A redwood tree - an apt metaphor for a company that has created its own ecosystem, much as a redwood tree does in its forest. Redwood Software has long been a pioneer in workload automation celebrating 30 years this year, rolling out a new logo and branding to coincide with this milestone. Its flagship product available on SAP Store, RunMyJobs weaves together the entire ecosystem of enterprise applications on a unified platform. And, to extend the metaphor, Redwood has created a broad interconnected network of partners, employees, acquired companies, and customers that work productively together to solve business and IT challenges.

 

I learned about all this in a discussion with CEO Kevin Greene, who told me that Redwood’s employees – Kevin’s teammates – will celebrate the big anniversary together in Europe this year. You might think that the company originated in Silicon Valley, near California’s redwood forests, but you would be wrong. In fact, Redwood was founded in 1993 by a group of foresighted innovators based in the Netherlands, who identified the need to enable business processes seamlessly across the enterprise. That, of course, would involve integration with the leading enterprise resource planning software, SAP ERP. Proximity to SAP’s headquarters in Walldorf, Germany was an early strategy.

 

Weaving processes seamlessly together across the enterprise

 

Today, Redwood has thousands of customers in some 40 countries and more than 400 teammates around the world. Their main office is “Microsoft Teams and Zoom,” Kevin joked, explaining that the company has “communication rituals” to ensure close collaboration. Everyone attends the quarterly calls – product management, sales, service, and the CEO himself. “Feedback is a gift,” he said. “These cadences are so important for understanding where our product should be headed based on what we hear from our customers.”

 

In that way, he said, Redwood is culturally quite similar to SAP, not just in the intense focus on customers, but in the companies’ values-based leadership. Beyond the obvious business synergies, those shared values explain a partnership that spans some 20 years. From the outset, Redwood’s workload automation software has tightly integrated with SAP ERP to unify fragmented IT landscapes. That capability has never been more important, Kevin noted, given the explosion of innovative applications and microservices that will only continue. “What weaves it all together is automation. We witnessed the move from mainframes to client servers, and now we are seeing the great ‘replatforming’ as organizations rethink their architecture and refactor IT stacks with the move to the cloud.” RunMyJobs automates applications no matter where they are hosted in on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments.

 

Fully integrating IT stacks for “lights-out automation”

 

And full-stack automation is essential to enterprises that depend on reliable business processes and future-proofed operations. Because SAP and Redwood have been developing products together for so long, the teams work together to assist customers as they make the move from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA. Redwood is fully certified to integrate with all modern SAP solutions and certified “works with RISE”, securing operations while customers are transitioning to S/4HANA with RISE. It’s a collaboration further supported by the integration of the Redwood solution on SAP Store.

 

Business continuity is critical. “When a customer calls for help, they want a highly trained engineer on the phone,” Kevin said. “Think about the nature of the business processes involved.

 

If the books aren’t closed accurately, someone could go to jail. If manufacturing operations fail, the stock could tank.” Borrowing a term from manufacturing, Kevin calls that operational seamlessness “lights-out automation,” meaning that operations will continue without hiccups when the lights are out and there’s no human in the room.

 

Supporting industry-specific automation fabrics

 

Industry-specific automation fabrics are the next focus for Redwood, as customers themselves drive their own use cases supported by the software. Kevin pointed to financial service firms, where record-to-report processes are helping close the books faster, and utilities, where meter-to-cash processes are accelerating payment cycles. Kevin remembers that back when he left investment banking for technology, IT didn’t even have a seat in the C suite. Workflow automation was considered back-office functionality. Now, he observed, banks consider themselves technology companies providing financial services, for instance, in a complete paradigm shift.

 

For partners new to SAP that hope to emulate Redwood’s longevity, Kevin recommends tuning out distractions, focusing on solving the customer’s problem, and finding the people to make that happen. As the son of a two-star Admiral in the US Navy, Kevin learned from his father to emphasize the achievements of his team. He considers it a moral obligation to support his teammates at Redwood in their career growth plans. Longevity and growth – sounds like a redwood tree.

 

Find out for yourself how RunMyJobs can support your business longevity and growth by orchestrating business and IT processes across your organization.