Gartner defines business process automation (BPA) tools as software that enables the design, execution and monitoring of business processes involving diverse sets of systems and humans. BPA tools provide an environment for developing, running and monitoring business processes that incorporate process models (and other business, decision and data models) enabling automation of business operations. BPA tools play a crucial role in streamlining business processes, thereby increasing efficiency, reducing human error and enabling better decision making across various functions and industries.
Gartner defines contract life cycle management (CLM) market as a solution that proactively manages contracts from initiation through negotiation, execution, compliance and renewal. In this context, a contract is any agreement or contractual document containing rights and obligations that affect an organization now or in the future (e.g., a nondisclosure agreement). CLM solutions allow organizations to create, negotiate and store contracts in a centralized repository. Using these solutions helps mitigate organizational risk by enabling regulatory and policy compliance, providing governance over what is signed and with whom, and role-based access to terms and obligations with third parties. CLM solutions drive visibility, consistency and efficiency in the contracting process across an enterprise. Use cases are primarily aligned to parts of the process, such as presignature and postsignature. Different departments often prioritize a certain use case based on their involvement in the contracting process.
Gartner defines the service orchestration and automation platform (SOAP) market as encompassing solutions that empower organizations to manage and automate their entire technology stack, including workloads, workflows, resource provisioning and data pipelines. SOAPs empower infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to streamline and accelerate the delivery of business services. These platforms integrate workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid IT landscape. By automating and optimizing these processes, SOAPs enable organizations to rapidly deploy workloads, enhance operational efficiency and achieve significant cost savings while ensuring high availability and business continuity. SOAPs enhance traditional workload automation by supporting use cases in data pipelines, cloud-native infrastructures and application architectures. They complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains, enabling organizations to achieve customer-centric agility, reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and establish standardized processes across their entire IT landscape.