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Data integration and migration has been high up in tech news lineups the first few months of this new year.
Salesforce spent a whopping $6.5 billion March 20 in acquiring MuleSoft to power its new integration cloud. Adobe on March 27 partnered with SnapLogic—and could possibly acquire it in the future—to integrate its myriad complicated marketing and service clouds.
Back in January, Deloitte—a respected consultancy that has been investing heavily in acquiring new-gen tech IP—brought hybrid cloud management and data integrator ATADATA into its growing fold. Analysts expect more such acquisitions and/or partnerships coming in 2018.
Why? Because the most significant big data trend of 2018 is the increased need for integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into enterprise environments, many of which aren’t nearly ready for this kind of big-data analytics functionality.
New Integration Item on the Books
On April 2, we have yet another integration news item to report. Workato, which has built its intelligent automation and integration platform to be usable by line-of-business staff, has hooked up with Apttus, a growing player in quote-to-cash and contract lifecycle management software, for the same reasons.
San Mateo, Calif.-based Apttus uses AI in its business platform and required new-generation integration capabilities, and that’s what Workato brings to the table: intelligent automations to quote-to-cash and contract management workflows.
Five-year-old Workato, an iPaaS provider based in Cupertino, Calif. and whose service is used by more than 21,000 organizations, claims to be the only platform for intelligent automations that provide enterprise integration, process automation, along with a citizen-developer interface.
Workto enables business users and IT personnel to collaborate to build, operate and roll out automations.
The partnership between Apttus and Workato aims to achieve scalable growth for users by maximizing efficiencies in their revenue operations processes as follows:
- Faster quote-to-cash: Automates and uses AI-enhanced workflows across the entire quote-to-cash process by integrating Apttus with CRM (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics), and ERP/Financial applications (SAP, Oracle, Netsuite, Workday).
- Contract cycle time reduction: Automates workflows across the entire contract lifecycle for all types of contracts, including sales, service and procurement, by integrating Apttus with Service apps, (such as ServiceNow, Atlassion JIRA ServiceDesk), procurement apps (Coupa, Ariba), and ERP/Financial apps (SAP, Oracle, Workday, Netsuite).
- Reduce approval times: Reduces time required to obtain approvals and contract signatures by enabling intelligent approval workflows through Workbot, a platform bot that works with messaging apps such Slack, MS Teams, Email, and SMS.
- Empowered Ops: Workato’s robust, business-user friendly UI enables sales ops, revenue ops teams and more to build and operate automations while ensuring corporate governance.
“Managing the overall quote-to-cash process and contract lifecycle can be extremely complex and disjointed,” Markus Zirn, Workato Vice-President of Business Development, told eWEEK.
“We are the first partner to integrate with the Apttus Middle Office Platform, enabling their customers to automate their customer and revenue operations end-to-end with our AI-enhanced Intelligent Automation Platform.”
For more information and use-case examples, go here.