We’re proud to announce that Salto has launched five new applications—Zuora, Jira, Zendesk, Workato, and Stripe—bringing the total to seven. (They’re joining applications like Salesforce and NetSuite). By the end of the year, we’ll add even more, bringing the total to 10.
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There are several reasons this is such a big deal. The first is that while Salto provides visibility within and control over those applications, it also offers visibility and control across them. That matters, because while business applications have grown into towering silos, workflows like quote-to-cash need to work across departments. Salto provides that.
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The second reason is new applications and use cases mean people can answer questions in minutes rather than days or weeks. It provides an unheard of level of certainty. You no longer have to live in Bayesian confidence score limbo—e.g. “I’m 90% certain nothing will break if we change this... maybe.”
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What do speed, certainty, and more applications mean for you? Explanatory power and credibility like never before.

Top takeaways

• 10 business applications supported by end of year
• Salto’s NaCl language binds all applications together to create a true multi-application solution, thus offering control within, but also across
• The entire solution is open sourced, as part of our ongoing commitment to our developer community
• With Salto, everyone can be a developer, even without understanding code

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New application highlights

Upon launch, these new applications are read-only. They provide visibility into each system. In time, as with our Salesforce and NetSuite application, we’ll also launch controls. Today, they allow you to explore and monitor the following configuration elements:

• Zuora—the main configuration entities in Zuora Billing such as product catalog and rate plans, workflows, custom and standard objects, and settings related to accounting and billing
• Jira—the main configuration entities in Jira such as issue types and fields, screens, boards, filters, projects, workflows and permission schemes
• Zendesk—the main configuration entities in Zendesk Support, in areas such as ticket management and customization, business rules, account configuration, and more
• Workato—recipes, connections, custom properties and roles, API clients, and profiles
• Stripe—the main configuration entities such as products, prices, coupons, report types, tax rates, webhook endpoints, and country specifications

What can I do with these applications?

1. Understand impact, analyze root causes, document, and collaborate

These applications allow you to understand what impact a particular proposed change will have in that system. Or, if a change occurred and you want to understand it, you can trace it back to its root cause, and debug.
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Let’s explore a few practical examples. Let’s say you want to retire a field in Zendesk or Zuora, and you want to know what this change will impact. With Salto, you can inspect that field and identify whether any other fields are dependent on the field you would like to retire. Another example is being alerted about a bug in production that’s related to a recent change. Given that you know this change worked properly on your test environment, you can compare your test and production environments in Salto to identify the differences and pinpoint the root cause.
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These applications allow for impact analysis across systems—that is, Workato plus Salesforce, NetSuite, or Zuora. (Workato provides the cross-app connection.) Let’s walk through an example.
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Say your quote-to-cash workflow spans Salesforce (product configuration, pricing, and quoting), Zuora (invoicing), NetSuite (financial ledger), and Stripe (payment processing), you can monitor that whole progression with Salto. This allows you to anticipate and avoid costly mistakes. Curious how a change in Salesforce might affect your quote-to-cash process? With Salto, you can check. Worried that someone might make one of those changes unannounced? Salto allows you to set alerts via email or Slack for any part of that flow.
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As part of our ongoing open source commitment and our belief in open ecosystems and the power of crowds to create and troubleshoot, we are also offering these extended capabilities in our open source Git repository.
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And finally, and we’ll explore later in this article, you can collaborate, so what one person is doing in one of those systems is visible to their team.

2. Get the full power of Salto with no need to code

We’ve reimagined the Salto interface to make it friendlier and more intuitive to anyone—administrator or developer. (Or, as we’re increasingly defining it, pro-coders or low-coders. Everyone who alters these applications is a developer. It’s just a matter of degrees.) With this new interface, there’s no need to know how to code to use Salto, even though it provides all the power of code.
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Specifically:

• A new layout: We’ve elevated important features that previously felt buried, making them easier to access from a new navigational hierarchy.
• A new semantic, code-free view: We’ll soon introduce a new semantic view to allow those who don’t code to nevertheless read NaCl.
  

In truth, Salto is pioneering a bit of a different path. When asked, “Code or no-code?” our answer is, “Both.” Under the hood, what makes Salto so powerful is the fact that it extracts configurations from your top applications and abstracts them into a uniform language (NaCl). That makes previously misfiring systems like Salesforce and NetSuite interoperable and consistent. It allows you to bring all the power of code-management principles like version control to bear, and to "search and replace" 100 settings in a few clicks rather than having to change these settings directly from the application.
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At the same time, Salto’s interface for administrators is now no-code, or what we call “semantic.” It offers the advantages of code (in that all your systems are now interoperable) but displays it in a no-code interface. So, instant visibility into what’s happening, as well as versioning, branching and merging, collaboration, and consistency.
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This is the future, we think. Code control with a no-code option to democratize access.

3. New and improved use cases and features

In addition to the above, we’ve also added the ability to compare environments and upgraded your ability to audit and collaborate. We’ve also added support for on-premise Git systems.
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Environment comparison: Quickly compare two environments. If you’re told about a bug in production, but you can’t reproduce it in your testing environment, you can check to see what’s different. This works for all the configurations within those environments.
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Find and replace: Make bulk changes the same way “find and replace” works in a text editor. For example, rename a field that appears across many forms. (This already existed in our open source offering and we’ve pulled it into our SaaS offering.)
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Collaboration: Previously, Salto was a personal workspace. Now, we’ve added shared, read-only environments, and you can share links that’ll point a teammate to a particular configuration element of interest. If a new environment is added, other teammates can immediately see it in their accounts and can execute any of the read-only use cases.
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Git on-premise: You can now connect your self-hosted Git system with Salto.
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Audit: In the new interface, we’ve elevated the Audit feature to the forefront, and improved it, with things like the ability to re-edit comments. You can capture and document each of the changes to your business applications. It syncs (via Git) with a ticketing system such as Jira or ServiceNow which you or an auditor can query later.
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CPQ: You can now onboard your CPQ configuration to Salto faster. (New CPQ customers are automatically processed.)
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Tracker: You now have a new notification format that’s less technical and easier to read. You can also receive notifications via email. (It was previously only available via Slack).
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Improved performance: Enjoy shorter configuration loading times.

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Explanatory power and credibility like never before

What has me most excited about everything we’ve launched isn’t the release itself, but what it can mean for teams like yours. You can now be the business systems expert who does everything faster than expected. When stakeholders ask what were previously unanswerable questions, you now have an answer, and quick. And with the ability to analyze impact, you can start to make a quantitative case for more resources, and handle more tasks with the same effort.
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It’s an exciting new world for business systems teams—one where they can move faster and influence the business—and we’re only just getting started.