Digital platform conductor tools coordinate hybrid digital infrastructure management tools used to plan, implement, operate and monitor underpinning technology and services for applications and digital products. They may be delivered as on-premises, SaaS or platform as a service (PaaS) solutions, and provide a unified view of digital infrastructure and dependent applications. They enable I&O leaders to get an overarching view of the infrastructure and evaluate the infrastructure’s contribution to business value, regardless of the environments used or their owner. This provides input into strategic I&O decision making to get better value from infrastructure.
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.