AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
HCL Workload Automation expands AWS integration with AWS Step Functions
By Salvatore Tucci, Lead Product Manager – HCLSoftware
By Eugene Wiehahn, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Chandra Parvathaneni, Solutions Architecture Manager – AWS
 |
| HCLSoftware |
 |
Introduction
In a world of digital transformation where speed and efficiency are increasingly important, automation is critical. HCLSoftware’s Workload Automation (HWA) and AWS Step Functions act as this workload automation and orchestration layer. Customers look to these comprehensive solutions to streamline the management of complex workflows across their technology landscape.
With a robust user base, HWA has facilitated millions of automation jobs helping businesses achieve operational efficiency and reliability. HWA’s automated job scheduling and workflow orchestration has evolved to equip self-healing capabilities, reduced errors, and improved compliance. HCLSoftware customers have reported productivity gains to the order of 60% and reduced operation costs by up to 15% thanks to HWA’s AI-assisted automation.
Why HWA?
What distinguishes HCL Workload Automation (HWA) is it’s centralized point of control for automation management. For HCL its not just about automating a specific set of operations, it’s about transforming large parts of the customer IT landscape. HWA’s value proposition is multifaceted:
- Centralized Control: Single pane of glass for managing automation workflows. This reduces complexity while enhancing the end-to-end business process across various environment types.
- Hybrid Integration: Seamless orchestration of tasks across cloud and on-premises environments, including sophisticated integrations with core AWS services and applications like SAP no matter where it’s hosted.
- Accelerated Troubleshooting: Quick identification of issues in automation workflows, decreasing mean time to resolution. This minimizes downtime and errors, while maintaining business continuity.
- Enhanced Visibility: End-to-end insights into automation tasks including automating critical alerts. This enables proactive planning, management and optimization.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Designed to scale with your business, HWA supports a broad spectrum of automation needs, from simple tasks to complex workflows.
HWA Integrations
HWA has been integral to the digital strategies of many organizations, offering a suite of integrations with cloud-native services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon API Gateway. HCLSoftware customers have been requesting HWA integration with AWS Step Functions to further enhance automation capabilities, and leverage cloud-native orchestration for workflows.
Announcement: AWS Step Functions Integration
HCLSoftware and AWS are excited to announce integration of AWS Step Functions into HCL Workload Automation. This new feature is a significant milestone in the continuous effort to provide comprehensive, cloud-native automation solutions that meet the evolving needs of customers.
AWS Step Functions is highly valued by AWS customers for its ability to orchestrate microservices, serverless applications, and workflows in a reliable and scalable manner. Step Functions itself is serverless, leaving customers with nothing to manage other than their workflows. Step Functions allows developers to directly integrate with over 220 AWS services and over 10,000 APIs across Compute, Database, Messaging, Analytics, custom APIs created by Amazon API Gateway, Machine Learning, and generative AI services.
Another reason customers gravitate toward Step Functions is its visual interface, which provides a clear and intuitive way to model complex workflows. This simplifies the development of applications especially when coordinating multiple distributed services. Furthermore, Step Functions automates error handling and retry logic, ensuring resilient workflow execution even in the face of failures. The combination of simplicity, reliability, and integration with the broader AWS ecosystem makes Step Functions practical for businesses looking to streamline operations and efficiency.
Customer Example – Sara Assicurazioni
Leading Italian insurance company Sara Assicurazioni uses HWA to perform 500+ use cases. One example is automation of the claims ingestion process, leveraging Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) as trigger, Amazon S3 as storage for claims documents, Amazon Textract to perform OCR extraction of claim document data, and AWS Lambda for workflow logic – all orchestrated by HWA.
Now, with AWS Step Functions integration, Sara Assicurazioni will expand workflow functionality via AWS Step Functions calling Amazon Bedrock to facilitate access to generative AI foundation models. These models will help analyze documents and provide recommendations. This analysis inspects vehicle glass damage claims for missing or incorrect data, anomalies, and claim approval logic allowing for automated completion of most claims.
As described in the following architecture diagram the workflow is as follows:
- Customers submit claims data
- AWS Lambda pulls attachment(s) and stores them in Amazon S3
- Amazon Textract extracts claim information from documents, which is submitted to an AWS Step Functions workflow to call Amazon Bedrock
- Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to pull additional data which augments the foundation model prompt
- Augmented claims data prompt is submitted to a Claude foundation model, and output is stored in an S3 bucket
- AWS Lambda pushes the data to a Document Management System, where a Claim Router Lambda function routes it to either be automatically processed, or where needed invokes an Amazon SNS notification for manual claim processing
Figure 1: Sara Assicurazioni claims analysis architecture orchestrated by HCL Workload Automation
The entire workflow is orchestrated by HWA, and the inclusion of Amazon Bedrock into the pipeline is only possible with AWS Step Functions today, showing the value provided by this new feature in the HWA lineup.
AWS native integration benefits
As described in this example, the integration of HWA with AWS Step Functions opens up a realm of integration possibilities, offering benefits such as:
- Time-Critical Scheduling: With AWS-managed Step Functions, workflows rely on the native integrations built by AWS and can be orchestrated within seconds, facilitating time-sensitive operations seamlessly.
- Native AWS Service Integration: Now, HWA customers can utilize native AWS services leveraging hundreds of AWS Step Functions-supported services. These integrations built by AWS enable a direct and flexible approach to automation. For example, existing HWA integrations like S3 storage can be accessed directly, while also allowing Step Functions to manage tasks from services like Amazon Bedrock. HWA customers can leverage AWS Step Functions where needed permitting all service integrations created by AWS. This is critically important in technical domains like generative AI, where things evolve quickly.
- Existing Step Functions workflows: New or existing HWA customers with existing Step Functions workflows have the flexibility to integrate these into HWA as-is, not having to rebuild to be managed natively within HWA.
HWA Automation Hub
HCLSoftware maintains the HWA Automation Hub housing technical documentation on HWA’s integrations. The Automation Hub allows customers to:
- Access the centralized Automation Hub Catalog with integrations that cater to cloud, and on-prem workloads. This includes integrations with environments across a customer’s entire digital landscape. Customers can integrate with cloud providers like AWS, as well as Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) like SAP, Jira, ServiceNow, Snowflake, and more. This ensures a comprehensive automation strategy no matter where customers decide to run workloads.
- Contribute to HWA integrations by submitting new integrations or updates to existing ones.
An example business-case solved by utilizing a combination of integrations from the Automation Hub catalog can be found in the following scenario. In this example a banking customer tracks payment transaction flows, performs anomaly detection to each transaction, and acts accordingly.
HWA orchestrates this by reacting to transactions in Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), verifying transactions by invoking AWS Lambda functions, sending customer alerts using SNS, and posting messages to a new SQS queue. Anomalies are tracked and blocked where appropriate. Data is stored in an appropriate database which is easily stored to any of the HWA Database or Data Warehouse plug-ins, and transferred to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for long-term storage. From there, further actions can be executed like initiating Step Functions to execute Machine Learning training jobs on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon SageMaker, and more.
Figure 2: Banking Transaction Anomaly Detection and Machine Learning model training execution
Additional scenarios can be found on the AWS Step Functions page on Automation Hub.
AWS and HCL Partnership
The partnership between AWS and HCL is important to the success of customers. With this strategic partnership we work towards a common goal of customer success, ensuring customers can easily procure HCL solutions, and that those solutions follow common technical best-practices. HWA can be procured via the AWS Marketplace providing customers with all the benefits including increased license flexibility, streamlined procurement, and accelerated onboarding. This is especially powerful to customers who already run Workload Automation on-premises today, as it allows for an easy path to migrate to the cloud. Additionally, HWA can be launched on Amazon EKS through the AWS Marketplace, ensuring scalability and simplified solution management for AWS users.
For more information about the AWS Marketplace, see The Total Economic Impact™ of using AWS Marketplace, a commissioned study by Forrester.
Conclusion
To explore how HWA and the new integration with AWS Step Functions can transform your automation strategy, please refer to the HWA Automation Hub AWS Step Functions integration documentation. This integration adds to the already broad list of automation capabilities in the HWA catalog. It also underscores HCL’s dedication to supporting customers on their journey towards increased and improved automation.
By leveraging the strengths of both AWS and HCL, AWS Step Functions integration provides a pivotal feature towards cloud-native automation. Organizations can automate more use cases, with elevated levels of efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
To get started with HWA please visit the HCL Workload Automation AWS Marketplace listing.
HCLSoftware – AWS Partner Spotlight
HCLSoftware, a division of HCLTech, is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Competency Partner that develops, markets, sells, and supports software for AI and Automation, Data, Analytics and Insights, Digital Transformation, and Enterprise Security.