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.
An MXDP is an opinionated, integrated set of front-end development tools and “backend for frontend” (BFF) capabilities. It enables a distributed, scalable development approach (in terms of both teams and architecture) to build fit-for-purpose apps across digital touchpoints and interaction modalities. At minimum, an MXDP must support cross-platform development and building of both custom iOS and Android app binaries, responsive web apps, and at least one of the following: PWAs, chatbots, voice apps, wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) apps, and augmented-reality (AR) and mixed-reality (MR) apps.
Gartner defines the service orchestration and automation platform (SOAP) market as encompassing solution suites that deliver capabilities enabling organizations to manage workloads, workflows, resource provisioning and data pipelines across their technology landscapes. SOAPs enable infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to design and implement business services. These platforms combine workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure. Increasingly, they are central to an organization’s ability to deploy workloads and to optimize deployments as a part of cost and availability initiatives. SOAPs expand the role of traditional workload automation by adapting to use cases that deliver and extend into data pipelines, cloud-native infrastructures and application architectures. These tools complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains to provide customer-focused agility, cost savings, operational efficiency and process standardization.