As for your key feature. If I’m hearing you correctly is having a connector “studio” versus simply having a SDK (API, Documentation & Examples). I completely agree, any way you can automate a process, saving time and making it easier is fantastic.

I would encourage also having the SDK/API since some complicated interactions may not work (or be an option) through a recording process (also, even through more complicated, some people just prefer scripting). Another thing this made me wonder is do you offer a community where your customers can share these “connectors” they build? Do any IT Process Orchestration vendors offer this?

Our solution (and my vote for a required feature) is capture/replay, ideally both for the Windows GUI and http. It’s a really useful tool to have the in box when you need to integrate with something unusual. It also has the benefit for helpdesks or diagnostics that by going through the same UI a human would use, the automation will experience exactly the same behavior that customers are seeing avoiding the problem that an API will behave differently to a user interface in some cases.

First I’ll add a few more attributes that I think are important.

1. A set of out of the box integrations with infrastructure and management products that is both deep (i.e. engineered, not scripted) and broad (i.e. support for most tools you have in your environment from multiple vendors).
2. An integrated data bus for passing information within the workflow (eg. using the attributes entered in a Remedy form as parameters for provisioning a virtual machine) that doesn’t require scripted variable substitution.
3. Integrated rules-based decision making capabilities that (guess what comes next) doesn’t require scripting.

Without these things you’ll find that in order to make the product work in your unique environment you’ll be writing a lot of scripts, which is what you’re supposed to be eliminating with these tools.

I’d also alter your statement about out of the box processes from “more is better” to “make sure that the vendor offers a broad and deep library of high value processes that solve real world problems”. In this area while quantity matters, quality matters more (do you really need 50 variants of “open a help desk ticket based on an alert”?).

Thanks for writing this blog. I enjoy it very much.