We hope you’re as excited as we are for Day 2 of CamundaCon New York 2024, which kicks off soon! After an amazing day 1, day 2 of the conference is here, and we’ll be bringing you the latest updates from the event live as they’re happening. Be sure to check back frequently as we’ll be updating this post throughout the day.
If you couldn’t join in person in NYC, it’s free to join online—so you can still catch all the sessions! Just register at the link below, check out the agenda and make sure you don’t miss anything. We’ll see you there, whether online or in person!
Morning run with Bernd
Did you join Bernd and Co. at 6:30am this morning for a run through NYC? It was a refreshing day for those who made it (which, uh, did not include the authors of this post – but we’re told it was fun! :-D). See if you can spot a special guest below 😉
The main event is about to start!
Welcome!
Camunda’s Amy Johnston welcomed everyone to Day 2 of CamundaCon New York 2024! After a brief reminder for the Selfie Screen (remember to tag your selfies with #camundacon and #selfie to join!), how to navigate all four tracks both in person and online that will be taking place over the next two days. Amy also shared highlights including key speakers and events (like lunch, of course, and our behind the scenes videos), our AMA and sponsor booths, the always popular Unconference, in-person AI workshops and much more going on today.
Next up, she welcomed Camunda Chief Technologist and Co-Founder Bernd Reucker, CTO Daniel Meyer, and Principal Product Manager Bastian Koerber.
Opening Keynote with Bernd, Daniel and Bastian
As he opened today’s morning keynote, Bernd jumped right in with a discussion of the spaghetti architecture that had been referenced yesterday. You all remember that? It looks… not fun. The pressure on organizations to try and improve quickly leads to a hunt for quick wins and point solutions that look good at first, but ultimately add to technical debt and just make the spaghetti worse.
The solution is not more spaghetti. The solution is orchestration so we can cut those spaghetti lines.
Live Demo
Of course, this is a Bernd keynote, so you know there has to be a live demo. Bernd walked us through a claims processing demo, which incorporated new Camunda functionality including IDP to scan the claims document with info and images, native RPA bots to enter data, DMN tables and more. He demonstrated how easily the process can be changed and adapted, even showing (as an example) how you could incorporate openAI to help decide on approval decisions automatically. His demo also included a live example of our new SAP integration in action as well.
Enterprise Process Orchestration
It won’t come as a surprise to you that Bernd (and everyone at Camunda) has been thinking a lot about how to achieve successful process orchestration at the enterprise level. In fact, along with fellow Camundi Leon Strauch, he recently wrote a book on the topic (which you can get a signed copy of if you’re here here!). He described effective strategies for, and benefits you get from, holistic change that runs from top to bottom of an organization.
A modern composable process orchestration and automation platform
Daniel then took the stage to talk about the way Camunda is looking at the changed in the market and growing the Camunda Process Orchestration and Automation platform by improving its leading capabilities like Zeebe, adding new functionality like RPA and IDP, and flexible composability that allows you to use the tools that work best for you at every step.
AI-Enhanced Process Orchestration
Next up, Bastian took center stage to talk about a particularly exciting new direction for Camunda, AI-enhanced process orchestration. He described the ways this can help you create processes faster, execute your processes more intelligently, and orchestrate more endpoints. Bastian then spoke to the power of our new Camunda Copilot BPMN Chat, and demonstrated its effectiveness live to build a process model right on stage.
Agentic AI and the future of AI with Camunda
Daniel then joined Bastian on the stage to talk about the evolution of AI, describing a journey progressing from using AI to answer questions to having AI take actions. This direction is in many ways represented by the emerging concept of “Agentic AI.” Bastian returned to the demo screen, showcasing how Camunda is already implementing agentic AI. Daniel followed up the demo off with an explanation of how this can be applied today at many levels of a business process or organizational need, the importance of a composable AI Agent architecture.
Bastian spoke excitedly about where AI will be going at Camunda, including the need for it to be very secure, provide actionable insights, and make creation effortless. Then Daniel delved into a bit more detail of a concept that Jakob introduced yesterday, “Autonomous Orchestration with Guardrails.” He showed an intriguing BPMN design showing a partially dynamic agentic area (which you can see in the box). You can see below where there are no arrows and the agent can choose, but also where there is an arrow that points to when a human needs to review. This enables you to build a flow for agentic action that is controlled, all within the context of a BPMN model that is visible, logged and provides a real audit trail of what’s going on so you can always monitor and understand it.
This is an exciting area of development for Camunda, and there will be several other talks today that get deeper into it, so be sure to check those out today to learn more. And don’t miss the full recording of this talk to see Bastian’s live demos in action and hear every word.
The Rise Of Agentic Process Management
Next up, Craig Le Clair, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, joined to bring us “up a few levels of altitude” and talk more broadly about the future of AI in the market and the world. He opened with a story about John Lennon, who supposedly when asked at 5 years old what he wanted to be when he grew up, answered “happy.” Craig noted that the development of the next generation of automation truly has the potential to make us all happier. Orchestration will play a huge role in that.
Craig spoke to the power of a new interface to really change the game. You can go back all the way to the printing press, but more recently it’s the iPhone and ChatGPT that have fundamentally changed the way people interact with knowledge. Agentic AI has the potential to be the next fundamental change. As Craig noted, it will remove the friction between people and technology.
One important note that I found helpful was when Craig defined the difference between AI Agents and Agentic AI, two very similar sounding terms. Essentially, AI Agents can perform tasks for people, and Agentic AI can perform tasks themselves.
Agentic AI and the evolving Automation Fabric architecture is going to have a massive impact on the world. Craig noted that according to Forrester’s model, there are 25 million customer facing support agents working today, but in five years, there will be five million as virtual agents take on much of this work. This will allow people to take on more complex and higher value tasks further down the chain. There are going to be a number of places where this kind of transformation may take place.
Financial services are also primed for this kind of transformation. For those of you viewing at home, this slide surely stood out.
Craig noted that DPA has a major role to play as automation evolves, particularly with task automation and for long running processes.
Craig spent some time discussing the challenges with incorporating AI into existing workflows. There is a lot of change management to work through, and a lot of trust to build. This actually raises the visibility of automation CoEs and the role they can play in enabling this across an organization. He described the benefits of an “automation strike team” to help prevent problems and help with strategy and planning, among other things.
“Analyst firms love confusion,” Craig admitted, because it gives them something to solve. Right now there is a lot of platform confusion. He pointed out the players in last year’s Forrester DPA Wave, noting that the players will be different and in different places next time this refreshes. There are a lot of options out there, and as we’ve heard elsewhere, things are likely to change and converge.
Craig closed with a brief nod to his new book, Random Acts of Automation, which aims to explain the impact of the changes in the automation world that we’ve been hearing so much about. Certainly, technology and automation are evolving quickly, and this talk gave us plenty to think about.
Unconference
At this time the Unconference is kicking off in the Green Stage. Picture below, the Deehan Brothers are ready to go and wondering why someone is taking a picture of them. They, along with other Camundi and attendees, will be driving this event with no strict agenda – just show up and make a proposal! The Unconference is in-person only and not recorded.
How Barclays transformed post-trade settlements with Camunda
Trade processing is incredibly important to a financial institution like Barclays, and it’s also very complex. Barclays leaders Shakir Ahmed, Head of International securities Settlements Tech. and Larisa Kvetnoy, Managing Director Markets Post Trade Technology, joined us next to talk about how Camunda helped them revolutionize the way they handle post-trade processing. As Shakir noted, these are a big deal, as if one trade fails, there is often a cascading series of failures, which can have disasterous results for the whole company.
The team was looking into a microservices architecture to try and improve their agility and performance, and initially weighed whether to use choreography or orchestration to manage them. In the end they settled on orchestration because it gave them the highest level of control over the whole end-to-end process.
Making use of an orchestrator like Camunda 8 brought significant benefits. Crucially, process speed and scalability significantly increased, but that was far from the only benefit. Thanks to the flexibility of the orchestration platform, Barclays was able to easily connect with legacy systems from 30+ years ago and evolve iteratively without having to completely migrate or remove all the old systems at once (which would have been nearly impossible). The ability to get a real-time understanding of the state of the process through Operate also lets them answer questions from other stakeholders across the company about performance that they never could before. On top of it all, these changes ease regulatory concerns by enabling Barclays to provide faster service (aligning with initiatives like T+1) and provide a comprehensive audit trail more easily.
This was a fascinating and comprehensive look at the way a large company with extensive legacy architecture and regulatory requirements was able to greatly improve their performance and drive real business value with Camunda. Be sure to watch the recording to get all the details and hear the Q&A.
Tracking RSM’s journey from legacy to process orchestration
“To get started, neither one of us are technical,” said Ken Koch, consultant and product owner at RSM. “So don’t ask us technical questions.” Koch and Tom Clark, principal and assurance digital services lader at RSM, spoke on the orange stage this morning about the challenges of leading a 100-year-old company with 26 legacy systems into a future of process orchestration.
Challenges with audit tools
“As you can imagine, changing the way of thinking at a 100-year-old company is super easy,” Clark said. “I had hair when I started.”
“My hair was brown,” Koch said.
To put it simply, Clark said, technology is the easy part—changing people’s minds and hearts is hard.
“To be honest, we’re probably using some of the same tools we used a hundred years ago,” Koch said. “We have a lot of legacy systems.” RSM has about 26 different systems that don’t talk to each other. “Before Camunda, I was moving client data around in my covered wagon.”
On an organizational level, no one at RSM knew where any client team was are at in its processes without going and checking in with that team individually.
How Camunda is helping RSM transform
“We just went live with Camunda in May,” Koch said. “We’ve already got 9,000 engagements running through Camunda since then. It’s working, it’s happening, but we’ve got a long ways to go.”
“We’re trying to build this ecosystem, Luca, to automate different steps,” Clark mentioned. “We’re looking at eighty hours worth of savings per engagement.” This of course introduces business changes in training and how fees are calculated with fewer hours. But the goal is not to have technical employees spinning their wheels in meetings or with administration. You want them to be working in their primary area of expertise.
“To me, technology is as much sociology and psychology as anything else,” Clark said, adding that it doesn’t matter if your technology is agile if your people aren’t.
What we’ve learned
Data integration is hard. Every one of the 26 different applications has different definitions for their data. Creating master data and standardizing process are some of the biggest challenges RSM is dealing with.
The internal fear has been a challenge to overcome. “We have IT people with 20 years of experience who’ve built these legacy systems, and they’re not sure about moving data elsewhere,” Koch said. “It’s not always easy, telling someone that the 20-year-old application they’ve poured their heart and soul into is going away.”
Other RSM business lines are waiting for this team to be successful before they buy in to process orchestration. “This can put people on guard,” Clark said. “It takes a lot of work, so we start from small processes. Then people will come out of the woodwork to support it, because it’s proven successful.”
But BPMN diagrams and real-time data updates are slowly increasing buy-in.
Clark said he’s trying to encourage leadership to build toward composability. “You have to accept that everything’s changing all the time.” In five years, it may be more efficient to swap two applications out for one new plug-in. “If you make it composable from the beginning, you can make changes without having to change everything.”
ICYMI
- Camunda Connectors unleashed – Crafting future-proof low-code solutions. At the same time, an in-person workshop was taking place over on the Purple Stage. This popular session focused on how to use Camunda Connectors efficiently in low-code environments, solving common challenges and explaining how to develop your own Connector tailored to your business. It also goes higher level to understand the whole Connector ecosystem and how to design a sustainable process architecture.
- Unconference continues: The Unconference will be going throughout the afternoon. We just took a quick peek and there is a lively conversation going on up there. We hope everyone attending is enjoying!
Book Signing, Behind the Scenes of Unconference and Lunch
Now we have a break for lunch. At the same time, you can enjoy a quick look behind the scenes of Unconference (above, Michael Sanders is inviting you to participate)!
Bernd and Leon are also signing their new book on the terrace. If you’re here, grab yourself an early access copy and an autograph!
And of course, our latest local celebrity didn’t want to miss out on the fun and mingled with the crowd at lunch as well :).
Enhancing Risk Management by leveraging workflow Orchestration and DMN at a larger scale
Capital One is one of the largest banks in the US, with hundreds of millions of customers. As Sean Webb, Product Manager at Capital One explained, managing risk is crucial for any bank (and really any person), but all the more so for an organization so large and highly regulated.
Risk management, as Sean noted, is often a decentralized discipline across an entire company. But there are benefits to centralizing it, as well as challenges. Senthilkumar Manokaran, Master Software Engineer at Capital One spoke to the kinds of best-in-class requirements that were critical for a risk management platform. Once they had these requirements around process and task management, decision management, optimization capabilities, multi-tenancy and more, they went and searched if anything in the market already met them. That led them to Camunda.
Sean went on to explain the challenge of how to distribute ownership – if it’s too centralized or too federated, there could be problems. Fortunately, Sean said, “BPMN and DMN were easy enough to use that once we got everyone over the initial hump for how tihs adds value, people were able to own these things and make changes on their own… most people ended up taking complete ownership and we could just be there for additional guidance.”
Sean talked with obvious delight about meetings with business partners where they could talk through a BPMN or DMN model together. Then at the end, when the business partner asks how long it will take to implement these changes, the answer is simply “as long as it takes to upload the model – we just did it!” Thanks to this, lag time in review cycles and communication between teams can be drastically reduced, and things can be improved in real time.
This was a really engaging session with something for everyone, exploring in detail both the technical and business value that Camunda brought to Capital One. I found it interesting that their risk management team seemed to be doing a lot of what a CoE might do, and indeed this was the first question addressed in the Q&A (short answer: they are, but they aren’t). Don’t miss the recording to hear more including the full lively Q&A.
Revolutionizing digital onboarding for financial services: Quicksign’s Journey with Camunda 8
“We are focusing on a very business approach,” Charlotte Stril, chief marketing officer at QuickSign, said of today’s presentation. “If you have technical questions, we can get you set up with our CTO.” Stril and Thibaut Ravise, cofounder and CEO at QuickSign, spoke on the orange stage after lunch today about how Camunda 8 has helped their organization easily onboard clients who are giants in the financial industry.
“We need to transform the way our clients serve their customers digitally,” Ravise said. QuickSign has three goals for providing service to their clients:
- Provide an easy user experience that enables high conversion rates
- Comply with local regulations
- Mitigate risk of customer default
But you won’t meet business requirements just by connecting a few shiny services. “Process orchestration is very important,” Ravise said, “which is why we’re here.”
QuickSign’s CTO, Frederic Guay, did a deep dive on the competition and found that Camunda 8 gave them the most scalability, the most resilience, and the best ability to meet regulatory requirements across the EU.
“About 50 percent of our workforce is working on our process orchestration pillar,” Stril said. She compared QuickSign to an oil rig. “Except we’re turning raw data into gold.” With a relatively small workforce and so much data to process, QuickSign leans on AI for wading through data and decision-making, and also BPMN modeling.
The fact that nondevelopers can use Camunda’s BPMN modeling facilitates helps QuickSign comply with strict regulations across Europe and the US. Business experts are determining processes and workflows that best suit the needs of large clients who require strict compliance but also demand the highest innovation as quickly as possible.
“With Camunda 8, it’s simple to distribute tasks to external works,” Stril said. “We have our incredibly niche expertise we provide to our clients, and Camunda is enabling us to do that efficiently.”
Features like Camunda Operate and Optimize have become indispensable for the customer care teams at QuickSign. “They allow us to deep dive into specifics,” Stril said. “And these teams are always working on high-stress problems that need quick solutions.”
Stril emphasized that QuickSign must have very high availability and a very robust infrastructure. “When we were choosing Camunda 8, we could not compromise on any of those commitments because of our compliance requirements across many countries,” she said. “The good news is we didn’t have to.”
Stril and Ravise wrapped up by noting that Camunda 8 lets QuickSign as an organization forget about administrative issues, allowing them to focus on their core business.
Building a SAAS automation platform on top of Camunda 8
Ed Perez, Head of Architecture for data and Analytics, took the stage next to present for BNY (formerly BNY Mellon). BNY is a major bank with a longstanding history – it was the first stock ever traded on the NYSE, with over 50 trillions in assets under custody, making them the largest such bank in the world. Given their central role in global finance, they think very carefully about how they operate and manage their business critical processes.
BNY uses a cloud-native platform they call their Data Vault, which allows them to model, govern, discover, visualize and connect their data. There are many vault platform services and tenancy models they need to maintain and develop, along with APIs and other interfaces to manage the UI, services and users.
To develop their vault, should they build or buy? This is a question many organizations face at one point or another. Initially BNY tried to build what they needed, but it’s a big undertaking and as Ed noted often “your eyes are bigger than your stomach” and you think something can be done quickly that takes far longer. As they began to consider the buying option, they assembled a list of requirements, including use cases (data retention, capturing statistics, client-facing telemetry), non-functional requirements (security, resilience, high availability, scalability), and integration (complete flexibility over the UI, don’t want to remap things).
Originally, Camunda 7 was used sparingly at BNY, but over time they collaborated with Camunda and learned that Camunda 8 provided something different and more modern. SaaS availability, horizontal scalability, a maintained event-stream and more were among the many reasons why it met their requirements, and pointed to a huge opportunity.
Ed walked through the resulting automation service architecture that they were able to develop, explaining why they made each choice at each step. He also covered their BPMN deployments, showing their workflow and how they run integration tests and deploy through different environments to ensure high quality.
Ed capped off his talk with a discussion of what’s next for BNY. Training and implementing more use cases are a big part of the future, but also the continued migration of legacy workflows, greater use of Connectors, priority queues and of course developing AI/Agentic flows.
This was a detailed and technical look at how BNY built their automation platform on top of Camunda 8 SaaS. Don’t miss the full session in the recording.
Innovation through transformation: Learn from Alliander’s migration to Camunda 8 to drive the future of energy
“Raise two arms if you are a Trekkie.” Floris van der Meulen, business analyst of system operations at Alliander, and Eric Hendriks, senior software engineer at Alliander, presented a love for process orchestration and Star Trek on the orange stage this afternoon. But there was plenty for nonTrekkies, too.
One of six distribution system operators (DSOs) in the Netherlands, Alliander provides energy to 300,000 homes. The energy leader currently uses Camunda to orchestrate their Autonomous Grid Manager, which handles load demands.
Challenges in the energy industry
Solar park growth, the war in Ukraine, and a need for 1.6 millon chargers for electric cars by 2030 are all challenges in the energy industry. “If we overload the grid,” Hendriks said, “we could destroy it.”
To keep up with the increasing changes, Alliander moved from Camunda 7 open-source to Camunda 8 enterprise.
Migrating to Camunda 8
The migration was not a trivial task, but “it was worth the risk,” der Meulen said. They decided against big bang and inside-out migration methods and went with new world instead, migrating piece by piece.
der Meulen used a BPMN diagram to map out Alliander’s migration to Camunda 8, and pointed out some of the challenges as well:
- Camunda 8 did not have execution listeners, “and we were using them,” Hendriks said.
- Alliander was using its own UI and layering Camunda 8 underneath it, which added another level of complexity.
- They also needed to overhaul their testing procedures.
But once all processes were migrated, Hendriks noted with a sigh of relief that they were finally able to sunset the old system. “I’ll just say don’t code. Orchestrate,” he added. They have about a dozen processes left to fully orchestrate.
“A lot still needs to be done,” der Meulen agreed, “but we are on the right track.”
ICYMI
For those here in person, a pair of very interesting in-person workshops just took place back to back on the Purple Stage that we just have to mention:
- Building AI Solutions with Camunda: A hands-on workshop: Bastian Koerber, Principal Product Manager at Camunda and Arushi Mishra from AWS led this hands-on workshop to explore how you can integrate AI with Camunda right now. They explored how to leverage Camunda Connectors and Web Modeler to build AI-driven solutions, how to create your own AI agent orchestrated by Camunda and more. This was a really fascinating session to play around directly with how you can unlock new potential with AI and Camunda.
- On the road to Camunda 8: HDI’s travel report: Uwe Koch, Architect at HDI shared the journey of HDI from Camunda 7 to Camunda 8 as they automate insurance policy processing across several business areas. Uwe explains how the decentralized, agile-deployed workflows are meant to be flexible and independent, and their design and implementation informed the migration and deployment process. Learn about their transition to C8 and how they handled showstopper events, and as a bonus attendees were asked to optionally bring their own Camunda 7 model to get recommendations for migration to Camunda 8.
Gartner’s BOAT in Action: Fueling Payter’s Global Hypergrowth Strategy through Camunda.
Payter is a tech company that develops unattended payment terminals. They are growing fast along with the growth of the self-service market in general, but they can tell that something big is coming. Andre Bal, Director of Supply Chain at Payter, borrowed a phrase from Jakob’s keynote yesterday – they know there is a big wave heading their way, and they want to be ready to catch it.
At a conference, Andre met Floris Weegink, Field CTO at Incentro, and asked him to build them a surfboard to catch the wave. His answer? “You don’t need a surfboard. You need a BOAT.”
BOAT, or Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies, is a new term that we heard about directly from Arthur Villa at Gartner yesterday. It represents a new convergence that is coming in the market, and it is critical to understand it to have a modern and future-proof foundation.
Payter had important business goals they needed to achieve, including 24/7 self service availability, a quicker response time, and scalability so they can ride the wave. Working with Incentro, they realized they could achieve these goals by adding a process orchestration layer between the user interaction level and their backend systems, allowing them to meet all their requirements while retaining flexibility and control.
At that point, Floris congratulated Andre on buying their first BOAT!
This was an interesting story, told by Floris and Andre with humor (it’s clear they work well together), of how a fast-growing company like Payter with a vision for where the market is going is taking advantage of the latest systems and technologies even before they “need” it, so they can be ready to catch the wave when others aren’t.
Enterprise Process Orchestration: A hands-on guide to strategy, people, and technology
Bernd Ruecker, cofounder and CTO at Camunda, and Leon Strauch, senior practice strategist for process orchestration at Camunda, took the main stage to highlight a few key takeaways from their book Enterprise Process Orchestration: a hands-on guide to strategy, people, and technology that will transform your business.
Why did you write a book?
“We saw a lot of organizations and customers who use Camunda on quite a huge scale,” Strauch said. “They have hundreds of processes that they automate. It’s really impressive. At the same time, we have a lot of customers who want to get to that stage.”
Interviewing several clients, large and small, revealed insight that they wanted to get into a book format. “If you cannot write it down, you cannot think it through,” Ruecker said.
And if you want to stay competitive, you have to think about automation holistically. You cannot silo your automations. Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester, wrote the foreword, stating that “organizations began to get serious about the need for broad-scale automation.” Which you cannot have without process orchestration.
Five drivers to achieve process orchestration
“A successful transformation is more than technology,” Ruecker said, highlighting five drivers in particular:
- Technology. It has to be easily accessible to the entire organization.
- Vision. It has to be defined and rooted in company strategy.
- People. Your team structures have to be effective.
- Delivery. Solutions have to be delivered effectively.
- Measurement. It has to be quantifiable.
End-to-end processes do not belong to one department. They hit a lot of different systems and teams. “Only if that runs smoothly am I happy as a customer,” Strauch said. “That’s the architecture we sketch. It’s not about technology so much. It’s about how to build vision.”
He suggests building a vision along a wave: have a strategic goal and then focus on your first solutions. From those, you can derive best practices and move onto more solutions. With multiple solutions, you can manage them within a center of excellence and then scale solution creation.
To follow that wave, Strauch outlined specific steps organizations should consider, including solution delivery, provided infrastructure, process overview, and depth of enablement.
Use cases with US Bank and Atlassian
Prashant Appikatla, at US Bank, joined Strauch and Ruecker onstage, to talk about US Bank’s CoE. “It’s actually quite small,” Appikatla said. “Four members.” Onboarding time to production has been reduce by 40 percent, and production incidents have gone down about 90 percent.
“Any new business line or team can directly access Camunda 8 to build out their PoCs or MVPs.” In that way, Appikatla’s team can ensure quality and viability of new processes.
Sanjam Sarpal, solution architect at Atlassian, also joined Strauch and Ruecker onstage to discuss how architecture decisions are driven by Atlassian’s CoE. “We take multiple approaches to our CoE, and they look at the solutions that make the most sense. They can come up with their own recommendation for what we should follow.” Time well spent, he said, to avoid issues with delivery.
Overrides of their recommendations are of course possible, but the CoE is much closer to more systems, so their advice is valuable.
All four speakers remained onstage for the following Q&A, responding to questions like how to hire for a CoE, and whether or not a full-blown CoE is a bit overkill instead of just building solutions.
The agile enterprise: Rapid deployment with Camunda 8
Andrey Belik, senior product manager at Camunda, handled the day’s final presentation on the orange stage about Camunda 8’s new deployment reference architectures.
How does Camunda fit with agile?
Camunda is not only built on cloud-native architecture, Belik pointed out, it also allows for module scalable deployment, essential for agile dev environments. “Obviously we can still deploy on bare metal, but this provides more flexibility.” Camunda also integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, fitting well into the infrastructure as code (IaC) landscape.
Reference architecture
“If we can standardize across all our customers’ deployments,” Belik said, “it becomes less risky to test in all those environments. We know parameters, and we can define how to scale, say, VMs versus Kubernetes.”
Camunda’s reference architecture includes, among other elements, architectural overviews, deployment requirements, and infrastructure setup instructions. “Kubernetes, container services, or manual and bare metal—all will eventually get their own reference architectures,” Belik said.
Camunda and CI/CD
In a live demo upgrading from Camunda 8.5 to 8.6, Belik explained how to chain everything together into a proper CI/CD pipeline.
ICYMI
Here are the last two in-person workshops of the day that we don’t want to miss!
- Build your first low-code process with Camunda: Low-code tools can be great, but only if you know how to use them! In this hands-on workshop, Norman Lüring from Camunda guided attendees new to low-code in Camunda on how to master the tools that can streamline their workflow creation and help them develop powerful automated workflows in under an hour. A highly productive session!
- From Data to Action: Unlocking Task Automation: End-to-End Orchestration with Camunda: Bastian Koerber, Principal Product Manager and Calvin Robbins, Senior Product Manager Product at Camunda explored the latest ways that Camunda can enhance end-to-end orchestration with new task automation capabilities. This session gave attendees an exclusive glimpse into the newest innovations and the future of task automation with Camunda.
Closing Keynote: Leadership Guide for the Reluctant Leader
We all make mistakes. David Neal, Microsoft MVP, Software Developer, Author and today’s closing keynote speaker, is no exception. David admitted he has made mistakes, he has run away from decisions and avoided telling people things. Early in his career, he received a promotion to manager and hated it. He just wanted to write code and solve problems! He didn’t think he could or even wanted to lead, and he later left for a lower paying job.
Later, at his startup, his CTO pulled him aside and thanked him for being such a leader in his company. He was confused – he had no reports. But he was told he was a leader because people looked up to him and valued what he has to say. It turns out, everyone can be a leader. Could there be more to work than code and coffee?
Leadership is less about control and more about influence.
In this talk, David wants to give you a “bigger lens you can use to see your world.” To take a step back and ask, what do you want your legacy to be?
He reminded us all that we are awesome. You’ve been told lies by the world. You need determination, practice, and patience, and you can succeed.
One target in David’s sights is multitasking. He used the example of a lion tamer who uses a chair to confuse a lion – apparently, the trick is that lions focus very intently, but the four legs of the chair confuse a lion and make it hard for them to know where they should focus. The lion is paralyzed by indecision. That’s us, David argues, when we try to multitask. He urges us to try and keep our focus on one thing at a time whenever we can.
David then turned his attention to everyone’s favorite thing… meetings. Not always super productive. So how can you have the best meetings in your life? David suggests an interesting system called “Lean Coffee.” It’s a way of running a collaborative meeting that uses a few tools – a way to jot things down, markers, a Kanban board, a timer, and a good attitude. The meeting starts with jotting ideas down, making a quick pitch to describe what they all mean, and giving everybody two votes. Then you sort and run the most popular ones for 5 minutes. When time is up, you can vote to stay for another 5 minutes or move onto the next one. Voting and time boxing prevents anyone from dominating a meeting and keeps everyone involved.
We all have a purpose – and beyond our job. David encouraged us to leave the world better than you found it. Every day there are ways we can do this.
A believe David long supported was that “Life is too short to work somewhere that stinks.” If it’s terrible, leave and find something better. But at one point, when about to leave, he was asked – have you done everything you can do? If you left now, would you have any regrets? Reluctantly, David stayed and worked hard to fix the problems that had prompted him to want to depart. He still left the job a year later, but with pride rather than regrets. So his new believe is that life is too short to let things stay the way they are. Taking ownership and responsibility is always the right thing to do.
One example David gave is this: Why is there often a culture where we only say nice things about people when they announce their departures? Noticing this, David started an experiment by posting a public tribute to someone on Slack. The amazing thing, he noted, was not what he said, but was how many other people would pop in to say wonderful things and make someone feel appreciated. It was beautiful. It’s so important to show people you value them.
There is a concept, which David represents above, of an imaginary “line” that people are often above, or below. When they’re above it, they are open, curious, playful. Below, they are the opposite. Treat people with respect and keep them – and yourself – above the line.
Among the many gems that David shared was this quotation from C.S. Lewis, which we love: “Humility is not about thinking less of yourself. It’s about thinking of yourself less.” David asked us to be grateful each day, to look beyond flaws, to find communities and to always keep trying. You are not an imposter – there are people who would love to hear your story.
There were so many beautiful and inspiring notes in David’s talk, it would be impossible to come even close to capturing them all. But I think everyone in the room left this keynote a little lighter, and if you watch the recording later and take it to heart you will too. With David’s parting words – “Go, and be awesome” – we move onto the concluding fireside chat.
Fireside Chat & Closing
Amy welcomed Jakob and Bernd back to the stage for our closing fireside chat. After she asked how they were all doing (really good conversations, but tired!), she brought up a question – now that everyone has an “early access” copy of Bernd and Leon’s new book, how can they leave feedback? Bernd’s reply: “Any channel!” Email, LinkedIn, whatever works for you. He pointed out that they’ve come a long way in the book so far but it is not yet final and it’s not too late to incorporate feedback, and they want to hear it!
A lot of themes came up this week, including composability and “this little thing called AI,” as Amy jokingly called it. She asked if Jakob or Bernd had any suggestions for next steps that people can take away from the conference today?
We’ve heard a lot of themes, composability, this “little thing called AI,” do you have any advice on next steps? Jakob says get your hands on the product right when its ready and try things out, RPA, Copilot, all the new stuff, just use it. And get in touch with us when you want to move this to an enterprise-wide application level and we can help. Bernd added an answer shockingly close to “it depends,” noting that it depends where you are and what you’re doing. But he added that it’s important to get familiarized with the impact of process orchestration on the business and know how to tell that story.
We hit ARR $100MM… what has the road been like to get here? Do you have any reflections on the journey? Bernd shared that the motivation for improving processes and making it all work better has always appealed to him, and this interest has always been a part of his journey with Camunda, though he never dreamed it would turn into a company this successful. Jakob noted that a guiding principle has always been about “No B.S.” – which when they started applied to what they saw as overpromising by BPM vendors, and even now applies to AI. Camunda was always about doing it right, and honestly, and that has never changed. The trust in our integrity from our customers and community is so important to what Camunda is.
Amy concluded by asking where we go from here. Bernd spoke directly about the product, and how excited he is for the direction of the product when it comes to the foundation and framework they have built with Connectors, and Marketplace, and the incredible potential for the variety of things we can now build upon this foundation. It feels future-proof, no matter which kinds of solutions or technologies we layer on top.
Thank you all and please share your feedback!
With that, Amy began to wrap up the conference. She shared our now-complete “selfie screen” (above, thank you for sharing your wonderful pictures!) and thanked our generous sponsors. She also reminded everyone to look out for the recordings next week and to please share your feedback on the conference, as well as on Camunda in general in places like Gartner Peer Insights (there are even some $25 gift cards available for those who submit with Gartner Peer Insights). We really value your feedback, wherever you share it, and thank you!
See you next time!
The next CamundaCon will take place on May 15-16 in Amsterdam – you can sign up for that right here! Then we’ll be coming back here to New York on October 8-9 2025, so be sure to mark your calendar. Sign up now so you don’t miss anything, and we can’t wait to see you next time!
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io