Success Story: Microsoft Services DevOps Chooses Provance ITSM for a Rapidly Changing World

Change is a way of life for DevOps. As the bedrock that supports the various Microsoft DevOps teams, Microsoft Services DevOps relies on Provance® IT Service Management and Microsoft Dynamics® 365 to meet the challenges of their day.

Microsoft Services DevOps is responsible for a large range of services to support the various Microsoft DevOps teams—encompassing approximately 15,000 employees—who in turn are responsible for the delivery of high-quality and secure software to Microsoft customers.

“We needed a platform and a service management solution that could support heavy traffic and would allow us to adapt and respond quickly to constantly changing business requirements,” said Manojkumar Damodaran Nambisan, Architect Manager at Microsoft. “We wanted a tool that could match the DevOps environment where change is the norm.”

A Modern ITSM Evolution Begins

Although the Microsoft Services DevOps team were familiar with Dynamics 365 and were aware of Provance ITSM, they decided to review various solutions to see how they measured up against their known requirements.

“Besides needing the ITSM essentials, the solution had to have integrated IT Asset Management, be easily configurable, support self-service, capable of complex automations, and give us a holistic dashboard view with all details in one place, which could then be modified to cater to different user groups ranging from fulfillers, users and management,” said Manojkumar Damodaran Nambisan.

Upon completion of their analysis, Provance ITSM was the clear winner as it met all their requirements.

“Since Provance ITSM runs natively in Dynamics 365, it also has a richness of integration within the Microsoft eco-system, so we knew we could capitalize on this further and in ways we hadn’t yet envisioned,” said Deepak Kumar Mishra, Sr. Consultant at Microsoft.

ITSM and ITAM Work Best Together

Top of their list of requirements was an integrated IT Asset Management (ITAM) capability for updating and hosting all assets created as part of their Service Request fulfillment process.

“We’ve always known that for every service we do, assets are impacted, but we were really in the dark, so integrated ITAM along with CMDB capabilities were extremely important to us,” said Deepak Kumar Mishra. “For example, now when a service request is opened, all assets that were created during this particular request are tracked and traceable. Having asset and service information integrated in one platform has given us much greater clarity as to what’s happening and the interrelationship between the two.”

Automating With Minimal Coding

When resources are stretched to the limit, automating processes and repetitive and simple tasks is a great way to increase efficiency, ensure consistency, and reduce errors.

“It was quite important to us that our new solution can automate most of our service catalog items, supporting self-service,” said Deepak Kumar Mishra. “Of course, while automation of a few service catalogs is in progress, we recently delivered—to one of the teams we serve—self-service channels for two of their main catalog items and an automated approvals process that had a huge set of complex requirements, including nearly 20 forms.”

One of the great features of Provance ITSM is that it enables codeless configuration, from forms to process stages to automations and more.

“It’s just so easy to automate now,” said Deepak Kumar Mishra. “We didn’t have to learn a new language to automate within Provance ITSM or even to connect Provance ITSM to other solutions with Power Automate. We’ve started delivering automations and target about 80 percent of the service catalog getting automated. We now handle over 600 requests a month, with plans to onboard more catalogs to handle over 1500 a month and these automations would definitely help us cater faster to our user base. We’ve also found that the turnaround time to create an automation from conception to production has been substantially reduced and that’s because of the capabilities of Provance ITSM and Dynamics 365. Not having huge amount of code has made a big difference.”

Leveraging the Native Integration Capabilities

Provance ITSM leverages Dynamics 365, the Power Platform, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Azure and Office 365 to let IT overcome data silos and become more nimble, flexible and efficient responding to the needs of the business.

“We are planning to leverage Microsoft Teams now in a way that we couldn’t have before. At Microsoft, everyone uses Teams every day and in a big way. And now, without leaving Teams, we get to see their service cue and the responses, how different fulfillers are responding, ticket status and so on,” said Deepak Kumar Mishra. “The added efficiency of this would be immense when all users and fulfillers leverage this functionality.”

Calm in a Sea of Change

“One of the biggest achievements for us when we implemented Provance ITSM is that we now have all the data from all the different solutions that we use coming into a single platform, giving us a complete 360 degree view of our environment,” said Manojkumar Damodaran Nambisan. “This has not only given us greater clarity, but it’s allowing us to respond more quickly and more effectively to business requests.”

“We are able to now meet the challenges of the DevOps environment that we work in day to day,” said Deepak Kumar Mishra. “We knew that to leverage Provance ITSM, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure and the rest of the Microsoft eco-system would help us to achieve our goal of modern service management, which would also best serve our user base and prepare us for the next generation of capabilities.”