Gartner defines business process automation (BPA) tools as software that automates business processes by enabling orchestration and choreography of diverse sets of actors (humans, systems and bots) involved in the execution of the process. BPA tools provide an environment for developing and running applications that incorporate process models (and optionally other business, decision and data models) enabling digitization of business operations
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.