Universal connectivity on the Tray Platform: Why it matters

Whenever we talk to someone evaluating solutions like the Tray Platform, one of the first questions they ask is, “Can you integrate X application with Y application?” Our answer is very simple: “If there’s a data source, we can connect to it.”

Today, we’ll explore what universal connectivity means on the Tray Platform. We’ll also cover how integration impacts automation, provide better definitions about how we integrate into specific services, and explain our approach to building connectors overall.

At Tray.io, our mission is to be the central nervous system of the automated enterprise. The Tray Platform provides business users the ability to automate any business process without relying on developers. Integration is the first step to building any process automation, which is why universal connectivity is so critical to the Tray Platform.

As prospective buyers begin their search for solutions to their integration and automation challenges, it’s essential to understand what their integration needs are.

In order to achieve our mission, we knew that we had to build the Tray Platform to be flexible enough to connect to any data source. The Tray Platform provides builders a variety of tools to facilitate integration, including Tray Connectors for hundreds of common business applications and databases as well as our universal connectors.

Connectors

Today, the Tray Platform has more than 500 connectors built for a wide variety of business applications, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, data warehouses and many more. Each connector has both event-based triggers and CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations.

Since we have a variety of connectors available, our low-code builder enables business users to easily drag-and-drop any of these connectors into their workflows. After adding a connector to a workflow, users authenticate into the selected apps, configure each step with the necessary operations, and deploy it to production. Dragging and dropping apps into connected workflow steps automatically creates seamless API integration between them - again, with no developer resources required.

While this is the most common way that Tray Platform users integrate their apps, it’s far from the only way we connect into the apps you use everyday.

Webhooks are one of many ways to connect using the Tray Platform.

Using the Tray Platform’s Universal Connectors

While our team adds new connectors every week using Connector Press, we know that our customers use more applications than we have connectors for today. There are several scenarios that we needed to solve for when we set out to build the Tray Platform:

1. Extend existing connectors to access additional endpoints or operations that aren’t currently included in one of our connectors
2. Access data from applications for which we haven’t yet built a connector
3. Transform, map, and manipulate data within a workflow from a flat file or database

As a result, our universal connectors represent several features that enable our builders to access any data they need to successfully automate their mission-critical business processes. These features include our HTTP client connector, GraphQL connector, connectors for common databases like our JDBC connector, our CSV Editor, S/FTP, and universal triggers like webhooks, email, form, and more.

Here are a few of the many ways our universal connectors meet our customers’ additional connector, data, and flat file/database requirements:

1. Our Universal Connectors can help you manually make API requests to any URL using a variety of APIs.
2. Our Universal Connectors can also access data for services for which we don’t have connectors today. You could also use a webhook trigger (sometimes referred to as a “web callback”) to access real-time events and trigger a workflow.
3. Use our JDBC connector or CSV Editor to transform and manipulate data from a database or flat file.

As you can see, we can connect to applications and data sources in a variety of ways. Our flexibility is a major benefit to partnering with Tray.io, and it’s why we can confidently say, “If there’s a data source, we can connect to it.”