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Camunda BPM Automates Microservices

Camunda, a business process management (BPM) tool vendor, releases Zeebe, a workflow engine that enables automation across cloud services.

Microsevices architectures are becoming increasingly common as organizations move away from a unified ERP system and adopt decentralized, best-of-breed tools that are unified by middleware. It is typically challenging to automate processes across microservice-based architectures, due to the disparate nature of the applications. Camunda is trying to change this.

It is worth noting that Camunda already has a BPM automation tool, but Camunda is marketing Zeebe as an alternative for organizations working with cloud-based tools or operating in agile development environments.

The vendor wants to get the automation tool into the hands of as many organizations a possible. To do so, Zeebe uses vertical-agnostic standards such as BPMN 2.0 forprocess mapping, Kubernates for container orchestration, and Apache Kafka for managing data feeds.

Zeebe will initially offered for free as an open-source add-on to Camunda’s products. There is potential for a paid version down the road with additional services like vendor support.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group, Select a Business Process Management Tool, August 2019.

Our Take

There has been a movement for BPM vendors to offer more low-code products, which allow organizations to orchestrate processes across applications without requiring resources that have deep technical knowledge. While these applications provide a great opportunity for the business to take more ownership of BPM, they lack capability compared to development platform BPM.

As demonstrated on the graph above, development platform BPM vendors like Camunda require technical knowledge but are extremely rich from a functional perspective. For this reason, organizations that have the resources to leverage these technologies should consider going against the low-code grain to get most value from their BPM solution.

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