To implement a CoE approach, it’s important to select the right platform that can support this centralization by orchestrating disparate automation tooling and integrating across multiple technologies and domains. Itential’s unique integration capabilities that help users connect every automation tool and third-party system made it the perfect fit.

To get started, they took a measured, incremental approach: leverage Itential to solve four high-priority use cases quickly, thereby increasing familiarity, building a working process, and proving to each team that the new platform approach would deliver results.

It was immediately clear that Itential’s orchestration capabilities would greatly increase the impact of any given Python or Ansible automation. Orchestration means connecting individual task automations to build an overall process which can then be automated end-to-end. With Itential, the team’s task automations can now be attached to APIs and included in end-to-end process workflows that can also include automated activities on third party systems, such as change management or security systems.

Of course, this didn’t mean the network team would need to throw away any of their existing automation work. With Itential Automation Gateway (IAG), the network team is able to continue building task automations with the tools they’re comfortable using. Whether it’s automation you built in Python, Ansible, Terraform, or another tool, IAG helps to standardize the automation execution layer so automations are easier to share and execute.

Additionally, our orchestration solution, the Itential Automation Platform, offers low-code workflow building capabilities and the ability to easily onboard those automations from an IAG instance by attaching API endpoints to them. That means the people who build automations can focus on that, and the extra requirements for orchestrating them into end-to-end processes can be handled by IAP and the operations teams building workflows.

The company’s Center of Excellence model and Itential’s integrated platform have created a framework for centralizing automations. Now, because all network devices, all task automations, and all third party systems can be onboarded to Itential, they’re able to standardize and accelerate automation across the company without forcing anyone into specific tooling decisions. Key capabilities that make this possible include:

• The ability to leverage and extend existing automations built with tools like Python and Ansible by attaching API endpoints to them, enabling these automations to be included in end-to-end orchestrated process workflows.
• Comprehensive integrations generated using API documents with every network and IT system to extend the reach of their automations.
• An easy to use, low-code workflow building canvas so that coders and non-coders alike can participate in building orchestrations.
• The ability to expose automations for self-serve consumption via several methods including a ServiceNow catalog and CI/CD pipelines. This enables others to request and leverage automations without the need to manually run scripts themselves, understand technical details, or even have visibility into the relevant infrastructure components that their request will affect.