Hyper Automation - how a new startup is tapping into a $500 billion opportunity

If Netflix builds a software product to run some of its most rigorous backend business processes, you can be damn sure that the product will be robust. To serve its 200+ million subscribers seamlessly, Netflix has to spin up a mind boggling array of content. It cannot afford to mess up.?

If Netflix open sources such a product, you can be damn sure that many technology companies will adopt, download and use such software.?

If the core team that authored this open source software decides to leave Netflix and build a startup, you can be damn sure they know what they are doing.

Enter Orkes.io - a startup that is building an enterprise offering on top of a hugely successful open source project called Netflix Conductor - which is already being used by several thousand companies worldwide including Tesla, JP Morgan Chase, VMWare, Github, Deutsche Telekom, American Express and many more.? Within a few weeks of the Orkes's launch, several large publicly traded companies are reaching out to explore ways of minimizing their brain damage. The pain of setting up and managing their Conductor clusters is a drag. Instead, they could now focus on designing and managing their workflows, not setting up the basics. With Orkes, this becomes easy. One of the potential customers is eager to expand quickly - and is planning a twenty fold increase in their Conductor workflows! And they need to get going fast.?

But what is the market pain - let’s take a step back and understand this space better.

Hyper Automation - a $500 billion opportunity

Gartner has carved a new category called Hyper Automation- an approach that enables organizations to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many processes as possible using technology, such as robotic process automation (RPA), low-code application platforms (LCAP), artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual assistants. The worldwide market for technology that enables hyper automation will reach $596.6 billion in 2022, according to a forecast from Gartner, Inc.? The report states that hyper automation has shifted from an option to a condition of survival.? Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner was quoted saying “Organizations will require more IT and business process automation as they are forced to accelerate digital transformation plans in a post-COVID-19, digital-first world.” Matt Braiser, Analyst at Gartner who did a technical deep dive describes this space of microservices process orchestration as emerging.? (See - What a Microservices Process Orchestration Framework Is and When to Use One, published by Gartner, Sep 2021)

Sooner or later, most software applications will need to run faster, smarter or better. And based on what we have experienced in recent times, the speed of adoption of new technology has increased dramatically. In a McKinsey survey,? companies were implementing changes that were expected to take 500+ days within 20 days or so. Such a breathtakingly 20X to 40X fast adoption can create new technology opportunities or break the slower monoliths.???

As companies continue to refactor monolithic applications and adapt to the microservices environment, orchestration challenges that Netflix faced early on, are now becoming a burning problem in the industry. In a survey of 1200 executives, conducted by IBM (Microservices in the enterprise, 2021:Real benefits, worth the challenges - How organizations are finding speed, agility and resiliency through microservices) demonstrated that microservices architectures delivered a clear ROI as follows:

• 30% higher customer satisfaction
• 28% improved application performance
• 27% flexibility of resource scaling and?
• 26% improvements in developer productivity?

Indeed, it is not a choice - the business case is clear. Everyone wins - customers, product performance and development teams win.?

Managing distributed systems with the speed of light

To understand the magnitude of importance of Orkes, let's step back and look at any business. It can really be broken down into a series of tasks and workflows. Ordering a car on Tesla.com? Or food delivery? A customer starts with a menu of options, places the order, completes the payment, tracks the delivery, rates the product - and so on. Or take an example of mortgage processing. Or an insurance claim. Inside the enterprise, a number of processes and tasks can often be myriad - expense approvals, financial audits, drug discovery and healthcare applications. The business guys design these processes on white boards, and hand it over to software teams. Typically, it's an engineering manager or a Product Manager (PM) who owns the app, and they have to communicate these business steps - called workflows - to their development teams.?

The problem begins when developers have to take these workflows and break it down into small tasks. An example would be to authenticate a user before a food order can be placed.? The developers convert these workflows into bits and bytes of code to operate at scale. How do they rapidly design applications, test and debug them? All this in complex multi cloud environments. The top challenges of using microservices include development inconsistencies, communications in between team members, status checks and ability to visualize end to end processes, testing, error management and debugging.?

And this is where Orkes comes in - it has built a microservices orchestration framework that is used to manage complex development and operational environments. It is programming language agnostic and cloud agnostic. It can work within grueling customer use-cases calling for millions of invocations per second. (Think Netflix!) A slick UI, Client SDKs for Java, Python, Golang, C# etc.? and a multitude of integrations make this platform a developer's dream. Go ahead and pull up some building blocks, plug in some workflows and a development team can get going ASAP.? Lowcode and process automation modules can be set up quickly so that the business analysts and loan mortgage officers and insurance claims adjusters can modularly set up their own processes without creating tickets or asking for feature requests or updates. And yes, that's just a fraction of what you can do - there is a whole range of debugging and optimizations that can also be done.? When your goal is to write code, test applications or make sure all systems are running at optimal capacity, Orkes is a management platform that makes it possible. In short, it's a very general purpose orchestration framework that spans any programming language, any cloud (including on-prem),? all-code, low-code and no-code scenarios.

Enterprise Use Cases: What can be automated? What should be automated?

As much as 70% of Enterprise IT spend can be a suitable target for automation, according to a McKinsey analysis. Managing applications, automating delivery, triaging incidents are all ideal opportunities.

The decision to bring in automation of various processes is amorphic - no one decides not to automate. Therein lies the challenge. As such, is there no centralized function - like a chief? “automation” officer? In companies like Netflix, their DNA is driven by technology and automation. Those who follow the dictum of such leaders can win. For the others and the vast majority, if the top-down awareness and push for process automation does not occur, it’s often a struggle. Technology teams have to try bottoms-up gorilla tactics and play their own cards to make stuff happen. Or system integrators and consultants like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys drive improvements as part of their offering.

And then there is the business case - the ROI calculation that needs to justify the time and effort being spent on automation. At a very high level, for every $1 spent automation can yield a return that can be 5X or higher, based on my own rudimentary analysis.?

Business case Example: Self Healing Code - Calculating ROI

Assume a developer needs to design a workflow that sends email confirmation to a customer. The email can be sent only if a set of predetermined tasks are completed. There may be multiple parallel tasks and the system needs to wait, watch and send an email only when all the conditions are met & tasks are completed.? If the task is not completed, or fails, an error message needs to kick in to ticket the error. Debugging would help. Eventually, a set of logical automation steps can be designed for self healing systems. This is a simple example for which designing for a single workflow is not that complex. But cloud native companies have several thousand processes that run in parallel. And this is where a platform like Orkes makes life much sweeter for developers. In fact, leading companies that seek to improve their developer experience - or DX - are proactively adding automation platforms in their environment. It's all about making sure the development teams have the best-in-class tools to stay productive at scale.? The business use case or ROI for such a system becomes pretty clear with three distinct advantages:

• Speed of launch / updates / release - getting applications launched faster is the name of the game in the hyper competitive age
• Developer efficiency - this can scale by 10X or higher and a small group can achieve much more.
• Product robustness - reduced errors and improved customer experience keep driving revenues and engagement

Why Orkes? Why now??

Two words - robustness and scale. And a third might be cost, thanks to open source.? While a number of companies have been building and selling business process management (BPM) systems, there is a reason why Netflix decided to build their own - Conductor, back in 2018. As co-founder and CEO of Orkes, Jeu George shared, “We needed modern day systems to tackle micro-services and run at millions of requests.” And since it was open-sourced, it has become hugely popular with over a thousand forks, and adopted by over 100 large companies worldwide.?

The four co-founders of Orkes, like the bandmates in Beatles, bring their own unique strengths to make a powerful team. The drummer, guitarists and lead singers conduct (yes, pun intended) an wonderful experience of sorts. This is where technical, product management and business talent converge to lead this company to meet its potential.?Viren Baraiya who authored the open source offering, Conductor, and has worked in companies like Netflix, Goldman Sachs and Google. CEO Jeu George was a software architect at Netflix and Uber. Dilip Lukose headed up Microsoft Azure’s edge services, and Boney Sekh led engineering roles at JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Robin Hood and Netflix. This is a team of seasoned professionals who have lived these problems and are now solving it for the rest of the Global 2000 customers.

But this road is not paved with manuka honey and macadamia nuts. If anything, it has its own market challenges. Besides the top-down adoption, which often can be slow, competition will impact its journey. Existing cloud vendors already offer micro-services orchestration frameworks. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has Step Functions and Azure has Durable Functions. Other venture backed companies in the space include Temporal (Madrona, Sequoia), Camunda (Highland) and Tonkean (Foundation, Accel) with each carving its path, flexing its own muscles to show its core strengths.

While this is a large $500 billion market as Gartner suggests, the game has just begun. And for the co-founders of Orkes.io, the fun has just begun. Orkes has already built an enterprise grade cloud offering that customers are now using in production for some of their core business flows. (Companies can sign up here) Within weeks of launch, new customers have started to sign up.? Its seed round ballooned to $10m and was led by Battery and Vertex Ventures.

As capital supply stays strong for early stage companies, it’s anybody’s guess how soon the next round will get locked in. For Jeu, that’s more of a distraction. “We are focusing our energy on users and customers. That's where the real value is. It’s execution time.``