Get to know CORTEX
Whether you are seeking Growth or Enterprise versions of CORTEX, the features of the product remain the same.
Watch our videos to see our product, and hear our colleagues discuss the real world application of the features and functions of CORTEX.
Automation Governance
Role-based access control
Centralised governance and control are critical to your business's automation success as you scale. CORTEX’s granular access control means you can centrally control who can view, modify, create, release, and use automation at every stage.
Role-based ownership of automation in both development and production removes the risk of accidental, malicious, or unapproved change, giving reassurance across all business functions that changes are made by the right people at the right time.
Full logging and audit capabilities enable a single graphical view of your automation estate, capturing detailed execution activity.
Release Management
CORTEX provides added governance over the publishing of your automation flows to a production operation state. Selected users create solution packages containing the appropriate versions of all automation definitions, which are known to work together. This solution package, which is version-controlled in the same fashion as individual automation definitions, is published by the user to the production environment when it is immediately available for use.
CORTEX supports multiple versions of each solution package to be active in the production environment, and the user can select one as the default version. This enables you to migrate other systems which interact with CORTEX from the previous to the new version at an appropriate pace.
Version Control
A citizen developer user base means developers are often spread across different floors, different offices even different time zones. Being able to effectively track changes is critical to ensuring your automations are correct.
CORTEX’s integrated Version Control ensures that you have a full history of every committed change to your automation, including who made it and when.
Our graphical flow comparison viewer allows your team to quickly understand the differences between versions, reducing the likelihood of lost updates from one user overwriting the work of another.
Rapid Development
Everything needs to be visual
As you will now have seen in our videos, we believe in the visual experience.
With CORTEX, we try to keep everything complex easy to work with so you can have confidence in what you are doing and have done.
We use a visual model for our automation definition environment, making it intuitive and easy for citizen developers to rapidly build and validate new automation flows in the CORTEX Design studio.
Icons and clear descriptions mean that users can rapidly grasp the layout and overall function of the automation flow.
Each function block icon displays its configuration in the property editor, allowing users to enter property values by entering literal values, referencing existing data variables, or providing C# expressions.
Pre-built Function Blocks
CORTEX comes out of the box with more than 200 pre-built Function Blocks providing discrete atomic functions, enabling citizen developers to drag and connect them up as necessary to meet the automation requirements.
Function Blocks exist to:
- Parse and manipulate data structures, including simple types such as strings, numbers, and Booleans and complex types such as lists, dictionaries, and dates and times.
- Help make decisions and route execution.
- Integrate with external 3rd party applications over a range of connectivity protocols including HTTPS, email, SSH, and SQL.
- Catch, identify and handle both expected and unexpected error conditions.
Each Function Block has comprehensive online help providing examples of its use, details on its specific properties and information on the types of exceptions it may report.
Exception Handling
To be truly autonomous, automation must be able to identify and handle exceptional situations. Hierarchical exception handling allows developers to define the automation response to both known and unknown errors.
Developers can chain together multiple exception handlers, each triggered by a specific exception scenario; the logic from each of these can be as unique as necessary. A final ‘catchall’ exception handler allows the user to define logic to execute when an unknown or unexpected error occurs.
This is a powerful capability that organisations can leverage to ensure that the automation delivers maximum value.
3rd Party Integration
Integrating with your existing IT landscape your devices, systems, applications and data is at the core of every useful automation platform.
CORTEX supports a wide variety of out-of-the-box integration technologies, including HTTPS RESTful APIs, FTP, SSH and telnet, and SQL. Our application extensibility capabilities have enabled CORTEX to be integrated into Kafka brokers, ESB such as Web Methods, and social media apps including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram.
Automation at scale
Concurrency
At scale, RPA, scripts and other simpler technologies fail you. They are not designed for concurrency, nor should they be.
Your business can be operating hundreds, thousands and much higher volumes of tasks and processes concurrently, and under certain conditions, this can be business critical, service-affecting and therefore brand-affecting.
CORTEX enables you to operate concurrently, rather than in simple sequences or in batch processes. This will be critical when you consider the dynamic needs of 5g, incident-triggered service, or even just to help you meet the needs of substantial Enterprise demands you would otherwise not deliver the expected fulfilment against.
Zero-downtime automation
Things change, all the time; and you need to be confident you automation will keep up with any changes in its environment. We recognise how mission critical deployed automation is and that’s why CORTEX supports zero-downtime automation models.
At the touch of a button, an appropriately 'authorised user' can publish CORTEX automation to your production environment as frequently as necessary, with no interruption to in-flight process executions. CORTEX also supports multiple concurrent versions of each published automation, allowing you to migrate your other applications from previous to new at a pace that suits you.
Human-in-the-loop
No matter how much automation you have, at some stage there will always be a need to consider a Human-in-the-loop, and our Interaction portal supports these activities:
- Change Management - Effective change management can involve a decision to make change in small and incremental steps, especially when it moves when tasks and decisions from the humans to CORTEX.
- Automation Exceptions - CORTEX will run, and run, even when exceptions occur. Your operation should not be forced to stop owed to an anomaly, other than by design of course. CORTEX traps exceptions and presents them to the Human-in-the loop for review.
- Continuous Automation - There will be processes you want to materially automate which will include a Human by design. From Customer Experience innovations, to your debtor management, sometimes you shouldn't have a fully autonomous operation!
- Quality Assurance and Control - Like and QA and QC process, random line picks for assessment feature for CSPs too. CORTEX can be configured to support random selection so you can review whatever you want to, whenever you want to, when it's necessary, and when it's preferred.
A Personalised Experience
The CORTEX Interaction Portal is a web application which, as described, allows users to access in-flight automation executions as and when needed, by desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
Whether users need to review and approve 'next actions', provide additional data inputs, or handle exceptional scenarios, the CORTEX Interaction Portal presents necessary information in a context-specific, personalised interface with clear guidance on what inputs, decisions or actions are required.
Jeopardy Management
As in any business, certain processes will demand timeliness and certain inputs to keep the whole machine moving. CORTEX has built-in jeopardy management, tracking when any necessary input is not received by the required time, after which CORTEX can escalate or redirect the request as appropriate.
Automation Factory
Also called Sandboxes, our CI, CD, CT capability includes a safe place to design and build your automation.
Sandboxes create safe havens for users to make mistakes, innovate, and create privately so they can really push the boundaries of what they're trying to achieve. Users can experiment to the extreme, while also being safe in the knowledge that they are not harming the organisation or breaching safety protocols.
Sandbox designs remain concealed until they are published for wider review and potential promotion to Production systems. They do not incur fees or costs and can cause no harm.
This powerful facility to let your business experiment means they can harness more people and more know how. You can learn faster, and in do so safely. You can innovate and transform like never before.
Geo-Resilience & High Availability (HA)
If you opt for Enterprise, CORTEX can be deployed in High Availability and Geo-Resilient architectures, ensuring the availability of your automated operations 24x7x365
Based on state-of-the-art technology, CORTEX ensures that your automation platform is always available to process service requests from your business. By spreading the workload across many CORTEX nodes, the loss of any one node does not impact the ability of CORTEX to continue operating.
You can choose to deploy each CORTEX node on-prem in your data centres, in a public cloud, or in your private cloud environment, adding to the resilience of your CORTEX operational platform.
If you want to read more about our Software Features or access more content about the application of automation and orchestration, our blog has an extensive library of content.