New industry-first capability simplifies smart home setup, boosts network performance, and enables greater interoperability across ecosystems October 1, 2025 — Mountain View, CA — SmartThings, Samsung Electronics’s global connected living platform, today announced it is one of the first major smart home ecosystems to support two-way Thread network unification, enabling users to seamlessly join SmartThings […]
Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) have become a strategic necessity for enterprises struggling to manage the complexity of modern IT environments. Operations teams must juggle thousands of interdependent workflows, bridge data across cloud-native applications and legacy ERP systems and meet evolving performance expectations. Reactive automation is no longer sufficient.
Intelligent orchestration ensures business processes execute reliably, securely and without unnecessary manual intervention. As hybrid environments expand, data pipelines multiply and digital initiatives accelerate, unified orchestration platforms have become mission-critical.
This leap is reflected in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP. Vendors are being evaluated on execution in addition to how well they support end-to-end processes, hybrid environments and governance at scale.
If you’re in the process of selecting a SOAP solution, use this practical guide to evaluating your options, with insights inspired by Gartner’s criteria and industry trends.
What is a SOAP — and why does it matter more than ever?
According to Gartner, “SOAPs unify workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning, extending across data pipelines and cloud-native architectures.”
SOAPs represent the evolution of traditional workload automation beyond job scheduling. These platforms are crucial for bringing order to complex IT environments that span on-premises, multi-cloud and hybrid environments. They matter because they provide a centralized hub to coordinate workflows across diverse systems — both within an organization and across an ecosystem for suppliers and distributors. They reduce risk by providing end-to-end visibility and control and improve business agility by reducing manual intervention.
A modern SOAP coordinates dependencies, enforces service-level agreements (SLAs) and triggers workflows based on events, making it essential for:
Digital transformation in finance, supply chain and IT operations
Cloud modernization initiatives
AI and machine learning (ML) adoption that requires governed data movement
Compliance with security and regulatory frameworks
5 signs you need a SOAP platform
How do you know if your organization is ready to invest in a SOAP? These red flags often surface first:
You’re managing hybrid complexity without centralized control. Your teams are juggling workflows across multiple schedulers, multiple cloud tools and homegrown scripts.
SLAs are being missed without warning. There’s no predictive monitoring or visibility into where delays are happening.
Automation is fragmented and hard to maintain. Bots, ETL pipelines and job schedulers all operate in isolation.
You can’t observe your business processes end to end. Status, delays and failures are invisible until they cause downstream issues.
Business and IT work in silos. A lack of shared workflows slows down change and increases risk.
The “right” SOAP solution should reduce human error, free up IT to focus strategic priorities and streamline how automation is designed, maintained and governed. It should support faster response to business and market shifts, break down silos by connecting legacy systems and cloud services and enable seamless coordination across your technology ecosystem. Most importantly, it should enhance visibility, control and auditability with a unified view of every process, so your automation is as trustworthy as it is efficient.
Key evaluation criteria when choosing a SOAP solution
Here are six areas to include in your evaluation, inspired by trends surfaced in the Gartner report and common attributes among SOAP Leaders.
Scalability and performance
The platform should be able to handle high volumes of automated tasks without performance degradation. Ask whether it can support millions of jobs per day and how it performs under peak loads. A SOAP must be resilient and elastic enough to accommodate sudden surges in workload without compromising execution times or reliability. Scalability is about sustained performance, not just capacity.
Cloud-native architecture and SaaS delivery
When evaluating a SOAP solution, start with how the platform itself is built and delivered. A truly SaaS-native platform doesn’t just “run in the cloud;” it’s designed for elastic scale, multi-tenant performance and frictionless updates. Look for characteristics like agentless architecture, stateless services, zero-maintenance provisioning and high availability built into the core. These reduce operational overhead and speed up onboarding.
Deployment flexibility and hybrid orchestration support
It’s not just how the platform is built but also how it operates. A SOAP platform must support orchestration across your entire environment, from legacy mainframes to modern SaaS apps, cloud services, containers and DevOps pipelines. Seek flexible endpoint support, native connectors and the ability to run across multiple clouds, regions or tenants without custom scripting or duplicate workflows.
Ease of use and low-code accessibility
Automation should be democratized. Your SOAP platform should provide a low-code interface that enables IT operators, developers and even power users on the business side to design and modify workflows. Features like drag-and-drop workflow designers and reusable templates make it easier to build, test and share workflows. Integrated documentation and governance reduce training time and increase adoption.
Observability and monitoring
It’s not enough to execute a job. You need to know what happened, why, and what could go wrong next time. Real-time dashboards, job dependency maps, SLA monitors and predictive alerting help teams quickly isolate failures and understand upstream/downstream impact. A strong observability layer turns the SOAP into a diagnostic tool, not just a transaction engine.
AI-powered productivity
It’s key to empower your teams with specific and valuable assistance for using the product and operating the platform to deliver efficient, reliable and observable automation fabrics. AI is now embedded into how automation platforms help users work faster, smarter and with greater confidence. AI features can significantly reduce time-to-value and operational risk. Whether you’re troubleshooting a failed job or optimizing a business-critical process, AI-powered diagnostics accelerate root-cause analysis, helping your teams resolve issues before they cause downstream delays. Equally important is AI’s role in design-time productivity. Context-aware configurations and AI-optimized change management can reduce the friction involved in building new workflows.
Security and governance
Security and compliance should be built in, not bolted on. SOAPs must support enterprise-grade authentication and authorization, including single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access control (RBAC). They should also be able to encrypt data in transit and at rest and offer detailed audit logs. Look for support for compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA, depending on your industry. Governance features should also enable fine-grained control over who can modify, execute or monitor workflows.
As you narrow your shortlist, consider leading conversations with these high-impact questions:
What’s your average time-to-value for large-scale implementations?
What migration and onboarding services are available?
How do you handle error recovery and SLA breaches?
Do you offer certified integrations for SAP, cloud and data platforms?
How do you manage governance across departments or regions?
Can you provide end-to-end automation in a hybrid environment across on-premises and multi-cloud?
Can you provide real-time data sync and event-based triggers in a hybrid environment?
Trends shaping the SOAP landscape in 2025
“By 2029, 90% of organizations currently delivering workload automation will be using service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAPs) to orchestrate workloads and data pipelines in hybrid environments across IT and business domains.”
SOAP solutions are evolving rapidly. Let’s examine a few trends shaping enterprise automation strategies this year.
Convergence with adjacent tools: Modern SOAPs increasingly overlap with iPaaS, managed file transfer (MFT) and IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms. Expect tighter ecosystems and fewer isolated tools.
AI-enhanced observability: Predictive analytics, anomaly detection and proactive SLA risk insights are fast becoming differentiators, especially in high-volume scenarios. The report notes that, “By 2029, 75% of SOAP workflows will leverage generative AI (GenAI) to increase troubleshooting efficiency by 50% — up from less than 10% in 2025.”
Orchestration for analytics workloads: Data must flow faster and more reliably. As AI becomes operationalized, orchestrating data is just as important as model performance.
Citizen automation: Business users want self-service tools without compromising governance, and IT needs to enforce guardrails. SOAPs now must deliver both to enable scalable citizen automation.
Centralized control across domains: Fragmented platforms are falling behind. SOAPs that serve as a control plane for hybrid IT, cloud, data and business workflows are rising to the top.
What sets Leaders apart in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™
According to Gartner Magic Quadrant™ research methodology, “Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow.” Choosing a Leader as your SOAP vendor doesn’t guarantee success, but it does reduce risk, accelerate ROI and align you with those invested in long-term innovation.
Why organizations are turning to RunMyJobs by Redwood
When enterprises outgrow reactive automation, they turn to RunMyJobs. It’s purpose-built for orchestrating complex, enterprise-wide workloads.
RunMyJobs helps global organizations automate with confidence through:
SAP Endorsed App, Premium certification — SAP’s highest standard for performance, security and integration
Robust hybrid connectivity to seamlessly connect on-premises systems (e.g., ERP, WMS, MES) with multiple public cloud services
Event-based triggers and integrated data management
SaaS-native, agentless architecture built for scale, with no infrastructure maintenance
Built-in observability via Redwood Insights with pre-built dashboards and the ability to customize
AI-powered productivity enhancements that range from knowledge access to troubleshooting to actual design and development of automation workflows
Low-code workflow design for both IT and business users
Enterprise-grade security and compliance
Decades of automation expertise and two consecutive years of being named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP
Choosing the right SOAP solution means choosing the foundation for your automation future. Make the investment count — for what your business needs today and what it will demand tomorrow. Read the full analyst report today.
Every great play looks effortless to the audience. They see the actors hit their lines, the music swells at just the right moment and the lights fade exactly when they should. What they don’t see is the stage manager, the tech booth and the writers that made it all possible.
Forecasting and replenishment (F&R) works the same way. To the customer, it’s simple: the product they want is available where and when they want it. But what got it there was a full production involving forecasting systems, ERP, POS, purchase orders, distribution centers — each with their own scripts.
Take the case of Target Canada. They had ambitious plans, shiny stores and plenty of product in stock. But backstage, systems weren’t talking to each other. Some shelves stayed empty while others were overstocked, and many customers walked out or didn’t show up at all. The two-year production bombed big-time, resulting in a multi-billion-dollar loss. “Ticket sales” didn’t even cover the cost of performances in this scenario.
Opening night: The performance customers see
F&R is the entire performance from the moment you draw the curtain back. It’s what the audience (your customers) experiences when they shop. Your forecasting engine is the lead actor, but it can’t carry the whole show alone. It depends on a cast:
ERP systems handling orders and procurement
POS systems sending daily sales signals
Warehousing and logistics making sure the right props (products) land on stage
Replenishment planning and allocation tools managing cues
If these players don’t work together well, the audience will see the mistakes: empty shelves, markdown bins and lost orders, to name a few.
Missed cues: Why supply chains go off script
Even seasoned companies misstep when the backstage crew isn’t in sync. In supply chain terms, that means F&R falls apart when the systems behind them aren’t connected or coordinated.
Take siloed systems, for example. ERP, POS and warehouse management each follow their own script, and none of them talk to each other. That disconnect means planners may not see when a promotion is running, when seasonality is driving spikes in demand or when external events disrupt supply. Without those inputs flowing cleanly into the forecast, replenishment planning quickly goes off track. It’s like three actors reciting different versions of the same play — it’s confusing, messy and painful to watch.
Manual workarounds are another sign of a shaky production. When planners resort to spreadsheets to patch gaps or re-sequence orders, it’s like stagehands rushing onto the set with duct tape mid-performance. The show goes on, but the cracks are obvious.
Rigid, batch-driven processes add another layer of risk. Imagine trying to run a live play using only rehearsed recordings. The story would fall flat the moment something unexpected happened. And the same goes for replenishment runs that can’t adapt when demand shifts suddenly, such as when there’s an unforeseen weather event.
Then there’s the lack of visibility. Without clear lines of sight into whether a job has started, finished or failed, supply chain leaders are left waiting to see if the actor will make their entrance. By the time they realize the cue was missed, the audience already knows.
The outcome of all these broken scenes? Outdated forecasts, replenishment delays, high carrying costs and frustrated customers who don’t come back after intermission.
The director’s chair: Keeping every scene in sync
An orchestration solution like RunMyJobs by Redwood acts as the director behind the curtain, ensuring every system, transaction and dependency plays its part. Think about the challenge of planning a holiday promotion: Forecasting modules may generate a strong demand forecast, but if order proposals don’t trigger on time or distribution centers can’t see accurate inventory levels, the campaign won’t be successful.
With RunMyJobs, order forecasts, replenishment planning, purchase orders and automatic replenishment proposals are kept in sync with demand planning and forecasting algorithms. That means safety stock calculations adjust automatically when seasonality spikes, promotions launch or future demand signals arrive from POS sales data. It also means master data issues are flagged and corrected before they cascade downstream.
This is true whether you’re running SAP F&R, IBP, Retail and Distribution Industry Solutions, MM, APO or connecting to non-SAP systems — RunMyJobs keeps the performance on track no matter the complexity of your tech stack. You’ll be able to respond faster to factors influencing demand, like promotions, pricing changes or unexpected stockouts, while reducing manual interventions.
Orchestration transforms F&R from a fragile balancing act into a resilient, repeatable process that adapts to real-world conditions.
Standing ovation: Course-correcting with orchestration
The value of orchestration in F&R shows up in the KPIs that matter most: gross margins, order fill rates and customer satisfaction.
– Order fill rate ↓ – Replenishment cycle time ↑ – Customer satisfaction ↓
Autonomous execution and error handling
– Order fill rate ↑ – Replenishment cycle time ↑ – Customer satisfaction ↑
Siloed and limited visibility across systems
– Inventory turnover ↓ – Lost sales ↑ – Gross margin ROI ↓
Unified view and monitoring of all workflows
– Inventory turnover ↑ – Lost sales ↓ – Gross margin ROI ↑
Rigid scheduling, no real-time triggers
– Lost sales ↑ – Stockout rate ↑ – Carrying costs ↑ – Markdown % ↑ – Days of inventory ↑
Event-driven scheduling triggers
– Lost sales ↓ – Stockout rate ↓ – Carrying costs ↓ – Markdown % ↓ – Days of inventory ↓
Treat F&R like the production it is
In retail and distribution, forecasting and replenishment is mission-critical. It’s not a solo performance but an ensemble production that needs perfect timing, cues and orchestration.
RunMyJobs provides the automation fabric that keeps your show running. Global retailers and distributors trust it to bring order to complexity and deliver consistent, applause-worthy results.
Book a demo to see how RunMyJobs can optimize your F&R process end to end.
A smart home should make life easier, safer, and more connected, but achieving that takes devices that work together seamlessly. That’s where our partnership with Level comes in. By combining SmartThings’ automations with Level’s thoughtfully designed smart locks, homeowners can enjoy convenience and security without visual clutter.
Change is coming to SSL/TLS certificate management, and it’s arriving faster than most organizations realize. The CA/B Forum’s version of “March Madness” will start rolling out within months and culminate in a rigorous 47-day maximum certificate validity requirement by 2029. The 47-day mandate will force a new approach to outdated manual CLM approaches for several reasons:
Shorter validity periods mean stronger security posture – Less time for compromised certificates to cause damage, faster revocation cycles, and reduced exposure windows
Forced automation eliminates human error – Manual certificate management becomes impossible at scale, driving the necessary shift to automated systems
Competitive differentiation through operational excellence – While competitors struggle with compliance, you’re delivering seamless, uninterrupted services
Foundation for crypto-agility – The infrastructure you build for 47-day compliance becomes your platform for post-quantum cryptography readiness and future algorithm transitions
Skip the Scramble: Start Scanning Today
Organizations that embrace this change now will emerge with certificate management capabilities that their competitors won’t match for years.
We’re already seeing two distinct paths emerge in the market. Some organizations are waiting it out, hoping the mandate will be delayed or diluted. Others are seizing the moment, using this transition as their catalyst for CLM modernization.
When compliance deadlines loom, scrambling organizations typically rush to implement band-aid solutions that barely meet requirements and suffer the resulting outages and service disruptions.
Forward-thinking IT security experts will lead their organizations using a different approach:
Building comprehensive discovery capabilities that reveal their complete SSL/TLS certificate landscape. This is not just the publicly visible certificates, but the hidden infrastructure certificates that pose the real operational risk.
Implementing automated lifecycle management that handles certificate provisioning, renewal, and revocation seamlessly across all environments—from public cloud to private networks to edge devices.
Creating crypto-agile architectures that can adapt to algorithm changes, post-quantum cryptography, and future security requirements without massive infrastructure overhauls.
Establishing governance frameworks that enforce consistent security policies while supporting business agility and compliance requirements.
Most organizations have no clear picture of how many SSL/TLS certificates they actually have or where those certificates live. The reality is that they are spread across:
Internal network infrastructure – Servers, databases, APIs, and applications that never appear in public scans.
Cloud-native environments – Container orchestration platforms, microservices, and serverless functions, each with unique certificate requirements
Development and staging systems – Non-production environments that still need valid certificates for testing and integration
IoT and edge devices – Connected devices and edge computing platforms with embedded certificates
Legacy applications – Older systems still running with forgotten certificates
The bottom line: You can’t manage what you can’t see, and you can’t secure what you don’t know exists.
The Crypto-Agile Advantage: Future-Proofing for the 47-Day Mandate and More
The 47-day mandate is just the beginning. Post-quantum cryptography is coming. New algorithms will emerge. Security standards will evolve. The infrastructure you build to handle shorter certificate lifespans becomes your foundation for adapting to all of these changes.
Crypto-agility means:
Seamless algorithm transitions when new cryptographic standards emerge
Rapid response capabilities for security vulnerabilities or algorithm compromises
Standardized processes that can accommodate and work seamlessly across multiple certificate authorities and environments
Automated policy enforcement that adapts to changing compliance requirements
Zero-downtime updates that maintain service availability during security transitions
Organizations building crypto-agile certificate management now will handle future changes with confidence while their competitors struggle through each new requirement.
Building Your 47-Day TLS Advantage: The Practical Steps
So how do forward-thinking organizations actually make this transition? It starts with understanding where you are, then building toward where you need to be.
Step 1: Complete Discovery and Assessment
Get the full picture of your SSL/TLS certificate landscape—not just the public certificates, but every certificate across every environment. Most organizations discover they have 10-100 times more certificates than they realized.
Assess your current processes for certificate lifecycle management, crypto-agility readiness, and 47-day compliance gaps. A clear baseline is essential for planning your modernization journey.
Step 2: Design Your Modernization Strategy
Develop a roadmap that addresses immediate 47-day TLS compliance needs while building long-term crypto-agility capabilities. The best strategies solve today’s problems while positioning for tomorrow’s requirements.
Plan your automation architecture to handle certificate lifecycle management at enterprise scale across all environments and certificate authorities.
Step 3: Implement and Optimize
Deploy automated certificate lifecycle management that can handle the operational requirements of 47-day TLS certificates while supporting your broader security and compliance goals.
Establish governance policies that ensure consistent security standards while supporting business agility and growth.
Build monitoring and alerting systems that provide visibility into certificate health and proactive management of potential issues.
Schedule a consultation to discuss your specific modernization strategy →
The Time to Act Is Now
PacificSource recently modernized its certificate lifecycle management program, automating and ensuring crypto-agility for IT security. What they knew that others don’t is that the organizations that will thrive in the 47-day TLS era are the ones taking action today. While competitors debate and delay, they’re building the certificate management capabilities that will serve as competitive advantages for years to come.
The window for strategic positioning is closing. Organizations that wait until compliance deadlines are imminent will be forced into reactive, sub-optimal solutions. Those that act now can build comprehensive, crypto-agile certificate management programs that position them as industry leaders.
Your next move matters. Will you be among the organizations that use this transition to leapfrog competitors, or will you be scrambling to catch up while they pull ahead?
The choice is yours, but the time to choose is now.
Ready to Build Your 47-Day TLS Advantage?
Don’t wait for the scramble. Start building your competitive advantage today with a comprehensive understanding of your SSL/TLS certificate landscape and a strategic plan for modernization.
Finance teams aren’t lacking in activity. From bookkeeping, journal entries and invoice processing to reconciliations and reporting, there’s always something in motion. Yet despite all the hustle, progress often feels out of reach.
The real problem? Manual work hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been reshuffled into bottlenecks that delay more strategic work.
In many cases, automation efforts have only shifted time-consuming accounting and finance tasks from one format to another. A spreadsheet becomes a shared dashboard. An email approval becomes a routed task. But your finance team is still stuck chasing numbers, rekeying data and resolving issues after the fact — all of which hinder decision making.
The result is a constant state of motion without momentum and no cost savings to show for it.
The human duct tape holding it all together
Across many finance departments, people have quietly become the connectors between systems that don’t integrate, business processes that don’t scale and tools that don’t talk to each other. This work is often hidden, but it’s everywhere.
Manual transfers still dominate
It’s common for financial data to be passed manually between accounting systems, cloud-based tools and spreadsheets. Reformatting templates, copying journal entries, extracting expense reports and uploading to ERP and other core systems are all daily habits. But they aren’t strategic; they’re fragile and expose gaps in finance processes.
Instead of enabling financial automation, these patterns create process gaps that rely on individuals to hold things together.
Email is the approval workflow
Approvals for purchase orders, reimbursements or journal corrections often live in inboxes. There’s no standardized tracking, no built-in audit trail and no ability to scale. Delays compound, and time-sensitive tasks get buried in threads with no visibility into who owes what to whom, which is an inefficiency that hurts accountability.
Errors hide in plain sight
Manual data entry, repetitive tasks and disconnected handoffs make room for mistakes. Small discrepancies lead to larger rework — sometimes noticed too late to avoid compliance issues or reporting misstatements. Even one error in invoice processing or forecasting can distort financial results.
Finance teams often absorb these mistakes silently and patch over them to keep things moving. But the impact is real: lost time, lost trust and missed opportunities.
What real automation looks like
True finance automation software doesn’t just wrap manual processes in nicer interfaces. It eliminates the work entirely. When you’re ready to truly automate your financial operations, evaluate your team’s foundation, platform, metrics and methods.
Fix the foundation
Automation done right starts by removing handoffs instead of just digitizing them. That means getting rid of emails, templates, offline trackers and error-prone spreadsheets, not layering new tools on top of them.
Unify the platform
Use a unified finance automation platform, like Finance Automation by Redwood, that streamlines your processes for you. It’s designed to replace the manual duct tape with a single, unified solution. It connects the entire finance lifecycle, such as journal entries, validations, invoice approvals, reconciliations and financial close, into one streamlined system while improving visibility.
Instead of moving data manually between tools, Finance Automation integrates directly with ERPs, CRMs and other business systems via APIs. It accesses data in real time, automates the transformation steps that normally happen in spreadsheets and initiates downstream accounting and financial processes automatically, so no bots or workarounds are required.
That means your team won’t need to cleanse Excel files just to make them automation-ready. There’ll be no back-and-forth with IT to get a new workflow running — just intelligent automation that’s purpose-built for accounting and finance functions.
Automate the middle, not just the edges
Many finance automation solutions focus on what happens at the beginning or end of a process. One example of this is automating invoice intake or reporting disclosures. But the real time is spent in the middle by formatting files, validating values, routing approvals and chasing down exceptions.
Finance Automation addresses these middle steps, where your accounting and finance teams lose the most time, require the most manual effort and introduce the most risk. It doesn’t just trigger actions; it transforms how your work flows.
Intelligent controls without the complexity
Finance Automation includes built-in internal controls, audit trails and SLA tracking with a user-friendly interface that doesn’t require coding. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can detect anomalies, recommend corrections and reduce reliance on tribal knowledge by combining AI with automation technology to increase efficiency.
This allows your finance department to scale without scaling headcount. It’s automation that adjusts to real business needs, not the other way around.
Movement isn’t the same as momentum
Procuring new finance automation tools is easy. Getting real ROI from them is harder.
If spreadsheets still drive month-end close, if manual tasks still dominate onboarding or procurement or if human error is still part of your team’s weekly routine, the illusion of progress has taken hold.
Real automation delivers more than dashboards. It delivers control, speed and clarity. It enables informed decisions and measurable performance improvements. Most of all, it frees up your team to focus on value instead of firefighting.
Where to begin
The first step is to look honestly at your current accounting and finance processes. Ask whether these tools help you optimize outcomes or simply keep things moving.
Are manual approvals still clogging email inboxes?
Is data copied between systems by hand?
Do dashboards reflect real-time updates or just snapshots?
Are audit trails automated or assembled post-close?
If the answers point to hidden manual work, it’s time to question whether your existing tools are still running on human duct tape.
Don’t just add more finance tools. Remove the unnecessary work.
The goal isn’t to digitize more steps. It’s to eliminate the ones that shouldn’t exist at all.
Finance Automation is a solution that’s built to do exactly that. It replaces fragmented, repetitive and error-prone financial tasks with fully automated systems that handle end-to-end processes — from journal entry to reconciliation to intercompany.
With seamless integration, real-time dashboards and scalable infrastructure, it’s designed to keep accounting and finance operations running without the duct tape.
Evaluate your current financial tools to see if they’re truly helping you progress or just keeping you and your team busy. Then, book a demo to see how you can create a fully automated finance close.
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