According to Gartner, turnkey integration capabilities to key tools and vendors is a critical capability for network automation – however, most vendors make it difficult to integrate by requiring the use of custom code, or view integration as a profit center by selling services for integration or licensing a vendor-approved module to the customer.
This “Integration Tax” increases project timelines, adds cost, and limits versatility. Traditionally, customers had to make choices and select a few key systems to integrate because it was either too time consuming or costly to integrate with everything.
Itential’s approach to integration starts by recognizing the customer’s right to select the “right tool for the job” from among a variety of choices and understanding the immediate value of leveraging the existing tools and systems they already own.
To eliminate the Integration Tax, Itential has implemented a way to build codeless integrations with systems using standards-based API specifications, like OpenAPI, Swagger, or Postman collections. Instead of limiting organizations to a few technology choices, this empowers our customers to integrate quickly with any API-managed IT system, network controller, or cloud platform that the organization wishes to use —today or tomorrow.
Itential has also addressed one of the hidden costs normally associated with integration – data transformation. One essential requirement for full integration is the ability to transform the payloads that come from the various integration points so that the automation system can incorporate the data into automation flows. Itential’s data transformation capabilities replace complicated scripts and enable users to take a no-code approach for creating comprehensive data transformations.
In this on-demand webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, and Karan Munalingal, Head of Solutions Engineering at Itential, explored Itential’s unique approach to integration for network automation by discussing:
- Itential’s API first approach to network automation.
- The importance of out-of-the-box integration for network automation and associated time and cost savings.
- The value of data transformation for integration.
- Why Itential believes in integrating with a federated source of truth.
- How to connect to anything with Itential’s automation products.
- How to easily build your own integration and transform data on the fly.
