Operaton in the Public Sector

When we started working on Operaton in autumn 2024, one question dominated: what happens to all those Camunda 7 installations once the Community Edition runs out? Two years later, a sizeable part of the answer comes from the public sector. Agencies and municipalities in the Netherlands and Germany run Operaton in production, often without anyone outside the project noticing.

The Netherlands: four major cities and student finance

The Netherlands is furthest along. Ritense builds Valtimo, a low-code platform for case management and process automation designed specifically for municipalities. Under the hood, Operaton serves as the workflow engine. Through Valtimo, Operaton runs in the country’s four largest municipalities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague. Jaap Bakker of Ritense told the story behind it in his talk on the success of Operaton in the Netherlands.

Smaller municipalities are following suit. Heusden, for example, uses Operaton for the Heusden Pass and models the decision logic in DMN. Steven Gort presented the example in his talk on the Operaton DMN Evaluator plugin for WordPress Gravity Forms: residents fill in a web form, and Operaton evaluates the DMN rules behind it.

A second field of use is student finance, an area with high case volumes, clear rules and little tolerance for outages. For a workflow engine, that’s a pretty good stress test.

Germany: FIT-Connect and the first larger installations

In Germany, FIT-Connect is the most visible case. FITKO’s infrastructure securely routes applications from online services to the responsible back-office systems, and its reference implementation uses Operaton. That this went so smoothly is largely thanks to Julian Haupt. He owns backoffice.plus, whose product builds on Operaton, and is one of the project’s core developers. He also regularly joined the FIT-Connect jour fixes and built the FIT-Connect adapter for Operaton. Thank you, Julian.

Beyond that, we see signals of larger installations in tax administration and at municipalities. We can’t get more specific at this point. And that leads to a problem many open-source projects know well: lots of organisations use Operaton, few talk about it publicly. Linux is a good comparison: it runs in millions of TVs, routers and cars, yet no manufacturer puts it on the box and hardly any buyer asks about it. Operaton sits just as invisibly inside back-office systems and products like Valtimo. The focus is on the processes running on it, and rightly so. The downside is that hardly anyone finds out how much already runs on Operaton. We’re working on a reference list on operaton.org, and the topic deserves an article of its own.

Why Operaton fits public administration

With the end-of-life of the Camunda 7 Community Edition, many public authorities face a decision. Over the past years, public agencies have modelled a lot of process logic in BPMN, and much of it runs on Camunda 7. Operaton grew out of that code and stays API-compatible, so existing BPMN and DMN models, Java delegates and integrations keep working. A migration mostly means swapping dependencies and package names and testing thoroughly; you don’t need a rewrite. I showed what that looks like in practice in my BaselOne 2025 talk “Camunda 7 ist tot – lang lebe Operaton!” (in German) and in an interview at the conference.

At the same time, we’ve modernised the code base thoroughly: current Java versions, Jakarta EE, current Spring Boot, outdated components removed. For public-sector IT that’s moving its operations to containers and cloud-native development anyway, that’s a solid reason not to stay on the old stack.

Digital sovereignty takes more than a licence

Operaton is released under a free open-source licence and doesn’t belong to any single vendor. For a public authority, that means no supplier can change the licence terms, discontinue an edition or dictate the price of continued operation. Many Camunda 7 users have just been through exactly that. Why open source alone isn’t enough to prevent it is the subject of our article Digital Sovereignty Starts with Open Source.

Free software alone doesn’t guarantee reliable operation over ten or fifteen years, though, and that’s how long back-office systems in public administration often run. It takes people and companies who carry the project. Around Operaton, a network of national and international companies has formed that offers professional support and actively develops the engine; itemis is one of them. Rutger Haagsma, co-founder of Ritense, explains in his article “Why we dedicated to open source” why companies deliberately build their business on free software. To keep the project formally independent as well, we’re founding an association that will steward Operaton. The constituent meeting has taken place; registration with the court is still pending.

We noticed the growing interest in early October 2026 at All About Process Management, where we exhibited together with our strategic partner Flowset, which builds tools and applications complementing Operaton: a striking number of questions came from the public sector.

What public authorities can do now

If you run Camunda 7, you can evaluate Operaton in parallel at no licence cost, ideally with a real back-office process rather than a demo. If you’re starting fresh, don’t just compare features when choosing a process platform; also check who will still fix bugs and ship security updates ten years from now. With Operaton, several independent providers can answer that question.

More about the project: operaton.org

Custom software at itemis — From Camunda 7 migration to production-grade BPMN platforms built on Operaton: Custom Software →