Challenge 1: Fragile legacy integrations

Challenge 2: Scattered, complex environment

Challenge 3: Time-consuming operations

Before switching to Workato, Relativity's developers relied on a legacy cloud ETL tool for 7 years. At the beginning, their needs were fully met, but as the company grew in size and scale, severe operational challenges emerged.

Relativity had begun purchasing more systems to support its business needs, but found it difficult to integrate them. "We found the previous solution was deeply lacking in its ability to integrate outside of its comfort zone. It could integrate with HTTP RESTful connections, but it was a heavy lift to do so," said Chris Dundon, an IT Applications Architect at Relativity.

A lack of platform strategy was another challenge. While evaluating the platform, Chris saw that "the platform had no environment strategy. They claimed to have multiple environments, but they were impossible to use. I couldn't figure out how to connect to source control, despite them claiming the ability to." He tried turning to product documentation, but found it spread across locally installed copies and over a decade of websites. He also spoke with the platform's Support teams, who were equally unhelpful in resolving the issue. Said Dundon, "Getting information was impossible."

The time costs snowballed. According to Artem Milovanov, Senior Middleware Engineer at Relativity, "approving a task that should have taken me 10 seconds instead required minutes, sometimes hours." With Relativity being a 2000-person company, the time loss and increased complexity of every action resulted in an ever-growing backlog.

Pricing added to the confusion. The vendor's pricing model was deeply nested and difficult to comprehend, making it easy to overlook that the vendor used a metric that was in no way an industry-standard measure of unique connections to a data warehouse. That gap became the true breaking point, leading to a challenging renewal discussion.

Solution 1: A true integration backbone, built without limits

Solution 2: A platform strategy built for the whole company

Solution 3: Transparent, predictable evaluation and total cost of ownership

Relativity turned to Workato to build a true integration and orchestration backbone, one flexible enough to reach systems its old platform never could. Where the legacy tool struggled to integrate with anything outside its native connectors, Workato let Chris fully author custom Ruby-based connectors himself, closing gaps the previous vendor had left open for years.

Since switching to Workato, Relativity has extended integration work well beyond its IT team while gaining more control over how that work gets done, backed by measurable gains in speed and cost.

New integration projects now move more than two weeks faster from kickoff to production, a direct result of Workato's workflow-based recipe-building and reduced reliance on specialized developer time. Relativity has also lowered operational costs on its existing integration solutions by more than 30%, a sharp contrast to the six-figure surprise the prior vendor left behind at renewal.

That speed and cost efficiency extends to who can do the work in the first place. Non-technical Salesforce administrators can now build and manage integrations that once required specialized developer skills. OAuth setup runs automatically through Okta, so users connect to systems like Jira without ever touching an API key or personal access token.

Rather than accept that risk, Relativity built its own governed MCP servers inside Workato, using role-based access and service account connections instead of broad user-level permissions. The first of these, a Jira Data Center MCP server, is live in production today, enabling users to search, create, comment on, and transition issues, all through the same secure, Okta-driven connection flow used across the rest of the platform. The team is also extending this model to Gong and Gainsight, with more integrations planned as needs evolve.

Alongside MCP, Relativity has been an early user of AIRO, Workato's multi-agent system for building recipes. What once took Chris 30 to 60 minutes to build by hand, he completed in about a minute with AIRO, including logic he had not yet learned how to configure manually.

AIRO's ability to explain its own actions and to ask for permission before committing changes to a recipe has made it a tool Chris now reaches for even when working with unfamiliar connectors, using it to build first and study the documentation afterward.

Governed AI access and faster development with AIRO are now central to Relativity's plan to bring AI safely into its systems going forward.