VHV is a century-old insurance company headquartered in Hanover, Germany, offering a diversified portfolio of products for the German market and beyond. They are also one of Camunda’s long-time customers, running a total of 500 processes and subprocesses for their life insurance division on Camunda’s platform. According to VHV’s Center of Excellence Java Developer, Niklas Fehring, and Information Technology Leader, Carl Oelker, on a normal day, their Camunda 7 platform supports approximately 1.2 million process instances. On peak days, VHV’s volume can rise to 2.5 million process instances. Though this support is significant, VHV is migrating its 500 process instances to Camunda 8 to take advantage of new connectors and agentic orchestration capabilities, while further scaling its process orchestration and automation operations as its market share continues to grow.
The architectural differences between platform versions, however, can create challenges when migrating from versions 7 to 8, with the level of difficulty for a migration project depending on the complexity of an organization’s existing solution. Since VHV’s team of developers has over a decade of experience building and operating Camunda solutions that follow BPMN and Camunda development best practices, they were eager to begin migration as early as possible. Niklas and Carl are sharing their team’s migration journey to give other organizations insight into the challenges they faced and the opportunities they envision.
“We used a self-managed installation of Camunda 8, and that was a challenge because we did not have a prior installation of Kubernetes. Also, our team was using Spring Boot with Camunda 7 but had no experience installing a Spring Boot application in Kubernetes, so those were the first two things we had to do.”
–Niklas Fehring, Java Developer
VHV’s Center of Excellence team began planning their migration strategy to Camunda 8 at the end of 2023. As part of the planning process, they met with their customer success manager every two weeks and collaborated with their dedicated Camunda consultant three or four times throughout the migration. The project started at the end of the first quarter in 2024, and they went live with their first process in April 2025, about one year later.
According to Niklas and Carl, the main technical challenges their team faced during migration were:
Additionally, as a future-forward platform designed for integration, connectivity, and agentic orchestration, updates to the Camunda 8 platform continue to bring key changes to its architecture and capability. The impact of these changes is different when compared to the release history of version 7. As Niklas and Carl pointed out, Camunda 7 was “a solid rock” for them. They used the platform for 10 years, and in that time, the architecture did not change a lot as it was already a mature platform. “Camunda 8 changed heavily over the 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, and 8.6 installations,” said Carl. “For example, we developed a plan for document processing in Camunda, and just when we had an internal story ready, the IDP feature was launched, and now we are rethinking that process. Our input management team is especially excited to see intelligent document processing features are now out-of-the-box.”
Though platform migrations require coordinated planning and effort, VHV’s Center of Excellence team undertook the project because they believe Camunda 8 and Camunda’s new SAP integration will help the team develop new end-to-end business processes. Niklas and Carl also see the potential Camunda’s process orchestration and automation capabilities and new agentic orchestration capabilities can bring to all lines of business across the organization.
As Carl explained, “With modern connectors, we have more possibilities to make the benefits of end-to-end process orchestration and automation more visible to the rest of the company. We can bring more and more functions and experiences to benefit end-users and customers, and we now have the capability to use AI functions to help the business meet performance or financial goals. We want to take a look at opportunities to use agentic orchestration ASAP because we see the benefit.”
“We want to bring every app to Kubernetes,” said Niklas. “Now, we have the chance to bring everything together—SAP, RPA, IDP, and AI—and have everything in one engine. And development is faster.”
VHV has successfully migrated a few processes and automated over 84,000 process instances since going live on Camunda 8 in April 2025. The team still has many more processes to migrate and are leaning into the lessons learned from their initial efforts. For other IT leaders building a Camunda migration strategy, Niklas and Carl share these key insights:
Of course, VHV’s learning continues along with their migration journey. Their plans in the near future are to focus on migration and integrate Camunda 8 extensively into their different operational use cases.
“Our basic use case for Camunda is integrate everything you can integrate,” said Carl. “Guidewire, SAP, archive software, output software like Inspire from Gradient—we integrate everything. This is the job of our team. We are integrating with Spring Boot services, and if we have to use processes, we are using Kubernetes.”
The Camunda 8 connectors and out-of-the-box features are helping the Center of Excellence team bring new ideas and new possibilities to the company. “We are at a time and place where we want and need to connect processes across the greater organization,” said Carl. “Now we have a platform that makes it easier to connect and scale. Our vision and our hope is that Camunda’s impact over the next 10 years will be very great.”
Camunda supports multiple ways to deploy the Camunda 8 Platform Self-Managed edition, including Kubernetes, Docker, and Java. Camunda 8 can also be deployed as SaaS. Get the details on migrating to Camunda 8 and find out which approach works best for your organization.
