About AHEAD
AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. With cloud-native capabilities in software and data engineering, and an unparalleled track record in infrastructure modernisation, AHEAD helps their clients accelerate the promise of digital transformation.
AHEAD’s main integration challenges
As a Managed Services Provider, AHEAD’s work touches hundreds of customer tools and systems each day. Having a future-proof, flexible integration solution is integral to the growth and success of their services, and their customers’ experience.
Before working with ONEiO, AHEAD’s main integration challenges were:
- Lack of bi-directionality and control over integrations
- Rising cost of licenses for customer tools
- Increasing complexity of integration logic
- Growth in volume of customer connections
Why did they choose ONEiO?
At the time, Senior Manager of Managed Services Engineering, Ben Weber’s team were attempting to solve every incoming integration as a one-off with a new solution, which in turn had led to AHEAD manually integrating each tool.
Ben and the AHEAD team recognized this was not a sustainable way of working, especially with the company’s projected growth.
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 customers’ tools.
So the need was clear: AHEAD needed an integration partner that would allow bi-directional integration directly with their end-customers, regardless of the tool the end-customer was utilizing. A solution that could suit all of their integrations: both those that were in place already, and all new ones.
ONEiO went on to become that solution, for a few key reasons: 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 wasn’t complex to set up.”
Configurability
“Another feature that really set ONEiO apart was the ability to easily create standardized integrations for endpoints that weren’t yet offered. 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.”
Pricing
“We have no idea what the volume of our messages are going to be from customer to customer, so the idea of having a set price regardless of the traffic with the customer was very appealing.”
How we solved their integration challenges
What made the integration project more complicated was the need to integrate LogicMonitor, AHEAD’s infrastructure monitoring platform, to the managed ServiceNow instance in order to 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.
Before using ONEiO, AHEAD’s previous integration solution would change an alert’s severity before raising the correct incidents – which gave the AHEAD service desk team even more work to do: find the incidents, match them, and try to create a history.
With ONEiO, the alert and severity workflow is automated between ServiceNow and LogicMonitor, removing the burden from the service desk, and giving the team a clearer picture of the overall situation. Not only that, but ONEiO’s integration automation platform ensures all messages are sent and received in the correct order, regardless of downtime.
AHEAD’s integration requirements were much more complex than other vendors offered as standard. With ONEiO, they could easily achieve the extra customization without extra cost.
The best things about working with ONEiO
Working with ONEiO has allowed AHEAD to overcome challenges that limited their growth, while providing flexibility and control for their organization and their customers.
“Our customers are relieved that we offer a non-native solution to integrating their tools. Some companies have struggled to perform this work themselves using, for example, the built in ServiceNow tools. They’re excited to hear that with ONEiO we have the capability to easily onboard them, whatever tools they use.”
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. Additionally, AHEAD customers are seeing the benefits of saving on licensing costs—to the tune of 100 ITSM user accounts per customer.
Before utilizing ONEiO, integrations would consistently take months to set up. However, once they began automating integrations with ONEiO, the time dwindled to just weeks or days – saving over 100 hours a month in effort and resources.
What’s AHEAD for our collaboration?
As AHEAD continues their growth path with new customers onboarding regularly, ONEiO will be there to support them in collaborating with their customers even better.
To create a smoother, more efficient experience for AHEAD’s customers, the ONEiO team will continue to add necessary endpoint types to suit the needs of each customer.
What’s next for AHEAD and ONEiO?
“We’ve got a pipeline of customer integrations lined-up and we’re scheduling one integration to go live every month. It’s that easy.”
