See the Most Complete Cloud-Based Integration Offering

See the Most Complete Cloud-Based Integration Offering

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hello and welcome to this edition of dev cast demos we'll begin our presentation in just a couple of minutes so please stay tuned hello and welcome everyone i'm anna birdsall your host for software ag's web methods dev cast demos devcast demos is software ag's ongoing webinar series focusing on powerful integration and api strategies to help make organizations innovation ready today we're going to deep dive into the most complete cloud-based integration offering web methods io integration software ig's ipass and in just a moment we'll be hearing from senior director of product marketing david overos and product manager dave pemberton and as we move through today's presentation we invite you to place any questions you have in the q a box which is located at the bottom toolbar of your screen david and dave will address your questions at the end of today's program however if we are not able to answer your question in the allotted time we will get in touch with you after the program as soon as possible and now it's my pleasure to introduce today's first presenter david oberos over to you david thanks anna and thanks everybody for joining today um it's always fun to go through and do these demos i know that um everybody's interested in what the products can do and what the capabilities are but i think it's just so valuable to see it in action so that's why i'm really glad you were all able to join today um i'm gonna before i kick it off and hand it over to dave i'm just gonna point out a couple things that you should look for in the demo to give you some idea about why the product is designed the way it is and why it has the capabilities it has um i think the first thing that across software ig we see for all the different products that we offer is they're all addressing this kind of new kind of modern normal which is that we live in a truly connected world like all the different applications and i.t and devices they're all connected or they need to be connected in order to provide the value that these technologies are designed to give us so and because of that these drive a need for integration technology so for example we see a tsunami of cloud applications emerging i this is not a surprise that's been happening for years but the pace of adoption of cloud based sas applications just continues to rise new applications or perhaps more important more adoption from existing customers who are using these sas based applications and as people adopt these cloud-based applications they need to essentially improve their operational efficiencies and kind of synchronize data between these devices or not devices these applications which leads to the second point which is the demand is moving to data integration so whether they're apps devices cloud databases continuing to be on premises companies are still looking to improve their operational efficiencies and excellence and at the same time drive improved or superior customer experience and finally what you'll see today in the demo and what i'm sure you've seen in your own experience is that even as we move to the cloud there's still a strong need or a strong strong requirement for hybrid integration technologies to because these portfolios of i.t investments that we all have will continue to be hybrid for quite some time so you know with the world is not a nice and neat place where everything lives it's all very distributed and it's all um but it all needs to interact so that's kind of the world we're living in so why does integration matter or why does uh integration technology matter uh it has a lot to do with what we're the ultimate benefits we're trying to get out of it you know we're we're continually striving to create new products and services especially new digital products and services that requires access to data to services that are already available within your it systems um we're looking for new channels for growth especially in disruptive times like we live in we're constantly looking for how can we continue to do business business continuity or find new channels for growth to compensate for channels that are no longer performing again customer experience becomes even more critical as we move to a digital experience you know people's loyalty customer loyalty is so important to continue to support like ongoing recurring business and to be able to compete against you know the the so many new digital channels that are available and finally better data drives better decisions and integration is a great tool for accessing data to be able to feed into the decision-making technologies that you're using so when we go through the demo um keep in mind you should be looking for certain kind of characteristics in any integration platform some of those things would include making sure your integration platform supports not just the tech users who are used to doing the integrations but also business users business users analysts people that are closer to the applications than they are to the central i.t organization your platform needs to support a wide variety of standards and protocols this is a complicated world we live in lots of different applications lots of different standards lots of different document formats all of those things need to be supported both from like the modern cloud-based api driven applications to you know your traditional on-premises document formats or even edi standards right all those different protocols are still important you need to be able to have a system that can live in the cloud it can live on premises or it can span the two right you need to be able to connect to any endpoint from app to edge you know iot devices are becoming increasingly popular but the on-premises devices have not gone away yet so we need to make sure that any integration platform can connect you know from app to edge uh has to be secure has to be governable has to be scalable and ultimately it needs to unlock the data so you can build those innovative capabilities we just talked about so keep in mind these kind of characteristics of an integration platform as we jump into a demo with dave pemberton so dave i'm going to hand it over to you to walk us through the product thank you very much okay so um you should be looking at um my browser running a web methods i o instance right now um what we're seeing here is the the projects view and a project is a collection of integrations into a deployable unit and a project is what you would deploy into a production tenant what i'm going to do today is to to walk you through building a couple of integrations i'm going to take a ticketing system and i'm going to create a collaboration space to to work on that ticket and i'm also going to take some metrics and push that to excel online and show you how easy this is to do both as a business user uh and even as a technical user and then i'll create another integration um that i will expose as an api i'll show you how again how simple that is to do to kind of show you the breadth of the integration platform that we have on offer so i'm going to go into my devcast project and it launches me into the project and it says straight away no workflows are created now a workflow is a very business friendly term and it's done that way to try and catch the the mind of a business user who might need to build integrations and typically business users need to build integrations to satisfy their their job and their role and quite often these might be short-lived integrations they're not integrations that people think of such as integrating your key systems or records but pulling in data to server tasks um that they need to to do their role themselves and that's why we call these workflows so i'm going to create a new workflow and then walk you through the process when i press on plus the first thing you'll see is it prompts me to either start building a workflow from scratch or to use a recipe if i look at the recipes first just to show you this recipes are essentially pre-built integrations that have been developed over time and there are a large number of recipes so if i wanted to use a recipe that works for salesforce i can type them with salesforce and sure enough i see a number of recipes that deal with salesforce so for example here extract contact details on salesforce and create this data into microsoft dynamics crm a very common integration that many people do and likewise you'll see here there's one for the opposite direction extracts accounts from microsoft dynamics crm and create an account in salesforce um and that's just one example and you can pick any more examples and see all the different recipes you can pick from and these give you a quick start to an integration so you pick the recipe it prompts you to configure your account for say dynamics or salesforce and then once you've done that the integration works and you can use it as this or you can look to tailor that what i'm going to do is show you i'm building an integration from scratch because it's just slightly more exciting okay so i press the create new workload button and it launches me into our workflow canvas so first i'm going to give this a name i'm going to call this um incident process and i can put tags in and like our description of what i'm trying to do so this takes a ticket from incident management and dot dot and this is going to then create a collaboration space and then it's going to put some data in i could go out and fill those things up and it's important to do those things because that's helped people to understand what this workflow does when they come to look at it later now if we look at the workflow canvas um we've got this big area on the screen and i've got a play icon and i've got a stop icon and obviously the workflow starts at the play and finishes at stop and then i make a sequence of actions between the play and the stop that dictate what i need to do so in this example i'm going to use servicenow which is an incident management system it's quite a popular system that many of our customers use um and to use servicenow i double click on the trigger here and it pops up the triggers panel and then says um what what do i want to trigger from when i can trigger from a web hook which creates me a web hook endpoint i can use a clock for scheduling i can take messaging paradigms such as amqp or mqtt or i can trigger from a bunch of different systems um if i type in servicenow you'll see servicenow appears in the list of systems here if i pick servicenow and press next um it then takes me through the configuration this trigger so what do i want to do so i want to trigger a workflow when there is a new incident inside servicenow um so the first thing i need to do then is i can look here i want a new record and table i need to connect to servicenow so i need to give it my credentials so to connect the service now i have to put a few different parameters in so i will copy these and paste them in one by one that's my that's the username i'm going to use today and then i have a password to paste in straight from my password database i press add and this creates my account inside servicenow um so that i can use core service now with so next i the the servicenow trigger works on tables inside service now um exposed to the servicenow api um what do i want to trigger well i would trigger on the incident table and you'll see as soon as i press the drop down box i don't have to know what the table names are because they're all described so that the trigger and the connectors we have in the platform do things like introspection to the apis to give you data back in to make it more usable so i want to use the instance table and if i start to type the word incidence you'll see here it finds me each of the different things within it and i'm interested in the incident table itself so whenever i create an incident i'm going to trigger this workflow and then i press save and now again say somebody from the business someone who who has a a good eye on it but isn't a developer um it's trying to take me by the hand now to guide me through the process so it says go to service now then perform what i just did so create a new incident and then press this test button down the bottom so let's just do that and then we'll see why so i go to servicenow and i press to create a new incident so i'm going to put in here short description dev cast demo incident it doesn't matter i've got typo one i'll create this as a high impact issue and i'll just put in some gibberish description and i will press submit and that has created my incident inside servicenow now if i go back to webmethods i o and i press the test button what we'll see is it will now pull that data from servicenow so you can see now here here's my lovely display value i typed in and if i scroll further down you'll see a bit more information you'll see the ticket there the user which did it uh and so on so you can get to see all the data that's come from that trigger and this it does this for one particular reason it does this to to get some sample data so that when you're building your integration to different systems mapping is much easier if you can see the data that you expect trying to see things like field names like description display value sys id they're kind of meaningless but if you've created something in the system and you've typed in data and you can select data it makes it much easier to map the data together to see what's happening so i press done and now my trigger is done you see it changes from the play icon to it's now going to trigger when i get a new record in servicenow so what shall i do next so next i'm going to use a connector if you look on the right here you'll see the connectors panel and it's categorized into different services different utilities iot based connectors and even node.js

connectors you can write yourself in node.js as a scripting language um i'll come back to this one a second so if we look down here we can see all the different connective different systems that we're interested in and i can go down the list and find the connects that i want to use so for now i'm going to use slack for example so i come down here and i find slack which is there and i grab slack and i drop it straight onto the canvas what am i going to do is slack i'm going to create a public channel inside slack so i'm going to come to here and create a public channel i have to authorize against slack and you'll see for slack when i authorize against slack it uses the award to negotiation protocol that slack expo so i i press on my permissions it will go off to slack it says webinar integration is requesting access to slack it tells me it's going to access and then i press allow and that grants me now to talk to slack and there's my account up for slack so i can press next again and we'll see i'm going to create my public channel so this is where we get the mapping screen itself so you can see here on the rise is what slack wants to create a public channel to give it a chance name and optionally a purpose if i look on the left you can see here i have my trigger data from servicenow so if i scroll down here i can see all of the data and there's a lot of service now about an incident and you can see the list is endless right it goes on for for quite a while um in terms of the number of fields that there so um what do i want to do with the slideshow right so i can i can find a field from here so let's say i wanted to use the sys id of servicenow and i could find that and i could type in i could drag display value over and that i'll call that um incident collaboration so that would create me a channel in slack with the the service now cis id is a collaboration now that's not a great one to use right the the the society because it's a kind of a guide most people inside service now use the number here so i'll drag that one over and i'll put that in and i'll do it instant channel for incident that so that's going to now um create me a channel and i can put a purpose and i'll put in collaboration for incident and press next so that's how i can map the data from the trigger to this slack channel you can again you can see my typos here because it's showing me the data at the input it's going to send the slack so you can see here is the access token it's going to use um it's the key to the access token then here you can see the name but john's going to create it's kind of called incident collaboration channel for incident inc which is the incident i just created inside servicenow and then it gives it a purpose and again i get the option to test and if i press test what it will do then is it will then go to slack and now you can see here it's the output backwards i can see it's actually created that channel and now i have that channel there ready to go so at that point then i press done so i now have my public channel what do i want to do next well next let's just post some information about the ticket into slack so i'll drop another site connector on go to here and now i'm going to post a message to a channel um i can pick my pre-existing authorization and what channel do i want to post to well if i look under here um you see i get my channel id so i can drag that through to there what text do i want to put in well i'm going to use the servicenow description which is this one display value and i put that in there and i could put a username in or fill these out but i don't need to because one of these mandatory so um that's gonna now post this message to this channel inside slack as well so i press test again now you see it follows the same process again it guides me through creating this workflow now here we can see um the the descriptions posted into that channel which is really useful for someone to help diagnose the issue okay so that's the slack side then next um i have my recording service now creating a public channel inside slack and then a message inside slack so that um the the person who's running the ticket can collaborate with the person who raise the ticket and they can pull in other people to converse over the issue and deal with it um what else should i do so um i'm also going to use excel online so i'm going to use this to create some data about um new tickets created in servicenow so i'll drop this just down here for example and i will link it through this way here and here now i'm going to call to excel online at the same time so i'm going to take um the data from servicenow and put that into excel now to show you with excel online um here is my open ex online spreadsheet here and and you can see i've got a little dashboard showing numbers of impacts here and if you look in here in the columns here you can see a lot of test data so i'm passing in the incident number the description um the open date time and the impact so if i go back to our methods io again then we followed the exact same process so how do i get the data in i go to here i want to add a row to my excel spreadsheet and i need to authorize and again because it's online um it's a microsoft-based product it takes me through the microsoft account authorization process i pick my right account and it creates me the the access to excel online and i press next and we see the same mapping view again so here what do i want to do where do i want to look for this excel sheet so if i look at the right i can drop down folder name and again it inspects into um my microsoft account online shows me my directory so i can pick out demo um in there i can then pick out the workbook and just again it looks inside so i don't have to know this guide here i can just pick out the name of the file and even then i can then pick here the sheets that i want to use that spreadsheet i'm going to put into sheet 1 which is where the data rows were i'm going to insert a single row and i want to insert four columns i want to insert the number which is here for the incident i want to insert the description which is this one i want to insert the open date and to show you another way of doing this i can search for opened here i can find open data and put that over there and just show this as well if i go to here and put dot you can see again it gives you the complete the complete like completion of all the things on here as well so you don't have to kind of know what you're doing it helps you as you go through um and then the last one was the impact so i found the impact in this list um i'll do it with a search because it'd be quicker and then in here i want display value again so now you can see i've got all my data maps um from servicenow and you can see again if i can open my you can see here where they all are in this big huge list of fields um into the excel action itself and i press next and sure enough you'll see now here it's showing me the data going to the columns based on my sample data and i press test and this will go off to excel and it will insert that data into my x online sheet and if i scroll down here you'll see the the from round two row as to where it's gone from and two so this is on row number 16 from a to d and i press done so that now creates me my excel data if i go back to here um showing off here you can see the the gibberish that's come through as i've done these things right now the final bit then is i can link all these to the end right so what i'll do just just for completeness i'll show you a developer tool so for example i can do a log section um and i'll connect this to there and this to there and in here i can choose to log any sort of message i want to help along the way so i can log out any number of pieces of data um either from mapping again or even just by typing in so i'll just put in the word completed as an example and press next um and then i will map to the end and that's kind of my workflow complete so i'll press save and just to show you the developer tools um if i go to here for example you can see you've got things like text emoji whatever use someone might need that for um switch statements so you can make branchy decisions for example the ability to download files even things like ftp http different json combinations for example emailing um and even another bunch of spreadsheet functions to be able to turn spreadsheets into different data to work with them as well as the transforms as well so that's kind of all the developer spec developer tools that you might use in addition to the connectors you have here so that's kind of the way the the canvas works now i i have got my workflow so um as you can see this clock here this is this is a what's called a polling trigger so servicenow has no push notification api um which means we have to poll servicenow to detect changes um what it means now is i can actually go to servicenow here and create another incident when i create a brand new incident and this one i call this um dev cast incident two i'm going to put that in there and there as well i'll make this a hi and i will press submit so that creates my side service now and it was this one three six six zero zero um so um eventually what we'll see happen is this will run through um on the next point interval you'll see this run through and pick up the things um in the meantime what i can show you first i can press test for sample data and that will take my sample data and we'll run through this integration again with the sample data i started with so you'll see here you notice the green lines as it goes through and you can see in certain places where it gets to and um dozor doesn't fail so here look this has an issue right this channel's been taken because i've already run this one before so i can't create the same public channel twice because um in in my psychic type connection here i'm using the same channel name if i test it twice it won't work right so i create a different instance it will work um i can also test with account data and with account data that will go straight to servicenow and pull the data through and this time you'll see now because i've not got the same channel electronically in the slack time and time again it will now run through that integration you see the green lines follow through although it's the end when it finishes and you see the dots about the committee steps it then shows me the execution history down here and here you can see the amount of duration on each of the actions that's taken to those things so you can actually see that the slack calls are pretty quick but the exile call takes quite a while to go through to microsoft excel online and insert the rows um if i go back to excel online back to here what we'll see once excel updates itself as well is that that would also show inside here and we'll see that incident appear as well um along with all the others in the list uh there it is and of course because the the dashboard's tied to this then you see the number of high impacts has gone up as well so that's kind of the way you can connect systems together through integration whether it be as i used here servicenow slack in excel or whether it be salesforce or sap success factors or an aws or amazon type integration or even microsoft azure type things you can connect any of these things in the exact same way and drag any of these connectors on to be able to create those integrations so that's the first style of integration that i want to show you i'm going to just take the stage i'm going to save and exit this workflow um you can see here is my workflow if i go to the monitor tab next here you can see for example i can look at the executions in my platform identify if i go to workflows you'll see here the ones i've just run the incident process ones um that i've actually fired through today and you get to see things like the failures and those sorts of things as well so you can monitor the integrations here and even go into each of these things in turn and actually see the data again that went to the actions on each of these different steps um inside the workflow itself as well you can even go into the workflow here and within the settings of the workflow up on the top you can go down here and you can say save the status of each successfully extract executed action now what does that mean that means if any one of those actions fails it will have saved the status of the previous steps and therefore i can go to the monitor screen i can pick up the failed into the failed workflow and i can rest restart from that point onwards from the failure and also i can change the data to allow me to manipulate data if it was an issue for example so where it failed to create my channel because i'd already created the same name i could go and edit the channel name and then carry on it would run through to completion and you see he's got things like around um retrying the actions a number of times before it gives in to trying to retry three times so this is quite useful when you're calling systems if there's kind of like a an interim connectivity issue you might retry again and then we try again one more time and then you give up and say actually i can't get through to the system so therefore i'll stop at that point in time and then if you stay at the status then you can carry from that point forward so that kind of shows you the the monitoring side let me now show you um how to take the stage further and then kind of build um integrations you can also use as apis and turn into apis so for this i'm going to use the developer side of the platform a bit more so it's more focused on a developer now on and people who are used to building integration and people who know how to develop integration so it's a step um above what kind of a business user could do um i create what's called a flow service uh and this flow service is actually going to um to get some data from servicenow actually what i'll do is i'll create an incident inside service now um and then let x expose an api from past api to partners and they can then use api role and having direct access to my service now or having to do it via email which is quite clumsy so so this is um create sn incident um and when you create um one of these more technical integrations you have to define your service contract which again is fantastic when you're creating an api because an api if there's a rest api i'll have a an open api definition or a swagger definition that i want to use to share with the parties so here i create my inputs and my input for this is going to be just two strings to make it easier i'm going to put in short description for example so i call this short description you'll see here i can do things like strings or boolean doubles floats i can create any sort of complex structure here that you can represent in xml schema xml json doesn't matter i can create any sort of complex nested structures inside here with repeating elements and those sorts of things um i'm going to keep it simple for this just to to make it easier to understand so i'll create a short description and i'll create description and we'll use these to take in just the bare minimum data for service now to create that instant easy one for mark them as required so um next i go to the output what do i want to output from my api or my integration i'm going to output here the incident number because that's what people care about they want to know what their their number is um and i'll press done so that's my service contract done so now let's build this this more complex integration and let's then turn this api so what do i do well um i click on here and i can look down here right so i can see i've got different connectors so here are my connectors again i've got different controls so if else um i'll say switch statements branch statements case statements repeats do untils and so on so you see again the full breadth of like the developer palette that you could use to be able to build more complex integrations and sorts of things i can look at what um other flowcharts i've created and use those to embed them inside this one and i can look at this the inbuilt services which give you useful functions so you can see you've got i o functions um json functions list functions math functions and mime functions and all other sorts of inbuilt functions that are useful to to build out complex integrations themselves um i tend not to use it that way i what i tend to do is sit here and i just start typing away so i want to create a try catch so i type try and you'll see here it pops up try catch so i'm going to put a try catching so i'm going to try and do something and if i get an error what am i going to do for now i'm just going to throw an error so i start typing through and here i put it failed exclamation mark now inside my try i want to call servicenow so i'm going to type in servicenow and down here you can see i can find servicenow i can press on this and now i get to put the action so here i want to um create an incident for example so if i find correct incidents and pick that um then like before i have to go and configure my account so i'm going to use credentials here to connect to service now i'm going to type the same things back in again so i want to take this here and again for those who are taking note you'll see here there's a lot more configuration that i can do here in terms of the connectivity between this and servicenow to control how it works a little bit more put my password in we need better gauge authentication i'm going to press add that should have my account to service now and now it goes green so what do i do next now so now i go to the map step so i'm going to map data from my input to servicenow so here you'll see the data i start with the gradebook at the end here is the data i've finished with and the blue bits in the middle of the service now call so this is the input to the service now connector and this is the output and i want to pass in um data into the service now right so i want to pass in for example the short description description and i can start searching again and pass a short description and i can map it through like that and i could type description for example um if i type description in the first place and i found both um map to there and that gives me my mapping of the data that servicenow needs to create an incident um you'll see servicenow returns um a sys id back uh and if you remember when i was talking about this earlier on um the society is kind of a good which doesn't help anybody um now i'm gonna say actually i don't really care now anymore about my description i can throw these away i just want to keep the cis id so i come back out now no i've got my sis id right but i need something useful to return back so how do i return music back well i have to go to service now and actually find the real number right and so this id so to do that i do a get incidence um i pick my account and now um if we look here you'll see i've got my create internet output with my ssid and i've got here my get instance input so i can map this ssid straight over and now i get incidents output inside here i've got the full detail again about that incident um so having got that um then i will come out and then um now i've got my instant number then what do i do right at the end let's do what's called a transform pipeline and this again is kind of a an interim map statement so i can do a map statement anywhere within the integration um because here's my output now instant number and i want to take get incidence output and go into here and find number which is somewhere down here right um if i can scroll properly or i can search for it and i map that into number over there now i also don't care about these anymore as well this is important i'm going to create an api because i don't want these things coming back when they aren't in my interface definition so i can remove all these things as well and now here is my complex integration built so let's save this first and then because this is a developer type view scenario here i can debug this thing through as well now so i can put some information here so i can put in test one description one and press debug and now i can actually step over the the integration itself piece by pcc i spot test wrong not on purpose but i can correct that as part of my debug cycle and i can carry a step and go over so here it's going to create the incident i can step again um and you'll see here is the society coming up the correct incident and then next it's going to get the incident using the cis id so i'll step again now we see they get incidents output and if we look inside the incident we can see the new incident number and then right at the end what it's going to do is sort all that out and just returned the instant number back so i've now taken um a couple of different connector calls wrapped those together and created one nice um service that i can use um to listen to api so i'm gonna come out there now and come out of this now just to come back to the workflow one second because i mentioned something i'd come back to if i now look inside here if i go to this step here where i've got the the flow service you can see here now i've got my flow service and i can actually put this flow service under here and use this like any other connector as well things here i could create an instant in the tickets with just this data and this would then call my flow service and do all those things for me um so you can build up complex chunks of integration is flow services and then use those um inside your workflows and business users can pull these things in and use those things because they don't necessarily understand the complexity and don't want to but they can use pre-built chunks that have been built by a developer buy it and then can orchestrate those inside their workflow so last thing i'm going to create an api so i'm going to take my integration i just built and now turn that into rest api how do i do that well i go to the api section and i press create api and i'm going to create an api from scratch what do i call that i'll call this create incident this can be version 1.0 give it a description these are useful because this will go into my api definition so i'm going to use json as my consumption producer and i press save so now um i have to have my resource so this is going to i call this slash create i'll just make it again for simplicity run the post um create and now here i pick my workflow or flow service that i want to use i'm going to pick the one i just built called create sn incident and then you'll see here it pulls in the the input contract into my api because it knows what it is so because here's the short description description because i'm using get is created as query string parameters um and down here you'll see it's got a 200 response for okay and a forward one for access denies i press done i press save and now i actually have an api created so here is my api details um if i just press download in this right this saves me this api out if i put postman over next to show you this um i can import and i can drag in um this one here he says hopefully which never works me so i'll do it this way downloads incident there we go um and um if i just press import it will create this straight person for me so here it is here's my api um you see here it's giving me the description and the short description if i put in here um there's a value i'll put in test from postman and i'll put the same short description for now um now the other thing i have to do here is to authorize so it requires credentials to authorize i'm going to put in my my credentials to this which again are in my password database so i'm going to copy and paste those things in into the credentials itself as well [Music] once i find it okay here it is so this is my username my email address this is my password which i have no idea it is but it's horrendously long um and i press send and now this will call that api inside with method integration is it's come back with um a hml representation why why did it do that well i haven't told it what i want back so if i go to the headers here and i put in accept for example and i say i accept application slash json not ecommerce script json press send again then you'll see this time it will respond with the json representation if i put in applications xml then it's going to respond with an xml representation of of that call as well so so that's how quickly i can then take an integration and turn that api and then i could then perhaps use a you know publish this out to a partner or a customer and they could then create their own incidents um against my platform through this api and i could then populate more data and service now about that customer as they create those incidents through this api so that's kind of all i wanted to show you um hope that was useful and i'll come back to you david thanks dave let me just um switch it back over so you can see my screen and can you see my screen yes perfect all right so um so i want to point out a couple things like uh dave when you went through that you you did a great job of showing um some of the key things that makes uh webmethods io integration uh provide support for like a wide breadth of capabilities or for yk capabilities wide group of users i should say um you showed both the what we would think of as a simple workflow approach to building an integration and then a much more sophisticated more powerful set of tools to build out integrations using what many existing web methods customers would know of as a flow service something that's built with you know basically full programming type capabilities to build an integration so when we look at um the users to interact with our products or who are trying to solve problems we see there's like a spectrum of type of users right we see the integrators these are the traditional specialists and integrations uh these are the people who are very comfortable coding working with an ide um comfortable with um different kinds of technologies and understanding like integration architecture right we see maybe not specialists but just your standard developers people who are familiar with programming languages they can work with lots of different technologies they may not be experts in integration but they tend to know a lot about building applications or working with code and a lot of times developers will work in different departments within different kind of business units and so they need tools that'll support them right but increasingly what we see are people that work within the line of business i often think of these as people who are closest to the application so these might be people that are responsible for the sales force implementation the marketo implementation the servicenow implementation they understand the data that they need they understand how that interacts with other applications and they have integration needs just like the specialists do but it's just a little bit different right so what we see is that the the needs for integration kind of increases like the the requirement to be able to do integration increases as you get closer to these line of business users away from the integrators but interestingly the skills increase as you get closer to the integration users right so what you need are a set of tools that basically supports a wide spectrum of of users and then beyond that you have different categories of mitigation problems right so we have and i think you talked about this initially dave you know historically what we saw were what we would think of as strategic or kind of mission critical integration problems these are your tier one systems of records this might be your sap erp implementation this might be your oracle erp implementation uh working with with salesforce like these are very common type integration problems they're typically handled by those specialists that we talked about on the previous screen then you'll see that there are some integrations that are just very common right there they may be critical they may be strategic but you know a lot of people have had to tackle the same problems so to a certain degree they're a little bit more commoditized so what we think of as for example the standard erp to crm type implementations and that's where within our product you'll see we have things like recipes that help kind of define that there might be integrations that are complementary these are nice to have these you can see we're moving closer and closer to those like line of business users who are wanting to provide some kind of integration to get some sort of benefit out of it maybe it's providing a nice integration to give you extra data for making better decisions or integrating a sas application to make it a little bit more robust and finally you know you'll see integrations that are really just ways of providing new experiences to customers making it easier to interact with you providing new ways of working so there's a wide spectrum of type of integration pro projects or categories and when you think about your integration needs you need to think about whether or not the platform's going to support all of those so you know just as a quick summary when when dave walked through you can see we had on the left the the type of user interface experience was really designed for that kind of core integrator that the person who's comfortable working with um you know with code and who's actually doing individual mappings whose walking through testing step by step and who's maybe even exposing that as an api for end users versus on the right you have something that would be more akin to what the line of business user would require and that might just be simply dragging and dropping kind of the key uh sas applications uh or mapping steps or you know posted to slack as a step within a workflow and that's just as you can you can see much easier to accomplish doesn't require nearly as much background information about the applications you're working with or understanding how integration technology works or you know what that means in terms of architecture on the back end so very broad spectrum of the kinds of support we have so why is what methods you know what methods i o integration the most complete ipass well we look at it as providing the broadest support for the numbers of people who are going to interact with the product so that means we build it for business analysts for people that work within the line of business as well as those kind of core iat specialists you really need to be able to support both and you know in most companies those people are going to work hand in hand like like dave described at the end there it might be that the it will build out a service that can be used by line of business but they don't have to understand uh how that was created they just need to know that it's available for them right you need a platform that's extensible we just showed mostly relatively simple sas applications we showed you slack we showed you uh excel like a microsoft 365 version of excel we also showed your service now but remember you're also going to be working with with on-premises type applications iot devices maybe you're you're integrating with um b2b document formats like edi or xml formats your support needs to be broad enough to cover all of those different use cases you're going to encounter and at the end of the day we didn't show you the enterprise class qualities in terms of like how robust it is you know how reliable it is but at the end of the day you need to have a platform that's secure it provides connectivity to you know cloud on-prem uh and then it scales to fit your needs this is us talking about ourselves but if you want to know how we stack up against the competition here's the latest forrester wave for ipass and hybrid integration you can see that saw 4ag has the strongest current offering in the market in integration technology so um we we have a broad set of customers that use us for mission critical systems mission critical projects uh and you can count on software ag to be a reliable um and trustworthy vendor to work with in the space of integration anna i'm going to hand it back over to you to wrap up and handle any questions we might have great thank you david and for those of you who may not be as familiar with software he we have been around for 50 years and have consistently been recognized as a customer-centric leader in many innovative and digital technology categories both on premises and in the cloud plus we can cite over 70 percent of the global 1000 as customers and for those of you who would like to continue exploring today's topic please visit our website at softwareig.com to download our analyst

reports and see what the leading experts are saying about us you can also watch our product demos in our devcast youtube channel and try the product for free on softwareag.cloud please reach out directly to david and dave with any questions you have and now it is time to move to the q a portion of our session if you have a question please do type it into the q a box now i see that we do have some and i will take the first question how do you manage a new version of services for existing workflows i'll take that one david um okay it's a great question um it's kind of multifaceted as well because you've got new versions of connectors and you have new versions of workflows um and the two are handled inside the platform so let's say for example that you saw i was using servicenow and then um in in three months time so it's now releases a new version and changed the api interface drastically typically they don't do that right typically but it's not unheard of and therefore what what you'll find happens then is we'll have another connector version and there'll be two versions of the connector um quite often when they change the apis on a connector they will deprecate the previous api but leave it around for a period and then give you a new api so you can have two in tandem um two different connectors to talk to the system and over time you can switch out your old api call for the new api call which might need a mapping gif if for example it's completely different so that's kind of um the way the connectors were themselves in terms of workflows um and even the flow service results every change you make and save is versioned anyway and inside the ui i didn't show this but you can actually switch back to a previous version of both to restore back to where you were great thank you dave next question how does the product integrate with cloud services with microsoft azure vmware oracle and aws okay i'll take this again um so we have a number of connectors for different platforms already in place so you saw some of the amazon ones or the aws ones so for example if i want to use aws to create an s3 buckets file for example or object or i want to use amazon sqs we have different connectors for different um cloud service providers that you can use to to create different things so for example we have um azure connectors for different things in azure as well and so on so when you see all those listed connectors you can you can see all the different platforms we support and you can actually go and look at the list of connectors yourself um if you go to docs.webmethods.io you can actually look at the documentation look at all the connections we have available excellent next question how do you compare your solution to a more general workforce solution such as servicenow it's so it's a question as well um that the two products are in different classes so so this is an integration platform as a service its focus is on integrating systems and data whilst we call it workflow um workflow is a generic business language term that everyone recognizes but people use it in various different guises um so surveys now have their their workflow um if we've got something called workflow another other platform which is workflow as well um that inside what methods i o integration the workflow is about moving data from one system to another um not about for example bringing in human and managing human interactions those sorts of things but actually moving the data in real time between muslims so you can do things like synchronize data between systems you can offer um an api to create a single point of view from other systems it's that kind of thing that the webmaster integration is and that's slightly different than what the general workflow solution does inside servicenow and again other connectors we have um you'll see that they might even have workflow concepts as well um but they all serve kind of different purposes in terms of what what their their intentions are with the workflow yeah and dave like one thing i would think about is if there's data that's in an application like servicenow and you're building another let's say you're within your company you're building your own application for your workforce right or you're building something for your customers to access to check the status of a service incident or something you can expose the integration you build as an api and use that within an application but but web methods io [Music] as an ipass is not designed to be like a workflow tool per se right but it can feed into workflow applications that you would build on top of the data that's available in the applications great thank you david and dave looks like we have time for one more question um next one you've shown how to create an api from an integration how can i control who has access to this that's that's an awesome question as well i'll pick that one up as well um so i created my api and you see it had credentials in to log in but that's typically not good enough to expose an api right because you want to pass this to third party organizations you might want to rate limit this you want to identify how they're using the apis you might even want to charge for those apis so our ipas as well as having the integration product inside it also has our api products inside as we have our api gateway and our api portal and what you can do is you can take that api that i created you can register inside the api gateway and then create policies on that api to control who can see that api and then you can push that to the portal to allow developers to discover that so that gives you the full round trip of creating an api and then exposing it to the parties to understand how it's being used excellent thanks dave we are right at the top of the hour and out of time for our q a portion of our session we'll now conclude by once again thanking our presenters and our audience for attending on behalf of software ig have a great rest of your day

2020-12-30 13:36

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