ServiceNow has recently been announced as a leader in the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT).
The new product category accredits vendors who have automation offerings across several different existing categories, including RPA, API, low/no-code, agentic tools, and more. For ServiceNow, achieving ‘leader’ status in the first product category is further proof of the company’s long-established dominance in the enterprise automation space.
ServiceNow: A Leader in Unified Enterprise Automation
The Gartner Magic Quadrant report was released at the end of October and was accompanied by a press release from ServiceNow. The company was joined by two other leaders in this report: Pegasystems and Appian. A total of seventeen other providers were discussed in the report across three other categories: Challengers, Niche Players, and Visionaries.
These Magic Quadrant reports are designed to accredit tech vendors in particular areas, like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and many more. Needless to say, Gartner accreditations are well-regarded, so these reports have become something of a fixture in the tech scene.
This new BOAT category focuses specifically on automation technology vendors whose offerings span several different product categories. And anybody who knows anything about ServiceNow will tell you that unified automation is pretty much in the organization’s DNA – so it’s little surprise that the tech giant finds itself topping the rankings here.
What’s a BOAT and Why Do We Need One?
“Most vendors offer individual automation tools—RPA here, low-code there—that run separately. ServiceNow brings everything together on one platform. Workflows give structure to how work moves, and AI and data power the automation behind it.”
ServiceNow (via Press Release)
Gartner defines this new category as follows: “A consolidated software platform that delivers enterprise process automation by enabling capabilities including orchestration of business processes, enterprise connectivity, low code development, and agentic automation.”
Let’s unpack this in a bit more detail.
Over the last decade or so, the tech market has evolved a whole range of product names and categories within the automation space. These include business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA), low-code application programming, and more. That’s before we even start on AI.
But until recently, much of this technology was only available through self-contained platforms, known as ‘point solutions’. These are great for solving a specific business problem – but the more of them an organization adopts, the more confusing, expensive, and fragmented the resulting system becomes. In short, having one of these is great – having ten of them is a nightmare.
According to the Gartner report, 70% of enterprises will “pivot to a consolidated automation platform”, which will “include AI agents, bots, APIs, and human actions.” Notably, this number is a rise from just 5% today.
In response, the new BOAT category has evolved to offer a single base of operations for automation. And according to Gartner, this category involves a clear set of features:
- Orchestration of business processes.
- Enterprise connectivity via APIs and UI interaction.
- Extraction of data from unstructured and semi-structured documents.
- Capability to design, build, and execute automation objects such as bots, workflows, connectors, and LLM-based AI agents.
- Low-code development and business-IT collaboration.
- Platform governance and operations.
When compared with other vendors on Gartner’s list, ServiceNow is something of an anomaly here. Like other vendors on the list, they’ve heavily invested in the kinds of technology that now come under the ‘BOAT’ label. But for ServiceNow, this consolidated, platform-based approach is less of a response to market developments; it’s pretty much as close as an organization gets to having an ideology.
Gartner on ServiceNow: What Did the Report Say?
“Its [ServiceNow’s] BOAT platform is the unified ServiceNow AI Platform that combines low-code, BPA, RPA, and AI agents. Its notable features include an AI-first platform, facilitating multi-agent orchestration via the low-code AI Agent Studio, as well as AI Agent Fabric to connect diverse agents.
“ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric is a comprehensive offering for application and data integration, including real-time data.”
Gartner (via Magic Quadrant)
Gartner is well-regarded as an independent voice in the tech ecosystem, so the organization’s comments carry much weight and credibility. It’s worthwhile, therefore, to consider exactly why ServiceNow was chosen as a leader.
Principally, the company’s investment in AI-related automation technology over the last two years has clearly paid off here. Indeed, Gartner specifically mentions the low-code AI Agent Studio and AI Agent Fabric as tools that can connect and orchestrate disparate AI agents. It also mentions three key elements of the product roadmap for the next year: Human-led collaboration, voice agents, and multi-agent orchestration.
In terms of the organization’s approach and business model, Gartner pulled out three main benefits: The scalability of the platform, the vendor-neutral and multi-agent approach, and the strong focus on governance and observability. These topics have come up a lot in the last twelve months, and it’s clear that ServiceNow’s unique approach here has worked.
That being said, it’s not all roses – and Gartner always includes ‘cautions’ (criticisms, but more polite) about the vendors listed in these reports. While most of these are fairly niche, Gartner did also mention ServiceNow’s ‘complex licensing and cost predictability’. The combination of multi-tiered add-ons, modules, and consumption-based pricing creates a confusing price structure that can lead to volatile and unpredictable costs.
This is a fairly well-known challenge with ServiceNow products, so it’s little surprise to see it being called out here by Gartner.
The Leader in Enterprise Automation
If you’re familiar with the kind of technologies that ServiceNow has built its business on, it won’t surprise you at all to see the vendor topping the list here. In fact, ‘unified automation’ is as close as you can get to a straightforward description of the company’s business products and services. Arguably, therefore, Gartner’s decision to create the new category is more interesting than the decision to put ServiceNow at the top of it.
Either way, the news clearly demonstrates that ServiceNow’s investments, roadmap, and product strategy are more than paying off.