To guarantee a high level of service to its customers, ScaleSquad has been using the iTop ITSM tool, known for its flexibility, for 10 years. Recently, iTop has once again confirmed its adaptability with the implementation of satellites between the tool and ScaleSquad’s customers’ ITSM software. Explanations with feedback from Erburul Yasar, ITSM Manager and Sydney Sicard, Tooling, Automation and Safety Manager.
Offer outsourcing without “confiscating” customer data
For the past ten years, ScaleSquad has been using the iTop ITSM solution to manage its managed services business. The tool meets all the needs of the service center: it is flexible, suitable for multi-client management and its cost is controlled. More recently, a new need has been recognized: that of interconnecting iTop with the ITSM software in place at ScaleSquad’s customers.
“Initially, we had customers who were very interested in setting up their own iTop, in order to keep their data at home under tight control, especially if the managed services contract had ended,” explains Erburul Yasar, ITSM Manager at ScaleSquad. We saw this as an opportunity to create synergies between the tools to improve performance and deploy more automation.“
The ScaleSquad team then launched the implementation of ‘satellites’, i.e. mirror synchronizations between their iTop and those of their customers. “Satellites make it possible to replicate data, tickets, actions, and especially repositories (CMDBs, catalogs, etc.) of our customers. The notion of a ‘common repository’ is important: the goal is not just to make two tickets communicate with each other. Above all, it’s about having the same repositories on both tools, to speak the same language and to be able to ensure truly efficient supervision,” explains Sydney Sicard, Head of Tooling, Automation and Security at ScaleSquad.
Create satellites between iTop and other ITSM tools
The establishment of interconnections between two separate iTops has opened the door to new possibilities.
“The creation of iTop satellites has given us a foot on the ladder to interconnect iTop with other ITSM software. At the request of one of our customers, we set up a mirror synchronization between iTop and EasyVista, in complete autonomy. This needed more investment in R&D (definition of scenarios, expression of needs, etc.), but we achieved a conclusive result in less than six months. We then repeated the operation with four other customers, in ‘continuous improvement’ mode,” says Erburul Yasar.
ScaleSquad went on to establish interconnections between iTop and ServiceNow, with the support of Combodo, and then in complete autonomy. At the same time, the service center deployed automation in iTop to improve its performance.
“We recently set-up automatic calls for calls to our ‘on-call’ service: The night-shift duty is called upon if and only if a failure occurs (thanks to the synchronization between our supervision on Centreon and iTop). This feature makes it possible to save several hundred thousand euros each year, by mobilizing only the necessary on-call duty,” enthuses Sydney Sicard.
The service desk has also implemented automatic ticket creation. “We can now react faster thanks to autoticketing, because where a human might hesitate to create a ticket or wait a certain amount of time before creating it, the robot does it immediately and quickly. In addition, the major advantage of auto-ticketing is the automatic assignment of tickets to the right teams, no longer based on the service catalog, but on the more refined information of the iTop CMDB.” explains Sydney Sicard, enthusiastically.
Expand the customer portfolio with the possibilities of iTop
The figures show the extent to which iTop enables finer traceability of infrastructures : “In 2022, we solved 85,000 tickets. In 2023, we solved more than 100,000 of them. We are becoming more accurate in identifying and resolving incidents with the iTop CMDB, as we have more and more customers with large volumes of infrastructure.“
Indeed, the synchronizations between different ITSM tools have allowed ScaleSquad to expand its customer portfolio by approaching larger accounts (GE, ETI, etc.). The latter often already have an ITSM solution in place…
In addition, iTop allows the service center to visualize all its customers on a single interface, perfectly segmented, in compliance with the GDPR. “The iTop tool allows us to work by pooling resources within a service center, to respond to the requests of our various customers. At the end of the day, this leads to an increase in productivity and savings,” concludes ScaleSquad’s ITSM manager.
