Today, organizations are separately approaching integration and automation, setting up teams with different capabilities and tools to integrate systems and automate processes.
But that’s not supposed to happen, according to Allan Teng, Workato’s managing director and founder for Asia-Pacific and Japan, who says automation and integration are in fact two sides of the same coin.
In an interview with Computer Weekly, Teng explained Workato’s integration-led approach to automation, why it makes sense for organizations, and how the company addresses the Asia-Pacific market.
Can you tell us more about Workato and its heritage in the integration space?
Teng said: Our founders have a very rich history in the integration space. They started Tibco with products such as enterprise service buses. Fast-forward 30 years, and the biggest integration challenge hasn’t changed. It’s still very technical and requires a lot of work. But what has changed is that employees want things faster and easier, as they do with consumer apps.
Workato started with the hypothesis that companies value the result of connecting data, process and user experience. These are interrelated matters and not separate problems. Integration vendors may tell you that you have a data integration problem, while automation vendors may see the problem as a workflow and process issue.
Companies should not buy different tools to solve their data problems. These can be ETL [extract, transform, load]API [application programming interface] management or iPaaS [integration platform-as-a-service] tools. And on the automation side, there’s BPM [business process management] and RPA [robotic process automation] tools.
A well -known Gartner analyst who joined us recently said that integration and automation are in fact two sides of the same coin. And if companies address them in different ways, they will always have a gradual approach. The world has changed, and we want to look at things in a holistic way, where you connect all of your systems to seamlessly integrate them, and then use this connectivity to automate the business process. and for user experience purposes. That’s what we call the integration-led automation approach.
When we started the company, one of our first use cases was about integrating Salesforce with QuickBooks. But what we realize is that because our technology is easy to use, customers have started to connect to different applications like Trello and other components to automate their processes.
Now we have customers like Grab who use Workato for integration and automation. Another customer was Gainsight, which started using Workato for API use cases and later replaced its ETL tool with our platform.
But don’t get me wrong, we also partner with RPA vendors like UiPath because they are very good at automation. But the market is signaling that while automation is important, they also want more and that’s why more RPA vendors are going into the integration space through mergers and acquisitions.
But merging the two companies will not solve the problem. While this makes it easier to buy from a single source, companies have repeatedly told us that they are not trying to find a better RPA or integration tool.
We want to look at things in a holistic way, where you connect all your systems to fix them, and then use this connectivity to automate the business process and for experience purposes. of the user.
Allan Teng, Workato
Workato’s value proposition is that we are a platform for both integration and automation. It’s also easy to use – when companies implement Workato, they expect to do so within a month, with the first use case going live within a week.
But it’s not just the speed in building and maintaining integrations. Many IT organizations are starting to realize that they have become the biggest bottleneck in their business. In order for them to provide more value to the business, they need to move from integrating systems and being a service provider, to being more of a strategy and empowerment team.
For example, if HR wants to do integration work, why can’t IT give them the tools to do it themselves? This is what happened to Scoot, the budget airline. Their HR failed in IT, requiring nine months to integrate SaaS [software-as-a-service] applications such as ServiceNow and Workday. In Workato, they can do this in one to two months.
Finally, the most important thing is that Workato meets the requirements of the enterprise and does not shy away from IT. So, when Scoot bought Workato, their IT team got involved and did their reviews on things like security.
Can you explain the benefits of a holistic platform like Workato compared to an integration platform with RPA capabilities?
Teng said: On paper, those platforms can do everything, but in practice it’s really hard. The biggest challenge is with skills and resources. In the past, you needed a different set of tools and skills for integration and automation, making teams less agile and harder to measure.
On the flipside, with Workato, you don’t have to form different teams. In fact, most companies that choose Workato don’t start with a Workato team. They start training everyone in Workato, including jobs without coding. They train people to manage applications like Salesforce and Workday. This alleviates the need to bring in different groups of people for a project.
I can tell you why we are confident in this career. We have partnerships with tertiary institutions where the professors who teach Workato in their courses are not even from IT schools. An HR professor teaches at Workato to make HR students tech-enabled. If 18-year-old students from non-technical backgrounds can use Workato to solve problems, I don’t believe companies can’t do it and that’s why we’re so excited about the space ito.
What is the typical entry point for most of your customers in the APAC region?
Teng said: Most companies started working with us somewhere. Certis, for example, began using Workato as an SAP integration tool, so for the first two months, their CIO thought Workato was just about SAP integration. Then I had lunch with their CEO and showed them what we could do.
The entry point to this region is all over the place, actually. We get in wherever we can, but our strength is always solving integration problems. For example, some of our customers have SAP systems that need to be integrated, while others want to have chatbots on Slack.
When we go to market, we talk less about technology and more about our value proposition-for example, what it means to automate the sales process so you can achieve profits faster and the technology behind it. We’re not really trying to sell integration or automation products. Often, we work with business teams to look at their goals and how our technology fits.
Can you give me an idea of your overall business in the region? How fast is the company growing and in which industries do you interact more often? Are most of them in the financial services industry?
Teng said: Today we do very little business with financial services companies. We still have a lot to do in other industries because the biggest challenge to financial services companies is that they are slow to change their mindset, even the most forward-looking ones. Their investment in legacy technology is huge because they have to justify those investments.
We work with underserved organizations. Our strength today is in the technology space. Most of our customers are tech unicorns like Gojek, Grab and Tokopedia. They are often the fastest adopters because they are not the type of companies that are afraid to say they made the wrong choice.
We’re also looking at companies with a public cloud mentality because you can’t deploy Workato on-premise or in a private cloud. It is a full-fledged SaaS platform, which is unacceptable to some companies. But that could change over the next three to five years, as companies begin to realize they’re being beaten by cloud-native competitors who are completely changing the game.
We are also starting to see more traditional customers, such as airlines, property developers and shipping companies, with modern CIOs 98% choosing Workato. But if they’re trying to maximize their current investments, we won’t get in until they realize they’re moving too slowly.
How are telcos?
Teng said: Our biggest challenge in history is that we are only hosted in the US. We will have a Singapore datacentre in a few weeks. There’s one telco where Workato wins in technology, but there’s one component, a local datacentre, that we don’t have. Their CIO told me that if we had a local datacentre, he would choose Workato at every opportunity. The same goes for the public sector, but once we have a datacentre in Singapore, it shouldn’t be an issue.
In the long run, do you think there will be less need for integration if business software suppliers begin to offer loosely integrated microservices of capabilities that can be integrated to suit the needs of a organization?
Teng: Easier said than done. With so many applications out there, it is not possible for software providers to build point-to-point integration with each application. If all we do is integration and we can’t connect to every application, no one can connect. Instead, software providers use the Workato platform to do the integrations.
That’s also our fastest growing business because many technology companies can’t create custom integrations for every enterprise customer beyond basic integrations. Also, it is difficult for business users to understand what microservices are about. They value the process more and are likely to be more familiar with triggers and actions when making combinations.
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