MSPs are seeing new opportunities to increase their product offerings and revenue by expanding process orchestration and automation services to business customers who are learning how they can use the technology to drive their internal efficiency efforts.
This is one of several revealing conclusions from a new 2025 State of Process Orchestration & Automation 2025 report released by process orchestration and automation vendor Camunda based on input from some 800 respondents in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France between September 30 and October 28 in 2024.
The 21-page report concludes that as businesses are ramping up digital transformation efforts they are finding them difficult to achieve due to complex and interconnected IT systems, siloed applications, and the presence of legacy platforms and critical business applications that are often a challenge to update and use.
And once businesses add in the pressures of AI, cloud, and other powerful transformational technologies they are also finding that they need help to automate, manage and process these additional competing needs and forces as well, the study reports.
Organizations Need Help to Make It All Work
Some 85% of the respondents said that they face challenges in scaling and operationalizing AI across their business, while about 84% said that a lack of transparency in applying AI applications within business processes is causing regulatory compliance issues, according to the study. Some 93% said that they believe that AI must be fully integrated into orchestrated processes to maximize the return on investment and business value.
Many organizations said that they have implemented significant automation into their operations but that they often face challenges in managing it across diverse systems and processes, the report continued.
How MSPs Can Help Their Customers with These Challenges
That is where MSPs can come in to help customers gain additional process improvements through the introduction of broader process orchestration services and capabilities for their clients.
Christiana Christenson, the vice president of partners for Camunda told ChannelE2E that the data from the study shows that 83% of organizations are considering the adoption of tools to help orchestrate and coordinate tasks across their diverse process endpoints. “This highlights an opportunity for the MSPs to help customers reduce the complexity of their IT architectures,” she said.
The report’s data also shows that there is strong support for the move away from large monolithic enterprise applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) towards composable architectures that promote flexibility.” And MSPs can help with these transitions as well, she said.
“Unsurprisingly, 84% of organizations are looking to add more AI capabilities over the next three years,” said Christenson. “With so much hype around AI many organizations will need help to implement new AI tools and applications.”
For MSPs, these new services will help them find profitable new customer opportunities while helping businesses run their complex IT systems, she said. “With process orchestration, organizations can tie together, manage, and improve all their different processes from a single location, providing IT and business teams with greater visibility and control.”
Where Does Tradition Robotic Process Automation Fit In?
So, how does this all fit in with existing robotic process automation (RPA) services that MSPs may already offer to customers?
“RPA is not dead,” said Christenson. “Instead, it is very much part of process orchestration and automation. RPA usually focuses on a single task that is performed automatically and can speed up manual processes. However, if an organization wants to automate more than a handful of tasks, it can get hard to keep a handle on all the RPA bots that are running.”
That is where process orchestration can help to manage all the RPA bots that are in use to make it easier to understand what each one is doing, giving visibility into bottlenecks and areas of improvement, she said.
“Although simple automations can often stand by themselves, once automation maturity reaches a certain level of complexity, orchestration is necessary to keep the automation environment healthy and efficient as it grows,” said Christenson. “In many ways process orchestration is the natural extension to what the channel has already been helping businesses with when it comes to RPA.”
About the Report
Global market research agency Coleman Parkes was commissioned by Camunda to create the report by surveying 350 respondents within companies of at least 1,000 employees in the U.S., 150 in the U.K., 150 in Germany, and 150 in France. Each respondent was responsible for or significantly involved in process automation in their organizations.
