Infinidat is an Israeli-American enterprise data storage company. Founded by a team of storage industry experts, the company supports numerous Global 1000 companies. Infinidat empowers its customers’ competitive advantage at multi-petabyte scale.
As a large global company with a diverse portfolio of products and services, Infinidat needed to automate many critical processes for fulfilling their orders. To do this, they looked for an iPaaS solution that could accommodate wall-to-wall integrations that were scalable, connect easily with on-premises applications, and had a short learning curve.
Today, many of Infinidat’s business processes are automated by Workato, with over 200 company-wide recipes that automate processes for sales, order fulfillment, procurement, customer support, hiring, and more. They even created their own logging tool using Workato and Graylog to allow for easier recipe management across teams.
| Apps NetSuite, Salesforce, Jira, Classmarker, Greenhouse.io, Graylog |
| Challenges Automating sales, shipment, and procurement workflows involving NetSuite with custom Python code was too unwieldy and time-consuming, but few automation platforms offered a robust alternativePrevious automations for customer support and employee recruitment weren’t reliable or customizable enoughWith over 200 complex automations, troubleshooting errors in business-critical workflows became challenging. |
| ROI with Workato Built +200 automations and integrations in minutes or hours, not monthsCreated a central log for all integration recipes, so business teams can easily identify errors without using technical resourcesQuickly create robust, complex integrations and automations using pre-built connectors (NetSuite, Salesforce) and Workato’s easy API interface for any niche appEasily connect on-prem apps without opening ports in the firewallDeliver the automations employees expect quickly, without overburdening developers |
“Our automations significantly improve many key business functions, whether that’s sales, procurement, or IT. The difference Workato has made in our environment is tremendous. We have crucial tasks that we can now accomplish with just a few clicks. It works on a whole other level!”
– Guy Rozendorn, CIO at Infinidat
Finding an iPaaS Platform to Support Infinidat’s Rapid Growth
As the company grew into a global player in the storage market, finding the right integration and automation platform became a priority to support their growth.
“We are a software technology company, and if we wanted to, we could have assigned some of our developers to invest the time and effort into building all of these integrations ourselves,” said CIO Guy Rozendorn. “We wanted to use an iPaaS platform so that we could do it faster, with as little effort as possible. We needed a platform that makes integration and automation easier to implement and manage over the long term.”
It was crucial to find a tool that could connect to a wide range of apps, including NetSuite and Salesforce.
“Our number one concern was which connectors are supported and which are not,” added Guy. “Even though some platforms claim to support NetSuite, their support is very limited. That was the number one question that we looked into: Did they actually deliver extensive support for Salesforce and NetSuite?”
Scalability was also a concern, along with support for on-premises applications: “We have quite a few integrations that we needed in order to operate efficiently, so scalability and being able to easily connect to on-prem apps without opening ports in our firewall were important criteria in our evaluation.”
Related: 3 examples of process orchestration
eCommerce
Automating Sales, Shipment, and Procurement Workflows
Today, automation plays a key role in coordinating the company’s workflows that span Salesforce and NetSuite. These workflows automate processes like Order to Cash (O2C) and procurement.
“Everything that goes from Salesforce to NetSuite—our sales, procurement, everything—goes through Workato,” Rozendorn says.
Scaling Fast with Automated Order Fulfillment
Infinidat’s Sales team works with multiple tools in addition to Salesforce. Rozendorn’s first project was to get the sales order process running, and he knew automation was a must. Without the Workato recipe that moves all relevant sales data into Salesforce and then into NetSuite, the team would need to find information in these ancillary apps and manually enter it into the CRM and ERP applications – a process that must be automated if the company needs to scale quickly.
“Basically, we need to pull information for every order from Salesforce and move it into NetSuite, so we can invoice and ship the order. But we also have a bunch of other specialty tools—such as demo tools—that help us understand which mechanical parts are needed,” he explains. “We automated the entire process so that it would include these tools as well.”
This automation is business-critical and complex, as Infinidat not only needs to ship physical orders to customers but also administer software services as well.
Rozendorn adds that automating this process quickly became a big concern.
“We had only a few months to fully build out this workflow so we could have the sales order process up and running in NetSuite. Custom coding would have taken much longer, even with our own team of developers. Workato is so easy to use and the connectors that it comes with are so rich, that if there is an API or a built-in-connector for the system, we can do the automation in a little as a few minutes,” he recalls.
Related: How to implement order process automation
Orchestrating Complex Shipment Workflows Without Custom Code
Infinidat has also automated several shipment-related processes that are critical for processing the growing number of orders.
“Our product is an integrated reference architecture,” says Rozendorn, “meaning it’s an integration of software and hardware.” The hardware must be physically shipped to customers. To deliver these goods, Infinidat partners with several logistics companies.
But before a product can be sent to a customer, Infinidat must provide the shipping company with the order information— the requested delivery date, order number, and product to be shipped. Similarly, information about the shipment (such as the date it actually ships) needs to move back into NetSuite so that Infinidat can see its status.
Prior to Workato, the company relied on custom Python code to move this data around.
“The problem is that the NetSuite API is not that easy to use, and there are no simple bindings in Python,” Rozendorn explains. “So the learning curve for using Python code to solve this problem was enormous.”
“We now use Workato as our API front end with our logistic partners. Moving the information via Workato was, and it still is, so simple!” he notes. “It’s very easy to create an external API and use the NetSuite connector to create the new transactions in NetSuite. We don’t have to use Python bindings for NetSuite at all. With Workato, these integrations are fast and scalable.”
HR and Recruiting
Customizing Recruitment Automations to Fit the Employee Journey
Infinidat has also expanded to using Workato for recruitment and new employee onboarding. Giving new employees a good experience from day one is crucial to retention, so the company wants to make sure all the steps in the recruitment process flow together seamlessly.
“We went live with Greenhouse about two months ago,” explains Rozendorn. “For online tests and assessments, we use a platform called ClassMarker. It has a native integration with Greenhouse so that whenever a candidate finishes the online test, it pushes the results to Greenhouse.”
He notes that this native integration wasn’t ideal for the company’s recruitment process. “It just didn’t suit our workflow,” he says.
As a solution, Rozendorn built a Workato recipe to move the Classmarker data into Greenhouse accurately and in a way that better matches the company’s recruitment practices.
“We now use webhooks in Classmarker to move the data to Workato, and then we use Workato’s HTTP connector to put the data into Greenhouse,” he explains. “Having automation that moves data the way the company prefers eliminates the need to change natural workflows, resulting in a smoother onboarding experience for the candidates.”
Related: How automation will transform organization’s recruiting operations
ITOps
Empowering Employees to Troubleshoot Workato Automations with Centralized Logging
Because Infinidat uses Workato to automate so many complex processes, they have created over 200 recipes with the platform. Many of these recipes are callable recipes, meaning they invoke another recipe in order to complete a task.
Breaking workflows up into multiple callable recipes makes it easier to design and manage those automations, but it can make identifying errors more complicated.
“Let’s say I have four recipes. Recipe 2 can call Recipe 3, and Recipe 4 can call Recipe 2, but Recipe 1 can also call Recipe 2. If we have a problem with Recipe 3, we need to identify which recipe initially invoked it,” Rozendorn explains. “In one instance it could be Recipe 4 that called Recipe 2, which then called Recipe 3. But in another instance, it could be Recipe 1 that called Recipe 2, which in turn called recipe 3.”
On the Workato platform, every recipe has a unique identifier. But the platform logs job executions for each recipe separately, which means it can be time-consuming to pinpoint an error in a chain of callable recipes—especially for members of the sales team or other business users who might not be familiar with the platform’s interface.
Infinidat created their own centralized log for Workato activity in order to make the process easier and allow business users to identify if a recipe error stems from a mistake they made and can fix easily. To do this, they now include a step in every recipe that adds all relevant job information—like the parent recipe and the recipe being called—to Graylog.
“Whenever there’s an error, it’s important that we understand the originating context. Graylog gives us one simple place to view the details of the entire call stack, which would otherwise be very complex to navigate. You’d have to do a lot of copy-and-pasting to get to the originating job,” Rozendorn continues.
This easy-to-navigate central log empowers employees to resolve automation errors faster, which is key to keeping core business processes on track.
“For example, if an employee forgets to fill in certain fields necessary to create a sales order, the error log can help them figure out which fields they are missing and on which record,” he explained. “If the error is more complicated, they can open a Jira support ticket so that someone more familiar with the issue can help them troubleshoot.”
Given the lean size of Infinidat’s recipe creation team, this centralized approach to logging is especially valuable.
“There are only three people at Infinidat who are responsible for creating recipes,” he notes, “but the beauty is that if something goes wrong, any of the sales operations staff can just log into Graylog and look for the strings that gave them the error. They can resolve the issue without having to go into Workato or use developer time.”
Delivering the Automations that Employees Expect Quickly
For Rozendorn, adopting Workato is a key aspect of a broader quest to make Infinidat more efficient. It’s a win-win: Rozendorn’s team benefits from robust connectors and easier integrations with on-prem apps/difficult APIs, while the business teams enjoy how quickly projects can get done.
“The whole purpose of building these automations is to simplify and save time for people,” the CIO notes. “In terms of operations, most employees don’t care whether we use Platform A or Platform B—they care about whether we can get the job done quickly.”
Workato’s robust platform, he says, means that Infinidat can build integrations and automations much faster than they could with other tools.
“In most cases, we don’t have to worry about any low-level, nitty-gritty details like whether we have the right bindings or what the correct data field mapping is,” he explains. “The platform is so easy to use and the connectors that it comes with are so rich that if there is an HTTP API or a built-in connector to the system, we can create an automation in minutes or hours.”
He also credits Workato with being much easier to use than any other tool for both NetSuite and on-premises integrations: “The learning curve is great. It’s incredible how easy it is to set up NetSuite-based workflows in Workato compared to doing it with another platform. Additionally, no other platform has a simple agent that you can deploy inside the network. Workato was the easiest of the platforms that have this capability.”
But most importantly, Infinidat is able to rapidly scale without worrying about how their integrations and automation will hold up as things change. “It’s definitely a significant improvement for many key business functions, whether that’s sales, procurement, or IT,” Rozendorn notes. “I can tell you that the difference is huge. We have crucial tasks that we can now accomplish with a few clicks. It just works on a whole other level!”
