AI that delivers: Redwood RangerAI now available in RunMyJobs 

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Earlier this month, we announced Redwood RangerAI, which represents a significant shift in how you build automations and operate your automation platforms. Redwood RangerAI began with a bold idea: that automation could act with the same precision and purpose as the teams it supports. 

Starting with RunMyJobs by Redwood version 2025.4, that vision is on its way to full realization. Redwood RangerAI is live and integrated across the platform, bringing embedded AI assistance and AI-driven development to the automation solution enterprises already trust to run their mission-critical operations.

AI built for the enterprise

Redwood RangerAI is a product of Redwood Software’s 30-year legacy of enterprise-grade automation. From contextual guidance to AI-assisted workflow creation, its capabilities are built directly into RunMyJobs, not bolted on. It’s AI designed to work within your governed, secure automation environment.

All of Redwood’s solutions are shaped by direct, high-touch engagement with customers, including regular feature-focused user advisory boards and strategic customer advisory boards that directly impact near-term and longer-term roadmaps. 

Redwood RangerAI is no exception. Redwood’s teams have focused first on delivering practical upgrades to accelerate users’ tasks and cut down on their backlogs. These focused enhancements lay the groundwork for upcoming AI capabilities that will further expand your ability to build and scale automation within your enterprise.

What’s new in RunMyJobs 2025.4

Redwood RangerAI introduces a range of AI-powered features that help users learn, build and operate faster within a secure framework.

Redwood RangerAI Product Assistant for RunMyJobs

Get guidance right where you work

Embedded directly into the RunMyJobs interface, the Product Assistant provides on-hand guidance tailored to your tasks. It can:

• Suggest one-click error resolutions and best practices
• Reduce reliance on specialized knowledge and support tickets
• Accelerate onboarding for new users

With dynamic, situational guidance, the Product Assistant makes RunMyJobs more intuitive for every user, not just automation experts.

Redwood RangerAI Automation Co-pilot for RunMyJobs

Build better automations, faster

The Automation Co-pilot helps teams translate intent into execution. Using natural-language input, it can automatically generate scripts, complete with built-in guardrails to maintain compliance and prevent common errors.

Engineers can now focus on design and innovation, not repetitive maintenance. The Automation Co-pilot dramatically shortens the cycle from concept to deployment while producing consistent, high-quality outputs that align with enterprise governance standards.

A robust, intelligent ecosystem

Redwood RangerAI doesn’t stop at RunMyJobs. Its intelligence extends across Redwood’s entire product portfolio to give you a consistent experience from discovery to deployment.

Redwood RangerAI Learning Assistant

Learn continuously

Available through Redwood’s public documentation site, the Learning Assistant gives users 24/7 conversational access to product knowledge. It provides instant answers to technical questions, with precise contextual references. This reduces the learning curve for new features and capabilities, in addition to helping users find the exact information they need without manually searching.

Redwood RangerAI Support Assistant

Resolve issues instantly

Integrated within the Redwood Support portal, the Support Assistant instantly analyzes issues and suggests resolutions for common scenarios. It reduces first response time to seconds (every time) and allows technical experts to focus on higher-value challenges.

A foundation for agentic orchestration

Redwood RangerAI is the next step in your enterprise’s journey toward true autonomy. With its capabilities now embedded across RunMyJobs, your enterprise gains the secure footing you’ll need to evolve from deterministic workflows to goal-driven, adaptive automation.

Designed to support industry standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol for interoperability, Redwood’s open, future-proofed approach allows you to securely connect to your broader agentic ecosystem, including SAP Joule. Your AI systems can make informed decisions while IT retains complete visibility and control.

Redwood provides the trusted bridge to carry you from today’s automation to tomorrow’s autonomous enterprise, ensuring you can leverage existing investments and scale AI securely.

The business impact

Every organization adopting Redwood RangerAI has one thing in common: a drive to accomplish more with the same resources. These intelligent capabilities amplify human efforts, automating what can be automated and guiding what requires expertise. Most importantly, learning continuously from both. Here’s what Redwood RangerAI can enable for your teams.

Redwood RangerAI doesn’t replace people. It extends their reach, generating measurable improvements in efficiency, accuracy and time-to-value.

What it means for you

Already a RunMyJobs customer? Redwood RangerAI capabilities are available now as part of the 2025.4 release. SaaS customers will automatically benefit from the Redwood RangerAI Support Assistant, and upgrade options are available to activate additional features. Take a tour of Redwood RangerAI in RunMyJobs.

To experience what’s next in AI-powered automation, visit the AI hub or request a personalized demo of RunMyJobs and Redwood RangerAI.

SAP clean core and SAP Cloud ERP: Technical debt prevention with strategic orchestration

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Enterprises adopting SAP Cloud ERP, formerly known as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, or modernizing through RISE with SAP share a common goal: moving faster without losing control. The SAP clean core methodology makes that possible. By keeping the ERP system close to standard, it removes friction and potential technical complications that can delay upgrade paths, improves resilience and makes it easier to adapt as business priorities evolve.

Applying clean core strategies reduces complexity by emphasizing configuration instead of customization. With less customized code buried in the ERP, updates install cleanly, integrations behave predictably and technical debt can be avoided as much as possible. It also shortens the time it takes to roll out new functionality and enhancements, so the system evolves in step with your business.

When clean core principles are paired with orchestration and side-by-side extensibility, your enterprise can handle complex operations without sacrificing flexibility or creating long-term maintenance issues.

What is an SAP clean core?

A clean core describes an SAP Cloud ERP or SAP S/4HANA on-premises environment that remains as close as possible to standard SAP. Enhancements are built externally using approved extensibility frameworks such as SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). This keeps the foundation stable and cloud-ready while giving your teams room to innovate.

A clean core strategy enables consistent upgrades and simpler integration of new SAP and non-SAP capabilities. Guiding principles include:

• Relying on standard SAP functionality whenever possible
• Extending through platforms like SAP BTP
• Governing all custom development to maintain transparency
• Preserving compatibility across future SAP releases
• Allowing key user extensibility without altering core logic

ASUG calls clean core a foundation of agile ERP and business transformation. Standardization accelerates innovation, trims long-term maintenance and streamlines compliance while leaving room for business-specific differentiation.

At SAP Sapphire Orlando, SAP leaders reiterated that clean core is not optional anymore. It’s essentially a baseline for every modern ERP strategy.

The problem with customizations: Technical debt and inflexibility

Many long-standing SAP landscapes still rely on layers of custom ABAP code built to address one-off requirements. Over time, these changes pile up, forming a cluttered landscape of custom code. The further a system drifts from SAP standard, the more expensive, fragile and time-consuming every future change becomes.

Common consequences include:

• Upgrade delays: Each new release requires re-testing and re-work
• Higher total cost of ownership (TCO): Maintenance grows harder as custom logic ages
• Reduced adaptability: Connecting new technologies, such as AI or analytics, becomes more complicated
• Performance concerns: Additional code can slow processing and increase resource use
• Security exposure: Non-standard modifications introduce potential vulnerabilities

NTT DATA notes that once an ERP environment diverges from SAP standard, even minor upgrades demand heavy manual validation.

Reducing this dependency sits at the heart of the clean core approach. Externalizing logic and integrating through APIs rather than internal code changes restores agility and simplifies ongoing maintenance.

How future-ready orchestration enables clean core extensibility

Maintaining a clean core while still running large, interconnected business processes efficiently requires coordination. Orchestration is the answer.

Modern Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) can link SAP and non-SAP systems without embedding logic in the ERP. They handle workflow sequencing, manage dependencies and automate handoffs across applications. Instead of writing isolated scripts, your IT teams gain a central control layer that unifies automation.

The advantages are practical:

• Streamlined integration through standardized APIs and connectors
• Faster response to business or process changes
• Less testing and regression effort with each upgrade
• Centralized visibility and stronger governance
• Consistent behavior across hybrid and multi-cloud landscapes

With orchestration managing process flow, the SAP core stays clean, upgrade-safe and easier to evolve. As a result, you reduce the technical debt that too often slows and, what’s worse, limits innovation in transformation projects.

Leveraging SAP BTP for extensibility

SAP BTP provides the official foundation for extensibility in SAP Cloud ERP. It lets your teams build, integrate and operate new applications that enhance functionality without altering core code.

As outlined in SAP’s ”Clean core extensibility” whitepaper, BTP supports upgrade-safe enhancements through ABAP Cloud, seamless integration via standard APIs, low-code application development with SAP Build and workflow automation, without modifying core ERP logic.

When orchestration platforms tie into BTP services, they can initiate workflows, move data securely and synchronize systems across cloud and on-premises environments. So, they keep the ERP core stable while allowing innovation where it’s needed most.

SAP BTP also supports a wide range of extensions and SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), from analytics and planning to integration and data orchestration. Solution services like SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), SAP Datasphere and Integration Suite help teams enhance functionality without modifying ERP code.

By automating the flow of data between S/4HANA, BTP services and analytics platforms, you avoid embedding custom logic or reporting scripts in the ERP. This approach keeps core processes standard and ensures upgrades remain predictable — even as your business intelligence needs grow.

Clean core in practice: RISE with SAP

RISE with SAP offers a managed path to SAP Cloud ERP that bundles software, infrastructure and services. Clean core methodology is fundamental to that journey.

Legacy customizations often complicate RISE migrations, introducing extra testing cycles and unplanned delays. Systems designed around clean core principles migrate more easily, adopt future releases sooner and need less remediation and oversight afterward.

Orchestration strengthens this model by automating the cross-system activities that typically require manual oversight, such as:

• Financial close and reporting
• Order management and fulfillment
• Supply chain coordination and demand planning
• Master data synchronization
• Billing and receivables management

➡️ As described in detail by SAP in this community post, RunMyJobs by Redwood is part of the RISE with SAP reference architecture and is, thus, SAP’s recommended solution. RunMyJobs managed services, delivered by the SAP ECS team, offer a compliant and lower-risk approach to modernizing job scheduling within a RISE environment. Rather than relying on OS-level scripts or unmanaged third-party agents installed without oversight and control on application servers, SAP ECS provides managed connectivity and oversight for RunMyJobs. This enables customers to execute OS-level workflows, including file transfers, in a standardized, cloud-compliant way.

Automating key business functions while keeping the core clean

Clean core methodology supports automation without compromise. By managing automation outside the ERP core ABAP code and integrating through APIs and other SAP-approved methods, you maintain system integrity while improving efficiency and accuracy.

Finance automation

Financial closing often involves repetitive manual steps that slow cycle times. Orchestration can handle reconciliations, journal entries and accruals automatically using SAP standard interfaces. Enterprises using Finance Automation by Redwood have reported significant time savings — in some cases up to 90% — across record-to-report processes. It allows you to execute these tasks externally, maintaining upgrade safety and compliance with clean core principles while supporting continuous, touchless close capabilities.

Data excellence and migration preparation

Migration success depends on both clean code and clean data. Archiving, validation and cleansing are essential to maintaining data quality and readiness for future releases.

Automation coordinates these steps end-to-end, optimizing accuracy and consistency throughout migration. It minimizes manual effort and reinforces data governance across the enterprise, supporting the same discipline that defines clean core strategy.

A foundation for future SAP innovation

Clean core is a commitment to long-term stability and adaptability. It simplifies upgrades, accelerates adoption of new SAP capabilities and creates a predictable base for innovation. As enterprises extend their automation and data strategies, BDC adds another layer of value by connecting data across applications and business processes. Together with SAP BTP, BDC helps you achieve end-to-end visibility without compromising clean core integrity.

Clean core extensibility lets organizations evolve through approved frameworks rather than custom modification. This design keeps systems agile and dependable over time.

Enterprises that follow clean core principles gain measurable advantages:

• Lower maintenance costs and effort
• Faster access to new SAP features and releases
• Greater agility to adjust as business priorities shift
• Improved reliability and system uptime
• Readiness for new SAP and third-party technologies

Strategic orchestration for clean core success

Sustaining a clean core across enterprise operations requires discipline and coordination. Modern orchestration platforms supply that structure, aligning automation and governance so processes run consistently while the ERP stays untouched.

Redwood Software has worked with SAP for more than two decades. RunMyJobs by Redwood is the only workload automation solution that is a Premium certified SAP Endorsed App. It uniquely supports SAP’s clean core strategy in cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments by eliminating custom code and workarounds.

By following SAP’s clean core framework and extending it through orchestration, you can keep your S/4HANA environment adaptable, reduce technical debt and ensure every new capability builds on a solid foundation.

Explore how a leading SOAP can future-proof your clean core strategy. Book a demo of RunMyJobs.

Self-driving automation: The leap from cruise control to true orchestration

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The evolution of enterprise automation looks a lot like the automotive journey from fully manual driving to autonomous vehicles. You can’t simply flip a switch from cruise control to self-driving; you move through discrete stages, each laying the foundation for the next. 

Similarly, in the IT world, your organization cannot leap overnight from task-level automation to full enterprise orchestration. You must build the capabilities carefully.

The 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms report flags that we are at a pivotal inflection point: what was once the domain of job schedulers and workload automation is now evolving into enterprise orchestration fabrics that span IT, business services, data pipelines and multi-cloud ecosystems. The vendors leading this shift are not just automating but orchestrating. And the business consequences could not be clearer.

We’ll walk through five stages of evolution, from manual operations to autonomous orchestration, framed in the language of orchestration, and pull insights from the Magic Quadrant™ on what to watch for as you chart your next move.

Stage 1: Manual operations

The pre-automation era

Before any driver-assist features, the human driver handled everything: steering, braking, monitoring blind spots, judging distances. In this phase, your automation may not yet be formalized. Work is isolated. Dependencies are hidden. Risk is unmanaged. 

As Gartner notes, the shift away from purely workload automation is driven by exactly this: organizations finding that scheduling jobs and hoping they succeed is no longer enough. 

Key action: Inventory the manual work: what processes are being run by hand, what dependencies are invisible and which handoffs are subject to errors or delay? Capturing the map of manual operations is the first step toward orchestration.

Stage 2: Assisted automation

The rise of workload automation

Just as cars added features like cruise control, lane-keeping or adaptive cruise assist, organizations added scheduling tools, workload automation platforms and event-driven triggers. At this stage, you’re automating within domains: IT ops can schedule jobs, data teams can automate transfers, Finance may have some back-office automation — but it remains siloed.

In Gartner’s framing, however, this stage is no longer sufficient, considering the future of automation will be AI-driven. The market shifted to SOAPs precisely because these assisted workload platforms cannot orchestrate across hybrid, multi-domain, service-oriented environments. 

Key action: Push beyond individual automations. Ask: Which tasks are being automated but still reside in silos? Which workflows span applications and teams and, yet, are still manually handed off? Start identifying cross-domain opportunities for integration, handoffs and orchestration.

Stage 3: Coordinated orchestration

SOAPs transform the enterprise

Now, we reach the point in automotive evolution where vehicles begin to talk to one another, sharing speed, position and intention. It’s no longer isolated, driver-assist features but real coordination. 

In enterprise terms, this is where orchestration comes into play. A platform can integrate across multiple domains (IT operations, business services, data pipelines), across environments (on-premises, cloud, edge) and across organizational boundaries (business users, DevOps, operations).

This is exactly the space Gartner defines for SOAPs:

“Service orchestration and automation platforms are essential for delivering business services through complex workloads. SOAPs unify workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning, extending across data pipelines and cloud-native architectures.” 

In the 2025 Magic Quadrant™, vendors who sit in the Leader quadrant are those who already deliver across those boundaries. One of the key shifts is moving from automation as tasks to orchestration as services. Workflows are no longer just sequences of jobs but deliverables to the business. 

Key action: If you’re in this stage (or aiming for it), your focus should shift from “How many tasks are automated?” to “Which end-to-end services do we deliver, how well are they orchestrated and how visible and responsive are they?” Define service-level outcomes, identify orchestration gaps and consider a platform that supports orchestration rather than just job scheduling.

Stage 4: Intelligent orchestration

Where SOAPs are heading

The next generational shift in driving is full autonomy, when cars not only sense lane, distance and speed but adapt to traffic, make decisions and even anticipate hazards. The comparable shift in orchestration is when platforms begin to embed intelligence, analytics, machine learning and predictive capabilities, turning from reactive to proactive.

Gartner’s commentary on SOAPs points to this evolution from scheduling. Orchestration enables business outcome optimization, real-time responsiveness, hybrid execution and data-driven insights. 

What makes this stage distinct:

• The platform monitors SLA slippage, process deviations and event patterns and intervenes automatically
• It adapts workflows based on business outcome metrics, not just runtime metrics
• It integrates across domains (IT, business, data) with a unified observability and orchestration layer

Key action: Ask whether your orchestration approach is still reactive (executing defined workflows) or becoming intelligent (monitoring, adapting, optimizing). Consider adding observability dashboards, SLA tracking, anomaly detection and business-metric alignment. Ensure that your orchestration platform supports and surfaces these capabilities.

Stage 5: Autonomous orchestration

The inevitable destination

In the automotive metaphor, this is fleet-wide coordination, vehicles and infrastructure orchestrating together — with no human driver in the loop. In enterprise automation, this is where orchestration spans entire business ecosystems: external partners, supply chains, digital services and beyond. Platforms anticipate demand, compose new service flows, self-heal and self-optimize.

The Gartner report points toward this future: by 2029, Gartner predicts “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.” 

Thus, the destination is a space where orchestration is the only way to stay competitive. Businesses that stay in scheduling or siloed automation risk being outpaced.

Key action: Visualize not just automation within your walls, but orchestration across your value chain. Consider how automation fabrics can link partner systems, customer-facing services, external data flows and more across business functions. Begin constructing the operational model for autonomous orchestration: monitoring, governance, AI-assisted workflows and outcome-based orchestration.

Accelerate your journey

Gartner is signaling that this shift has already arrived. The question isn’t whether enterprises need orchestration platforms but who will have them and how effectively they’ll deploy them. The vendors in the Leader quadrant have already embraced the orchestration fabric, not just automation modules. 

For CIOs, heads of infrastructure and operations (I&O) and automation leaders, here are the implications:

• Siloed automation tools (task → script → schedule) are no longer sufficient for scale, complexity or agility
• A SOAP platform becomes the anchor for hybrid, cloud and business service-oriented orchestration
• The technology investment moves from standalone tools to orchestration fabrics: connectors, observability, low-code orchestration and event-driven services

Your roadmap must reflect the above stages of automation and orchestration maturity to ensure you can deliver business outcomes at speed. Use analyst frameworks (like the Magic Quadrant™ and Critical Capabilities) as strategic lenses — not just vendor checklists — to benchmark your progress and maturity.

Just as automakers gradually moved through mechanical driving, driver assist, autonomy and vehicle-to-vehicle coordination, enterprises must traverse these orchestration stages deliberately. And the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP provides the framework for what good looks like today and which vendors are leading the charge.

Download the full report now and use it to choose a partner with a proven track record of enterprise orchestration.

From checklists to automation: Why your close management is still manual

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A close management system is only as good as the automation it enables. Get real-time visibility into your tasks.

Digital point or close management tools have replaced spreadsheets for many accounting professionals and finance teams, but the work beneath those tools is still largely manual. Critical close tasks, from SAP job execution to journal entry posting, still depend on you to run the process, confirm it’s done and update its status afterward, which is time-consuming.

Tracking is helpful, but it doesn’t equal progress. A faster, more scalable close requires intelligent automation that executes the work — not just organizes it.

That’s exactly what Finance Automation by Redwood is built to deliver. As the only financial close management software designed to orchestrate a full, touchless record-to-report (R2R) process, Finance Automation connects directly with ERP systems like SAP to automate execution, streamline dependencies and surface exceptions in real time. Explore the different ways your close management process is still manual and how Redwood Software built a tool to help you reach full automation in your financial processes, whether it’s by helping you catch discrepancies ahead of time, update account balances and balance sheets or manage other financial data.

Manual work still runs the process

Most checklist tools only centralize task management. They don’t launch SAP close jobs, start reconciliation processes or automate end-to-end journal entries. Those tasks still happen offline or inside disconnected accounting software and rely on you to return to the checklist you created in an Excel template to mark them as complete.

If your tasks go unconfirmed, successor tasks are delayed. This slows the close cycle, forces follow-ups and leaves your team with an incomplete view of progress. During high-stakes accounting periods like your entity’s close, this lack of insight leads to bottlenecks, delays in financial reporting processes and costly rework.

Finance Automation automates this handoff. Tasks are closed by the system once work is executed, not by someone trying to remember to check a box. That means your close checklist reflects truth, not approximation.

Where most tools fall short

Digital checklists and shared dashboards offer visibility, but not execution. The underlying manual effort remains and requires finance and accounting teams to manually launch close activities, manage data entry and update task statuses, usually in tools that aren’t connected to your ERP.

Without system-driven updates, your metrics, KPIs and dashboards are lagging indicators instead of real-time performance signals. That leaves CFOs, controllers and global stakeholders guessing about the true close status and unable to confidently have fast, informed decision-making.

Finance Automation integrates with SAP to automate the close at its core by removing these dependencies entirely and allowing your teams to operate in real time with full control and traceability.

What intelligent close management looks like

Modern close execution doesn’t require more checklists; it requires fewer manual steps. Finance Automation executes close activities directly within your SAP environment, then updates the task status automatically.

This includes:

• Automatically escalating exceptions and delays across workflows
• Creating, validating, approving and posting journal entries, including accruals, provisions and reclassifications
• Initiating and tracking account reconciliation workflows based on a top-down, risk-based approach
• Managing intercompany eliminations and automatically posting transactions in the core ERP with the correct trading partners
• Running SAP close programs (e.g., depreciation, currency revaluation and allocations)

This task automation is captured with a complete audit trail that gives you the controls you need without slowing down execution. Finance Automation doesn’t just track work — it performs it.

Built to scale with complexity

Global finance operations rely on consistent, reliable execution across regions, systems and teams. Finance Automation was built specifically to support the orchestration of close activity across multiple entities and ERPs, while maintaining compliance and control.

The platform automatically adjusts task calendars, handles multi-entity dependencies and routes exceptions based on business logic. Whether your team is centralizing its financial close processes or managing decentralized business units, Finance Automation ensures that your close remains consistent, scalable and auditable. You’ll also gain:

• A reduction in manual tasks and repetitive manual processes
• Enterprise-ready support, including AI-powered exception detection and 99.95% uptime
• ERP-native execution across SAP ECC and S/4HANA
• Streamlined workflows that eliminate unnecessary coordination
• Support for dynamic tasks across business units, sub-ledgers and general ledgers

Why finance teams choose Redwood

Unlike checklist tools that depend on you to move the process forward, Finance Automation automates the actions behind the scenes. It enables finance teams to:

• Complete close tasks with fewer handoffs and greater speed
• Ensure system-driven validation of critical milestones
• Improve financial performance by accelerating close and reporting cycles
• Optimize timelines across regions, departments and systems
• Provide confidence to executives and auditors with a full, traceable audit trail

And with transparent, scalable pricing — with no per-user or per-task fees — this close management solution grows with your business needs, not against them.

Stop tracking. Start automating.

If your close checklist still depends on manual inputs, disconnected tools or human coordination, it’s not built to scale.

Finance Automation transforms your checklist into an execution layer. SAP tasks run when ready. Journal entries are prepared and posted automatically. Reconciliations are initiated and completed based on actual source data. And your team members focus on analysis versus manual work.With this solution, your month-end close process becomes faster, more consistent and confidently audit-ready every time. Your modern finance organization needs more than visibility. It needs results. Schedule a demo to see how Finance Automation can help your team close smarter, reduce risk and lead with real-time performance instead of after-the-fact reporting.

Beyond the dot: A strategist’s guide to the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP

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Each year, the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) becomes a focal point of enterprise IT strategy. It’s widely shared, often cited and used as a north star for vendor selection and investment decisions. For good reason: it offers a concise, research-backed view of how the market is evolving and which vendors are leading that evolution. But its real value is unlocked only when viewed with strategic discipline.

In my view, the Magic Quadrant™ isn’t a scoreboard. It’s a strategic map that reflects thousands of product decisions, customer outcomes and architectural bets. Reading it strategically can help you make smarter investments in automation, extensibility and long-term innovation.

This year’s report reinforces something we’ve known for some time: not all Leaders are interchangeable. The quadrant tells you where vendors are positioned. Interpreting why they are there — and how that aligns with your own transformation priorities — is where the real insight lies.

Two axes, one strategy lens

The two dimensions Gartner evaluates — Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision — each reveal a different layer of vendor maturity. Together, they create a framework for interpreting platform relevance not just in the present, but across the lifecycle of enterprise automation strategy.

Ability to Execute: A test of operational resilience

I believe high placement here reflects sustained operational performance under enterprise conditions.

Leaders on this axis tend to demonstrate:

• Scalable performance across hybrid and multi-cloud systems
• Deep integrations with complex applications like SAP, mainframe and proprietary tools
• Operational simplicity that reduces total cost of ownership, not just task count
• Clear expansion momentum across customer accounts

As Gartner notes, Leaders “execute strongly at scale and offer deep capabilities across a breadth of use cases.”

Execution strength is, essentially, a measure of enterprise trust. It answers the questions: Can this vendor reliably orchestrate critical business processes at scale? 

Completeness of Vision: A proxy for architectural longevity

A forward-leaning position on the Vision axis, in my opinion, speaks to how well a provider anticipates market direction and whether its platform investments are aligned with that trajectory.

Strong positioning here suggests:

• Future-ready architecture — cloud-native, API-first, event-driven by design
• Flexible, extensible capabilities that allow teams to adapt without vendor lock-in
• Alignment with ecosystem shifts, including AI, data fabric and digital ops strategies
• Strategic investment discipline, not reactive product expansion

Vision matters because today’s innovation is tomorrow’s technical debt. A platform that lacks architectural foresight may soon be outpaced by your organization’s needs.

Interpreting quadrant dynamics

In my experience, reading quadrant by quadrant makes it easier to identify tradeoffs and risks. Here’s the breakdown of each quadrant position according to Gartner methodology — and my interpretation of these positions.

Extract maximum value by connecting quadrant insights to tangible outcomes: reduced cycle time, improved SLA performance or lower integration overhead, for example. Ask vendors to demonstrate how their execution and vision translate into business impact, not just platform metrics. By tying evaluation to outcomes, you transform an analyst framework into an instrument for performance accountability.

SOAP Leaders today

Leaders who share space in the top right quadrant may take fundamentally different approaches to orchestration, extensibility and AI integration. I feel a strong Leader in 2025 is defined not only by breadth of capability but by the ability to remain competitive through:

• AI-driven operations
• Composable, event-driven architectures
• Autonomous remediation and continuous optimization 

The most important question isn’t “Who leads today?” but “Who is building for what’s next?”

Enduring leadership depends on both continuous architectural evolution and current market momentum.

How to use the Magic Quadrant™ in your vendor evaluation

Position within the Leaders quadrant should not be viewed as a stamp of parity. Vendors may share a quadrant, but not a philosophy, architecture or roadmap. 

The most strategic organizations treat the Magic Quadrant™ not just as validation, but as an input in a broader due diligence process. Map vendor placement to your operating model maturity to turn the quadrant from a static chart into a living framework for modernization. Over time, this mindset shifts the focus from comparing vendors to clarifying enterprise priorities.

Ask questions like:

• How does the platform align with our current tech stack, business model and operating environment?
• Will this vendor support our transformation roadmap — or limit it?
• What aspects of execution or vision earned the placement? Are those priorities aligned with our needs?
• Do case studies and references indicate expansion, innovation and long-term value?

Use the quadrant to inform your next questions, not to answer them outright. Read our guide to choosing the right SOAP solution for a more detailed analysis.

Strategy, not symmetry

We’re all searching for simplicity in a fast-changing world of automation tech, so it’s tempting to view proximity on the Magic Quadrant™ as a sign of equivalence. It’s not.

Go beyond the dot — use this year’s Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP as your starting point. Consider the rationale behind each placement. Investigate the executional proof points and architectural investments. And above all, choose partners who will not only deliver results in the current environment, but evolve with you as strategy, scale and complexity accelerate.

The quadrant gives you a map. The next move is yours. Download the full Gartner report to examine the landscape and learn why Redwood Software was named a Leader for the second consecutive year.

The new rules of enterprise orchestration platforms

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Every IT leader reaches the breaking point. Automation tools that once ran like clockwork start to wobble more than once in a while. There’s the typical story of a critical overnight job breaking and an alert showing up in your inbox 12 hours too late. Or that one employee who “knows how it all works” being out on leave, so no one can recover a failed process without them. 

The problem isn’t a lack of automation. You have scripts, schedules and tools. The problem is a lack of orchestration. And that gap is putting your business outcomes at risk.

Modern Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) exist to solve this. When you look at the leaders in the latest Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP, you’ll find they aren’t just job schedulers with a prettier UI. They connect disparate systems. Understand business events. Anticipate outcomes and manage the mind-numbing complexity of a hybrid cloud world without increasing your team’s cognitive load.

Here are the new rules defining the modern orchestration platform.

Rule #1: Automation that listens

Time-based schedulers are still everywhere, but they’re tuned to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Business runs on events now, not clocks.

A supply chain workflow, for example, doesn’t need to run at 2 AM. It needs to run after the fulfillment file hits your cloud bucket and the payment clears and the inventory check validates.

Modern orchestration listens instead of waiting for time to pass. In other words, it sequences jobs based on the triggers that matter. Those might be external events, upstream outcomes or system states.

Rule #2: Integration is deeper than connectivity

Every platform says it “integrates.” But in my experience, that often means little more than a basic API handshake. Real orchestration is understanding what connection means in the context of a process.

For example, did the SAP job finish successfully, or did it hit a soft failure? Is the returned dataset complete? Does the next system require a transformation before ingesting it?

Modern orchestration is built to manage this kind of nuance. It adapts to API changes, handles schema validation, triggers follow-ups, reroutes based on conditions and preserves dependencies across platforms.

Rule #3: Failure is a scenario instead of an anomaly

Legacy tools treat failure like an edge case. If a job fails, they send a generic alert and might retry once or twice. But in distributed cloud architecture, failure is expected. It’s just a matter of how you recover.

Modern orchestration platforms treat failure paths with full auditability — and no panic. They track SLAs, anticipate delays, escalate intelligently and reroute automatically. It’s not mere incident avoidance.

Rule #4: Orchestration is no longer a solo role

You don’t build processes in a vacuum. DevOps is managing CI/CD, IT Ops is overseeing runtime, Finance is owning the close — everyone needs orchestration. But that doesn’t mean everyone should write scripts.

Modern SOAP platforms make orchestration collaborative. Devs work in YAML or code. IT manages by exception. Business users trigger workflows safely via self-service portals. Meanwhile, centralized controls keep everything governed.

Rule #5: Observability must trace outcomes, not just steps

Most platforms can tell you a job ran, and some can tell you it failed. Very few can tell you why, though. Not to mention which business outcome was affected and who needs to fix it.

Modern orchestration gives you end-to-end visibility, so you can trace a late report all the way back to the missing data file and see the ripple effect through every dependent system.

Legacy automation vs. modern orchestration

Rule #6: AI only works when automation does

Enterprises are rushing to embed AI into operations, but smart models are worthless without smart orchestration. A demand forecasting model can’t adjust inventory unless the right workflows gets triggered, and an LLM can’t summarize reports unless the right data lands in the right place. If your data pipelines are fragile or manual, your AI outputs will be dead on arrival.

Orchestration is that invisible engine behind AI-powered operations. It feeds the model, triggers the action, verifies the outcome. Without that layer, your AI is like a disconnected lab experiment.

Evaluation criteria have shifted

If you’ve read the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report, you’ll notice the bar has been raised. At Redwood Software, we believe the evolving contents of this report are a clear signal that the market has shifted. Hybrid control, event-driven design, persona flexibility, business outcome alignment … these are now table stakes.

If you’re evaluating your next orchestration solution, use the Magic Quadrant™ as a starting point. Download your complimentary copy of the report and ask whether your current platform — or the one you’re considering — is built for the world as it is today or the world as it was a decade ago.