Ovations, Camunda partnership to transform business process orchestration in SA

South African enterprise software firm Ovations Technologies has signed a partnership with Camunda, a leading provider of business process orchestration solutions. This collaboration aims to revolutionize how companies approach process automation in the region.

Ovations CTO Deon van Niekerk spoke about how Camunda's agentic AI technology allows organizations to rethink their business operating models, freeing up human workers to focus on enhancing customer service and relationships. He explained that Camunda's unique capability lies in its ability to seamlessly mix human-based workflows with AI-driven automation, significantly improving processes.

Van Niekerk highlighted that Camunda's pricing model, based on transaction volume rather than user numbers, aligns better with the value for customers in the South African market, particularly in the financial services sector. This partnership is expected to give Ovations' hyperautomation value proposition a much-needed boost.

Camunda's technology addresses the issue of legacy processes designed before AI existed. According to Van Niekerk, re-engineering these processes is necessary for an AI-native world. Camunda's solution orchestrates knowledge workers and AI agents across end-to-end business processes, simplifying the enforcement of guardrails and maintaining a complete audit trail.

The software is built for enterprise-scale, high-throughput, long-running operations, offering scalable AI-powered automation on open standards with no proprietary lock-in. It enables seamless coordination of agents within larger processes, injecting enforceable steps between an agent's decision and its action to ensure safety and consistency. This approach allows for straight-through processing for predictable steps and agent reasoning for exceptions, all within a single process.

A noteworthy addition to Camunda's offerings is ProcessOS, currently in closed beta. This new capability discovers how businesses truly operate, re-engineers processes for an AI-native world, and continuously improves deployed solutions automatically. Van Niekerk believes Camunda leads in innovation in agentic AI-enabled process orchestration.

Ovations has built its Camunda practice on developer skills and over 25 years of process delivery expertise. With a strong partnership in the Camunda South Africa community and a deep understanding of financial services, telecommunications, and retail sectors, Ovations is well-positioned to guide clients through this transformative journey and help them rethink their approach to future business processes.