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Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI) announced today it plans to build a self-healing workload automation platform based on an artificial intelligence (AI) cloud service and a Super REST API Adapter that can establish a connection with any application or platform that exposes an application programming interface (API).
The company also announced today it has acquired JSCAPE, a provider of a managed file transfer (MFT) platform, that ASCI will integrate with its ActiveBatch workflow automation platform.
Reed Overfelt, CEO, ASCI, said over the course of the coming year the ActiveBatch platform, used by IT teams to launch and manage jobs and tasks, will be infused with an AI-enabled, preemptive error detection capability using anonymized data provided by customers residing in a cloud-based graph database.
Once issues are detected, the Super REST API Adapter will create a patch that, once approved by an internal IT team, ActiveBatch will automatically apply. In effect, the ActiveBatch platform is being extended in a way that enables IT teams with no programming expertise to employ a graphical user interface (GUI) to manage APIs, Overfelt said.
That approach will enable developers to spend more of their time building code versus programmatically managing APIs via scripts and other tools they then need to support and maintain, Overfelt said. Employing developers to manage infrastructure as code is a lot more expensive than relying on IT administrators. The only reason developers are managing APIs, in most cases, is because IT administrators lacked tools that would enable them to do so without having to know how to program, Overfelt said.
IT administrators will still need to understand how APIs are constructed, but they won’t have to write low-level code to manage them, Overfelt said. In addition, ASCI expects many data science teams will employ ActiveBatch to manage APIs on their own.
Overfelt said that while the AI graph database resides in the cloud, the ActiveBatch workflow automation platform will continue to reside on-premises because of the sensitivity of the data typically shared via APIs. Eventually, ASCI plans to develop a predictive analytics capability that will alert IT teams to potential issues before they occur, Overfelt added.
Ultimately, Overfelt said, it will be up to individual IT organizations to determine what level of automation they want to achieve. They could decide to employ ActiveBatch to apply a patch any time an issue is detected with no IT intervention required, he said.
That level of automation may be far in the future, but AI’s potential to fundamentally alter how APIs – and by extension, IT operations – is managed. The challenge IT teams will face is determining how that shift my impact existing DevOps processes, as workflow automation platforms leverage AI to automate higher-level tasks.
