SAP is proud to be recognized as a Leader in the first-ever IDC MarketScape Worldwide Business Automation Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment.
We believe this recognition is testament to SAP’s long-term vision of integrating all components required for strategic, continuous business process improvement and innovation.
According to the IDC MarketScape, “Business automation technologies have evolved from fragmented solutions into comprehensive business automation platforms (BAPs). These platforms enable enterprises to address diverse process improvement needs through a single system supporting multiple integrated automation technologies.”
Bringing together process analytics from SAP Signavio, user guidance from WalkMe, process integration and automation technology from SAP Business Technology Platform, and the latest Joule Agents allows organizations to significantly accelerate automation initiatives.
by Maureen Fleming, Neil Ward-Dutton, Raghunandhan Kuppuswamy and Elena Semenovskaia,
May 2025, IDC #US52034624
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor name.
Continuous business automation
Continuous business automation is at the heart of every commercial IT deployment, as it allows companies to simultaneously scale their operations while reducing costs.
But when business applications are augmented with disparate automation technologies – such as standalone AI agent frameworks, workflow systems, integration brokers, rules engines, and process mining tools – they can become fragmented and lack business context. This approach also often requires large amounts of data to be copied outside of the business applications, which increases latency, operational costs, and the risk for expensive data quality issues.
The framework provided by enterprise automation with SAP overcomes these issues by adding an integrated business automation toolset closely linked with SAP Business Suite.
SAP Integration Suite helps ensure seamless data flow between SAP and non-SAP applications to and from standardized services (APIs) and events. Using these services and events, SAP Build then allows orchestration of process flows to implement new automations or adapt existing ones. Then, SAP Signavio enables end-to-end process analytics and optimization with process mining and insights, providing improvement recommendations directly into SAP Build automations. On top, autonomous, AI-powered Joule Agents can then use these automations as “skills,” which allows them to execute standardized business activities. Additionally, users can be guided through complex interactions by WalkMe overlays while feeding back user journey insights into the process improvement cycle.
Customer success across industries
Thousands of organizations across geographies and industries rely on automation solutions from SAP to optimize their business processes across lines of business. Here are a few:
- Italian publisher De Agostini offers a whole universe of hobbies and interests to a worldwide audience. But long before it gets collections and build-up models to customers, the company must first process its invoices with suppliers. Using SAP process automation solutions, De Agostini now manages to process more than 90 percent of its unstructured invoices, paper or PDF, automatically.
- German Lufthansa Technik is a leading provider of aircraft maintenance, repair, overhaul, and modification services for commercial, VIP, and special-mission aircraft. As part of its digital road map, the company wanted to increase automation in the material logistics process for defective parts. SAP process automation solutions are used to coordinate component repair logistics across multiple IT systems, enabling an increase in transaction volume by more than 40 percent.
- Canadian energy company Suncor believes it has a key role to play in providing secure access to affordable energy, supporting a vibrant Canadian economy, and improving environmental performance. Process automation solutions from SAP are used to improve automation of intercompany tax processes (ICT) and vendor invoice processing, leading to a 98 percent reduction in the time needed to reconcile ICT postings.
IDC MarketScape assessment
Business automation technology is advancing in big steps and enables companies to address an ever-increasing scale and complexity of automation projects. Learn more about the future of business automation from Maureen Fleming, program vice president of Worldwide Intelligent Process Automation Market Research and Advisory Service at IDC here. Read the report excerpt here.
Bharat Sandhu is chief marketing officer for SAP Business Technology Platform at SAP.
