Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Fylamynt, a new service that helps businesses automate their cloud workflows, today announced both the official launch of its platform as well as a $6.5 million seed round. The funding round was led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund. Mango Capital and Point72 Ventures also participated.

At first glance, the idea behind Fylamynt may sound familiar. Workflow automation has become a pretty competitive space, after all, and the service helps developers connect their various cloud tools to create repeatable workflows. We’re not talking about your standard IFTTT- or Zapier -like integrations between SaaS products, though. The focus of Fylamynt is squarely on building infrastructure workflows. While that may sound familiar, too, with tools like Ansible and Terraform automating a lot of that already, Fylamynt sits on top of those and integrates with them.

Image Credits: Fylamynt

“Some time ago, we used to do Bash and scripting — and then [ … ] came Chef and Puppet in 2006, 2007. SaltStack, as well. Then Terraform and Ansible,” Fylamynt co-founder and CEO Pradeep Padala told me. “They have all done an extremely good job of making it easier to simplify infrastructure operations so you don’t have to write low-level code. You can write a slightly higher-level language. We are not replacing that. What we are doing is connecting that code.”

So if you have a Terraform template, an Ansible playbook and maybe a Python script, you can now use Fylamynt to connect those. In the end, Fylamynt becomes the orchestration engine to run all of your infrastructure code — and then allows you to connect all of that to the likes of DataDog, Splunk, PagerDuty Slack and ServiceNow.

Image Credits: Fylamynt

The service currently connects to Terraform, Ansible, Datadog, Jira, Slack, Instance, CloudWatch, CloudFormation and your Kubernetes clusters. The company notes that some of the standard use cases for its service are automated remediation, governance and compliance, as well as cost and performance management.

The company is already working with a number of design partners, including Snowflake.

Fylamynt CEO Padala has quite a bit of experience in the infrastructure space. He co-founded ContainerX, an early container-management platform, which later sold to Cisco. Before starting ContainerX, he was at VMWare and DOCOMO Labs. His co-founders, VP of Engineering Xiaoyun Zhu and CTO David Lee, also have deep expertise in building out cloud infrastructure and operating it.

“If you look at any company — any company building a product — let’s say a SaaS product, and they want to run their operations, infrastructure operations very efficiently,” Padala said. “But there are always challenges. You need a lot of people, it takes time. So what is the bottleneck? If you ask that question and dig deeper, you’ll find that there is one bottleneck for automation: that’s code. Someone has to write code to automate. Everything revolves around that.”

Fylamynt aims to take the effort out of that by allowing developers to either write Python and JSON to automate their workflows (think “infrastructure as code” but for workflows) or to use Fylamynt’s visual no-code drag-and-drop tool. As Padala noted, this gives developers a lot of flexibility in how they want to use the service. If you never want to see the Fylamynt UI, you can go about your merry coding ways, but chances are the UI will allow you to get everything done as well.

One area the team is currently focusing on — and will use the new funding for — is building out its analytics capabilities that can help developers debug their workflows. The service already provides log and audit trails, but the plan is to expand its AI capabilities to also recommend the right workflows based on the alerts you are getting.

“The eventual goal is to help people automate any service and connect any code. That’s the holy grail. And AI is an enabler in that,” Padala said.

Gradient Ventures partner Muzzammil “MZ” Zaveri echoed this. “Fylamynt is at the intersection of applied AI and workflow automation,” he said. “We’re excited to support the Fylamynt team in this uniquely positioned product with a deep bench of integrations and a nonprescriptive builder approach. The vision of automating every part of a cloud workflow is just the beginning.”

The team, which now includes about 20 employees, plans to use the new round of funding, which closed in September, to focus on its R&D, build out its product and expand its go-to-market team. On the product side, that specifically means building more connectors.

The company offers both a free plan as well as enterprise pricing and its platform is now generally available.

ServiceNow, the cloud-based IT services company, is making a significant acquisition today to fill out its longer-term strategy to be a big player in the worlds of automation and artificial intelligence for enterprises. It is acquiring Element AI, a startup out of Canada.

Founded by AI pioneers and backed by some of the world’s biggest AI companies — it raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and Tencent, among others — Element AI’s aim was to build and provision AI-based IT services for enterprises, in many cases organizations that are not technology companies by nature.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a spokesperson told TechCrunch, but we now have multiple sources telling us the price was around $500 million. For some context, Element AI was valued at between $600 million and $700 million when it last raised money, $151 million (or C$200 million at the time) in September 2019.

Even at $500 million, this deal would be ServiceNow’s biggest acquisition, although it would be a sizeable devaluation compared to the startup’s last price at fundraising.

A spokesperson confirmed that ServiceNow is making a full acquisition and will retain most of Element AI’s technical talent, including AI scientists and practitioners, but that it will be winding down its existing business after integrating what it wants and needs.

“Our focus with this acquisition is to gain technical talent and AI capabilities,” the spokesperson said. That will also include Element AI co-founder and CEO, JF Gagné, joining ServiceNow, and co-founder Dr. Yoshua Bengio taking on a role as technical advisor.

Those who are not part of those teams will be supported with severance or assistance in looking for other jobs within ServiceNow. A source estimated to us that this could affect around half of the organization.

The startup is headquartered in Montreal, and ServiceNow’s plan is to create an AI Innovation Hub based around that “to accelerate customer-focused AI innovation in the Now Platform.” (That is the brand name of its automation services.)

Last but not least, ServiceNow will start re-platforming some of Element AI’s capabilities, she said. “We expect to wind down most of Element AI’s customers after the deal is closed.”

The deal is the latest move for a company aiming to build a modern platform fit for our times.

ServiceNow, under CEO Bill McDermott (who joined in October 2019 from SAP), has been on a big investment spree in the name of bringing more AI and automation chops to the SaaS company. That has included a number of acquisitions this year, including Sweagle, Passage AI and Loom (respectively for $25 million, $33 million and $58 million), plus regular updates to its larger workflow automation platform.

ServiceNow has been around since 2004, so it’s not strictly a legacy business, but all the same, the publicly traded company, with a current market cap of nearly $103 billion, is vying to position itself as the go-to company for “digital transformation” — the buzz term for enterprise IT services this year, as everyone scrambles to do more online, in the cloud and remotely to continue operating through a global health pandemic and whatever comes in its wake.

“Technology is no longer supporting the business, technology is the business,” McDermott said earlier this year. In a tight market where it is completely plausible that Salesforce might scoop up Slack, ServiceNow is making a play for more tools to cover its own patch of the field.

“AI technology is evolving rapidly as companies race to digitally transform 20th century processes and business models,” said ServiceNow Chief AI Officer Vijay Narayanan, in a statement today. “ServiceNow is leading this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make work, work better for people. With Element AI’s powerful capabilities and world class talent, ServiceNow will empower employees and customers to focus on areas where only humans excel – creative thinking, customer interactions, and unpredictable work. That’s a smarter way to workflow.”

Element AI was always a very ambitious concept for a startup. Dr. Yoshua Bengio, winner of the 2018 Turing Award, who co-founded the company with AI expert Nicolas Chapados and Jean-François Gagné (Element AI’s CEO) alongside Anne Martel, Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer and Philippe Beaudoin, saw a gap in the market.

Their idea was to build AI services for businesses that were not tech companies in their DNA, but would still very much need to tap into the innovations of the tech world in order to continue growing and remaining competitive with said tech companies as the latter moved deeper into a wider range of industries and the companies themselves required increasing sophistication to operate and grow. They needed, in essence, to disrupt themselves before getting unceremoniously disrupted by someone else.

And on top of that, Element AI could work for and with the tech companies taking strategic investments in Element AI, as those investors wanted to tap some of that expertise themselves, as well as work with the startup to bring more services and win more deals in the enterprise. In addition to its four (sometimes fiercely competitive) investors, other backers included the likes of McKinsey.

Yet what form all of that would take was never completely clear.

When I covered the startup’s most recent tranche of funding last year, I noted that it wasn’t very forthcoming on who its customers actually were. Looking at its website, it still isn’t, although it does lay out several verticals where it aims to work. They include insurance, pharma, logistics, retail, supply chain, manufacturing, government and capital markets.

There were some other positive points. Element AI also played a strong ethics card with its AI For Good efforts, starting with work with Amnesty in 2018 and most recently Mozilla. Indeed, 2018 — a year after Element AI was founded — was also the year AI seemed to hit the mainstream consciousness — and also started to appear somewhat more creepy, with algorithmic misfires, pervasive facial recognition and more “automated” applications that didn’t work that well and so on — so launching an ethical aim definitely made sense.

But for all of that, it seems that there perhaps were not enough threads there to need a bigger cloth as a standalone business. Glassdoor reviews also speak of an endemic disorganization at the startup, which might not have helped, or was perhaps a sign of bigger issues.

“Element AI’s vision has always been to redefine how companies use AI to help people work smarter,” said Element AI founder and CEO, Jean-Francois Gagné in a statement. “ServiceNow is leading the workflow revolution and we are inspired by its purpose to make the world of work, work better for people. ServiceNow is the clear partner for us to apply our talent and technology to the most significant challenges facing the enterprise today.”

The acquisition is expected to be completed by early 2021.

Enso Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building a new application security posture management platform, today announced that it has raised a $6 million seed funding round led by YL Ventures, with participation from Jump Capital. Angel investors in this round include HackerOne co-founder and CTO Alex Rice; Sounil Yu, the former chief security scientist at Bank of America; Omkhar Arasaratnam, the former head of Data Protection Technology at JPMorgan Chase and toDay Ventures.

The company was founded by Roy Erlich (CEO), Chen Gour Arie (CPO) and Barak Tawily (CTO). As is so often the case with Israeli security startups, the founding team includes former members of the Israeli Intelligence Corps, but also a lot of hands-on commercial experience. Erlich, for example, was previously the head of application security at Wix, while Gour Arie worked as an application security consultant for numerous companies across Europe and Tawily has a background in pentesting and led a security team at Wix, too.

Image Credits: Enso Security / Getty Images

“It’s no secret that, today, the diversity of R&D allows [companies] to rapidly introduce new applications and push changes to existing ones,” Erlich explained. “But this great complexity for application security teams results in significant AppSec management challenges. These challenges include the difficulty of tracking applications across environments, measuring risks, prioritizing tasks and enforcing uniform Application Security strategies across all applications.”

But as companies push out code faster than ever, the application security teams aren’t able to keep up — and may not even know about every application being developed internally. The team argues that application security today is often a manual effort to identify owners and measure risk, for example — and the resources for application security teams are often limited, especially when compared the size of the overall development team in most companies. Indeed, the Enso team argues that most AppSec teams today spend most of their time creating relationships with developers and performing operational and product-related tasks — and not on application security.

Image Credits: Enso Security / Getty Images

“It’s a losing fight from the application security side because you have no chance to cover everything,” Erlich noted. “Having said that, […] it’s all about managing the risk. You need to make sure that you take data-driven decisions and that you have all the data that you need in one place.”

Enso Security then wants to give these teams a platform that gives them a single pane of glass to discover applications, identify owners, detect changes and capture their security posture. From there, teams can then prioritize and track their tasks and get real-time feedback on what is happening across their tools. The company’s tools currently pull in data from a wide variety of tools, including the likes of JIRA, Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub, Splunk, ServiceNow and the Envoy edge and service proxy. But as the team argues, even getting data from just a few sources already provides benefits for Enso’s users.

Looking ahead, the team plans to continue improving its product and staff up from its small group of seven employees to about 20 in the next year.

“Roy, Chen and Barak have come up with a very elegant solution to a notoriously complex problem space,” said Ofer Schreiber, partner at YL Ventures . “Because they cut straight to visibility — the true heart of this issue — cybersecurity professionals can finally see and manage all of the applications in their environments. This will have an extraordinary impact on the rate of application rollout and enterprise productivity.”

ServiceNow today announced the latest release of its workflow automation platform. With this, the company is emphasizing a number of new solutions for specific verticals, including for telcos and financial services organizations. This focus on verticals extends the company’s previous efforts to branch out beyond the core IT management capabilities that defined its business during its early years. The company is also adding new features for making companies more resilient in the face of crises, as well as new machine learning-based tools.

Dubbed the “Paris” release, this update also marks one of the first major releases for the company since former SAP CEO Bill McDermott became its president and CEO last November.

“We are in the business of operating on purpose,” McDermott said. “And that purpose is to make the world of work work better for people. And frankly, it’s all about people. That’s all CEOs talk about all around the world. This COVID environment has put the focus on people. In today’s world, how do you get people to achieve missions across the enterprise? […] Businesses are changing how they run to drive customer loyalty and employee engagement.”

He argues that at this point, “technology is no longer supporting the business, technology is the business,” but at the same time, the majority of companies aren’t prepared to meet whatever digital disruption comes their way. ServiceNow, of course, wants to position itself as the platform that can help these businesses.

“We are very fortunate at ServiceNow,” CJ Desai, ServiceNow’s chief product officer, said. “We are the critical platform for digital transformation, as our customers are thinking about transforming their companies.”

As far as the actual product updates, ServiceNow is launching a total of six new products. These include new business continuity management features with automated business impact analysis and tools for continuity plan development, as well as new hardware asset management for IT teams and legal service delivery for legal operations teams.

Image Credits: ServiceNow

With specialized solutions for financial services and telco users, the company is also now bringing together some of its existing solutions with more specialized services for these customers. As ServiceNow’s Dave Wright noted, this goes well beyond just putting together existing blocks.

“The first element is actually getting familiar with the business,” he explained. “So the technology, actually building the product, isn’t that hard. That’s relatively quick. But the uniqueness when you look at all of these workflows, it’s the connection of the operations to the customer service side. Telco is a great example. You’ve got the telco network operations side, making sure that all the operational equipment is active. And then you’ve got the business service side with customer service management, looking at how the customers are getting service. Now, the interesting thing is, because we’ve got both things sitting on one platform, we can link those together really easily.”

Image Credits: ServiceNow

On the machine learning side, ServiceNow made six acquisitions in the area in the last four years, Wright noted — and that is now starting to pay off. Specifically, the company is launching its new predictive intelligence workbench with this release. This new service makes it easier for process owners to detect issues, while also suggesting relevant tasks and content to agents, for example, and prioritizing incoming requests automatically. Using unsupervised learning, the system can also identify other kinds of patterns and with a number of pre-built templates, users can build their own solutions, too.

“The ServiceNow advantage has always been one architecture, one data model and one born-in-the-cloud platform that delivers workflows companies need and great experiences employees and customers expect,” said Desai. “The Now Platform Paris release provides smart experiences powered by AI, resilient operations, and the ability to optimize spend. Together, they will provide businesses with the agility they need to help them thrive in the COVID economy.”

In what felt like strange timing, Salesforce has confirmed a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that it was laying off around 1,000 people, or approximately 1.9% of the company’s 54,000 strong workforce. This news came in spite of the company reporting a monster quarter on Tuesday, in which it passed $5 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time.

In fact, Wall Street was so thrilled with Salesforce’s results, the company’s stock closed up an astonishing 26% yesterday, adding great wealth to the company’s coffers. It seemed hard to reconcile such amazing financial success with this news.

Yet it was actually something that president and chief financial officer Mark Hawkins telegraphed in Tuesday’s earnings call with industry analysts, although he didn’t come right and use the L (layoff) word. Instead he couched that impending change as a reallocation of resources.

And he talked about strategically shifting investments over the next 12-24 months. “This means we’ll be redirecting some of our resources to fuel growth in areas that are no longer as aligned with the business priority will be now deemphasized,” Hawkins said in the call.

This is precisely how a Salesforce spokesperson put it when asked by TechCrunch to confirm the story. “We’re reallocating resources to position the company for continued growth. This includes continuing to hire and redirecting some employees to fuel our strategic areas, and eliminating some positions that no longer map to our business priorities. For affected employees, we are helping them find the next step in their careers, whether within our company or a new opportunity,” the spokesperson said.

It’s worth noting that earlier this year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff pledged there would be no significant layoffs for 90 days.

The 90-day period has long since passed and the company has decided the time is right to make some adjustments to the workforce.

It’s worth contrasting this with the pledge that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott made a few weeks after the Benioff tweet, promising not to lay off a single employee for the rest of this year, while also pledging to hire 1,000 people worldwide the remainder of this year, while bringing in 360 summer interns.

Zoom announced a new Hardware as a Service offering today that will run on the ServiceNow platform. At the same time, the company announced a deal with ServiceNow to standardize on Zoom and Zoom Phone for its 11,000 employees in another case of SaaS cooperation.

For starters, the new Hardware as a Service offering allows customers, who use the Zoom Phone and Zoom Rooms software, to acquire related hardware from the company for a fixed monthly cost. The company announced that initial solutions providers will include DTEN, Neat, Poly and Yealink.

The new service allows companies to access low-cost hardware and pay for the software and hardware on a single invoice. This could result in lower up-front costs, while simplifying the bookkeeping associated with a customer’s online communications options.

Companies can start small if they wish, then add additional hardware over time as needs change, and they can also opt for a fully managed service, where a third party can deal with installation and management of the hardware if that’s what a customer requires.

Zoom will run the new service on ServiceNow’s Now platform, which provides a way to manage the service requests as they come in. And in a case of one SaaS hand washing the other, ServiceNow has standardized on the Zoom platform for its internal communications tool, which has become increasingly important as the pandemic has moved employees to work from home. The company also plans to replace its current phone system with Zoom Phones.

One of the defining characteristics of SaaS companies, and a major difference from previous generations of tech companies, has been the willingness of these organizations to work together to string together sets of services when it makes sense. These kinds of partnerships not only benefit the companies involved, they tend to be a win for customers too.

Brent Leary, founder at CRM Essentials, sees this as a deal between two rising SaaS stars, and one that benefits both companies. “Everyone and their mother is announcing partnerships with Zoom, focusing on integrating video communications into core focus areas. But this partnership looks to be much more substantial than most, with ServiceNow not only partnering with Zoom for tighter video communication capabilities, but also displacing its current phone system with Zoom Phone,” Leary told TechCrunch.

With more companies moving workers home, making sure your systems are up and running has become more important than ever. ServiceNow, which includes in its product catalog an IT Help Desk component, recognizes that help desks have been bombarded during the pandemic. To help stop configuration problems before they start, the company today acquired Sweagle, a configuration management startup based in Belgium.

The companies did not share the purchase price.

ServiceNow gets a couple of boosts in the deal. First of all, it gets the startup’s configuration management products, which it can incorporate into its own catalog, but it also gains the machine learning and DevOps knowledge of the company’s employees. (The company would not share the exact number of employees, but PitchBook pegs it at 15.)

RJ Jainendra, ServiceNow’s vice president and general manager of DevOps and IT Business Management, sees a company that has pioneered the IT configuration management automation space, and brings with it capabilities that can boost ServiceNow’s offerings. “With capabilities for configuration data management from Sweagle, we will empower DevOps teams to deliver application and infrastructure changes more rapidly while reducing risk,” Jainendra said in a statement.

ServiceNow claims that there can be as many as 50,000 different configuration elements in a single enterprise application. Sweagle has designed a configuration data management platform with machine learning underpinnings to help customers simplify and automate that complexity. Configuration errors can cause shutdowns, security issues and other serious problems for companies.

Sweagle was founded in 2017 and raised $4.05 million on a post-valuation of $11.88 million, according to PitchBook data.

The company is part of a growing pattern of early-stage startups being sucked up by larger companies during the pandemic, including VMware acquiring Ocatarine and Atlassian buying Halp in May and NetApp snagging Spot earlier this month.

This is the third acquisition for ServiceNow this year, all involving AI underpinnings. In January it bought Loom Systems and Passsage AI. The deal is expected to close in Q3 this year, according to ServiceNow.

AWS today launched Amazon AppFlow, a new integration service that makes it easier for developers to transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications like Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake and Zendesk. Like similar services, including Microsoft Azure’s Power Automate, for example, developers can trigger these flows based on specific events, at pre-set times or on-demand.

Unlike some of its competitors, though, AWS is positioning this service more as a data transfer service than a way to automate workflows and while the data flow can be bi-directional, AWS’s announcement focuses mostly on moving data from SaaS applications to other AWS services for further analysis. For this, AppFlow also includes a number of tools for transforming the data as it moves through the service.

“Developers spend huge amounts of time writing custom integrations so they can pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analysed; these can be expensive and can often take months to complete,” said AWS principal advocate Martin Beeby in today’s announcement. “If data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications have to be made to the integrations. Companies that don’t have the luxury of engineering resources might find themselves manually importing and exporting data from applications, which is time-consuming, risks data leakage, and has the potential to introduce human error.”

Every flow (which AWS defines as a call to a source application to transfer data to a destination) costs $0.001 per run, though, in typical AWS fashion, there’s also cost associated with data processing (starting at 0.02 per GB).

“Our customers tell us that they love having the ability to store, process, and analyze their data in AWS. They also use a variety of third-party SaaS applications, and they tell us that it can be difficult to manage the flow of data between AWS and these applications,” said Kurt Kufeld, Vice President, AWS. “Amazon AppFlow provides an intuitive and easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public Internet. With Amazon AppFlow, our customers bring together and manage petabytes, even exabytes, of data spread across all of their applications – all without having to develop custom connectors or manage underlying API and network connectivity.”

At this point, the number of supported services remains comparatively low, with only 14 possible sources and four destinations (Amazon Redshift and S3, as well as Salesforce and Snowflake). Sometimes, depending on the source you select, the only possible destination is Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Over time, the number of integrations will surely increase, but for now, it feels like there’s still quite a bit more work to do for the AppFlow team to expand the list of supported services.

AWS has long left this market to competitors, even though it has tools like AWS Step Functions for building serverless workflows across AWS services and EventBridge for connections applications. Interestingly, EventBridge currently supports a far wider range of third-party sources, but as the name implies, its focus is more on triggering events in AWS than moving data between applications.

You don’t need your PhD in economics to know the economy is in rough shape right now due to the impact of COVID-19, but ServiceNow today pledged that it would not lay off a single employee in 2020 — and in fact, it’s hiring.

While Salesforce’s Marc Benioff pledged no significant layoffs for 90 days last month, and asked other company leaders to do the same, ServiceNow did them one better by promising to keep every employee for at least the rest of the year.

Bill McDermott, who came on as CEO at the end of last year after nine years as CEO at SAP, said that he wanted to keep his employees concentrating on the job at hand without being concerned about a potential layoff should things get a little tighter for the company.

“We want our employees focused on supporting our customers, not worried about their own jobs,” he said in a statement.

In addition, the company plans to fill 1,000 jobs worldwide, as well as hire 360 college students as interns this summer, as they continue to expand their workforce, when many industries and fellow tech companies are laying off or furloughing employees.

The company also announced that it is taking part in a program called People+Work Connect, with Accenture, Lincoln Financial Group and Verizon (the owner of this publication). This program acts as an online employer to employer clearing house for these companies to hire employees laid off or furloughed by other companies. The company plans to post 800 jobs through this channel.

Okta, the popular identity and access management service, today used its annual (and now virtual) user conference to launch Lifecycle Management Workflows, a new tool that helps IT teams build and manage IFTTT-like automated processes with the help of an easy to use graphical interface.

The new service is an extension of Okta’s existing automation tools. But the key here is that IT teams and developers can now easily build complex identity-centric workflows across a wide range of applications. With this, these teams can easily automate an onboarding process, where setting up a new Okta account also immediately kicks off processes on third-party services like Box, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Slack to set up accounts there. The same goes for offboarding workflows and username creation. A lot of companies still do this manually, which is not just a hassle but also error-prone.

“Adopting more technology is incredibly beneficial for enterprises today, but complexity is a significant side effect of a changing technology ecosystem and workforce. There is no better example of the potential challenges it can create than with lifecycle management,” said Diya Jolly, chief product officer at Okta. “Okta’s vision of enabling any organization to use any technology goes deeper than just access; it’s about improving how organizations use technology. Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows improves the efficiency and security of enterprises through its simple user experience and broad applicability, keeping organizations secure and efficient without requiring the complexity of writing code.”

Okta, of course, had lifecycle management features before, but now it is also putting its acquisition of Azuqua to work and using that company’s graphical interface and technology for making it easier to create these automation processes. And while the focus right now is on processes like provisioning and de-provisioning accounts, the long-term plan is to expand Workflows with support for more identity processes.

As Okta also stresses, administrators can also manage very granular access across the supported third-party tools like assigning territories in Salesforce or access to specific group channels in Slack, for example. For temporary employees, admins can also set up automatic de-provisioning workflows that revoke access to some tools but maybe leave access to payroll services open for a while longer. There are also built-in tools for automatically managing conflicts when two people have the same name.

“Millions of people rely on Slack every day to make their working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive,” said Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack, one of the early adopters of this service. “Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows has significantly increased efficiency for us by automating the provisioning and de-provisioning of users from applications in our environment, without us ever having to write a line of code.”

This new feature is part of Okta’s new Platform Services, which the company also debuted today and which currently consists of core technologies like the Okta Identity Engine, Directories Integrations, Insights, Workflow and Devices. The core idea behind Platform Services is to give Okta users the flexibility to manage their unique identity use cases but also to give Okta itself a platform on which to innovate. One other new product that sits on top of the platform is Okta Fastpass, for example, which allows for passwordless authentication on any device.