Integration Hub: Connect UAC With Any IT System

Morning, everybody. Good afternoon to those of you on the other side of the pond and welcome back to StoneBranch Online. I'm Nadia Davis, and I'll be here with you today moderating this session. Previously, we have talked about integrations, and in one of the previous sessions, we asked the poll to see how often people get to deal with bringing on new integrations into their landscape. And the poll sounded like this: Within your big data pipeline, how often do you get asked to add or remove additional data sources or data apps, essentially integrations at the end of the day, right? And an overwhelming majority, over fifty percent said that they have to do that ad hoc on continuous basis, depending on the asks from the lines of business users or their IT cross functional team users. The same story is true with any type of integration. So essentially, if you're using point to point or you're writing scripts, they will take forever, they will take over your life. And in today's session, we'll actually show you an easier way to do that. So today's session is on connecting the StoneBranch Universal Automation Center to any hybrid IT application, platform, or system. So let me go ahead and introduce today's speakers. There's been a slight change in the speaker lineup and Mike Oswald of Blue Cross Blue Shield was not able to make it because he got pulled away on urgent business. But this is the cost of running sessions live and that's okay because we still get to share his story. He was totally okay with me telling that to you. So that will still be a part of today's session. And I also have Peter Balgette, the CTO of Stonebridge and Karthik Mohan, who is a solutions engineer at Stonebridge. Karthik will run some demos for you guys today. So with that, let me hand this over to Peter for the first part of this presentation. Peter, over to you. Thank you, Nadia, and good afternoon and good morning to everyone. I'm excited to talk to you today about what we call the Universal Integration Platform two point zero. And as you know, one of the things that we constantly think about here is with the evolving hybrid IT landscape that we've been talking about is how do we constantly evolve our capabilities to integrate to the many different platforms and services that companies are now using with SaaS companies, with cloud service providers, and even in their own innovations that they're doing on top of these types of systems. And even though we release we have our UAC product, which we released twice a year, but we see the need really to be a lot more faster in delivering capabilities to our customers. And so the universal integration platform is the primary way that we're going to be able to do this. This platform enables us to rapidly build integrations, but it also enables customers to do that themselves and really release these things on a constant basis. So you really don't have to wait for these major releases of our product. You're able to take on new capability with this platform. So I'm excited to kind of talk more about that. And Kartik is actually going to give you a demo of just hands on keyboard, how you actually use the tools and how we internally develop integrations, but then also how we see our customers doing it as well. So historically, you know, our core foundation of UAC has been our central controller, which orchestrates all of the automation that we do with the agents. And you know, these agents that we have is part of the corp platform that sit on many different types of systems. And then we also have a universal data mover, which is the primary mechanism we use to to move data among different systems and even inside and outside of companies. And this is how we've historically kind of looked at the platform. The now when we look at the platform, really, we're completing that full picture with the key components of the Universal Integration Platform. One of these you've probably seen and heard already, and that's the Integration Hub. So this is the way that you can get existing integrations from StoneBranch, but we kind of just rereleased this into a new version. But the goal is to tightly integrate this into our development platform. So the development platform is something where is a platform where you can build your integrations using standard technologies that you see out there today that we'll get more into. And then what we're going to try to do with this is also include integrations, but also workflows. We primarily have integrations out there today that are kind of point to point system integrations. But we also see that these are part of an overall workflow, use cases and business problems that people are trying to solve. So the goal is to also provide kind of pre built best practice workflows to solve common business automation needs. The kind of diving down about how all these pieces are integrated, you know, on the left side, we actually see, you know, different users of this platform. It's not just for StoneBrains to use and build integrations, but we also see customers and partners using this so that they can, they have the ability to do it themselves because they may have some of their own innovations versus some of the standard ones that we provide to third parties and cloud service providers. You may be innovating on top of those. You may have some internal systems that you've developed that you need to integrate to. So having this tool be used by people outside of StoneBranch is one of the key capabilities. And to do that, we provide a number of things in this platform. There are standard tools that you typically see, which is an IDE command line integration tools, automation to kind of build the packages and deploy them up to the universal, you know, controller or to the integration hub. There's a lot of documentation that, you know, that we're starting to build. Any decent development platform and SDK always has quick start guides and templates that really get you up and running where you can build a basic integration in a matter of hours versus days or weeks. And so the platform is supposed to be easy to use and to get you very up and running very quickly. And then there's a number of different integration tools that we have. You know, we typically have run a lot of scripts, but we're getting into more of universal tasks and universal extensions, which are the that are primarily Python based that provide a very easy way to kind of integrate into a lot of the modern systems out there. The development platform also can automatically and easily upload things into the UAC. So it used to be where you had to manually do it, but now it's kind of there's APIs where it'll deploy things automatically and Kartik is going to show that a little bit later. But the goal would be to, these things that you build to go into a solutions library and an integration library, and those are available through the Integration Hub, which we'll demonstrate later too. And the goal will be that when you're in the UAC, you can actually automatically download. Today, it's a manual kind of effort where you download it and then you kind of upload it in into the UAC. In future releases of UAC, what you'll be able to do is to browse the Integration Hub. And then once you see an integration that you need, or even a pre built workflow, be able to automatically download those right into the controller. Kind of looking at how we view some of these integrations. You know, a lot of the integrations, if you look at the bottom, just connect to the different systems that you have that you're trying to automate and orchestrate across. But that's not the only type of integrations that we see. We're seeing different users of our software, where it's not just maybe IT administrators, but it's also data ops people or cloud ops people who are trying to automate different things for their particular use case. We also see kind of what we call upstream integrations that they typically use, which would be things like Slack, ServiceNow, Teams, you know, these tools where they can actually talk and control automation through those tools versus having to go through the universal automation center UI. So these are the different types of integrations you can do both downstream as well as upstream. Some of the key capabilities of the UIP platform is typically the way automations have worked is the controller would talk to the agents and it would run something and it would get a result back and pass it back up to the controller. The integration platform now is providing real time communication back and forth while something is running down at the agent so that, you can query down to the agent and through the UIP, get information in real time, either when you're doing a configuration or while it's executing, it can be sending events back up to the controller in real time. So you're kind of getting a real time status of what's going down at the agent level. And this is going to be enhanced more and more in the future where you can get events coming up from something running at the agent level to where it can trigger other actions to happen at the controller based on things that is sending up. So it's more of this real time bidirectional communication that we're going to keep building in. Python is the primary technology that we're using to build these integrations. One of the reasons we kind of looked at Python was because there's a tremendous amount of support for it. It's a very well known language and there's an immense amount of libraries out there. So if you look at most SaaS companies and cloud providers, they provide Python libraries and Python APIs that you can use to build these integrations. And it's something where we can also kind of build into the different IDEs that we support. There's also the, one of the other aspects is at the agent level, you don't have to install something locally. The controller can actually pass down all the packages that it needs down to the agent so that it can run-in sort of a virtual environment down at the agent level. So it eliminates the need to have to kind of do this complex installation of things at the agent client level. You can do everything from the controller level. And then again, there's a lot of documentation out there. There's a lot of resources for Python type integrations. So we felt it was a good technology to build as a basis for our integrations. And each of these, you know, we're grouping these integrations into specific areas. We, you know, a lot of customers are using UAC to automate particular business use cases or business processes. And so if you look at some of the ones we've built recently, we kind of group them into, these are kind of the five areas that we see right now and we expect to get more as people do more things with UAC. For workload automation, which has been our core, you know, we're focusing on some of the upstream UI interactions with automation. So Slack, PagerDuty, SAP Event Monitor are things we've added. From a cloud automation, really looking at Red Hat OpenShift when you have some of the container technologies are becoming very popular. And then VMware with vSphere, which Karthik is going to demo. We still see a lot of people doing automation on top of that hypervisor. And then data pipelines, you've seen us talk a lot about data pipelines. We see a lot of people using our data pipeline integrations. A lot of this is driven by the cloud adoption in terms of storing data and all of the cloud services that are out there for doing data analytics. So we're focusing a lot on the data pipeline integrations and we've got some new ones with Kafka, Informatica Cloud, Microsoft BI and Tableau. And then hybrid file transfer, you know, we've seen people in terms of intercompany data transfers, that's becoming bigger and bigger. So we see a big need to move data from the internal data center onto a lot of these different SaaS and cloud storage services. So you'll see us come out, if you look at the Integration Hub there, you can search by these different groupings and we'll kind of build up different groupings based on the need as it arises. And then Nadia, you want to talk a little bit about the Blue Cross Blue Shield story? Sure. Thank you, Peter. So for those of you who may have missed the opening of this session, I see more people that joined us since then. Blue Cross Blue Shield, the company that some of you on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean may not know is one of the largest healthcare insurance companies in the United States. And they ain't so big that domestically needs no introduction. And originally we were going to have Mike Oswald of Blue Cross Blue Shield, who is command center manager present this section, but last minute changes happened. Mike got pulled away in urgent business. So I got to interview Mike before we headed into this live session. So I spent ten years in healthcare technology. I was very interested in what Blue Cross Blue Shield is doing with the Stone Branch tool. So I got to hear that from Mike and he was okay with us sharing this story. So let me take you through this use case, this success story of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota and how they use the Stone Branch tool. So first to set it up, to give you a background, about two years ago, Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, like a lot of large enterprises, was going through their digital transformation. And, you know, the objective of that was to move away from their mainframe that had the CA7 scheduling solution and move most of their jobs into the cloud. And in fact, that goal was ambitious enough where they were seeing seventy percent of their workloads needing to be moved to the cloud. So clearly, you know, they were on the lookout for a platform that would allow them to handle the thirty percent of the jobs that were still left in different legacy systems across the enterprise and connect that to the seventy percent that were now moved to the cloud. As a part of that exercise, you all can imagine cost efficiencies were of course considered and IT footprint was decreased. And the new model that the enterprise was operating on or the IT portion of the enterprise was operating on was the command center model. And we've heard about that on the previous sessions of Stonebridge online or other large global enterprises use that model. You can go back and watch the BP session with Massimo Leoni talking a little bit about that and how BP used it. But here essentially the concept was the same. You know, the team now was part offshore and Mike was managing that team. As a part of the collaboration effort within the IT enterprise, the scheduling team that Mike was managing was now working with a cloud ops team, the change management, release management teams. So they were all working together and the cloud ops would handle everything that was done in the cloud, any processes that ran in the cloud. Any development work that had to be done in the cloud would also be handled by cloud ops. The scheduling team, however, would come into play where the deployments needed to happen. So this cloud first mindset was of course present within this exercise of moving from on prem to cloud. And to give you an idea in terms of the environments that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota had in place, the IT landscape, they were running most of their stuff on Linux. They had some Windows systems and their cloud part was handled by Amazon Web Services. So I'm sure, you know, I don't need to tell you that when they were looking for a replacement for CA7, having something that was environment agnostic that would allow them to bridge that gap between their on prem systems and their cloud systems, that was top of mind. And, you know, the quote that I got from Mike when I talked to him prior to this session, he said that the fact that Stone Branch agents supported any and all environments essentially was a very important factor made his life easier. So this session, however, we talk more about integration. So, you know, in the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota case in particular, ServiceNow was one of those integrations where they, you know, really used it a lot. They saw the quantifiable, measurable, intangible benefit of that integration, so they are the power user of that. And in terms of, you know, looking back now over the last two years, how did that manifest itself? What kind of efficiencies and savings did the team actually feel from this particular integration and the overall exercise of moving the platform to StoneBranch. What Mike said was that the staff did see a reduction in their work, the reduction that was now picked up by automation. So now with ServiceNow in particular, you didn't have to worry about, you know, manually handling the tickets. All the tickets were routed automatically. They went to the right team. So this little workflow picture that you see on the right hand side of the slide essentially demonstrates that. If you have a process, you have a job that's running, if it's successful and the process completes itself, you know, the user might get an email saying this process has been completed successfully. But if something goes wrong, an error occurs, then it would be the other part of this workflow where it would go into ServiceNow, automatically open a ticket and send it to the right team. So with this particular approach, you can be highly actionable, highly responsive, you can handle things in real time, you can also be proactive in terms of handling things as they come in and of course, efficiency is the key driver here, time savings, cost savings, all of those things. Now, as a summary, Mike mentioned that over the last two years, since this exercise got started, he was very pleased to say that there were no outages. They did not experience any downtime. So for him, this was truly peace of mind. Now ServiceNow is only one of the many integrations that StoneBranch offers. At this point, let me turn this back over to Peter, who will give you a tour of the Integration Hub, who will allow you to take a sneak peek under the hood of what else we offer. Peter, over to you. Thank you, Nadia. Yes. One of the things we always talk about is finding out all the different things that our customers are doing with UAC and the integrations. And the word we typically use is trying to future proof customers, meaning that UAC and its core technology is very robust and been around a long time. And how do we provide the ability for customers to, as they adopt and kind of get more into the hybrid IT world, have a product that can meet any need out there. And so this is the primary driver between the UIP platform is really to kind of give you that capability that you may not know what you need to integrate and automate with, you know, next year, but have the confidence that you can use this platform to build it out or have something available that we have on the Integration Hub. So the Integration Hub, you know, which we just kind of redid the Integration Hub is now out there. And you're welcome to go use it, download, try out any of the extensions and integrations that are out there. There's, you'll see over time that the list will grow of things that we have. And we see that coming from two different ways. We now have a dedicated development team at Stone Branch and their sole focus is to develop integrations on an ongoing basis. And those are things that we see that customers need as well as things that we see customers doing. One of the benefits that we do with this team is that we actually do a lot of testing, a lot of we security scan all these integrations. So just do it as a typical product development process when we take things in that people have built externally, which come from either some of our customers, but also we, again, we see the contributions coming from customers as well. These will probably be, you know, you'll see new things come out really on an ongoing basis. And typically you'll see every month new things being added from now on an ongoing basis. And we'll probably do some sort of a communication to let customers know some of the new things that have been added. But if you also have any needs, we encourage you to give us feedback. We always like to hear from customers the things that they're seeing that are needed in terms of plugging into their automation with UAC. One of the reasons that we chose Python was because it is a very well known technology and it's not very difficult to learn also. So if you have an integration, one of the benefits of submitting it back to us is that we will review it and we may add on to it. So, you know, a lot of times customers will do a very specific integration. When what we typically do is make it more generic, maybe expand the capability if that system that we're integrating to has more capability. And then we'll put it through a development process where we add testing, you know, when we do all the standard things that you would want to do to make something is secure and has good quality. So encourage everybody to give us your ideas, but also if you've built an integration and would like us to put it in the Integration Hub, we would be happy to do so. So now I will pass it back over here for the question. Thank you, thank you. So we're talking about our Integration Hub, right? And this session is one of the most exciting ones because our Integration Hub essentially makes these possibilities of creating new things limitless. So let me ask our audience, have you guys downloaded any integrations from our Integration Hub or just in general StoneBranch in the past? Your choices are yes, no, but I'm aware I know how to do that. And no, I don't know what integration is or how to download it. So go ahead and pick your answer. Let's see, I'm closing the poll. So the majority of you looks like it said yes, so seventy two percent said yes, you're familiar with how to download integration and you have done so. So Peter, this is kind of the pulse of the room. A lot of people know about our Integration Hub and integrations, which is good news, right? Yes, that actually is because one of the things that we are trying to do is to get the word out about the integration hub and make sure customers realize that it's out there. Kartik is going to actually show you all of how this is done. But the basic essence of it, and we're trying to make this as simple as possible. You know, one of the key tests of a platform is just how easy it is for people to, you know, to use. So our constant focus is the usability and how people are going to interact with it. So from getting an integration, it really is going to the integration hub, picking a template that you want and downloading it. So there's a kind of a process where you'll go through a little bit of a shopping store type thing, because you can get multiple at one time and then download them at the same time. And then today, you actually download it to your local workstation. And then you import that into the UAC when you're defining a universal template. I mean, once it's in there, then you can actually include it in a lot of different automations, you know, typically you have workflows, so it's easy as dragging and dropping it into a workflow and then adding any specific information in that workflow. And that's, today, that's the process. But if you can imagine it in the future from the controller, you'll be able to browse what's in the Integration Hub and then download it right from the universal controller instead of having to go to a website and then import it. So we want to get it more and more very easy to get these things into your automations. I'm going to pass it over to Karthik and he is going to actually show you live demo of how this actually works. Karthik. Hey, Peter. Thank you. Hello, So myself, Kartik Mohan, I'm part of Stonebranch team. I'm working as a solution engineer here in Stonebranch. So without further ado, I will start sharing my screen so that we can see how this integration hub looks and how people can start to find new integrations and put import it into their USA environment and start creating their wonderful workflows. I think everyone is able to see the see my screen properly. So the first way to reach our integration hub is through our Storm branch website. So he can share you can directly go to the integration hub on our pro on our company website. And as soon as you go there, you can just get into this beautiful new integration hub. So or else you can directly visit the link stone branch dot com slash integration hub. Yeah. So I think most of us answered since already using the integration hub already, so everyone has an account. If you're a new user, you can always sign up for a new account, and then you can start using the integration hub. So right now, we can I'll go through the different categories which we have inside this integration hub. So right now, we are at the integration home up home page. So here you can see all the featured integrations which are most like, the most downloaded integrations in from our website and slash the new integration sections where it gets constantly update updated with new integrations from our developers. Yeah. So on top, you also have this integration categories. If you want to search for a different integration depending upon the platform or something, you can always use these options here and then you can just quickly sort or make a sort of all the available integrations based upon any one of these categories. And also we have an about section for in order to give our customers a basic idea of how this integration hub works and what are the bay and also the main information in case if they want to reach to reach us. And also, that is this most important section, which is the contribute section. So here, if as a customer, if you want to develop or publish your integration, which is used in your organization to the Storm Branch USA user community, you can always come to this page and fill up this form and you can submit your temp exported files here. So as soon as we get these files, we'll go through it. We'll check if everything is working fine on our demo systems, all our test systems, and then we push it. And then once we push it into our integration hub, you will be notified about that process. Yeah. This is one way to keep keep active in our Stonebench user community. Now let me come back to the main integration hub. K. Now let's see how we can enter download a new integration and put it into your Universal Automation Center. So for this, I will choose this new integration, which is primarily focused on VMware vSphere enrollment, which helps you to manage all your EXXI data centers from the vCenter server. Yeah. So as soon as you get into a new integration, you can always see the compatibility. Depending upon your current version of your universal controller, you can choose between the version. So right now, you can choose between the earlier XML files, and now we also have a new form of providing integrations to our customers, which is the universal extension, which is kind of a package solutions, which comes with all the necessary universal template files and the Python packages, libraries, everything combined into a single zip file. So I will go with this seven point zero version of it and I will add it to my shopping cart and as soon as I'm done, I will check it out. So here I will accept the terms of use. I will submit the order. Here, you will see this integration doesn't cost us cost our users anything, so it's free of charge. And there are a few integrations in our integration hub main page where it will for where it will take you to a different payment portal where the users will be asked for a price to pay for. So I will download it. I'll have it in my system now. Yes. K. So as soon as you download it, you will find a zip file available in your download section or wherever you choose to. So I would recommend you to unzip it, like, ask extract it just one level, and you will find all the files here. So inside this folder, you will find two sets of information. One is the README file and again the actual templates on the actual integration related files here. Yeah? So the README file will contain the basic information of where to find the documentation and how to import it into the controller. Let me show you how to import this particular task into the controller now. So let me come back to my test controller here. So here, what I will do is I will use this import template option and I will choose the file which I downloaded right now. So yeah. Here, into the export, there is a zip file. I will choose it and I will import it. So as soon as I imported it, you can see the file the file got imported and the integration is available for use. Yeah. So what I will do is I will refresh the navigation tree so that I can see the task in the navigation tree here. So yeah. Here we have it. So I will configure one of the sample task in this VMware functionality. So I will say, let me start with the basic task list virtual machines. Yes. And I will assign an agent. So we have our demo system up and running. So I will link it up to the agent and the functionality. You can see all the available functionality within this integration. So we have around like fourteen functionality which takes care of the data center operations inside a EXXI host and the virtual machine operations as well as handling the host operations inside an vSphere environment. Yes. So now I will provide the details for this machine. Yeah. That that's where our vCenter server is running correct now. And I will add the credentials and save. So let me launch this task and see how it works. Launching it and I'm going back to the instance. It's running and We can see it got into success. So let's check the output And yeah. Here, we can see the list of available VMs in our vCenter server right now. So right now, we have two VMs, which is listed here. So like this, you can download all the integrations in our integrate from our integration hub, import into your controller, and you can start creating your workflows according to your use case. Right now, I have a sample workflow here, so which I created specifically for today's demo. So here, what I have done is I have preconfigured it so that in order to save time. So what this workflow does is it's provides it starts provisioning clients, be it in on prem data center, which is taken care by this VSPR integration or maybe in cloud, which is in the AWS environment, AWS easy to environments. Yes? So let me launch this workflow and let's see how this workflow goes. Yeah? And I'll come here, sorry, to the workflows. I am launching it. And in the instance, we see the workflows is running right now. And I'll open this, and we'll go to the workflow monitor. So the workflow is in held state. I will release the workflow so that it starts executing. So here, it's a manual task. Here, behind this manual task, have I included one off for another integrations, which is based on the Microsoft Teams. I think most of our users are aware of it. So here, what we do is with this here universal integration, we send an approval request to a Teams channel and I approve it. So in this case, I'm approving a provisioning of new systems in the cloud as well as in the on prem systems. I'm submitting the approval. As soon as this approval gets submitted, the workflow continues its operation. So yeah. Here we can see the workflow got into success. Here again, we are I'm listing the same set of VMs. So here you can see the output, which is again the two VMs which are running. So what I will do is so here k. So the system gets getting provision. So here you can see clone operation, which has been done. So and that is on create VM. So earlier, we had two systems, and now I have cloned one of the existing VMs, and also I created a new VM. Let me show it in the vSphere center, and now we should have four systems running in our vSphere environment. I'll switch back to the vSphere environment. Here, you can see the clone VM, which got cloned from the workflow and that is this VM which got created just now and you can see based upon the timestamp here. And again, we have one more approval. So with this time, we are taking care of deprovisioning the system, which is like removing the system from the data center. So again, it sends an approval request to the Teams channel and I'm gonna approve it. I'm submitting it. So it's approved. Now you can see the workflow started its execution further. So now the VM is stopped and the VM is still it. Here, what I have done is so here I have cloned one VM. So I am deleting that VM alone, not the VM which I created here. So if I come back to the vSphere environment, you can see the clone VM is gone now, but the created VM is still there. This is how you can import all our integrations into a very nearly nice workflow in for your general use cases. Here, it's again a cloud system. So here we are provisioning easy two instances. Let me launch this workflow. I mean, release it so that we can see easy two instances getting created. So here, I will come back to our easy two instance. So right now, you can see there are thirteen instances running, so I will refresh it. Yep. Now we have the fourteenth instances running, so which is this one from our workflow and it's getting initialized and stuff. Once this thing finishes its initialization, which means the basic checkup status checks unlike and it has to pass this two out of two checks. Once this is once these checks are passed, the workflow will continue its operation. And here, what we have done is just stopping the instance and terminating the instance. Yeah. We don't want to our EC two instances to be cluttered with demo instances and stuff. Let's give it a minute. Let's see. Yeah. It's still initializing. It takes a bit of a time today. Maybe I'll give it a minute more. Hey, Karthik. Yes. Hey. One one question that came up was what what integrations did we did you use for the Teams approval? So we have a separate task for Teams approval. So if let me show that to you. And this is our integration hub and you can search for Teams and then you will find this Teams send and receive notification. This is the one. So you can use it either in the older versions of the controller starting from six point seven till seven point one, the latest release. While we're waiting, Peter, let me go ahead and ask you, since we got a little bit of time. There was a question that came in that asked about submitting integrations and the language that they need to be in or the format they need to be in. And if they're built on PowerShell, is that something that can be submitted or is it only the Python stuff that can be submitted? Right now, integrations that you see on the IntegrationHub are all kind of used. There's two types up there. There's universal task and universal extensions, which are all Python based. So right now it's just Python based integrations that are up there. We haven't explored doing the other ways that are out there like scripts and such, but it's something that we'll be taking a look at. Thank you very much. Now one thing I will say is that if you've done an integration in something like PowerShell or a Unix script, you know, free to let us see it because what we could do too is we could implement that in a universal extension mechanism, which uses Python. So even though it may not be in that way, just submitting that so we can look at it and possibly put it out there with one of the Python based, you know, integration tools, we would take a look at that. So yeah. So now we can see the workflow is proceeding because we can see that system initialization completed on the AWS side. So now what I will do is and this task will simply check for the status of this particular VM which we created. So the EC two instance which I created, and I will submit, and then we can see the status of the machine in the output. Yes. And what I will do is I will get this workflow going. Relay said, now I am stopping this instance. And what I will do is I will delete this instance. I mean, terminate the instance from our AWS environment so that it's not there. So yeah. Like I said, this is one of the few functionalities which you can do, but it's not limited to just this environment. You can also do the same thing in terms of Azure and other cloud systems as well. So yeah. And once this finishes, let's see what's happening. Yep. Now you can see there are only thirteen instances. This instance has got deleted, and it's finishing up the final stages and stuff. Now if I come back to the main workflow, once that's done, the workflow finishes its execution. Yep. Now we can see all the workflows, all the tasks in the workflow got executed properly and this is just an email task which sends an error report of this execution. And either you can configure this as a email task to yourself or else maybe you can send it as a report or something in your environment. So here I have exported this as a report and I attached attached as an email to myself. Yeah. Peter, you can take it from here. Thank you. So the create, you know, the creating a universal extension, is a core part of the UIP platform. Just to kind of talk about what you typically do when you're building an integration. You know, one is just the use case. You know, obviously when you have an overall automation workflow, there could be a primary system you're integrating to, or it could be several. So understanding the technology that you need to integrate to, we, you know, we typically see that the integration mechanisms of most modern and also kind of new software tools all are standardizing on common ways to access their APIs. But just, you know, understanding the use case, you know, what type of business APIs you're executing is key. Test environments. We you know, the test environments are really important because those things tend to get take time to set up. You know, any time we're building an integration and we have to stand up a third party and it could be multiple systems that have to be managed. So having a very robust test environment, even one that you can spin up and down as needed, is key because you're going to go through multiple iterations of testing. And when you make changes, you want to have that all be available to you so that you can do it very, very quickly. We do a lot of cloud based systems just so that we can spin them down and up and they just don't have to be up and running all the time. And we find using one of the cloud service providers as a good mechanism to do that. The integration method, you know, a lot of things are standardized on either command line integrations, but those are typically built on a REST API. You know, most SaaS customers, I mean, sorry, SaaS providers, all the cloud providers provide a REST API. And then on top of that, they typically have libraries in Java, Python or CLI that you can do to kind of run their API. So having a good understanding of the system you're going to integrate to and the different API mechanisms is important as well as the authentication. So there's also some very common ways to authenticate against these systems And we're building standard libraries into the UIP platform to handle things like OAuth, API keys, username, password. So one of the things that you'll be seeing is more integration into management capability that most companies are starting to standardize on. And then the development tools. The development tools are really important if you have, and Karthik is going to show you one of the ones that we've been using, But modern IDEs very, make it very efficient to develop because of the whole cycle you have to go through, through making changes and testing. We've really focused on making that as efficient as possible to where from an IDE, you can deploy to the UAC, test something and kind of get a response back very, very quickly about whether something worked or not. So we're very much focusing on this time to build integrations and trying to get that as small as possible. And IDE kind of is a very key piece of that. And now I'm going to give it back to Karthik because he's kind of demonstrate kind of what I was just describing in terms of how you would see an integration being developed. And while we're waiting on Karthik, I see more questions coming in. You guys are fantastic today. This session apparently is generating a lot of excitement. So while Kartik is taking over, quick question on Teams. We were talking about Teams. Can Teams integration be used for notifications via the actions tab on a task? That's a follow-up question from Michael. Yes. We can do that functionality, Nadia. It's absolutely supported. Thank you. Yeah. We just need to create that task. So either we can send a normal notification to the team's channel or else we can send this approval notifications. Either way, we have to define those tasks and then put it in the actions. That's it. So yeah. Let me start with the demo. So just like Peter mentioned, so we have some new development tools. One is like this universal integration platform, CLI tool. So as soon as it's available for all our customers, you can download it using the pip command as as you usually download this Python based extensions. Now I will show you how this works. So let's check what version we are running on. So right now, we are running version one point zero. So let's dive deep into it. So let's use the help command and see what are the commands supported by our CLI. So as soon as I hit the help command, you can see we support different sets of commands, basically, from initializing your project and extension project in your project directory and then creating like, building it once you're done defining the logic and creating your extension. And once you done building it, you can upload it. And as well as you can pull and push an already existing extension or an integration from our controller back to your project directory, work on it, and then push it back the new code or the new updated version of the integration back into the controller. Yes. So let me start with running few of these commands. Let's start with template list. So the template list option helps you with listing all the templates which are available as a part of this tool. So here, we support provide one sample. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use this sample template and start initializing my new extension project. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the initiate initialize command, which is it's this one. So u I p initialize hyphen t, and I will use the sample. The hyphen t looks for the sample template. So I'm using the sample one template, which we already here. And I'm gonna provide a new name to my extension here, which is extension underscore name equal to sample one. Yeah. So as soon as I hit it, behind in you can see the projects getting initialized in the file explorer in my project library, and you can see it the project directory gets initialized with all the necessary files and the repositories and stuff, like including the source directory and as well as the setup files and the initialized files and everything. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna build it. So this basically, though since I used the template, it already comes with the basic functionality of a sleep task. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna build this universal extension now. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use build command, and I'm gonna build the template and as well as the extension. Yeah. So now you can see a sample zip file is produced, which contains my extension as well as the templates. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna upload it in my controller. So UIP. So before that, I'll show my controller which doesn't have any tasks here. So you can see it's a empty list. So I'm gonna run this. So upload and I'm gonna provide the login credentials and then follow password. Sorry. No. It's wrong. Yep. Just a minute, guys. So yes. Let me use the help command. Just a minute just to make sure I used the I think you guys between the dash and the w. Okay. Oh, yeah. Thanks, Peter. No problem. Yep. Now, as soon as I did it, so we can see the template available here. So right by this way, you can now you can just start updating your template right here, like, if you want to create a field. Let me show you one interesting thing here. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start editing the universal template which I uploaded, and then I'm gonna pull it in my using my IDE. Yeah. Let's do this. So I will add a different field also. Let me add a choice field. Why not? Choice. Yes. Allow empty choices. And I'll put it to dynamic sequence. Yep. Okay. Cool. Got it. So apart from the CLI, we also have an extension available for Visual Studio Code right now, which will be available for our customers soon this end of this month. And here you can see the extension which is available here. So we have this UIP extension available for our users. So what you can do is you can run this basic set of commands from here. So, yeah, I'll use this UIP extension now. But before running this extension, what I will do is I will set my login credentials and stuff. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Set user. Kartik is doing that, Peter. We got questions on Teams that keep coming in, so I figured might as well go ahead and ask another one. So when setting up the Teams approval, what is used for the API endpoint? So for Teams I think the one that Kartik showed was on Microsoft three sixty. So that one may be, I think you can have Teams based hosted yourself or you can also have it, Microsoft hosted. Ours is hosted. The one that he was showing was up on Microsoft three sixty. So it's probably an endpoint for that. Thank you. Karthik, back to you. Yep. Just a minute. I'm just configuring this extension once again. So one one of the other questions was where are the APIs that support building an integration documented? So as Kartik said, the the initial UIP platform and development platform is going to be released in a few weeks and with that will be documentation that describes what Kartik is showing here, which is the development tools, as well as sample extensions that you can see, that you can start with. So the goal is, is that you actually have templates that you can start and build from versus having to do everything from scratch. And again, it's based on Python. So you just download the SDK from the Python repository and then you're all ready to go. But everything you see that Kartik does from the command line, you can do from in Visual Studio Code. So it's very interactive in terms of being able to do hot keys very quickly to once you make a change to build it and publish it. And then through the APIs in the UAC, you can even run things from within Visual Studio Code through the REST API. So you really can do everything from within the IDE versus having to go back and forth between the IDE and UAC. And for those integrations provided through the Integration Hub, do they get patched, upgraded automatically by StoneBranch? I think we might have had that question before when they get submitted. One of the things that, one of the things with the Integration Hub is, everything is versioned. And so anytime a new version is published, it will automatically get uploaded into the Integration Hub. So the whole support process can be very quickly done to where if you need an enhancement or an improvement made to an integration, we will kind of publish it out there and then it can be downloaded very easily. And in the future, you can even get notifications when one of the integrations you have has been updated. And speaking of notifications, so we talked about Teams, but clearly there's tons of free tools out there and Google Chat is one of them. So somebody is asking, can the same functionality be applied to Google Chat as what you showed in Teams? I think, you know, we don't have an integration with Google Chat, but I know they have an API. So it's, I don't know offhand if it works exactly like Team does, but I believe you can, but we don't have one today. Great. And now we're at the top of the hour. So I know that Karthik probably, Karthik, do you need another minute or so? Yep. I got it working. Just give me two minutes. Okay. So But the again, these the development platform tools will be released in a couple of weeks. And these tools are not associated with a UAC release. So it is independent and will be released with updates outside of a we just released seven point one at the beginning of October, but the development kit, as long as with the integrations are kind of constantly updated. So you don't have to wait on that cycle for new features and capabilities. Thank you. And you got to love live demos, right? Real life scenarios of logging in and logging out and you always have the choice with live events. Do you prerecord and show it or do you run it live? Well, we always opt for the live version, so sometimes we do run into snags, but I know you guys are staying on, so we appreciate that a lot. I'm sure you wanna see the end of it. Right? K. Let me get started with this virtual studio code extension. So before doing anything, I will set my user ID, like configure things, and I'll set my password here. Yes. And I'll set my URL as well. Yes. Fine. So I'm in the project directory, which I set up earlier. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull this repository in so that there will be a change in the JSON dot template. It's running. Now yep. Yeah. Now you can see here that template dot json got updated because I created the choice field in the controller, not through the code, so it will be updated here now. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a logic here in the code and then we can get to see that code in action back in the controller in a minute. Yeah. I'll add a piece of code now and show so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add set of options for the choice field because if you guys remember, I didn't add any choices to the choice field earlier. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set those choices here now. So what I'm gonna I will save it and from the Visual Studio extension, I will build it once again, the new updates, and then I will push it to the controller, like upload it once again. So now the template got updated. So let's check that. Yeah. So let me refresh this template. Sorry. So here we have the sample task. So in the code here, we can see I added five choices. Let's see whether we have that available now. I will create a dummy task. I'll add an agent here and then we have the choice field and I will submit it. And now we can see the choices available here. So this way, you can use our new development tools in our development workflow and you can get starting and you can easily do this pushing and pulling from the controller to the controller from the controller in a easy way. Yes. Peter, back to you. Thanks. Yeah. And what Karlik just demonstrated is what I talked about earlier, which is the real time kind of back and forth between the controller and the agent running on a system. And so, you know, we can do this real time. You can query down to the system and get information back up and make that part of the task that you're executing. So that's the whole goal is to kind of get this real time talking back and forth, either before you run something or even during wallop, it's executing. So I think that wraps up the demo portion. I know we're over time. So Nadia, I don't know if you want to do Q and A or if you want to take the questions and we'll answer them offline. Actually, we were extremely successful and resourceful with today's Q and A. We handled all of that during the little waiting moments here and there. So I think we're good. We can conclude this session. So guys, thank you so much for your participation. This is Stone Branch Online and I'm Nadia Davis.