Gartner defines the service orchestration and automation platform (SOAP) market as encompassing solutions that empower organizations to manage and automate their entire technology stack, including workloads, workflows, resource provisioning and data pipelines. SOAPs empower infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to streamline and accelerate the delivery of business services. These platforms integrate workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid IT landscape. By automating and optimizing these processes, SOAPs enable organizations to rapidly deploy workloads, enhance operational efficiency and achieve significant cost savings while ensuring high availability and business continuity. SOAPs enhance traditional workload automation by supporting use cases in data pipelines, cloud-native infrastructures and application architectures. They complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains, enabling organizations to achieve customer-centric agility, reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and establish standardized processes across their entire IT landscape.
Software asset management (SAM) tools aim to decipher the complex and ever-changing world of software licensing. Core capability of SAM tools include discovery, normalization, reconciliation, optimization and reporting. SAM tools help address these common use cases: Discovery of software on on-premises, virtual and cloud platforms; Software entitlement management through a central repository, to track purchase data and contractual commitments; Spend management through demand forecasting, downgrading of entitlements, and reallocating of unused licenses or licenses assigned to leavers; Provision of software data insights by identifying licenses allocated to users and devices, software metering, providing usage data to procurement teams, and rightsizing. Ability to share data on software rationalization opportunities; Risk identification by detecting shadow usage, as well as end-of-life and end-of-support software; Increased collaboration between teams that participate in the software application life cycle, including all stakeholders internal and external to IT; Creation of reporting dashboards for operations teams and management.