About CANCOM
Since 1992, Düsseldorf based CANCOM has assisted over 30,000 customers across 60 countries in creating effective ITSM processes. Leading businesses through their digital transformation CANCOM has established over 1,000 long-lasting partnerships. Their consolidated group revenue in 2022 was approximately 1.3 billion euros. CANCOM doesn’t see itself as just another IT service provider, but as a business partner and enabler who can propel companies into the future with IT. CANCOM excels in managed service provision for both businesses and the public sector and works with partners from a variety of industries.
CANCOM’s Integration Challenges
CANCOM manages IT service management processes for a clientele of almost 1,000 businesses. End users record issues and submit requests to CANCOM's clients in the form of "tickets," brief data snippets sent by a variety of systems with varying formats and contents.
For CANCOM to process these tickets efficiently, the various customer service applications used by its clients must be seamlessly integrated with CANCOM’s own ITSM management tool, ServiceNow. These integration projects are technically complex, difficult to implement and maintain, and challenging to standardize because each customer uses a different set of tools and processes.
With this lack of standardization, managed service providers like CANCOM often struggle to give competitive price estimates or highly accurate lead times for integration projects. This is what inspired CANCOM to seek out a better solution for delivering service integrations.
Aside from defining a reliable duration for transition projects and their associated costs, CANCOM had to consider the following integration challenges:
- Mapping the client’s ITSM tools and processes
- Linking communications between the client’s tools and processes and CANCOM's
- Aligning on key processes, such as incident and service request management
- Synchronizing the information from both sides in real-time
- Setting out the delivery of a reliable synchronization with error handling
In the development of this offering, CANCOM hoped to achieve smoother IT processes that would benefit not only customers, but the staff tasked with implementing them, as Siegmar Bröhl, Manager of Enterprise Service Management acknowledges:
"I am responsible for the user experience - here as well as on the customer’s side."
Increased Revenue, Decreased Effort
In the case of CANCOM, an ambitious and market-conscious MSP, a systematic approach to delivering integrations benefits the sales team in particular. CANCOM salespeople can make reliable promises on price, performance, and time-to-value—addressing common concerns and streamlining negotiations. Moreover, CANCOM can calculate the effort involved in delivering integrations to its customers without projects running over time. Sales can be made without first considering the workload bottleneck which falls on technical, highly-trained, and expensive-to-hire staff. Bröhl comments: "We used to have to rely on assumptions here. For example, whether we would need 50 or 100 man-days (to complete a project)."
Data Protection Guaranteed
Being established in Europe was a distinguishing factor in CANCOM's decision to adopt ONEiO, especially given that the majority of ONEiO's rivals are based in the USA. Due to strict EU data protection laws, every participant in CANCOM's ITSM ecosystem must pass a thorough background check in order to prevent the transfer of sensitive customer data to the USA for processing. Bröhl comments on the data protection issue: "This means that we can, in principle, put a checkmark on the issue of the EU Data Protection Regulation." Regarding data security, CANCOM is unable to make any allowances, and its clients can be confident that no U.S. government agency will have access to their information. Additionally, ONEiO has complied with the ISO27001 standard for information security since February 2022, adding another level of protection that CANCOM can disclose to its clients.
Efficiency & Orchestration Built-in
A service provider must be able to complete projects in good time, providing full visibility of the process, and the terms of their Service Level Agreement. With ONEiO, CANCOM increased its efficiency in service delivery, outsourced integration implementation risks, and eliminated upkeep and maintenance requirements. Additionally, CANCOM gained end-to-end visibility of running integrations in a centralized location, allowing them to orchestrate their IT service management at a new level. As Bröhl puts it, "(customer) interfaces can be produced like on an assembly line,” meaning the sum of all tools and processes required to deliver service integrations are standardized to such a degree that they can be performed quickly, reliably, and to scale. Ultimately, this allows CANCOM to scale its ITSM ecosystem at a faster rate, assured of its sustainability going into the future.
How We Solved Them
Knowing that its customers prefer fixed pricing, CANCOM set out to create an integration service that it could sell at a fixed fee, with standardized service descriptions and a short time-to-value.
ONEiO’s role in CANCOM’s predicament was simple—ONEiO would take over the implementation of service integrations at a fixed price, thus allowing CANCOM to pass on these benefits to its customers in the form of guaranteed-pricing and reliable lead times.
Equipping CANCOM with a solution to implement more resilient, highly-scalable service integrations allowed them to do more than sell better—it enabled CANCOM to scale their ITSM ecosystem in order to focus more on growth than on maintenance.
ONEiO also tackled the aforementioned challenges by:
- Providing a standardized integration method and repeatable format for mapping a client’s tools and processes.
- Enabling CANCOM to easily link any tool or service with our innovative endpoint creation method and fully-serviced integrations.
- Facilitating real-time data handling and synchronization throughout the technology pipeline, with guaranteed service uptime, security, and error handling.
