Workato for the past two years has been offering a cloud automation service that bridges various enterprise applications. It enables different enterprise applications to sync data and prevents users from having to jump from one application to another to do their work.

About 12,000 companies now rely on its platform, and the Workato community has cooked up 100,000 recipes for how employ its solution.

Pricing for the Workato platform varies by applications used, but small businesses can connect to any number of applications on the platform for $99 a month, mid market pricing starts at $500 a month, and enterprise pricing starts at $2,000.

This spring the company unveiled a major update of that solution. The update addresses additional applications, features new chatbot capabilities, delivers reports and analytics, and provides lifecycle support.

New from Workato is support for Cisco Spark, a Slack-like solution; Marketo (News - Alert), a popular marketing automation solution; ServiceNow, a global leader in service desk management software; QuickBase, an Intuit (News - Alert) spinoff that allows medium and large businesses to do custom applications addressing stuff like accounting and project management; and others including Blackbaud and Tradeshift.

“The connectivity doesn’t mean much, it’s the solutions around it,” notes

Vijay Tella, CEO of Workato, which got its start two years ago with a focus on Salesforce.

Workato now has custom connectors for 150 applications, but it also offers REST APIs and a few weeks ago launched a beta of an SDK to allow for integrations.

Also new from Workato are workbot capabilities for individual applications such as Salesforce.

Workato actually launched its enterprise chat solution, Workbot, in early February. Salesforce is the top app used in Workbot. But recently the company introduced Workbot for Salesforce, which is a version of the solution tailored for Salesforce users, Tella explained.

The idea behind Workbot is to provide users with a console through which they can interact with various applications. Workbot typically lives inside business applications like Cisco (News - Alert) Spark and Slack and pulls in only the relevant information – like the trouble tickets an employee needs to see, as well a related charts and analytics that may be needed to allow them to take action on that information.

“So instead of hopping around five apps, you can just go into Workbot and say ‘tell me more,’” explains Tella.

Workato now also allows reports and analytics to be shared among the different business applications its platform connects. And the company recently began providing lifecycle support around its platform. For example, the company will help businesses apply to their own environments the recipes others in the Workato community have shared. Workato is also introducing a capability so users can test various tasks and turn on automations. And the company will provide its users with notifications of new recipes and guide those users through how to update for those recipes, explained Tella, who founded Tibco, started the Fusion middleware group at Oracle, and launched and sold to Skype the mobile video streaming company known as Qik (News - Alert).