In the digital world, the development and delivery of new applications and services rely on agile methods and on DevOps-based processes that speed up innovation and time to market.
On the IT production side, the new multi-cloud and hybrid iPaaS architectures must interoperate effectively with on-premises and cloud-based legacy systems in order to keep IT relevant and to support and facilitate the digital transformation of business lines. New and legacy systems must coexist and cooperate in the most efficient and economical way possible.
Efficiency and Performance of Information Systems
The efficiency and performance of information systems can only be achieved through integration and automation, on one hand by establishing a strong and scalable API-based interoperability between all the components of the IS, and on the other hand by synchronizing and orchestrating as many interactions as possible between these components, regardless of where they are hosted and operated, whether internally to the organization, by an outsourcer or by a cloud provider.
Operators aside, the infrastructures themselves are also more widely dispersed in terms of geographical location, whether within the organization’s own datacenters, in private or public clouds, or on platforms in SaaS mode.
Cost Optimization
Cost optimization involves capitalizing on existing processes and integrating them within the new architectures. The procedures and processes relating to both IT and business lines must be brought into alignment in order to ensure the correct execution and sequencing of tasks and processes across the entire information system and within the required performance conditions.
New IT challenges involve automation
To guarantee IS efficiency and performance and to curb the associated costs, it is essential to have a single automation solution capable of processing all applications and supporting all platforms that are set up to schedule, orchestrate, and synchronize both business and IT processes. This is achieved by facilitating the implementation of new technologies that provide access to the digital mode: big data, AI, security, mobile, API.
Automator, for production and for the CI/CD pipeline
Automator addresses the various issues surrounding digital transformation and the new challenges of end-to-end automation. The execution of a task in Automator is based on various combined criteria, such as dependency on another task, occurrence of an event, action of a user, and so on. For example, combining the receipt of a file from a business partner, the existence of a character string in another file, and the availability of resources in order to run the payroll print job after an employee has clicked a validation button in the company portal.
Automator can interact with any application type via Web Services or REST APIs
For example, Automator can query data from an application or database via its APIs and trigger a process according to the result obtained. Conversely, most actions performed via the graphical interfaces in Automator can also be performed by APIs. Via the APIs, Automator can be integrated with SaaS applications involving, for example, the CRM customer database on the business side and the IT Service Management processes on the IT side.
Automator can also interact with applications via native connectors
It is possible to define links between processes in third-party ERP systems (SAP/R3, SAP S/4HANA, PeopleSoft, MS Dynamics, Movex M3) within Automator’s overall planning. Native communication also exists between Automator and other Axway solutions (including Managed File Transfer and B2B Integration) to, for example, include secure file exchange within the Automator planning.
Integration within the AMPLIFY™ hybrid integration platform (HIP)
The AMPLIFY Catalog provides over 150 pre-configured connectors for the most popular SaaS applications on the market.
Data Sheet: Axway Automator
Cross-silo automation, synchronization and orchestration of job sequencing and processes within a hybrid environment
Reporting and Monitoring
All the events and statistical information in Automator feed into an ElasticSearch data lake.
Reporting portals that use Grafana or Kibana can be created, providing users with a straightforward way to set up their own reporting, including if necessary data coming from third-party sources
- Automator provides its own dashboards and reports to help follow up execution of jobs, showing errors, delays in task start or termination and other valuable information that help track the loss of quality of service delivered to businesses.
- Automator can feed its events into the Axway WideVision Hypervision solution to provide a business-specific vision of the automation process and to identify, for example, which customer is impacted by the incorrect execution of a processing sequence.
- Automator can also interact with monitoring solutions such as Centreon, Zabbix, and Nagios to correlate IS events with automation events for a more in-depth analysis of anomalies.
A few technical considerations
- Support for IBM z/OS, OS400, UNIX, Linux, Windows platforms
- Support for on-premises, private/public multi-cloud, hybrid infrastructures
- The Automator infrastructure includes:
- A centralized modeling server for configuration and setup
- Standalone production servers (agents) for running processing sequences in distributed mode (communication solely with agents that have execution dependencies)
- Agentless operation in centralized mode involving Web Services or APIs
- Exchanges between components via the security protocol TLS 1.2
- Interfacing with LDAP/AD business directories
Migrating an existing solution to Automator
Axway has experience with successfully migrating a large number of market solutions to Automator. For users who wish to replace their current automation software with Automator, Axway provides a comprehensive service offering that will automatically retrieve the full configuration of the existing software (definition of process sequences, dependencies, calendars, scheduling rules, conditions, etc.).