintended outcomes — or even risky regulatory compliance issues.
Scalability and resilience issues
Traditional siloed systems struggle to scale effectively. Many task-oriented automation tools lack the ability to integrate seamlessly into end-to-end business processes, leading to business process inefficiencies and bottlenecks. As a result, organizations often find themselves unable to evolve their automation capabilities, trapped in a cycle of maintaining their existing systems.
BOAT platforms are designed to address these challenges by providing a unified automation environment. By consolidating tools and providing a cohesive orchestration layer, BOAT minimizes the overhead of maintaining fragmented systems. Centralized control ensures that processes are transparent, secure, and compliant.
When combined with cloud-native and composable architectures, BOAT platforms enable organizations to scale efficiently and adapt to future technological waves. Embedded intelligence and orchestration capabilities allow teams to harness AI for meaningful, controlled automation.
The rapid pace of technological change and the burden of technical debt have made traditional automation approaches unsustainable. To contrast, BOAT platforms represent the next step in automation’s evolution, combining the strengths of existing tools into a unified framework that enables agility, scalability, and true business transformation.
What Does the Right Process Architecture Look Like for BOAT?
At the heart of BOAT lies process orchestration, a critical capability that integrates diverse automation endpoints into seamless, end-to-end business processes. You’ll see process orchestration at the base of the process architecture diagram below. It ensures that all people, systems, and devices within an automated business process are operating effectively and in the right progression. What’s more, process orchestration gives teams control over their automation efforts, offering a single view of their end-to-end business processes to enhance visibility, governance, and efficiency.
Process orchestration can help organizations avoid some of the common automation challenges highlighted above, including mounting technical debt from fragmented tools and diminished value from siloed automation solutions. In other words, a unified process orchestration layer can optimize and future-proof your automation efforts.
What are the Key Strengths of Process Orchestration Capabilities within BOAT?
- Composability: Modular architecture to support customizable, flexible processes
- Scalability and Resilience: Cloud-native infrastructure for handling large-scale, business-critical processes
- Embedded Intelligence: Integration of AI for decision-making, task automation, and intelligent document processing
- Orchestration of AI: Orchestrate AI endpoints and agents (with variable and objective outcomes) alongside deterministic automation and human tasks.
- Standardization: Use of BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) and DMN (Decision Model and Notation) to facilitate cross-functional collaboration and consistency
From there, look for these other critical task automation capabilities, as demonstrated in the diagram above:
Human-in-the-loop functionality integrates human decision-making into automated workflows, ensuring that high-stakes scenarios are verified and approved as needed.
Decision automation, powered by DMN, embeds repeatable, rule-based decisions into workflows, enabling faster and more consistent business processes.
Connectivity through a composable architecture allows seamless integration of automation technologies into existing tech stacks, providing teams with full visibility into end-to-end processes — while maintaining the flexibility to replace or upgrade individual components without disrupting the system.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) transforms isolated task automation into comprehensive workflows by embedding bots directly into orchestrated business processes, ensuring that legacy systems can be integrated without exposing APIs.
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) replicates human tasks using AI and machine learning to classify, extract, and process information from documents, minimizing errors and accelerating workflows.
In addition, a BOAT platform should provide the flexibility to connect with existing business solutions. For example, on the Camunda Marketplace, there is an extensive library of connectors to integrate various applications, from OpenAI to Salesforce. A rapidly growing pool of solution blueprints informed by real-world projects also kick-starts solution development. Some provide reusable process patterns, for example AI-powered routing of customer enquiries.
Others cover complete business process solutions, including BPMN process models, DMN decision tables, and task forms. For example, the Process Orchestration for SAP solution integrates S/4HANA and ECC into Camunda processes, enabling SAP users to be involved in end-to-end processes orchestrated by Camunda while staying in their usual SAP environment.
AI in BOAT: Enhancing automation through embedded intelligence
Generative and agentic AI are reshaping process automation. Generative AI, powered by large language models, accelerates process design by translating natural language into BPMN models, streamlining documentation, and providing decision support. For example, tools like Camunda Copilot make it easy to rapidly deploy AI-powered suggestions into process design and automation workflows, particularly in industries where speed and accuracy are critical.
Agentic AI takes automation a step further by enabling systems to act autonomously, making ad-hoc decisions and adapting workflows in real-time. This flexibility is especially valuable in dynamic scenarios like rerouting logistics or prioritizing customer inquiries. However, agentic AI’s complexity also introduces real risks, particularly when its decision-making operates as a “black box,” offering little transparency or auditability.
Enterprises should be cautious with agentic AI, especially in mission-critical business processes and within heavily regulated industries. AI agents run the risk of complicating compliance, creating operational risks, and ultimately undermining customer trust. A better approach combines agentic AI’s adaptability with deterministic frameworks like BPMN, ensuring the right balance of AI is used in relation to the risk — and that actions and decisions are traceable, justifiable, and aligned with regulatory requirements.
Look for a BOAT platform to balance AI’s innovation and control. Generative AI can fast-track process design, while agentic AI introduces autonomous decision-making. Together, they pave the way for predictive and adaptive workflows that optimize processes dynamically. By embedding agentic AI within deterministic structures, enterprises can unlock AI’s potential, while maintaining the transparency and accountability they need to earn valuable trust.
Enterprises need to think holistically about their end-to-end business processes to improve their own internal efficiency and the customer experience. If a process is broken or inefficient, it could result in lost revenue or customer churn. Process orchestration plays a vital role in ensuring that business processes operate successfully.
FEATURED STORY
Real-World BOAT
Application: Atlassian
Learn more about the business impact of Atlassian’s process orchestration here.
At CamundaCon New York 2024, Atlassian’s Intelligent Automation Platform Architect, Davish Shah, and Finance Tech Lead, Senjam Sarpal, discussed the significant impact of BOAT on their organization. They established a Center of Excellence (CoE) dedicated to process orchestration, which has been instrumental in driving innovation and continuous improvement across various departments, including finance, commerce, marketing, and customer support.
Atlassian’s journey with Camunda began in April 2020, leading to the deployment of over 16 applications powered by Camunda, processing more than 100 million decision instances and 65 million process instances. The CoE focuses on four key pillars: communication, tools, enablement, and solution delivery. This structured approach has streamlined processes and enhanced efficiency across the organization.
One example they highlighted is the “Shoplassian” business use case. Atlassian is using Camunda’s process orchestration capabilities to improve the user experience and streamline procurement processes for its marketplace. This initiative demonstrates how BOAT has enabled Atlassian to automate complex workflows, reduce manual interventions, and improve their overall operational efficiency.
How to Know if BOAT is the Right Automation Strategy for You?
A BOAT strategy may be right for your organization if you’ve been frustrated by the enterprise automation challenges detailed in this eBook. These range from technical debt, siloed implementations that inhibit growth and scale, and the inability to keep up with competitive demands or the pace of AI innovation.
Think about the existing automation technologies you have in place. If you have a fragmented automation tech stack made up of multiple tools, BOAT can help you consolidate and orchestrate your end-to-end business processes. Beyond what you have today, consider your future automation needs. For example, you may need to adopt an AI-infused approach to improve efficiency and scale your automation efforts. A BOAT platform can balance AI’s innovation alongside the structured, predictable business processes at the foundation of your organization’s successful automation strategy.
Above all, remember that process orchestration is foundational to realizing the full benefits of a BOAT strategy. Consider choosing a solution that specializes in end-to-end business process orchestration, so you’ll be set up to drive long term value from your automated processes. Organizations that are successful with process orchestration have improved their customer experience, streamlined their own operations, and saved costs. When done effectively, a BOAT strategy can help you experience the benefits of process orchestration today, while embedding the AI intelligence that will drive future automation success.
