Migrating a BMC-Based ITSM With 20 Integrations to the ServiceNow Platform

Summary

An enterprise IT services company moving its service desk from a legacy BMC platform to ServiceNow needed to keep roughly 20 client-facing ITSM integrations working through the switch. INNERLUXES designed and delivered a reusable ServiceNow integration application that preserved every existing workflow and turned each future integration into a templated, low-effort exercise. Twenty integrations were migrated, and the same solution has since powered more than 50.

About the Client

The Client is an IT company providing software development and IT services, with 10,000+ employees and a turnover exceeding $1 billion.

A Legacy BMC ITSM Could Not Carry Its Integrations to ServiceNow

The Client's BMC-based ITSM system was integrated with its customers' own ITSM solutions so that those customers could track, inside their in-house tools, the incidents and requests they had outsourced to the Client's service desk. These integrations were central to the quality of support the Client offered.

When the Client decided to move to the ServiceNow platform, the core difficulty was preserving every one of those existing integration workflows inside the new ITSM system, with no disruption to customers.

There were around 20 integrations to migrate at the outset. The Client also expected many more of the same kind in the future, so a one-off migration was not enough — it needed a scalable approach that would make each subsequent integration fast and inexpensive. On top of this, the solution had to satisfy the Client's strict internal security rules.

A Reusable ServiceNow Integration Application

INNERLUXES's experience with ITIL processes and with both ITSM platforms — BMC and ServiceNow — allowed the team to shape an integration concept that fit the Client's specific requirements. The work began with the foundations that make repeatable delivery possible, and only then moved to the application itself.

• Integration roadmap and standard documentation. Our ITSM experts produced an integration roadmap together with reusable templates for integration workflows, data mapping, and test cases. These were used to formalize each customer's integration requirements before development started, removing ambiguity early.
• An Integration Broker in the chain. Because the Client's policy forbade direct access to its ServiceNow system, the solution routed traffic through an intermediary — the Integration Broker, a third-party web service. INNERLUXES established the connection between the Client's ServiceNow system and the Integration Broker so the architecture honored the security rules rather than working around them.

Using the ServiceNow platform's native capabilities, INNERLUXES built an integration application and incorporated it into the Client's ServiceNow ITSM system. The two-way flow, in each case, runs as follows:

• The integration application reads the data for an incident or request from the Client's ServiceNow system and passes it to the Integration Broker.
• The Integration Broker transforms that data according to the integration rules and forwards it to the customer's ITSM system in a format that system accepts.

The same workflow runs in reverse, carrying data from the customers' ITSM solutions back into the Client's ServiceNow system. This is what lets the Client's customers keep using their own ITSM tools to track work handled through the service desk.

The application was deliberately split into an integration core plus three parts that can be tailored per customer, so a new integration is configured rather than rebuilt:

• Integration logic. Describes the overall workflow — how messages are pushed and pulled between the two ITSM systems.
• Integration parameters. Hold the rules that decide which tickets are transmitted and how.
• Configuration details. Carry the general information about a given customer and the Integration Broker.
• Business logic. Captures a customer's specific data-mapping requirements.

Two reliability features were added on top. Integration logging keeps the full history of data transactions between the Client's ServiceNow system and the customers' ITSM solutions. Status monitoring protects data consistency and enables fast recovery after a fault — it sends email notifications about failed transactions, produces automatic daily reports, and supports automatic or manual resending of any missed data.

Key Outcomes for the Client

• All 20 integrations with the customers' ITSM solutions were migrated to the new ServiceNow-based system without losing existing workflows.
• The Client can now offer integration with customers' ITSM systems as an extra paid service, on top of service desk support, using the reusable application delivered in the project.
• The standardized workflows and delivered functionality lowered the cost of each new integration and shortened delivery time to roughly 2-3 months.
• Around 50 integrations have since been performed through the delivered solution.

Technologies and Tools

ServiceNow