Integrating third-party products with BMC Helix Innovation Suite by using REST APIs


BMC Helix Innovation Suite is designed to be used with third-party products to create an integrated solution. The primary intent of business software is to enable users to do their jobs more quickly with fewer resources. In many IT organizations, BMC Helix Innovation Suite applications are the central applications for tracking information. Therefore, the opportunities to integrate BMC Helix Innovation Suite with other applications are endless, ranging from simple access to diagnostic utilities to large-scale integration with manufacturing, customer interaction, and financial accounting systems.

An administrator can either use REST APIs or web services for integrating third-party applications with BMC Helix Innovation Suite. 

The following image gives a high-level view about using REST APIs for integrating third-party applications with BMC Helix Innovation Suite:

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Integration between applications helps applications communicate with each other, and reduces data redundancy. The primary reasons for integration are:

  • Data sharing: To share data structures or jointly access a common database.
  • Process linking: To enable multiple applications to communicate with each other so that the user can complete a process seamlessly. For example, one application (App1) automatically launches another application (App2) and the user continues with the steps to complete the process because App2 receives information from App1 in the context of the process. The user might not even know that multiple applications are involved to complete a single task.

Scenario

Apex Global has built a custom helpdesk application to track requests. By using REST APIs, this helpdesk application integrates with BMC Helix Innovation Suite. When an employee creates a request, say for a new asset, the IT team, the employee's manager, and the accounts department are notified and the required approval process is initiated. After the due process is complete, the new IT asset is allotted to the employee.

Based on the scenario, the following image shows an overview of how integration with BMC Helix Innovation Suite works:

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Workflow

Step

Action

Reference

1

An employee requests new headphones, and an incident is created on the incident interface through a POST call. 

The incident is registered in the system after the POST call is successful.

For information about the POST method, see Create an entry.

2

The Manager and other approvers approve the request, and the incident is updated through a PUT call. 


For information about using the PUT operation to update or modify an entry, see Update an entry.

3

The employee receives the new headphones and the ticket is resolved.

The incident is updated with a PUT call. 

4

The incident is closed by the service desk agent.

Benefits

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  • By using BMC Helix iPaaS, reuse the APIs in the business processes of your applications without having to rebuild the integration for each application or use.
  • Integrating your application with BMC Helix Innovation Suite provides increased functionality and efficiency.
  • Its flexible, multiplatform, multi-database architecture and highly customizable user interface make BMC Helix Innovation Suite highly adaptive.
  • The webhook definition eliminates the manual effort required to create workflows and removes the need for continuous server polling.
  • Integration by using REST APIs requires a limited number of operations for the interactions between clients and services.
  • Integration by using REST APIs offers ease of communication between multiple data formats such as XML, JSON, and YAML.
  • Web services provide a simple, platform-agnostic method for application integration.


For complete information about integrating with third-party products, see Integrating .