The link between connectivity, velocity and hyperautomation

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Rich Waldron

CEO

How you can use hyperautomation to adapt to constant change

This article covers important updates such as Connector Builder, which facilitates fast, easy, custom connector builds, and Connectivity API, which simplifies end-customer integrations from thousands of endpoints to just three API calls. With these and other new capabilities, Tray.io is increasing your ability to execute on hyperautomation initiatives – so you can drive efficiency at scale by automating any processes across your organization. Read on to learn more about the importance of hyperautomation, or skip ahead to learn about the specific enhancements we're adding to support your team with connectivity and enterprise velocity at scale.

At Tray.io, our goal has always been to empower you and your team to do your best work. We understand that it’s more important than ever to focus on the highest-value projects at scale, particularly to navigate challenging market conditions.

We also understand that executing efficiently is tougher than ever because so many more processes are software-dependent, and because your company may be using as many as  250+ separate applications. And few, if any, of your apps offer the connectivity and data management you need to execute your mission-critical processes at the velocity required. 

In just the past few years, we’ve lived through multiple stages of a pandemic, forcing companies around the globe to adopt part-time or full-time remote status and leading to an increased urgency for IT teams to digitally transform their orgs in the cloud. To ensure you can adapt to constant changes in the market, we’re expanding our automation and integration portfolio with many important capabilities to support enterprise velocity and connectivity.

Hyperautomation elevates operations today, prepares you for tomorrow

It’s more important than ever to use automation to drive process efficiency. Organizations need to flawlessly execute so they can elevate customer and employee experience while improving performance across line-of-business (LOB) teams in marketing, sales, customer support, finance, and every other business unit. Gartner reports that 50% of CEOs and 69% of boards expect “accelerated growth and operational excellence.”

Gartner progression of hyperautomation initiatives

The need for automation in modern business has gone beyond legacy tools and requires large-scale orchestration. Image courtesy Gartner.

To deliver better, faster customer and employee experiences, retain customers, and grow revenue, it’s more important than ever to keep up with changes in the market. Sadly, it’s no longer feasible to rely on lightweight point products, or monolithic legacy products that require scarce engineering resources. As teams utilize more software applications to manage more data, they must also somehow connect an ever-increasing number of APIs across their tools – an estimated total of 300 million public, homegrown, and private APIs by 2030. Point products aren’t robust enough to handle the demand. Code-heavy platforms that require IT support cause too many bottlenecks and delays.

The real solution, of course, has been in front of us for a while: low code. Hyperautomation by way of low-code democratizes the ability to stand up integrations and automate custom data flows for everyone–not just IT. With low code, teams across the organization self-service their technical tool issues and scale their own processes, without IT having to invest hours in hand coding. Meanwhile, the IT project backlog thins out as LOB teams submit fewer helpdesk tickets, so that IT teams can refocus on the most valuable and strategic projects in their queue. In addition, hyperautomation means that software vendors and services teams can deliver the integrations and improved experiences their end customers need–faster and with fewer developer resources.

From day one, we’ve been dedicated to giving you and everyone in your org the power to get the absolute most from your tech stack with automation while delivering world-class security and compliance. With our connectivity improvements, you can simplify complex end-customer integrations, stand up your own custom connectors, and improve the OAuth experience. Our enterprise velocity enhancements include improved global management, governance, and authentication features that will help you do more, faster. Let’s review these important advancements now.

Use hyperautomation to unlock connectivity for your org and your customers

As you’re already aware, Tray.io products already offer a comprehensive variety of methods to connect your tools and data sources, including hundreds of pre-built service connectors and a universal connector to connect any REST, SOAP, or GraphQL API via HTTP. We’re pleased to announce a variety of new ways we’re adding deeper connectivity across your stack, and for your end customers.

Connectivity API - Use Tray Embedded’s full connector library directly via API

connectivity api postman

We first launched Tray Embedded to enable independent software vendors and services teams to deliver integrations to their own end customers faster using fewer engineering resources, while significantly reducing the burden of integration maintenance. We’re pleased to unveil our newest configuration of Tray Embedded: Connectivity API, which offers SaaS companies unprecedented, direct connectivity to hundreds of pre-built service connectors.

Connectivity API dramatically reduces the engineering and data delivery burden of providing end customer connectivity at scale. Connectivity API reduces integration overhead to just three simple, uniform API calls, while still providing full and granular control. 

  1. Get the list of available connectors using the GetConnectors REST API

  2. Get the list of available operations and schema for any connector and version with the GetConnectorOperations REST API

  3. Execute any custom operation using the CallConnector REST API

Connectivity API significantly simplifies the way vendors can offer multiple customer integrations to hundreds of high-value databases and applications covering ERP, CRM, HCM, and many more. (Note: The above image shows API calls in Postman.)

Learn more about Connectivity API in our documentation portal and in our product release demo videos.

Connector Builder - Stand up your own custom service connectors

Connector Builder Flow - 2022 0309-09

While Tray.io products already offer multiple ways to connect numerous different data sources, we understand that your team frequently faces growing demand for additional connectivity, including requests for custom functionality and endpoints. Going beyond a simple API integration to developing full-fledged connectors is traditionally a costly and time-consuming process that only developers could execute using a complex connector SDK. 

However, our new Connector Builder provides a guided, visual experience to stand up, test, and publish your own custom service connectors. Connector Builder includes support for authentications and adding custom operations to work with any REST API, along with versioning so that you can easily manage, update, and maintain what you build. Instead of spending months hand-coding net-new connectors, you can stand up your own connectors in minutes.

Learn more about Connector Builder in our documentation portal and in our product release demo videos.

OAuth customization - Offer a fully-branded open authentication experience

oauth customization screenshot

SaaS vendors in particular understand the increasing expectations around end customer integrations. End customers expect integrations that are robust, seamless, and don’t have any bulky, extruding interface elements. To help Tray Embedded customers offer a more-seamless experience for their end customer integrations, we’re pleased to announce OAuth customization, which lets Tray Embedded customers create custom service environments with their own branding for open authentications. When Tray Embedded customers enable OAuth customization, the OAuth environment will display only their own company’s branding, providing a more-seamless customer experience.

Learn more about OAuth customization in our documentation portal.

Use hyperautomation to execute with enterprise velocity

We’re pleased to announce extensive updates to Tray.io products to ensure you can  swiftly deploy your hyperautomation projects on a truly global scale.

Improved multi-region support - Data sovereignty for US, EU, APAC

We’re seeing businesses continue to adopt operations in the cloud and continue to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of serverless technology to expand their operations in step with their data usage. However, with increases in data regulation worldwide, we’re also seeing increasing importance for organizations that operate internationally to have full data sovereignty–the ability to protect sensitive, private data and ensure it remains under the control of the owner, per the regulations of each specific region in which they operate.

As such, we’ve improved our multi-region offering to support any customers operating with strict requirements on data hosting within the US, EU, or APAC. Now, users gain multi-region flexibility to process data in-region at their choice. Any organization headquartered within the EU or APAC regions can process data in-region using either Tray Platform or Tray Embedded. In addition, software and services organizations using Tray Embedded can also process data in-region, to maintain strict compliance with any internal data security and privacy policies that may vary from country to country.

Authentication Collector - For any user within or outside of your organization

authentication collector screenshot

We understand that building and deploying integrations and automation increasingly requires collaboration within the organization across IT, LOB, and “fusion teams” of low-code developers and business technologists. In addition, services teams and global systems integrations require the ability to build collaboratively with end customers to deliver their integrations faster and automate important connectivity processes such as app authentication. In all cases, teams across the organization need the ability to connect to and authenticate dozens of different apps, tools, and databases which may have a variety of owners within (and outside of) organizations that use Tray.io products. We specifically built our products for distributed development to give you the ability to rapidly deploy what you build to anyone, including external partners.

The next step in distributed development will be our new Authentication Collector, which will let you quickly, remotely, and securely collect and manage authentications for any tools you need as part of your workflows. You will be able to use the Authentication Collector to issue an authentication request directly to any relevant users to complete authentication for that app, regardless of whether those users are Tray.io customers or users. Authentication requests send recipients to a secure website to complete the authentication to minimize delays and ensure automation teams stay on track.

Learn more about our Authentication Collector in our documentation portal here.

Projects - Advanced workflow grouping and management

projects screenshot

Collaboration is crucial for scaling automation across the organization. We understand that as organizations adopt automation, they often find themselves rapidly building out automated workflows to manage a variety of use cases both across and within various departments. For example, marketing teams often find themselves automating key marketing processes such as lead management, campaign logistics, and pipeline metrics analysis. Sales teams often find themselves automating sales processes such as quote-to-cash activities, sales-to-support handoff tasks, and deal desk approvals.

To enable advanced collaboration within your team, we’re announcing projects, which gives builders the ability to manage their internal libraries of dependent and callable workflows as grouped projects. We’re adding projects within our previously-launched workspaces structure–which already gives you the ability to set up functional teams within your organization (such as for marketing, sales, finance, or other teams). With projects, your workspace team can improve day-to-day automation management and governance by logically grouping together related workflows within a single project, and manage all your team’s automated processes from your team-based workspace. Please note: Some of the functionality has previously been available in Tray Embedded products; but the grouping ability of projects will now be available for both Tray Embedded and Tray Platform.

Learn more about projects in our documentation portal here and here and product release demo videos.

Usage Transparency: Sandboxes and test users - Faster iteration and improvements on automation

usage transparency screenshot for blog

We understand that as conditions change in the market and within your organization, you may need to update existing automated workflows or iteratively test alternative processes.

To help you design, test, implement, and iterate faster, we’re pleased to announce a set of features to help with usage transparency including sandboxes and test users. Enterprise teams will be able to develop automated workflows in a secure test environment prior to moving to their production environment when complete, all at no additional cost. Tray Embedded customers will have the ability to set end users as test users, so they can ensure any test end user solution instances don't get billed as separate unique authentications. 

Learn more about usage transparency features in our documentation portal here and here and in our product release demo videos.

Getting started with hyperautomation

High-velocity automation with airbags is the best way to describe what Tray.io is bringing to customers in our latest product release. Point-to-point integration products often lack the global governance, collaboration, and controls enterprises need to meet IT demands. Meanwhile, monolithic legacy products require complex, developer-only SDKs that crush automation velocity when teams hit inevitable connectivity roadblocks. Companies crack the code on hyperautomation when they can sustainably scale it, teams can build new connectors on demand using low-code, and developer productivity increases.

Key components of hyperautomation include connectivity and driving enterprise velocity at scale. With the new capabilities unveiled today, Tray.io customers realize tangible benefits that accelerate automation and integration delivery for the enterprise.

Looking for more in-depth demos of our new enterprise management and connectivity offerings? Get a full walk-through by signing up for the upcoming product webinar.

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