Digital platform conductor tools coordinate hybrid digital infrastructure management tools used to plan, implement, operate and monitor underpinning technology and services for applications and digital products. They may be delivered as on-premises, SaaS or platform as a service (PaaS) solutions, and provide a unified view of digital infrastructure and dependent applications. They enable I&O leaders to get an overarching view of the infrastructure and evaluate the infrastructure’s contribution to business value, regardless of the environments used or their owner. This provides input into strategic I&O decision making to get better value from infrastructure.
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.