Unlock business value with a composable BOAT solution
Take ownership of your technology stack and put the future of the business into your own hands
What is BOAT?
Gartner defines Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT) as a market that converges the capabilities organizations need to automate and orchestrate work end to end — across people, systems, AI agents, and automation endpoints — in a single, composable architecture. In practice, BOAT enables organizations to overcome the limitations of fragmented automation and siloed AI, orchestrating processes from start to finish across many different endpoints, including enterprise systems of record. Camunda is a composable BOAT solution built to unlock that value.
Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT) combine business process orchestration, connectivity, and AI to coordinate end-to-end enterprise processes from start to finish. BOAT solutions replace fragmented, point-solution automation with a unified architecture that can orchestrate work across APIs, RPA bots, AI agents, human tasks, and enterprise systems of record — and continuously improve based on process data.
The business-driven demand for automation
The digital transformation of businesses across industries has driven the demand for increasingly automated business processes — but the core processes that build and sell an organization’s products and services are often complex and require high availability and extreme resilience. BOAT solutions address this need by combining task-level automation with the power to orchestrate end-to-end business processes across a wide variety of people, systems, and devices.
The benefits of BOAT
Orchestrates business processes from start to finish across all tasks and automation endpoints, improving visibility and enabling continuous improvement
Brings together fragmented automations in a single process flow, reducing operational overhead and making it possible to improve business processes
Blends orchestration, connectivity, and AI to give organizations a future-proofed automation architecture that can evolve to serve changing business needs
Consolidates data and process insights across systems, providing AI tools with the unified metadata they need to power smarter, more autonomous processes
BOAT is a strategy, not a platform
While automation capabilities have been converging across tools for some time, a single software platform is rarely the right choice for every use case in an organization. Rather, automation composability is critical for BOAT success. A composable process automation architecture allows you to select and integrate best-of-breed tools, technologies, and services, so you can ensure that your tech stack precisely fits your business use case — instead of constantly compromising because a platform limits your options.
Process orchestration lies at the heart of BOAT
A composable approach to process orchestration delivers the benefits of BOAT without locking you into a single software platform or automation strategy. Process orchestration acts as a layer on top of automation endpoints, integrating them into a single process flow. It orchestrates work across APIs, RPA bots, AI agents, and knowledge workers, ensuring the right things happen at the right time. As business needs or technological choices change, you can swap out endpoints without re-engineering the process.
Learn how consolidating automation technology is driving the emerging BOAT market — and enhancing automation maturity.
BOAT Guide for Automation LeadersAutomation driven by the business must involve the business
Collaboration between software developers, low-code developers, and business users is critical to ensure the right things are built and rolled out to your customers. A BOAT strategy is an ideal way to bring process stakeholders together because it revolves around end-to-end business processes. Visual process and decision modeling standards such as BPMN and DMN enable all users to get hands-on with the design, management, and improvement of core business processes.
What is BPMN? →
Operationalize AI with the right BOAT solution
Wave after wave of AI innovation requires organizational leaders to rethink their operating model and their approach to process automation. Many businesses are trying to balance the potential gains from AI with the risk of introducing it to their core business processes. As a BOAT solution, Camunda helps you ensure processes that leverage AI are efficient, compliant, and aligned with your business goals.
What is agentic orchestration? →Your BOAT checklist
As you consider adopting a BOAT solution, look for these qualities:
A composable approach that allows you to combine a variety of automation tools instead of locking you into a monolithic, black-box platform
An open architecture that ensures the solution will fit into your technology stack and work with software development and DevOps tooling and practices
Rich collaboration features that help IT teams and business stakeholders align on process design and work together to manage, analyze, and optimize processes
A proven ability to scale process volumes with high availability, consistent performance, and resilience against failures and data loss
Integrated intelligence with AI copilots that accelerate development, easy ways to connect to AI tools and services, and support for agentic process orchestration
Gartner
Visionary
2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies
Analyst Recognition
Named a Visionary in the first-ever Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for BOAT
Gartner introduced the Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies in 2025 — the first analyst framework to formally recognize BOAT as a distinct enterprise software category. Camunda was named a Visionary, recognized for its agentic orchestration capabilities and product vision.