The ONEiO platform has allowed RoundTower (Acquired by AHEAD) to overcome previous resource, and technical limitations with an easy to use, simply priced, agile and flexible solution for their organization and customers. With ONEiO in place, AHEAD has been able to:
• Handle 10-20,000 tickets per month without issue directly from their ServiceNow instance, without the need to purchase licenses for their end-customer tools (in some cases up to 100 per client)
• Save up to 100+ hours a month by automating integrations through ONEiO, and in the process reduce integration time from months to weeks.
• Forecast integrations costs with simple pricing from ONEiO.
Seeking better options for their Servicenow solution
AHEAD, a Managed Services Provider located in the United States set forth to find an integration partner, that would allow AHEAD to do a bi-directional integration directly with their end-customers, regardless of the tool the end-customer was utilizing. The focus was to support seamless integration, without having to train the managed services staff on the multitudes of tools their end-customers were using or having to purchase licenses to customer tools.
At the time, Senior Manager of Managed Services Engineering, Ben Weber’s team was working at a one off pace for every endeavour they faced and attempted to solve every incoming integration as a one-off with a new solution, which in turn had led to AHEAD having a manual integration built on various tools. Ben and the AHEAD team recognized this was not a sustainable way of working, especially with the projected growth.
“We had kind of a hodgepodge of solutions that we had put in place for different integrations. When I joined RoundTower (acquired by AHEAD), I was looking at the integrations to see if we could come up with a solution that would be kind of a one size fits all solution for not only the integrations that we had in place today but also for future integrations,” says Denise Taylor, ServiceNow Platform Architect.
Seeking the right solution to check all their boxes
Making the integration project more complicated was the need to integrate LogicMonitor to the managed ServiceNow instance that would support the entire managed services customer base. Upon several solution reviews, AHEAD had identified a few market leaders to evaluate, including Informatica, Dell Boomi, Celigo, Perspectium and Tray.io in addition to ONEiO. After finalizing their review, three things stood out to the AHEAD team – simplicity, configurability and pricing.
Simplicity - "Something many of the other tools had in common was their complexity. A lot of companies these days have a scaled down resource pool and we were going to need a resource that was an expert in these other tools we were considering because they were so complex. ONEiO just wasn’t as complex for being able to set up.
Configurability - Another feature that really set ONEiO apart was the ability to do integrations that weren’t already offered. Other integration tools offered endpoint solutions, but we knew there would come a day when we needed to integrate with one of our customers that used a non-mainstream ITSM tool. With ONEiO, the approach was, ‘Hey, we’ll help you guys build the endpoints’ and there’s basically no extra charge for that was so different than some of these other tools.
Pricing - We have no idea what the volume of our messages are going to be from customer to customer, so the idea that we could have a price point and knowing what that price was going to be regardless of the traffic with the customer was very appealing,” stated Denise.
ServiceNow-LogicMonitor and ONEiO
AHEAD needed a solution that would seamlessly integrate not just ServiceNow and the end-customer, but also their monitoring solution, LogicMonitor:
“When an alert is raised, we wanted to be able to auto acknowledge that the incident in Servicenow had been created and that we had received that alert. We wanted to show that acknowledgement in logic monitor and also wanted to be able to start that device out with a low level warning and then it could raise to an error or raise to a critical, so the severity would change depending on the metrics. We also needed to keep a history of what was going on with that device all in the same incident.
A previous integration prior to ONEiO changed its severity before raising different incidents and this gave our servicedesk more work to do in order to find those incidences and match them to try to keep a history together. We also have what we call ‘Monitoring Only’ contracts, and in some cases we wanted to be able to raise incidents but not work from them and wanted a way for those incidents to auto close so that they don’t stay open indefinitely.
In the case of Servicenow to Servicenow we’re running all the traffic through ONEiO and if they have different categories of incidence or different prioritizations, whatever the transformation is needed between how they’ve customized their Servicenow instance and how we’ve customized ours, we do those transformations across ONEiO and then we get the added benefit that if we ever have an endpoint that is down or we have a problem, we have those messages housed in ONEiO so they can be retried.
All of these types of requirements were beyond what the vendor offered out of box and that’s another reason we chose to go with ONEiO because we could accomplish those extra requirements,” Denise said.
Benefits of using ONEiO
A system that handles the ticketing output while saving customer’s money on licensing costs
AHEAD sees that there are many benefits from using the ONEiO platform for their integrations. The ONEiO platform has allowed them to overcome previous severe limitations while granting them flexibility and control for both their organization and their customers.
“I think that organizations that we talk about this with, first are relieved that we have a solution and it’s not a native solution. I think some companies have struggled to perform this work themselves using, for example the built in Servicenow tools or things of that nature and they’re really glad that we have figured out a better way and ONEiO is powering that. They’re excited to hear that we have that capability,” states Ben.
Additionally, ONEiO’s robust system has been able to handle the workload put out by AHEAD totalling 10,000-20,000 tickets per month without issue. Further, AHEAD customers are seeing the benefits of saving on licensing costs by leveraging the ONEiO solution.
“For like an enterprise customer where we’re doing a full infrastructure stack, we would typically have in excess of 140 accounts that we would need with our integration methodology, that’s been reduced to less than 20. So we’re saving over 100 ITSM user accounts in that platform and that’s per customer,” says Ben.
Further, AHEAD found that prior to utilizing ONEiO, their integration times would take months to set up, but once they began to utilize ONEiO, the time turned to weeks allowing for them to schedule more customer integrations.
“Before we had this product we were quoting very long lead times to be able to accomplish things and with ONEiO that time involvement and in turn cost has reduced dramatically. We’re at a point now where we are basically scheduling an integration per month with a customer. We’ve got a pipeline going with integrations lined-up right now. You could say that we’re potentially saving 100+ hours a month in effort by leveraging ONEiO as the solution versus what we were doing before” states Ben.
“I’ve been in IT almost 30 years now and I’ve worked with a lot of vendors and I have to say, ONEiO is towards the top of my list of being easy to work with and really trying to go out of their way to help us be successful as customers. They’ve been phenomenal to work with,” concluded Denise.
About AHEAD
RoundTower (Acquired by AHEAD) is an elite systems integrator known for providing innovative business solutions backed by timely and personable support. Recognized and awarded by CRN, Forbes, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte on multiple occasions for delivering consistently outstanding customer support. It's no wonder over 1,500 clients have chosen RoundTower (Acquired by AHEAD) as their technology partner.
About ONEiO
ONEiO is a cloud-native integration service provider. We are driving the industrial revolution in the enterprise integration space by removing all traditional integration challenges by automating integration delivery and production and providing integrations as a cloud-based, enterprise-grade, secure and always-on service with an affordable pay-per-use pricing model.
If you are looking for ways to keep your tools and people up to speed, contact us for a free 15-minute assessment to see how we can help you reach better integration outcomes. With a 100% success guarantee!
