Overview

Edit online

IBM® Business Automation Workflow is a platform to create workflow applications that orchestrate work between people, systems and information to improve productivity, efficiency, and insights.

To address specific business situations and optimize core business processes, you can orchestrate multiple workflows, such as structured processes for sequential collaborative work, unstructured cases for ad hoc non-sequential activities, or services.

By streamlining a wide variety of workflows and tasks, Business Automation Workflow offers the following advantages.
  • Enables businesses to automate at scale and do more with less.
  • Improves productivity by providing users with the right information at the right time, based on role.
  • Manages governance and compliance by offering auditable automated workflows that are governed, dependable, and predictable.
  • Increases visibility through built-in alerts and monitoring, helping manage and understand process performance.
  • Empowers business users by providing web-based no-code or low-code tooling to build consistent user experiences and standardized processes.
Business Automation Workflow overview

Depending on the requirements of your workflow environment, you can choose between the following Business Automation Workflow deployment options.

  • The traditional Business Automation Workflow environment provides a WebSphere® Application Server-based platform which offers
    • Compatibility with previous workflow installations.
    • Support for deprecated but still available functions in the development and deployment tools.
    • On-premise bare-metal deployment and VM-based deployment, which is the best option to leverage private cloud if 100% compatibility is required.

    The traditional environment offers an Advanced deployment environment that gives you access to all features and functions, including BPEL processes, mediation flows, and SCA applications, or a Standard deployment environment with a slightly smaller footprint. In a traditional environment, Business Automation Workflow configuration tasks and WebSphere Application Server administration tasks are performed with wsadmin commands, REST API operations, and the WebSphere administrative console.
    For more information, see IBM Business Automation Workflow 25.0.0.0 traditional.

  • The Business Automation Workflow on containers environment supports Rancher, VMware Tanzu, and OpenShift® Container Platform. It provides a Kubernetes-based enterprise workflow platform to run cloud-native solutions, which offers
    • Support for existing process applications and case solutions for running workflows in a cloud-native way.
    • Support for most non-deprecated artifacts in process application and case solution workloads in a Standard deployment environment. For a list of supported and unsupported features and artifacts in container environments, see Feature support for Business Automation Workflow on containers and Artifact support in traditional and container runtime environments.
    • Support for familiar on-premise development tools, such as Process Designer and Case Builder.
    • A microservices architecture that uses containers and the Kubernetes platform to support autoscaling, continuous availability, and downtime-free continuous upgrades.

    In a container environment, configuration and administration tasks are performed by modifying the workflow custom resource settings in the Kubernetes cluster and by using the workflow REST APIs.
    For more information, see IBM Business Automation Workflow on containers.

For a comparison between the deployment environments and for artifact support details, see the corresponding subtopics.