Advania is an IT managed services provider and multi-sector IT solutions partner. With roots in different Nordic countries, Advania was established in 2012 following a merger of Skýrr from Iceland, Kerfi from Sweden and Hands from Norway to become a leading full-service IT provider in Northern Europe.
Advania is also an Elite ServiceNow partner, helping its clients in the areas of IT outsourcing, ERP-systems, process automation, contact centre, IT infrastructure, integration solutions, and data centres.
Advania’s customers, some of them important government agencies, often have their own ticketing systems which need to be integrated with Advania’s own ticketing solution to facilitate the provision of IT managed services.
In the past, ticket exchange integrations were delivered through custom work. This required a significant investment of time — approximately 300 – 400 hours per customer — amounting to a couple of months of work. With Advania looking to scale as a systems integrator, this strategy was seen as both unsustainable and risky.
In 2019, Advania recognised that a profoundly new and much more simplified approach was needed to the way the company, and particularly its managed services arm, was managing integrations.
"The time was ripe for a new way of doing integrations and we knew we had to transform our approach with an agile and standardised solution that reduced the complexity of our integration efforts."
“The time was ripe for a new way of doing integrations and we knew we had to transform our approach with an agile and standardised solution that reduced the complexity of our integration efforts,” explains Elliot West, Head of Strategy & Business Development- Cloud software, Advania.
A stable and easy to deploy integration solution
Advania conducted thorough research of the integration engine market but due to a number of requirements many key players did not make the shortlist. It was essential that the chosen solution would enable both a cloud-based and on-premises implementation due to the nature of some of Advania’s customers.
Advania also wanted to get the new solution up and running fast.
“The fact that Unifi is the integration platform for ServiceNow was a critical factor. It meant we could draw on our existing resources and expertise and go to market with the new integration solution very quickly,” explains Elliot.
Unifi allowed the creation of a ‘golden image’ or standard integration that can be used internally and for all Advania’s customers, simplifying and standardising the integration process. As a result, Advania has generated significant time savings, with the time required to setup an integration being cut from 400 hours to an average of 35 – 40 hours.
New efficiencies driven by the standardised ticket exchange integration have resulted in financial savings of several million Swedish krona (1 million SEK = $120,000).
“The project has been a game-changer,” comments Elliot. “As a managed services provider, we can’t afford our integration system to go down. Unifi has proven to be a highly stable platform that is virtually incident-free.”
New added value for Advania’s consulting services
Unifi has also empowered Advania’s consultants to become best practice advisers on ticket exchange integration, addressing common customer business challenges with standardised solutions and tools.
“Unifi has been invaluable to our consulting business. It’s a great tool to have in our toolkit and we have recommended it to many of our ServiceNow customers,” explains Elliot. “Just like us, they have benefitted from ShareLogic’s pricing model which is very transparent and without any hidden costs.”
Documentation had been a problem for Advania and its customers in the past: “Where it existed it would require significant additional time and developer resources. But more often documentation was insufficient which left us highly exposed if the person that built it was unavailable or had left the business. Often, teams were stretched out and working on a project in a different department when an issue arose so they couldn’t fully focus on integration work,” Elliot adds.
Unifi’s self-documentation feature has automated the process of generating documentation, with Advania’s customers able to instantly access it at no extra cost.
Creating differentiated services with Unifi
The scope of Advania’s partnership with ShareLogic has been growing exponentially. Starting with eight integrations two years ago, Advania now operates 34 ticket exchange integrations with the help of the Unifi platform.
"The partnership has been fantastic and we’ve been constantly impressed by the expertise and flexibility shown by ShareLogic. The support services have been great. The team is highly trustworthy, engaged and responsive. They give us a total peace of mind and have delivered on their promises time and time again."
“The partnership has been fantastic and we’ve been constantly impressed by the expertise and flexibility shown by ShareLogic,” comments Elliot. “The support services have been great. The team is highly trustworthy, engaged and responsive. They give us a total peace of mind and have delivered on their promises time and time again.”
“Moving forward we are looking to leverage Unifi as an integration service bus that will provide our customers with an agile and flexible model to deliver any type of integration,” concludes Elliot.
