Over the past two decades, the enterprise software industry has revolutionized how companies connect, manage and govern business data, creating interconnected and intelligent architectures, now evolving into automation fabrics.
The “data fabric” revolution brought new buzzwords like “big data” and, “predictive analytics” but the reality was that the most competitive companies in the world were increasingly differentiating their ability to serve their customers by collecting, managing and utilizing their data.
By eliminating data silos, these leaders consolidated data from multiple sources to capture a unified customer view and gain a competitive advantage in responding to customer needs.
Today, the use cases and benefits of a modern data fabric architecture are apparent. And now, this revolutionary interwoven approach is happening in the automation industry.
The result of this will be a requirement for every modern enterprise to build automation fabric to effectively compete and profitably grow.
An automation fabric is a cohesive and integrated framework that seamlessly connects various automation tools, processes and data sources.
It acts as a central nervous system, enabling seamless communication and collaboration among disparate business activities, applications and environments, driving mission-critical business processes across any tech stack. Think things like procure-to-pay, just-in-time delivery, record-to-report.
The core market change driving this revolution and the need for automation fabrics isn’t rocket science. It’s simply a number of market shifts that we have all been investing in for some time.
For starters, IT is no longer relegated to being a simple enabler of the back office. Lines of business leaders expect their technology investments to drive core business outcomes with delivering a superior customer and employee experience being the new competitive battleground.
For example, how do I close the books in record time? How do I translate an online order into cash collections without error? Or how do I massively improve the resilience of my supply chain? Each of these business outcomes starts with some kind of end-to-end business process transformation.
However, achieving that end-to-end business process transformation is now quite complicated.
As best-of-breed products replaced business suites for more superior, targeted functionality, the number of applications that house these business processes, and their underlying transaction data, has absolutely exploded.
The good news is these highly specialized, process-oriented applications have made many individual tasks easier and more forgettable. But the bad news is they’ve created an endless sea of silos that do everything incredibly efficiently alone but do virtually nothing together.
Today, almost no business outcome—including mission-critical ones—is accomplished with just one application. Furthermore, most mission-critical business outcomes still require working with established transaction systems of record, like your ERP system.
As a result, the transaction data and business processes needed to come together to drive these business outcomes require coordination across multiple applications—cloud, on-premises or hybrid—working in an orchestrated fashion.
These bespoke applications often run on changing tech infrastructure. Enterprise modernization now involves reassessing tech stacks, refactoring to microservices, and containerizing applications, including modernizing CI/CD and DevOps pipelines.
When companies start refactoring their entire tech stack into microservices and containers spinning up and down on this massive a scale, you need an immense amount of automation because human beings cannot handle this manually, as it’s an n-dimensional problem.
This great replatforming has created a real problem for enterprises as their legacy automation platforms simply do not have the ability to automate business processes end-to-end across this full stack of mission-critical applications and underlying, ever-changing tech infrastructure.
This n-dimensional complexity requires a new approach to automation. One that’s purpose-built for a best-of-breed application world but also provides the flexibility to work across any IT infrastructure you may encounter.
Its why automation will become the pervasive operation system fabric powering today’s modern enterprises.
In the same way data fabrics revolutionized our ability to make more informed decisions for our companies, customers and employees, automation fabrics will now revolutionize our ability to deliver superior customer and employee experiences.
Like building data fabrics, building your automation fabric requires making critical decisions around your automation platform and software partner.
You need to consider things like:
Can I connect deeply to all the applications and systems I need to connect to ensure seamless end-to-end business process automation?
Does this include connections to my ERP system and my SaaS and legacy applications?
Can I create new automation quickly and at scale without extensive programming resources?
Can I easily create a new automation with a drag-n-drop approach and pre-built components rather than creating code?
Can I monitor and control the myriad of processes in real time and have confidence that the processes will run to completion?
Can I predict, manage and take action on SLA performance?
How confident am I in the platform’s ability to scale its performance in a highly secure manner?
Does it come with global 24/7 support?
The rise of automation fabrics is set to redefine how enterprises operate, paving the way for seamless business processes and an enhanced customer experience, making automation the true backbone of modern business success.
To learn more, don’t miss “The rise of automation fabrics” session during Redwood Software’s two-day virtual Automation Summit on October 30-31.
Explore the future of automation with sessions covering end-to-end IT and business process automation, data management automation and the role of AI, along with real-world use cases and expert panel discussions.
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