Digital Automation Platforms: Injecting speed into application development

Red Hat has just published a new study by Carl Lehmann of the 451 Group, “Intelligent Process Automation and the Emergence of Digital Automation Platforms,” that examines the increasing importance of business automation technologies in modern business, and the ways that converged solutions (digital automation platforms) are bringing value to organizations engaged in digital transformation projects.

Carl writes that competitive advantage is enabled when an organization either does the same things as its rivals, but differently, or it does different things that are acknowledged as superior by customers. In today’s competitive markets, businesses are turning to next-generation digital automation platforms (DAP) to enable greater automation of key business functions and greater flexibility in responding to their customers’ needs.

A DAP is a set of tools and resources structured within a uniform framework to enable developers to rapidly design, prototype, develop, deploy, manage, and monitor process-oriented applications – from simple task-related workflows to dynamic unstructured collaborative activity streams and even highly structured cross-functional enterprise applications. To do so, DAPs are equipped with a range of new capabilities that go beyond those of their BPM and application development predecessors.

Emergence of digital automation platforms is an exciting time for Red Hat as we bring together some of key middleware technologies into our new business automation portfolio.  In February, we launched Red Hat Decision Manager, the latest generation of our business rules platform, now supporting the Decision Modeling and Notation (DMN) standard so that users can quickly construct applications that automate operational decisions with little to no coding knowledge.  This adds to our current, fully open-sourced BPM, resource optimization, and app development technologies that combine to deliver the real benefits of digital automation.

The overall benefit of a DAP is speed. According to the 451 research report, digital automation platforms can potentially reduce development time by 50-90% compared to using a coding language. We believe low-code DAPs will craft nearly half of all applications developed in the coming years because they take less time to prototype, test, and deploy to production. Recent surveys have borne this out, with Red Hat customers reporting 33% more changes carried out and 26% faster execution of changes on our current generation BPM platform.  Emerging solutions, especially when combined with machine-learning and AI capabilities, could drive these numbers even higher.

As Carl writes, enterprises that exploit these trends will fare well in highly competitive markets. Those that do not face an existential threat.

Interested to learn more about how digital automation platforms can help you in your digital transformation journey?  Join us on Tuesday, June 26, at 12:00pm ET for the webinar, “How to create competitive advantage through digital innovation and automation,“ where Carl and I will discuss findings from the paper in more detail.  Register for the webinar today.