Combining probabilistic and deterministic technology to drive outstanding outcomes; lowest cost, fastest paper to production cycles and lowest risks.
Natural language co-pilots accelerate your OSS teams to go from ideation to production. Deterministic, programmable logic delivers wed to our AI gives you Telco-grade results; high availability, fault-tolerant, continuous-service operation all come as standard. Moving compute power and cost away from highly repetitive automations not only delivers you significantly lower TCO, but creates certainty and frameworks for building and delivering improved AI execution. An OSS with CORTEX supporting it, is just better.
Agents are more effective when using consistent data sets, and operationally safe decision rails.
CORTEX helps you bottle + document Engineering know-how. Re-use and re-purpose it across your entire OSS estate.
CORTEX is vendor agnostic. You need the right tech for each job.
Better OSS
Everything needs to be visual!
We believe in the visual experience. 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 expressions.
Ready to go, 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.
Every process requires Exception Handling
To be truly autonomous, automation must be able to detect, triage and continue to process, even when exceptional situations occur. Automations cannot stop. Likewise, the exceptional situation needs to be resolved, and in our experience, the autonomous design will rarely rely on probabilistic (AI) recommendations without human oversight. You will want an experienced Engineer to help here, but you need the entire operation to keep running as your Engineers step in and help your system evolve. ‘Hierarchical exception handling’ from CORTEX allows you to achieve this.
Developers can 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.
Autonomous Networks are highly integrated
Integrating with your existing IT landscape your devices, systems, applications and data is at the core of everything you need to do next, but the technology should not be difficult to work with.
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
You need rich Role-based access control (RBAC)
Centralised governance and control are critical to your business’s automation success as you scale. 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 just makes sense
Whether you have CI/CD or something else, CORTEX offers 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.
Peace of mind Version Control unlocks more Engineering know-how
A citizen developer user base means Engineers and 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.
Critical performance considerations include 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
A Human-in-the-loop (HITL) can be important
No matter how much autonomous your Network becomes, some sensitive functions of your business, are still best served by a Human interface. Debtor management, New Vulnerability Detections, Quality Controls; from security testing to QA and QC process, random line picks for testing or assessment can be a feature of operational excellence. 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.
Even with a HITL, CORTEX will run, and run, even when exceptions occur, unless you tell it not to! Your operation should not be forced to stop owed to an anomaly, other than by design. CORTEX traps exceptions and presents them to the Human-in-the loop, and increasingly, for AI to review, recommend and build an answer to, ready for the HITL to review and approve.
Of course, HITL can cause you jeopardy. We have thought of that. 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.
“We have a strategic vision for CORTEX which is owed to our success with it, and with team CORTEX"
“The solution has transformed our technical support colleagues’ work, which has enabled a stronger customer experience, and also delivered tangible financial benefits.”
