RunMyJobs’ roadmap for 2023: Supporting automation trends for the future
RunMyJobs by Redwood has an exciting product roadmap for this year. It continues the company’s investment in its industry-leading, cloud-native workload automation solution.
Abhijit Kakhandiki, Chief Product Officer for Redwood Software, shared the company’s vision and how it applies to today’s IT trends in a recent webinar. Customers rely on RunMyJobs to handle all their mission-critical business processes, and Redwood created its full stack automation solutions to support organizations today and into the future.
Full stack automation
Redwood believes in a world where any company is able to automate all its IT and business processes, end to end, regardless of complexity or underlying tech stack. With this ability, organizations can free up their most valuable resource — people. They can be redeployed to work on critical growth issues that will help the business meet its goals and be successful.
RunMyJobs wants to empower companies to automate and reimagine work by creating, distributing and helping consume composable automation solutions using its platform. It delivers automation of mission-critical processes in a secure, compliant and reliable manner.
In order to help customers achieve this vision, RunMyJobs has to accomplish two things:
- Offer a lower barrier to automation: With RunMyJobs, automation is intuitive and easy to use for more junior IT resources and business users. Automation is no longer solely in the hands of an organization’s software developers. Now automation can be spread rapidly across the company.
- Scale with organizational goals and drive business outcomes: To be successful, IT teams need to keep up with requirements from business stakeholders and automate enough processes to reach critical mass. As users work with RunMyJobs’ purpose-built automation solutions every day, they’ll be able to see and track their progress toward their goals, creating long-term engagement.
RunMyJobs is designed to evolve with the changing tech infrastructure. As organizations move from a suite approach to best-in-breed solutions, the use of applications has increased 20x in the past 15 years. Couple this with the move from on-premises to the cloud as well as the move from servers to virtual machines to containers to serverless architecture, and IT leaders need an agile solution to provide powerful end-to-end business process automation.
To be successful, an automation platform needs to automate at three layers — applications, middleware and infrastructure. In addition, the platform needs to be easy to adopt, so more users across IT and the business can automate more processes faster. The platform also requires an application development approach to automation where users can create modular, reusable components which allow them to compose automation solutions on top of the platform.
Redwood has embraced this approach and created additional automation solutions, like its Finance Automation by Redwood product, which allows users to close their financial books in as little as four days. RunMyJobs’ full stack automation works across all layers, applications, middleware and infrastructure for maximum coverage.
Automation trends
To understand what’s driving the need for automation, organizations need to understand five key trends:
Cloud modernization:
Companies are increasingly embracing the cloud to more easily manage their infrastructure and are moving from on-premises to SaaS applications. As they move to hybrid cloud models, they’re combining compute, networking and storage across public cloud, private cloud and in some cases, multiple public clouds in a multi-cloud environment. This allows organizations to choose the environments that work best for their apps and data while reducing cost and risks.
As a cloud-native platform, RunMyJobs is architected with lightweight agents, central cloud and streamlined product updates. It is highly available and has advanced features like cross-region disaster recovery. This year’s roadmap includes automation dashboards that will provide visibility into automation volume, savings and service levels.
RunMyJobs also offers connectors for a variety of cloud providers, including AWS, Azure and GCP, to help users in their cloud journey. For organizations with managed file transfer needs, Redwood will be releasing its JSCAPE MFT SaaS product in Q2, 2023. Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Business Central will also be addressed.
As more companies move from legacy applications to modern SaaS applications, RunMyJobs is supporting ServiceNow, Oracle Fusion and SAP S/4HANA, with plans to support Workday in the near future. For organizations looking to automate the app inside containers, RunMyJobs has a connector that will work with Amazon ES, Google GKS and Azure ACS with a connector for Docker containers on the roadmap.
Automation at scale:
Companies are automating at scale, since they’ve recognized that automation is key to thriving and competing in today’s business world. With the increasing number of mergers, acquirers are looking to improve their business outcomes quickly. This starts with standardizing business processes, which requires IT teams to have their process blueprints ready. RunMyJobs allows users to create process blueprints that can be standardized quickly across an entire organization.
RunMyJobs facilitates this process by providing an extensive connector catalog. This catalog is updated frequently as new connectors are released every few weeks. Users can access these connectors in the product itself immediately, with no need to wait until the next product update.
The roadmap includes many new connectors, including JD Edwards, CyberArk, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, BMC Remedy and more. For business users that work in apps like Microsoft Teams and Slack, RunMyJobs allows them to initiate and interact with all their automations within those apps. New integrations are also being created for Dell Boomi iPaaS and SAP’s repackaged iFlows to integrate with SAP Cloud. Also on the roadmap are inbound web hooks that invoke RunMyJobs’ platform from other systems to trigger and move automations along. Users can also create connections via a forms-like interface.
Currently, many organizations have integrations spread across EAI systems, BPMS, iPaaS, point solutions and more. RunMyJobs gives you a single point of visibility and control where you can orchestrate all your processes at the application, middleware and infrastructure layers. It supports a variety of triggers, is multi-threaded and has advanced features like asynchronous processing and even manages external systems.
And the final area RunMyJobs is investing in is its support of high-volume, high-throughput automation through the use of advanced features. Processes are easy to create using the low-code, visual drag-and-drop workflow builder and common scripting languages. To take this to the next level, RunMyJobs will be releasing its Process Studio in beta mode. This integrates with our connector catalog, so users can use drag-and-drop templates and connectors in the studio. In the Automation Portal, business users can interact with automations. Finally, the RunMyJobs team is looking to take its current upgrade time of five minutes and reduce that to achieve zero-downtime upgrades.
Data management automation:
Every company is becoming a big data company and wants to unlock the value of its data to get insights so it can continuously learn and improve. As data is being created at an exponential rate, it is siloed in databases, data lakes and data warehouses across the organization.
RunMyJobs integrates with Hadoop, Spark and other cloud data services to ensure you can transform and leverage your data. To continue the product’s data automation services, RunMyJobs is releasing a Data Transformer, which will function as a Swiss Army knife to transform data, but with an Excel-like simplicity.
Organizations can automate and get more value from their existing data by establishing context across various processes and applications. By extracting and transforming data from various sources and loading it into your targets, you can turn this data into insights about your customers, businesses and operation. RunMyJobs can extract data from virtually any source, from generic databases to a data streaming platform like Kafka or technologies like SAP Business Warehouse. Future integrations include Informatica Cloud and Matillion ETL.
For companies that have moved to data fabrics, RunMyJobs has a Snowflake connector and supports data management automation and workflows. The product roadmap has support for Azure Databricks and SAP Data Intelligence Cloud.
RunMyJobs already has several customers using its platform for data management automation. Honeywell is using RunMyJobs to move data from multiple data sources to Snowflake. Stadtwerke Munchen is orchestrating daily data flows to a single target to recommend next best actions. For the call center team, they don’t have to ask customers the same contextual questions repeatedly. AS Watson Group is using RunMyJobs to enable real-time inventory visibility to 20 million SKUs by utilizing Kafka data streaming. These organizations are already seeing the ROI from their automation investments.
Deep ERP automation:
ERP systems are the operational lifeblood of any company, serving as the sole source of truth. They need to be queried, updated and validated against in the course of running multiple processes and by many stakeholders, which requires deep ERP automation.
To best serve multiple processes and teams, automation needs to be built in modular components that can be leveraged by everyone. By setting it up this way, ongoing maintenance and governance is simplified as automation scales. RunMyJobs makes it easy to build components and even create templates and definitions to enable others. It supports native integration technology for SAP R3 and ECC by using remote function call (RFC). RunMyJobs is a trusted partner of SAP and has the broadest and deepest connectors for SAP products. It also supports Oracle, Netsuite and other ERPs.
The product roadmap includes the SAP RISE certification, SAP IBP enhancements, SAP Business Objects, S/4HANA Mass Activities, BTP API Hub Publishing and others. RunMyJobs will also introduce the ability to compose independent business logic on the platform. For organizations moving to S/4HANA, RunMyJobs can help. After prioritizing processes and corresponding data and moving it to S/4HANA, RunMyJobs provides support every step of the way by supporting older technologies so organizations can keep their R3, EC and Netweaver automations running for as long as they want. It makes data migration seamless to ensure an organization’s move to S/4HANA is successful, while extensively supporting SAP technologies to rapidly build and run automations on S/4HANA.
Intelligent automation:
Every system transaction is an opportunity for an organization to learn. Automation, coupled with AI, can help businesses automate more complex tasks, enabling humans to use their expertise to address gray areas.
For RunMyJobs customers, document processing is the most well-known automation use case. Using AI to extract data from scanned documents, it can then be entered into ERPs or other enterprise systems.
To facilitate this process, RunMyJobs offers the AWS TEXTRACT connector, which extracts data from scanned documents and managed file transfers (MFTs) to build a pipeline to process large volumes of documents. Users can also create downstream workflows to enter extracted data into any system. As part of the product roadmap, RunMyJobs will be introducing support for Microsoft Forms and GCP Document AI.
On a broader level, automation can be coupled with AI models that can learn from every transaction. AI models can be used in prediction mode once they are sufficiently trained. This enables businesses to automate more complex processes where human decision making is involved. While AI handles routine cases, it can escalate any outliers to humans to review and make a final decision. For organizations adopting AI, RunMyJobs offers inbound and outbound APIs that can be used to attach and train AI models with plans on the roadmap to support key cloud machine learning services and further streamline the AI prediction workflow.
Powering The Future Of Automation
RunMyJobs already has the integrations, features and services organizations need to automate their execution of the areas covered by these five trends, while the product roadmap demonstrates Redwood’s continued focus on helping businesses achieve their goals.
Organizations looking to maintain their competitive advantage with automation should identify which key areas they want to prioritize and then work with internal stakeholders to determine needs. The RunMyJobs team is always available to answer questions and provide guidance. Contact your account representative to set up a call.
