💡Note
Hi everyone,
In a company all hands at the start of 2023, I shared that before the end of the year, we would officially make Tines available to teams outside security. You had a lot of questions, the most common of which was “why are we doing this?” My answer was that “this was always the plan”. Although true, that wasn’t exactly a helpful or insightful response. So today, as we begin to officially tell the world how Tines can help any team build smart, secure workflows, I wanted to revisit the question.
In 2018, Thomas and I founded Tines to make the lives of security teams easier. While working at DocuSign, we experienced first hand the pain of being overwhelmed with alerts, data, and disjointed tools; we wanted to solve that pain. Our goal was to build a platform to automate frontline security teams’ repetitive processes. By doing so, we aimed to enable these teams to focus on the work that truly mattered to them and their businesses.
Our not-so-secret plan was to build the product in a way that would directly address the automation challenges of security teams, while simultaneously supporting any enterprise workflow, regardless of complexity, use-case, or technology stack. (Easy, right!?)
By maniacally focusing on flexibility, user-friendly design, and best-in-class security we won the hearts of customers, and in a remarkably short time, we've become the leader in security automation.
As you know, from our earliest days, we've relied on Tines to automate numerous mission-critical, internal processes. These include workflows like employee onboarding, infrastructure management, asset tracking, sales lead routing, and event sign-ups. We are unabashedly proud of this and have consistently shared on our blog the various ways in which we utilize our product to enhance the efficiency of our internal teams.
We’ve always been unsurprisingly motivated to apply Tines in as many diverse ways as possible. What has been surprising, however, is the eagerness with which non-security teams within our customers have embraced Tines to automate their own repetitive and manual workflows.
Seeing other teams find value and solve their problems with Tines –without any direction from us– has been exhilarating.
Non-security teams, much like our security customers, don’t view Tines as a "security" product; rather, they see it as a fast, secure, and straightforward solution for solving their unique workflow and automation challenges in ways other tools at their disposal can’t. Today, more than a quarter of our customers use Tines for non-security use cases, and they have done this in an organic, self-directed way.
The thing we’ve come to love most about Tines is the endless possibilities it presents when it comes to automation of processes and procedures. It is so simple to go from idea, to POC, to production usage, which was always one of the larger pain points when it came to building automations in the past.
Dennis Henry, Director of Engineering, Okta
Now that we have built all the rules and automation, we can {...} move towards becoming a more strategic partner with our HR function to identify new processes to make onboarding more seamless.”
Anything that has a backend API, we’re now using Tines to tie into that tool. Our ability to integrate new tools has taken out so much of our everyday tasks from before. We can automate anything, the only thing we’re limited by is our own mindset and time to do it."
We saw the opportunity to use it beyond security because it’s very easy to engage with, simple, and easily adaptable too. It gives us an opportunity to bring automation into areas of the organization that don’t have developers to implement automation in the more traditional [code] way.”
Code42 has developed integration workflows for their end customers powered by Tines, Mars has created self-service engagement portals, and Intercom's IT team has automated their entire user lifecycle management program. These are just a few instances illustrating how organizations of various sizes and across different industries have benefited from our platform beyond security. Now, picture the value we could add to other companies if we offered every team the same level of high-quality content, prebuilt workflows, and best practice guidance that we provide to security teams. Today, is the beginning of that journey.
In the past year, we've been working closely with customers, partners, and market analysts. We’ve fine-tuned our vision for a smart and secure workflow platform that caters to all enterprise teams. With the introduction of innovative features like API creation, apps, cases, records, and dynamic integrations, we are closer than ever to realizing that vision.
Finally, although offering Tines to these wider teams was always the plan, a plan is only as good as its execution. It’s taken discipline, creativity, and hard work to get to this point. You should all be so proud of yourselves, our customers, and our partners. I know I am.
Thank you and let’s get started,
Eoin