Workato, the leading enterprise automation platform, introduced a variety of enhancements to its connectivity framework highlighted by significant upgrades to the platform’s connector SDK, as well as new connectors for Process Mining tools, a Python connector to allow custom Python code, and Live Auth, which enables users to dynamically connect and authenticate to a variety of third-party apps in real-time.

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“Python is one of the most popular languages amongst our developers. The opportunity to leverage that skillset will launch a new wave in the design and development of automations at Collibra.”

The Workato community has experienced tremendous growth over the past year with a more than 3X increase in community connector utilization and an increase of more than 5.5X in the total number of community connectors available on the platform. This release follows Workato’s Series E funding announcement in which the company announced their acquisition of application connector factory RailsData as part of the company’s initiative to increase the number of Workato platform connectors by 10x over the next few years.

“With the explosion in the number of SaaS applications being utilized in organizations, the connectivity needs of our customers are growing exponentially fast. Empowering partners and customers to build more powerful connectors, more quickly, while also providing them with a first-class community in which to do so is key to addressing the ever growing connectivity needs of our customers,” said Gautham Viswanathan, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Workato. “With integration being the foundation of Workato’s enterprise automation platform, the development momentum we’ve seen from our partners and customers has been tremendous and we believe that will only accelerate with these new capabilities we’re bringing to the community and connector SDK.”

Build More Powerful Connectors

The breadth of Workato’s connectivity is made up of connectors developed and certified by the company’s engineering team and a growing community of partners and customers. With growth of over 3X in the utilization of connectors developed by the community, enabling partners to build more powerful connectors, more easily, is a critical focus of Workato’s overall connectivity strategy. To facilitate the continued growth of this community, Workato introduced the following enhancements:

• Develop more robust connectors. New enhancements to Workato’s SDK that add support for file streaming when transferring large files, parallel thread execution to improve performance when working with APIs that don’t support bulk requests, and multi-step actions required to more effectively work with asynchronous APIs.
• Build connectors on your terms. Introduction of the SDK Emulator enables community members to develop connectors outside of Workato’s cloud platform, using their favorite development environment. The SDK Emulator also improves developers’ ability to test/debug connectors at a more granular level, and utilize their favorite git tool for versioning and collaboration.
• Manage the lifecycle of connector releases. New lifecycle management capabilities enable developers to follow their preferred software development lifecycle processes to ensure the quality of every community connector release. This includes support for their favorite version control system and automated unit tests that can be integrated into CI/CD processes.

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Utilize Advanced Resources & Community Support in Development

Customers and partners are now able to build connectors that can be certified and published by Workato in Workato’s marketplace for access by anyone. To help partners through this process and ensure continued success of their connector development efforts, Workato has upgraded the training, enablement, and co-marketing available to the community.

“The value of Zendesk isn’t limited to what our customers can do within our product’s user experience. More and more, we see customers integrating the data and actions that can be performed within Zendesk into automated processes that impact the broader organization,” said Michelle Torres, Director of Technology Alliances at Zendesk. “We’re excited to see the advancements Workato has made for partners like us in enhancing the power of the connectors we develop for Zendesk and how they get publicized to their users. This will enhance the business impact we’re able to generate for customers by enabling them to leverage Zendesk within automations powered by Workato.”

Integrate with RPA & Process Mining Workflows

Workato’s enterprise automation platform has the ability to not only connect disparate systems as part of an automated process, but also integrate different approaches to automation that may already exist within an organization as part of a broader process. Process mining and robotic process automation (RPA) are two of the most widely utilized technologies for process discovery and UI-based automations. Customers can now use Workato to connect to process mining products like Celonis and Apromore, and RPA products like UiPath to orchestrate processes end-to-end.

Extend Your Automations Using Python

Workato’s low-code/no-code user experience is designed to enable a variety of users with differing technical skill levels to build automations. By utilizing Workato’s domain specific language for automation, users define automations using familiar, intuitive language that is both easy to build with and easy for other collaborators to understand. Workato’s interface also enables users to extend the capabilities of the platform by allowing them to define the logic of automation recipes using custom code. This extensibility supports a variety of languages including SQL, JavaScript, Ruby and now Python with each language requiring Workato to host an isolated runtime environment. With the newly released Python connector, Workato customers now have the ability to define steps in an automation recipe using their own custom Python code.

“By providing the ability for our team to utilize custom python code in defining automation recipes, Workato has expanded the impact of their platform to a new set of users and use cases,” said Mike Flynn, Enterprise Architect, Collibra. “Python is one of the most popular languages amongst our developers. The opportunity to leverage that skillset will launch a new wave in the design and development of automations at Collibra.”

Provide Dynamic, Real-time Authentication with Live Auth

As automations are pushed live, users accessing them often need to authenticate to a third-party application to perform a specific task within an end-to-end process such as an approval. Effectively supporting this usage pattern requires a separation of access permissions so that the authentication builders use for apps during design time is decoupled from those users leverage for apps during run-time. Live Auth provides this separation by providing run-time authentication for the apps that users connect to as part of an automated process which in turn allows builders to use the same automation for a multitude of use cases and users. This is especially common to customers of Workato’s Embedded Platform which enables software providers to more efficiently expand the integration and automation capabilities of their platform by embedding Workato into their customer-facing applications. To meet growing demand from customers to more flexibly support these connectivity requirements, Workato has introduced Live Auth. This feature allows builders to develop templated automation workflows that automatically customize connection and authentication for each user at run-time. For product owners, Live Auth enables them to build an automation once and deploy it across all of their customers.

“Our ability to leverage Workato in extending the connectivity of Playbook has made a tremendous impact in the breadth and depth of the challenges we solve for our customers,” said Alkarim Lalani, Founder, Rollout. “The release of Live Auth allows us to improve the flexibility and scale of integration capabilities we provide our users while also simplifying what’s required of our team to develop and manage these integrations.”

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