HFS Highlight: Celonis’ newly launched EMS solution brings it one step closer to being THE platform where work gets done

Process intelligence has really picked up steam in recent months: enterprises of every shape and size are recognizing it as a crucial step in any process excellence or automation journey, and several technology venders have emerged to service their every need. One of these vendors is Celonis, a process intelligence titan who already encapsulates HFS’ Triple-A Trifecta, blending automation, analytics and AI. At its inaugural ecosystem day event for partners, Celonis doubled down on the Triple-A philosophy, believing that value lies at the intersection of these technologies instead of siloed approaches to digital transformation.

Celonis’ Global Ecosystem Day saw the vendor announce its Execution Management System (EMS) and the acquisition of automation firm Integromat.

 It’s fair to say that Celonis is already a market-maker for process intelligence, and their $2.5 billion valuation is a testament to that – as well as its growing roster of blue-chip global enterprise clients. However, we all know that complacency breeds failure (que the Blockbuster refusing to embrace streaming story). Celonis is clearly vowing to stay ahead of the market, as their recent Global Ecosystem Day saw them make two announcements which they hope will further cement their position as leaders of the process intelligence market, and perhaps start to expand its role in enterprises’ digital transformation journeys. These announcements were its new EMS, and the acquisition of Integromat.

Celonis doubles down on the Triple-A Trifecta vision with EMS

HFS has already discussed Celonis’ Operational Apps, and how they blended emerging technologies to bring process intelligence, automation and outcome-driven AI closer together for specific functional use cases. Celonis has now iterated on this concept and evolved Operational Apps into what it now calls EMS. Essentially, the vendor has created a system-of-engagement layer that sits on tops of business processes and systems, drawing process insights, and creating execution strategies – either alerting and recommending actions to business users, or setting configurable rules to trigger automation for certain tasks. With this approach, Celonis is envisioning not only helping you identify and rectify process bottlenecks, but also helping you execute the process itself, with smart insights and recommendations, and automation capabilities.

EMS allows Celonis’ clients to measure the execution capacity of their business KPIs, identify pain-points and work to reduce them, maximising the business KPI. To do this, it extracts real-time data from client’s underlying systems, such as SAP and Oracle, and leverages its two core engines:

• The Core Mining Engine leverages machine-learning to analyse both system logs and user interaction data to identify any bottlenecks and provide actionable insights to help resolve them.
• The Automation Engine assesses the insights provided by the Core Mining Engine and takes action, efficiently automating workflows across all of the enterprises’ systems.

Executing an end-to-end business process requires domain knowledge and discipline. Recognizing this, Celonis is continuing to develop process-specific offerings to run through its EMS solution. Current examples include accounts payable, collections management and opportunity management, and Celonis has opened the door for its partners to develop their own Execution Apps. This is the most promising part of the direction Celonis is going in, where it is opening the doors for both clients and partners to develop and share domain-specific applications. Towards this, it has made developing on Celonis easier, with a new ‘Celonis Studio’ environment that provides a low-code development environment with access to all of Celonis’ platform components.

Integromat is a clever complement to enable stitching automation workflows in EMS

Celonis’ second announcement of the day was the acquisition of Integromat, its second-ever after acquiring Banyas back in 2019. Integromat is a UI-based automation platform that already boasts over 10,000 customers. The deal will see Integromat’s 60 employees absorbed into Celonis, and its technology will be weaved into its existing offerings, particularly EMS and the Automation Engine. The addition of Integromat will provide some much-needed bolstering of the vendor’s automation capabilities, especially given Integromat already works with such a wide range of systems and applications. Celonis will need to demonstrate further how EMS plays across its partner ecosystem, given it is now potentially in competition with some of its automation partners, and many clients already have investments there.

HFS has been highlighting the convergence of these technologies for a few years now, and with RPA firms getting building and buying their way into process intelligence technologies, it was only a matter of time before we went the other way: Celonis is one of the few vendors who could justify this investment. Ultimately, Celonis already does a very good job of leveraging AI and analytics to provide actionable insights for its clients, and the addition of Integromat will really enhance its pre-existing Automation Engine, pushing Celonis even closer to that Triple-A sweet spot and allowing clients to a way to minimize system complexity and function more efficiently, a goal for many in these volatile times.

The Bottom Line: EMS lets Celonis not only provide process intelligence, but enable process execution, which is what ultimately impacts business performance

Overall, Celonis is showing no signs of taking its foot of the gas. The announcement of EMS alongside the acquisition of Integromat proves that Celonis wants to move beyond simply process intelligence–instead hailing our Triple-A vision, leveraging a blend of automation, analytics and AI–and provide its clients with a full-cycle solution that caters to the challenges of digitizing operations while dealing with a fragmented systems landscape.