blueAPACHE makes multi-million-dollar investment with ServiceNow platform – ARN

blueAPACHE has made a multi-million-dollar investment to enhance its own customer experience through integrating the ServiceNow platform for its managed services practice.

Following a comprehensive review, the decision to leverage the ServiceNow platform enhances its operational capabilities and aligns with blueAPACHE’s growth ambitions and strategic goals.

“Our organization has continued to grow at scale,” blueAPACHE managing director Chris Marshall told ARN. “Our well-established mission is to be the global mid-market service provider of choice and to do that we need the best tools and the best people.

“We needed to make sure we’ve got the right platform that allows us to deal with multi-currency, languages, geographies and time zones – all these capabilities become increasingly important as well as the ability for ease of integration into other platforms.”

There are four key areas blueAPACHE operates within: connectivity, cloud infrastructure as-a-service platform, voice and managed services.

As a result, the five-time ARN Innovation Awards Mid-Market Partner of the Year winner, is moving off the Atlassian product stack. Marshall said it was a massive undertaking to switch platforms and had discussions with other industry peers to understand the challenges and opportunities with different platforms.

“It was a very considered process that we went through. Looking at all of our requirements, not only today, but the ones that we anticipate we’re going to have in the future, we recognized our previous platform and tools weren’t going to be able to deliver what we expect and what we want our customers to experience,” he said.

Michael Zuppa, blueAPACHE general manager of technology, led the program and the decision to side with ServiceNow took about 18 months.

Zuppa said it was down to its broader technical capabilities around risk profile assessments, skilled engineering resources as well as the likelihood of customers also running a ServiceNow platform.

“The ecosystem that it opens up to along with our key vendor partnerships that underpin our services that we take to market and any new leading vendors coming to market – the first platforms that those integrations are on, is with ServiceNow,” he said. “To remain at the forefront and take advantage of AI [artificial intelligence] and integrations with emerging technologies and platforms, it was ServiceNow that excelled in that part of the assessment.”

Customer centricity was at the heart of the decision-making process along with the ability to optimize processes to improve service delivery.

Meeting the needs of a global community of clients requires a leading platform that can accelerate automation and data-driven decision-making, while also having a compounding effect on customer experience.

The new platform will integrate customer management, service delivery and contract management functions, enhance operational efficiency, streamline processes and elevate the overall customer experience.

The integrated system aims to optimize workflows, foster collaboration and provide a unified view of customer interactions.

Zuppa also highlighted ServiceNow’s rate of innovation and investments in R&D exceeded that of other platforms in the market.

“We are at that maturity scale where this is the right platform to underpin us in our global ambitions,” he said.

“blueAPACHE ourselves have been on it for some time now. Every service that we take to market as part of our reference architecture and the way that we support and deliver to customers, we utilize ourselves.

“Considering that we run service provider-based platforms, all of that is running through this platform and system. So from a complexity perspective, we are the perfect testbed.”