Our Plan to Meet the Enterprise Need for Speed

Dec 5, 2018

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Today Workato announced $25M in funding from Battery Ventures, Storm Ventures, ServiceNow, and Workday Ventures. We’re proud to be the only company with investment from three of the largest SaaS companies – Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday. This investment will help us in our mission to do these 3 things:

Distribute the work of integration and automation across more stakeholders in a company, not just specialists
Deliver integration and automation projects 10x faster
Unite IT and Business Teams with one platform for all

All of these objectives allow businesses to scale without being backlogged or held back by automation and integration projects.

Product Updates to Bring Personalized Experiences to Life

A new era of intelligent automation and integration is evolving as businesses are relying on hundreds of new apps, each requiring hundreds of automations each day. Both customers and employees expect fast, personalized experiences that can only be provided by automation: seamless omnichannel support, fast application approval, easy order and return processes, quick HR onboarding—the list goes on. Enterprises understand that they need to automate their processes, but often don’t know where to start. IBM reports that <9% of businesses have no form of automation at all and 52% only basic process automation. Workato’s newly released features like Automation Editions and RecipeIQ can quickstart organizations on their journey to deliver great experiences to employees and customers.

Automation Editions for Business Teams

According to Capgemini, 57% of businesses report lack of talent skilled in automation technologies as a key challenge in implementing automation. Automation Editions provide a quick and easy starter kit for businesses to begin automating department by department without requiring a specialist. They make it easy for business teams to get going while ensuring compliance and security from IT. Automation Editions are available for Sales, Marketing and HR functions with Finance and Support coming soon. Automation Editions include:

Connectors to key applications and systems used by the functional team
Core business workflows and tens of thousands of community workflows that they can easily customize with simple drag & drop (no coding required!)
Easy inclusion of AI technologies in workflows
Personalized workshops led by experts to help them go from vision to production in weeks

Recipe IQ for Faster, Better Automation

As enterprises implement automation at scale, it is necessary to increase the number of stakeholders. RecipeIQ uses the wisdom and knowledge of thousands of professionals via Machine Learning to guide users to build the most effective automation and expanding which employees can make them.

RecipeIQ uses AI and machine learning to learn from the tens of billions of events processed, the hundreds of millions of metadata elements inspected, and the hundreds of thousands of automation patterns in order to suggest next steps to the automation builder.
RecipeIQ is seamlessly integrated into the automation creation flow to guide users with recommended actions, recommended fields, mapping suggestions, auto group-mapping and auto-validation of mappings and logical constructs via links to features.
RecipeIQ automatically maps various fields across apps using machine learning.

OpsIQ for Operational Insights and Autonomous Operations

27% of businesses are in the education process about more advanced forms of automation, according to PwC. As enterprises rapidly expand on their automation projects, it becomes imperative for them to have a centralized dashboard to review and monitor the status of automation recipes and manage automations at scale.

Provides comprehensive visibility and insights into the health and status of recipes for the Ops team to monitor and manage all automations.
At-a-glance overview of current status, trends, and issues that require urgent attention.
Smart filtering available in the dashboard enables the ops teams to slice-and-dice the operational data for analysis and troubleshooting.
Autonomous Operations, a set of Workato recipes that automate monitoring of production recipes, to reduce human labor and human errors.

An Intelligent Approach to Automation Across the Enterprise

Intelligent automation’s strength lies in its ability to harness multiple technologies to automate across a wide range of use cases. At Workato, we’ve seen our customers wholeheartedly embrace this agility to create life-changing workflows that save time, money, and talent.

Automating Across Every Department and Role

Over the past year, Quick Base (the world’s #1 no-code solution) has worked closely with Workato to connect its in-house custom apps with NetSuite, Marketo, and other SaaS platforms and automate tasks and processes across these systems. Workato’s intelligent automation platform has enabled Quick Base to:

Save its accounting team two full days of work per month
Reduce new employee onboarding time from 5 hours to 1.5 hours
Compensate sales reps more accurately
Integrate Quick Base apps with other apps in less than an hour

Other companies are taking this wall-to-wall approach and expanding on it by using chat as the primary UI. Tenable, a leading cybersecurity provider, realized that 90% of employee questions already had documented answers. The problem was encouraging employees to self-service and find those answers on their own. To make it easier, Tenable uses Workato to create an intelligent helpdesk that employees can access via Slack.

Leveraging Unstructured Data Through the Power of AI

Today, 80% of an enterprise’s data is unstructured. It exists as documents, audio files, and even video. With Workato’s intelligent automation platform, structured data can be combined with unstructured data to execute business-critical tasks. At the world’s largest retailer, intelligent automation is foundational to executing common HR processes like competitive wage analysis. Instead of a human scouring the web, they use ParseHub to scrape the internet for job listings from their competitors. Workato parses this data and enters it into their HR warehouse automatically, in real-time. The hours previously spent looking for listings and recording them, can now be used for higher level activities. They also allow employees to text or email in a picture of a competitor’s ad. Workato picks the image up and sends it to Google Cloud Vision, which uses image content analysis to translate the image into text. Now that Workato can read what was on the image, it applies taxonomy concepts in order to identify who the merchant is, what the hourly rate is, what the position is (like clerk or store manager), the benefits, and the location and then writes it in the HR warehouse. This aggregated data is used to determine the competitive pay rate in each area and is now available at any time, with very little manual labor. The retailer gets a competitive wage analysis in a few minutes, not a few days. This helps them attract the best talent with competitive rates while maintaining their margins.

Unlocking Legacy Systems with RPA

For many of our customers who work with legacy or custom systems, robotic process automation (RPA) is a key part of their approach to streamlining processes. Organizations like the leading logistics company have seen the value of using a tool like Workato in conjunction with RPA to remove the roadblocks that are holding back their transformation projects. The company needs to fetch delivery information from its clients—large retailers like Macy’s, Ikea, and The Home Depot—every day. Because the retailers make this information available through dedicated portals and in different formats, it’s difficult to gather it manually. RPA tools are an alternative to custom code and can easily collect data from the retailer’s portals, but they can’t execute the other steps in the process—like de-duping the data and reporting any errors. As a solution, the logistics company turned to Workato. Using a script built on top of an RPA tool, Workato collects data from the retailer portals every day. The intelligent automation platform then de-dupes and checks the data. If crucial information is missing (like an invoice or PO number), Workato automatically generates an email to the retailer. The retailer can then rectify the error using a button in the email. Workato then seamlessly moves the corrected data into the logistics company’s DMS.

Improving the Employee Experience

Broadcom is perceived as one of the most efficient companies on the market, so it’s only natural their IT team would have a keen understanding of the need for automation. Over the past several months, they’ve embraced an executive vision for automation across the organization. By leveraging Workato’s intelligent automation platform, the Broadcom IT team has completed several large-scale automation projects (such as fully automating VPN provisioning and requesting IT assets via email ) quickly, without straining their developer resources. Similarly, the leading financial software provider uses intelligent automation to better provision new employees via Slack. Because the company has almost 8,000 employees, they hire they need to have an easy way to request the items new employees need—especially when they hire new staff. Between new hires and current employee requests, the company generates 60,000 request tickets every year. Previously, all of those tickets were handled manually, which was a huge drain on their resources; every ticket took about 30 minutes to resolve. With intelligent automation, however, the process is 20% faster!

Going Beyond iPaaS

We’re excited for the future as enterprises implement wall-to-wall automations. The results will be tangible and far-reaching—from showing up at a new job to find that everything is provisioned and ready to go, to a bot reminding you to log your new lead in Salesforce after your meeting in Google Calendar has ended. This productivity, speed, and automation will drive the enterprise.