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.
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.
I believe these #1 rankings are a powerful validation of our product strategy and investments. In our opinion, they reflect our singular focus on building automation fabrics that deliver transformative results for our customers, no matter the challenge.
Redwood’s recognition in the Gartner Critical Capabilities report
“As an essential companion to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, this methodology provides deeper insight into providers’ product and service offerings by extending the Magic Quadrant analysis. Use this research to further investigate product and service ratings based on key capabilities set to important, differentiating use cases.”*
The Critical Capabilities research includes rankings for Use Cases: IT Workload Automation, IT Workflow Orchestration, Data Orchestration, Citizen Automation and DevOps Automation.
Redwood ranked first in five out of five Use Cases.
IT workload automation
For the second year in a row, Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.33 out of 5.
Gartner defines IT workload automation (IT operations persona) as follows: “Automating planning, execution, management and reporting of IT workloads across enterprise systems.”
We believe this ranking reflects the broad power of our composable automation platform to integrate and manage diverse technologies across the hybrid enterprise. Available as native SaaS for the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) or self-hosted on-premises or in the cloud, Redwood’s flagship workload automation platform delivers the deployment flexibility enterprise customers require. Extensive auditing capabilities, an expansive connector catalog and comprehensive APIs ensure unmatched reliability and business continuity for even the most complex workloads.
IT workflow orchestration
For the second year in a row, Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.43 out of 5.
Gartner defines IT workflow orchestration (IT operations persona) as follows: “Defining, executing and reporting on IT workflows across diverse IT and enterprise systems.”
We feel this score highlights our strength in orchestrating intricate dependencies across disparate systems. Redwood’s extensive library of pre-built certified connectors eliminates custom scripting, enabling users to visually build and manage complex, end-to-end workflows while centralizing control and visibility. This is further enhanced by the advanced monitoring and observability capabilities: a unified view of process health and performance with built-in AI troubleshooting. Extending this functionality via Redwood Insights, teams can view their entire orchestration ecosystem, from performance to configuration, to diagnose root causes, optimize workflows and track compliance. The result: seamless service delivery and optimal operational control.
Data orchestration
Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.43 out of 5.
Gartner defines data orchestration (DataOps persona) as follows: “Planning, executing, managing and reporting on data-focused workloads like ETL/ELT and reporting for data use cases.”
We believe our #1 score in this Use Case demonstrates the power of Redwood solutions to unify and manage complex data pipelines from ingestion to reporting. Redwood provides the flexibility to connect to any data source or application and gives DataOps teams the end-to-end visibility required to ensure effective data management and that key information is timely, accurate and readily available for the business.
Citizen automation
For the second year in a row, Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.45 out of 5.
Gartner defines citizen automation (business user persona) as follows: “Enabling end-users to develop and execute curated automations under IT governance.”
We feel this score represents Redwood’s commitment to empowering business teams and subject-matter experts to create and manage their own automation solutions safely. Our customizable and intuitive user interface includes a visual, low-code automation design studio, which allows teams to abstract away complexity, while centralized IT governance ensures every user-built automation is secure and reliable. To further accelerate this process, Redwood’s new AI assistant provides instant, context-aware guidance, allowing users to find answers and build processes faster than ever.
DevOps automation
Redwood received the highest score in this Use Case: 4.35 out of 5.
Gartner defines DevOps automation (DevOps/SRE persona) as follows: “Developing and testing automation workflows to support product delivery via DevOps tools and practices.”
We believe this recognition highlights how seamlessly Redwood integrates into the software development lifecycle (SDLC). DevOps teams can define, version, test and promote automation workflows just like any other application code, accelerating release cycles and improving collaboration between development and operations.
Boost your digital transformation strategy: Get your copy of the full analyst report here to empower your decision-making process. Demo our suite of workload automation, file transfer and finance automation solutions to start unleashing the human potential in your organization.
Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. Hassan Ennaciri, Daniel Betts, Cameron Haight, Chris Saunderson, etl. 26 Aug 2025.
Gartner, Inc. Critical Capabilities for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. Chris Saunderson, Cameron Haight, Daniel Betts, Hassan Ennaciri, etl. 26 Aug 2025.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.These graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from https://www.redwood.com/resource/gartner-critical-capabilities-soaps/.
I’m thrilled to announce that, for the second consecutive year, Gartner has named Redwood Software a Leader in its 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAP) report. This year, we are proud to be positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision and highest for Ability to Execute.
We believe this consistent recognition validates our strategy and the immense value of our automation fabric solutions. Our mission is to unleash human potential by empowering customers with end-to-end automation for their mission-critical business processes, enabling them to maximize efficiency, enhance agility and build a future-ready enterprise.
We see lights-out automation as the engine for continuous growth and success for our customers. This acknowledgment from Gartner further energizes our team as we continue to support enterprises globally.
Understanding the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP
The Gartner Magic Quadrant™ is a culmination of research in a specific market, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Magic Quadrant™ helps you quickly ascertain how well technology providers are executing their stated visions and how well they are performing against Gartner’s market view.
“Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow.”
“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.”
Ability to Execute: How well does the vendor deliver today?
Gartner positioned Redwood highest for Ability to Execute. Redwood feels the Ability to Execute axis assesses the “here and now,” measuring the tangible quality of the vendor’s products and services today.
Our view is that it’s a holistic measure of the entire customer experience and the vendor’s organizational maturity. It’s not just “Does the product work?” but “Is this a well-run company that is easy and reliable to do business with?”
Gartner evaluates Ability to Execute based on seven criteria:
Product or Service
Overall Viability
Sales Execution/Pricing
Market Responsiveness and Track Record
Marketing Execution
Customer Experience
Operations
Completeness of Vision: Does the vendor have a plan for tomorrow?
Gartner positioned Redwood furthest in Completeness of Vision for the second year in a row. In our view this category assesses the “what’s next.” It evaluates the vendor’s strategy, innovation, understanding of the market’s future and if the product will evolve to meet your future needs.
For Redwood, this category is not just about ideas; it’s about the credibility and plausibility of the vendor’s strategy. We believe a “complete” vision is one that is not only forward-thinking but also grounded in a realistic plan that the vendor is capable of executing.
The evaluation scrutinized whether the vendor has the foundational ability to deliver on its promises by assessing their product architecture, financial model and track record of past innovation.
Gartner evaluates Completeness of Vision based on eight criteria:
Market Understanding
Marketing Strategy
Sales Strategy
Offering (Product) Strategy
Business Model
Vertical/Industry Strategy
Innovation
Geographic Strategy
Vision and execution: Why Redwood was named a Leader
Redwood believes being named a Leader doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of a clear formula: listen to customers, build for the future and execute flawlessly. We feel this reflects our singular focus on automation fabrics, fueled by innovation and a deep customer obsession. Our strategic roadmap isn’t created in a vacuum; it’s forged in partnership with our customers through advisory boards and user groups.
We deliver on that formula with our enterprise SOAP solutions, available self-hosted, on-premises or through a highly reliable, true-SaaS platform. We believe our position as a Leader speaks to the maturity of our workload automation (WLA) solutions, which offer composable automation purpose-built for the hybrid enterprise. We deliver a unified platform that gives customers the strategic advantage to adapt faster and outpace change.
Redwood feels our forward-thinking approach empowers customers to move beyond simple, custom scripting and siloed tools. They can embrace a fully governed business and IT automation platform that prioritizes the entire digital infrastructure, managing everything from core job scheduling and complex data pipelines to orchestrating event-driven workflows and integrating with DevOps tools. This ensures their critical operations and IT automations run without interruption, meeting the needs of their organization.
We believe our commitment to innovation is clear in our latest platform advancements, which demonstrate a relentless focus on creating a more powerful, intuitive and intelligent automation experience enabling customers’ automation strategies:
Redwood Insights: We’re moving beyond simple monitoring to provide true orchestration observability, turning complex data into actionable knowledge that helps users predict and prevent issues.
AI assistants and co-pilots: Our embedded AI tools are already saving users hours by accelerating development and troubleshooting.
Modern UI: A completely redesigned user interface makes the platform more intuitive and powerful for all users.
Continuous integration and connectivity: We’re constantly expanding our library of pre-built connectors and advanced no-code wizards, making it easier than ever to create custom integrations and automate any process across the enterprise. Redwood offers unmatched integration with SAP applications and technologies, validated by RunMyJobs by Redwood’s SAP Endorsed App Premium certification.
Redwood believes our position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP is a testament to our commitment to turning cutting-edge technology, from multi-cloud orchestration to AI-driven insights, into real-world results for our customers.
Insights from the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report
In our opinion, the 2025 Magic Quadrant™ for SOAP report offers an in-depth analysis of the SOAP landscape and highlights the critical role of process automation in driving digital transformation. The report notes that,
“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.”
Get your copy of the full report here, and demo our suite of solutions to envision what your business could achieve with Redwood behind you.
Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms. Hassan Ennaciri, Daniel Betts, Cameron Haight, Chris Saunderson, etl. 26 Aug 2025.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
These graphics were published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from https://www.redwood.com/resource/gartner-soaps-mq/.
Basic accounting principles exist for a reason. They are neither optional nor vague. They’re meant to give us a consistent, trustworthy foundation for financial reporting, especially when accuracy matters most.
But even now, spreadsheets continue to dominate processes for way too many finance teams. They’re used for accruals, revenue recognition, allocations, reconciliations and other critical functions. And all of this is happening in spreadsheets, outside the systems that are actually built to handle this data. We expect our reports to align with standards like Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) or International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), yet we’re relying on manual tools that were never designed for this level of complexity.
We all want to uphold principles like reliability and consistency. But the truth is, spreadsheets quietly chip away at both. And they’re so familiar, it’s easy not to notice until something breaks.
Let’s explore the less obvious ways spreadsheets can undermine accounting integrity and what finance automation can do to help.
The silent killer of accounting integrity
At first glance, spreadsheets feel harmless. They’re fast, flexible and the tool most professionals first learned to use. But that same flexibility is exactly what makes them hard to control.
No version control: Anyone can tweak a cell, save a new copy or email the wrong file. There could be six versions of the same schedule floating around.
No audit trail: Adjustments happen, but unless someone manually annotates a journal entry or leaves a note — a step that is often skipped, there’s no method for tracing what changed.
No guarantee of accuracy: Formulas break, references get outdated, links go bad. And if no one catches it, the numbers roll forward.
Now imagine that across dozens of schedules, teams and entities. You’ve essentially built a shadow system outside your ERP — a significant audit exposure. Worse, leadership ends up relying on those numbers. Decisions are made based on the financial information in those files.
One bad cell: Unknowingly compromising reliability
The principle of reliability says our numbers should be verifiable and backed by objective evidence. But in spreadsheet world, “evidence” is often a file path and a line item copied from somewhere else. That’s not a system of record; it’s just a folder on someone’s desktop.
You could have a perfectly valid entry, but if you can’t trace how you got there — or explain why it changed — it’s not really reliable. And in many cases, even the person who made the update would have to dig to remember what they did.
Automation changes that. It builds logic into the process. You’re pulling live values from your ERP, not referencing a hard-coded number from three weeks ago. Documentation lives in the system, not in someone’s email. If something changes, you know who changed it, when and why. That’s what makes information reliable. And that’s what auditors (and leadership) expect.
Consistency is a team sport
Consistency is one of those principles that sounds simple: treat the same financial transactions the same way, every time. Yet, in practice, it gets messy.
Every finance team I’ve worked with has some version of this: one person does it their way, another has their own spreadsheet and over time, the logic starts to drift. Revenue deferrals, expense accruals and intercompany recharges all start off aligned, then slowly diverge based on who’s doing the prep work. That’s not anyone’s fault; it’s just what happens when we rely on tools that don’t enforce consistency.
Automation fixes this by turning those “ways of working” into actual, repeatable processes. You define the logic once, and the system applies it every time across accounting periods, teams and regions. Everyone starts with the same playbook.
Adhering to the consistency principle doesn’t just make audits easier. It makes your reporting more useful. It gives your team confidence in the numbers. And it makes analysis possible because you’re comparing apples to apples.
Invisible knowledge: A liability
Then, there’s the hero problem. Every finance team has one: that person who knows how everything works — the macros, the tabs, the quirks. This individual is often indispensable, holding the entire manual process together. But when they go on vacation, leave the company or just get reassigned, that knowledge goes with them.
This represents a huge risk, even though it isn’t often discussed. If your month-end close depends on one person’s memory of how the spreadsheet works, that’s not a process but a dependency.
Automation helps you get that knowledge out of someone’s head and into a shared system. It turns invisible logic into visible steps. It builds documentation into the workflow. That way, new team members can ramp faster, and no one’s irreplaceable because the process doesn’t live in a file; it lives in the system.
This is how a scalable team is built.
A stronger foundation for modern finance
Accounting concepts haven’t changed much, but everything around them has. We’re moving faster, dealing with more data, experimenting with new accounting methods and being asked to add value beyond the basics, but we still have to get the basics right.
For many organizations, spreadsheets have effectively become the primary system for managing financial processes, operating as a kind of shadow ERP. Even with dedicated enterprise software in place, the most critical accounting work often falls back on a collection of manual, disconnected files. While valuable for quick analysis, spreadsheets cannot provide the integrity and control required to be the backbone of your financial position. The work traditionally performed in these files must be migrated to a centralized system built for scale and auditability.
Finance automation can reduce spreadsheet risk and help your team uphold the accounting principles that matter most — from the matching principle to GAAP compliance. Request a demo of Finance Automation by Redwood today.
