Service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAP) are revolutionizing IT workload management. As complexity grows across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, SOAP delivers intelligent workflow orchestration to drive efficiency.
This comprehensive guide will explore everything you need to know about SOAP workload automation today. You‘ll learn:
- What is SOAP and why it matters
- Key capabilities and use cases
- Implementation best practices
- Leading solutions and vendors
- Growth outlook and industry adoption trends
What is SOAP Workload Automation?
SOAP combines workflow orchestration, event-driven automation, and broad integration capabilities into a single platform. It automatically coordinates workloads and tasks across your entire IT infrastructure.
In simpler terms, SOAP is smart automation software that makes managing IT workloads easy. It acts as an orchestra conductor for your digital operations.
While similar to workload automation, SOAP expands beyond job scheduling with wider environment support, self-service portals, real-time monitoring, and more.
Leading analyst firm Gartner predicts 80% of enterprises will shift to SOAP solutions by 2024 to orchestrate cloud workloads.
Key Benefits of SOAP Include:
- Increased efficiency and productivity
- Improved workload visibility and control
- Faster time to value for automating processes
- Reduced costs and IT headcount requirements
- Better cross-team collaboration and governance
- Higher application reliability and performance
SOAP Capabilities and Use Cases
SOAP platforms offer a diverse set of orchestration, automation, and analytics capabilities. Here are some of the most impactful use cases we see today:
Workflow Design and Orchestration
SOAP allows both IT teams and business users to model workflows with an easy drag-and-drop composer. It visually maps out interdependencies between tasks and systems for clearer understanding.
Workflow orchestration then reliably executes those processes across your infrastructure. This capability simplifies daily operations from batch processing to application deployments.
Use cases include: order-to-cash processes, supply chain workflows, ERP task automation
Event-Driven Automation
SOAP automates processes based on triggering events to enable real-time responses. Events can range from new user signups to server failures to data thresholds being met.
This is extremely useful for IT operations. Instead of manually monitoring systems, SOAPs detect issues and initiate automated remediation workflows in seconds. No human intervention required.
Use cases include: automated provisioning, self-healing infrastructure, IT alert resolution.
Self-Service Automation
Empower business teams to manage their own workflows with self-service portals. This shifts simple routine tasks away from IT staff, saving costs and speeding results.
Self-service use cases run the gamut from password resets, access requests, report generation, application testing, and data preparation.
Monitoring and Alerting
Stay on top of workflow health with automatic monitoring and alerts when performance declines. Configure customized dashboards to track KPIs like system uptime, task success rate, lead times, and more.
Sophisticated machine learning in leading SOAP solutions can even predict failures before they occur. This enables true predictive maintenance.
Resource Provisioning
Speed deployment of computing resources across environments using SOAP’s automated provisioning capabilities. It allows orchestrating provisioning tasks between on-premise, multi-cloud, hybrid infrastructure and container platforms.
As examples, automate adding network storage, spin up test servers, deploy Kubernetes pods, or clone full application stacks with a single workflow.
SOAP frees IT teams from time sinks like manual provisioning to focus on strategic efforts.
Data Pipeline Management
Finally, coordinate critical data integration workflows from extraction and validation to transformation to loading (ETL). Connect disparate databases, business intelligence tools, and more into reusable pipelines.
With data pipelines now automated, data teams gain efficiency and reliability. This leads to expanded analytics capabilities.
SOAP Implementation Guide
Walkthrough key planning steps for a successful SOAP implementation:
Step 1: Audit and Map Current Workloads
Before layering on automation, understand what mission-critical workloads run across your IT environment today. Catalog server workloads, data integration pipelines, ops procedures, and end user processes.
Identify top pain points and optimization opportunities to address with SOAP.
Step 2. Set Success Metrics
Define key performance indicators to track benefits from SOAP adoption. These often include metrics like:
- Workload uptime/availability
- Task throughput volume
- Error/failure rates
- Mean time to repair/resolution
- End user satisfaction scores
Setting targets for improvement will help quantify ROI later.
Step 3. Select the Right SOAP Platform
With large and small vendors now offering SOAP solutions, the hardest decision is choosing the right platform for your needs.
Key considerations include:
- Environment support (cloud, containers, ERPs)
- Code vs low-code workflow composability
- Performance monitoring depth
- Available skill sets and training
- Total cost of ownership
Step 4. Start Small, Then Scale
The most effective approach is piloting SOAP on targeted, high-impact workflows first. Pick use cases like IT issue resolution or account provisioning.
Once a foundation is proven, extend SOAP capabilities more broadly across other processes to realize the full benefits.
Step 5. Continuously Optimize
SOAP workflows are living entities that need care and feeding like any IT system. Leverage monitoring data to tweak and improve workflow performance over time.
As new technologies or infrastructure gets introduced, evolve your SOAP implementation accordingly. This ensures you automate the right tasks as your tech stack changes.
Evaluating Top SOAP Solutions
While dozens of tools exist, these 4 SOAP software vendors stand out as leaders:
1. Redwood Workload Automation
Redwood offers robust workload automation coupled with extensive support for cloud and container orchestration environments. It centralizes visibility with an intelligent data hub to manage workloads enterprise-wide.
2. Automic Automation Intelligence
Part of MicroFocus, Automic shines with one of the industry’s most mature SOAP platforms. It boasts proven scalability to automate over a million daily workflow tasks in large enterprises.
3. VMware vRealize Automation
For existing VMware customers, vRealize perfectly complements their virtualization stack with multi-cloud automation. Beyond provisioning, it centralizes policy enforcement and IT service delivery.
4. CloudShell Colony
Colony.io takes a full lifecycle approach from modeling to monitoring workflows. Their self-service app store allows reusing automation across your organization.
When comparing solutions, be sure to match technical capabilities to your primary SOAP use cases. Schedule demonstrations to validate ease of use and total cost of ownership estimates before purchasing.
The Future of SOAP Adoption
By 2025, SOAP global spending is projected to reach $9.3 billion according toleading research firm Gartner.
Beyond labor cost savings from increased automation, SOAP elevates enterprises technologically. Workloads become software-defined, dynamic tunable assets rather than constraints holding back the business.
As a proven force multiplier for IT teams, we fully expect SOAP adoption to accelerate over the next decade. Organizations that harness orchestration and automation will pull ahead of competitors still relying on outdated manual practices.
Conclusion
SOAP workload automation represents the next evolution of streamlining infrastructure and application management. It brings sanity back to sprawling multi-environment workloads.
Now is the time to start evaluating SOAP capabilities relative to your IT estate complexity. Conduct an automation maturity assessment and build a business case. Early adopters will benefit the most.
Have additional questions or need help with SOAP planning? Our automation experts await:
