Step into the Time Machine
In the nine years since Camunda released its popular process automation platform, a lot has changed. In 2013, Google Glass had just launched, both Facebook & Twitter IPO’d, and Steve Ballmer had just left as Microsoft CEO—it feels like eons ago.
Fast forward to CamundaCon 2019, Camunda Co-Founder Bernd Ruecker called attention to the fact that we build applications differently than we did 10 years ago—cloud, microservices, and serverless have all crossed the chasm into mainstream application development. At the same event, Camunda Co-Founder and CEO Jakob Freund mentioned the growing need for process automation at high-throughput scale. Jakob also mentioned the need to enable organizations to focus their time and resources on orchestration versus IT management. These statements were made in support of the “Camunda Cloud” project—a cloud-native, high throughput platform that had just been announced. This revolutionary product would become Camunda Platform 8.
The number of digital transactions continues to grow exponentially—according to McKinsey & Company’s report from Q4 2021, 82% of Americans are now using digital payments. As the digital revolution continues to grow at an unprecedented clip, we are witnessing an ever-growing demand for performance and resiliency of larger and larger transaction volumes. With today’s consumer apps having set a high standard for user experience, slow performance or downtime will lead to frustration, and customers will begin to seek out your competition.
End-to-end frustration with legacy and homegrown systems
Another common roadblock that we often hear about is the lack of connectivity or brittle UI automation of people, systems, and devices—this is especially apparent with legacy and homegrown systems. The lack of a consistently reliable manner to automate such systems prevents the end-to-end process from being automated or results in a never-ending, expensive maintenance loop that negates the benefit of automation all together.
Lack of collaboration leads to frustration and re-work
A recent study commissioned by Camunda, stated 95% of respondents agreed that for process automation to happen effectively, business and IT leaders need to be aligned and collaborating. As obvious as this may seem, we continue to see businesses struggle to achieve agility due to teams continuing to work in silos. The lack of effective collaboration often leads to expensive rework, and frustration on both sides.
Meet Camunda Platform 8
Camunda Platform 8 is completely redesigned to provide organizations with speed, scale, security, and resiliency via a breakthrough in horizontal scalability. This evolution is made possible by Zeebe, Camunda’s next generation cloud-native workflow engine.
Zeebe eliminates the bottleneck created by traditional database dependencies, allowing for essentially limitless linear scaling. As the system’s workload increases, you can add cluster nodes to process an unlimited amount of transactions at consistently low latencies with high throughput.
To ensure resilience, Zeebe comes with a new fail-over architecture that also supports geo-replication across data centers to provide enterprise-grade availability. If there’s ever a major incident, downtime is eliminated as the system will handle this seamlessly.
“Camunda Platform 8 has empowered us to build a scalable workflow-based messaging system for our customers, making it easy for us to run millions of process instances at any given time. The fact that it supports the existing BPMN 2.0 standard is a wonderful addition.”
– Vamsi Krishna, director of engineering at athenahealth
Intuitive integrations and universal connectivity
The open architecture in Camunda Platform 8 unlocks universal connectivity through an external task client pattern. This allows you to build secure and intuitive connectors across technology enablers from RPA, CRM, ERP, and BI Systems, to AI, IoT, APIs, and messaging platforms. As of today, connectors are available as a developer preview with a new REST and SendGrid connector directly accessible from within the new web Modeler.
Camunda’s new integration framework (coming soon) will give your team the freedom to develop custom connectors using their favorite programming languages. They can reuse and even govern usage of custom-built connectors across all aspects of the business.
This lets your team quickly realize and prove the value from process orchestration and gives your developers more freedom to focus on bigger strategic initiatives.
Helping business and IT collaborate with a common language and interface
Two keys to a successful digital initiative are collaboration and execution. Too often we see organizations struggle because IT and the business are “speaking different languages.” To realize value quicker, you need both the business and IT aligning on the challenge and outcome in a clear and user-friendly environment.
We completely reimagined Modeler in Camunda Platform 8 to unlock deep collaboration between business users and IT. Having your business team’s perspective is essential as they’re intimately familiar with the business processes and desired outcomes. Equally necessary is giving IT clear requirements and workflows so they can provide guidance on successfully developing the automation.
Improved collaboration combined with the new integration framework empowers business agility by drastically reducing the time it takes to design and agree on process changes. Your team can rapidly implement processes that orchestrate people, systems, and devices—including modern microservices as well as legacy applications to quickly show value. You’ll spend less time getting to consensus and more time on meaningful iterations—a proven recipe for success.
Our cloud or yours? We’ve got you covered
Every organization is different, so we created two ways your team can use Camunda Platform 8 for your next automation project—SaaS and Self-Managed.
Camunda Platform 8 – SaaS
Software as a Service (known as SaaS) is the easiest way to get started with plans available for production usage of any volume. The benefits of Camunda Platform 8 – SaaS, include it:
- Being hosted by us with no technical set up required by you.
- Being optimized for resilience, latency, and security.
- Allowing for focus on development versus maintaining infrastructure.
- Being available with a 30-day free trial.
- Offering flexible packages for any volume of process instances, decisions, and/or users.
- Being ISO 27001 certified.
Camunda Platform 8 – Self-Managed
Camunda Platform 8 – Self-Managed lets you host on your own hardware or cloud instance. This is a nice option for those who require systems to be run on their infrastructure for compliance reasons. Camunda Platform 8 – Self-Managed allows for:
- You to host. Being familiar with Kubernetes will be helpful for the set up/installation on your infrastructure.
- Us to supply the cloud-native goodness, but performance, security, uptime, redundancy, and resource allocation will need to be managed by your team.
- The use on your own hardware or any cloud provider such as Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS.
In addition, Camunda Platform 8 – Self-Managed also has:
- A free edition, learn more.
- Customized plans depending on your unique needs.
- An ISO 27001 certification.
See why Camunda Platform 8 customers love our new platform
Dozens of organizations are already benefiting from Camunda Platform 8. Find out how Goldman Sachs, 3ap, and Swiss Re are using universal process orchestration to delight customers and outpace competitors.
- Why Goldman Sachs Built a Brand New Platform on Camunda
- 3ap Automates State-of-the-Art Hospitality Platform with Camunda
- Swiss Re’s Transformative Journey Toward a Modern and Cloud-Native Orchestration Solution
The future is bright
We remain laser focused on our core values and what our customers have come to love about Camunda. These values center around developer productivity and friendliness, open architecture, collaboration, scale and resilience, and intelligent analysis. We have an exciting roadmap laid out; if you are interested in learning more, please contact your customer success manager, who can schedule a personalized roadmap presentation with our product team.
The imperative for digital-native strategies is clearly becoming table stakes for most. Yet selecting the right solution requires historic knowledge of your organization’s past with an eye on upcoming trends. For organizations looking to future-proof their operations, Camunda Platform 8 sets the bar for orchestrating complex processes across people, systems, and devices. After trying Camunda Platform 8 for yourself, you’ll quickly realize why we’re trusted to boost corporate performance and help our customers outpace even the most disruptive competitors.
How Can I Get Started?
Getting started with Camunda Platform 8 is simple.
The first step is choosing whether you’d like us to host the solution or if you’ll manage that. Once you decide that, you can simply sign up for a full-featured trial of Camunda Platform 8 – SaaS Edition or select the limited production Camunda Platform 8 – Self-Managed Edition.
We recommend trying out the SaaS Edition if you want to quickly create and deploy a test process as a proof of concept.
Where can I go to learn more before signing up?
As always, we have a plethora of helpful resources you can take advantage of immediately. Here’s our quick-start recommendations:
- Attend our upcoming Camunda Platform 8 release webinar taking place live on April 28, as part of our Expert Sessions agenda during Camunda Community Summit 2022.
- Read our product team’s official Camunda Platform 8 technical blog post.
- Check out Camunda Platform 8 FAQs for fast answers to common questions.
- Read through our extensive product docs.
- Reflections from Camunda Co-founders Jakob and Bernd.
- Our friends on the Camunda DevRel team have put together the ultimate Camunda Platform 8 post for Camunda Platform 7 users—you don’t want to miss this.
- Review the Camunda Automation Platform 7.17 release notes blog.
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io