SOLVE.IT: Combining Technological Competence with Methodological Experience

Deborah Meoli, ITSM & Agile Advisor

Until a few years ago, Solve.it—an Italy-based ServiceNow service provider—was among the hoards of IT consulting houses that offered specialized services to address common technology hurdles. The company was admittedly “providing nothing different from the rest of the market.” However, the dawn of digital transformation propelled Team Solve. it to assemble and change the direction of the organization. Solve.it began its transformation from an IT specialist service provider offering technical skills, into an end-to-end technology service management company that charts the digitization roadmap for its clients and consults them through every step of the journey.

Today, Solve.it has emerged as a prominent ServiceNow consultant with clients spread across Europe and the Middle East. Through a proactive and flexible approach characterized by a delivery method that enables clients to acquire highly-specialized skills and operational flexibility, Solve.it allows its customers to concentrate on their core business. In this chat with CIO Applications, Massimo Boano, Operations Officer and Board Member; Deborah Meoli, ITSM & Agile Advisor, and Paolo Merlo, Solution Architect at Solve.It, explain how their organization helps clients leverage the full capabilities of ServiceNow, and a lot more.

What were the factors that led your company to enter the ServiceNow landscape?

Massimo: When we started a little over 15 years ago, it was the coming together of experienced and proficient IT professionals from top multi-national corporations. While I came from Microsoft, our founders came from Hewlett-Packard. By combining our competencies and developed methodologies, our focus was on IT infrastructure at the enterprise level. With the advent of digital transformation, we decided to change our strategy, vision, and focus. We asked ourselves, ‘why should we restrict ourselves to just providing technical skills when we can take a 360-degree approach?’ We started to focus on advising clients on IT architecture transformation and began implementing cloud-based packages like ServiceNow. By leveraging our technical skills, we designed a rigorous strategy around the type of clients/ industries we wanted to have within our ecosystem. We drafted partnerships with leader vendors such as Microsoft, AWS, and, particularly, ServiceNow. The partnership with ServiceNow proved to be a massive boost to our business.

What type of industries do you serve with your ServiceNow consulting services?

Deborah: Through our wide range of ITSM services, we have created a significant presence in the automotive, oil & gas, manufacturing, and financial sectors. Since a wide variety of industries are now embracing cognitive technologies and hybrid IT, we have been able to alter the nature of our services and target a whole new set of clients. Due to this metamorphosis, we have emerged as a service provider who doesn’t sell just technical skills. By taking a 360-degree approach, we offer services that support a specific technology or a partner ecosystem with a vendor, such as ServiceNow. We believe in working with 10 or 15 technology vendors/partners and sticking with them, rather than exploring too many opportunities. That way, we can ensure that all our resources are certified to handle those specific technologies.

Massimo: Almost 96 percent of our business originates from consulting, services, and activities. We have grown our business at double digits; always working mainly at the enterprise level.

We are proud of our capability to successfully integrate ServiceNow with other tools. We are able to integrate ServiceNow within the entire landscape of an enterprise

At times, customers want us to provision software. However, as long as we can provide excellent service, we don’t need to move product. We move skill and service, not product.

When it comes to delivering your value proposition, do you follow a particular approach?

Deborah: Utilizing a consultative approach, we acknowledge the presence of a problem, but don’t attribute it to a customer’s processes or our service delivery methodologies. We believe the pain points emanate from a wide gap in the industry. While one side consists of anything-as-a-service, the other is still made up of a portfolio of legacy solutions. The complexity is increasing because of the presence of multi-technology environments and multi-vendors. Most enterprises struggle to transition to such a change.

How exactly do you mitigate those complexities?

Massimo Boano, Intel Operations Manager and Board Member, Paolo Merlo, Solution Architect

Paolo: The two common trends we’ve noticed is that our customers are starting to have a service-centric approach and want to create a multi-vendor environment. This evolution necessitates an integration architecture that ensures the interoperability of data within both organization and vendors. How do we help them evolve? We find that ServiceNow is the perfect solution for integrated service management. For example, we work with large corporations and lend them end-to-end support on how to transform the IT environment— and make it possible to have a setting with multiple technologies, vendors and suppliers, to facilitate the right tools, cloud-based services, and other services. Due to ServiceNow, we can focus on integrated service management, and take a proactive approach to ITSM.

What are some of the market differentiators that put you ahead of the competition?

Massimo: We invest a lot in certification respect to our select group of technology vendors. We ensure that every new employee of Solve.it is ITIL certified. Thereafter, while helping customers build their IT agility, digitize business processes and implement ServiceNow, we ensure that only ITIL-certified professionals are deployed.

ServiceNow is constantly trying to scale with new, out-of-the-box functionalities. When a customer approaches us, even though the alignment with process innovation might require customizations; we always try to stick to the available functionalities. This proves to be a huge trade back for customers, not only in terms of implementation but particularly reducing running costs. Also, we deliver the two annual ServiceNow upgrades to our customers without any hurdles or roadblocks. This is mostly due to our past expertise in deploying other cloud-based packages, and our IT personalization experience. We are proud of our capability to successfully integrate ServiceNow with other tools. We can integrate ServiceNow within the entire landscape of an enterprise—be it an application, a device, or a service from outsourced vendors.

Are there any customer success stories that you can share with us?

Deborah: A large shipbuilding customer was burdened with too many outsourcing contracts. They were constantly quarreling with the outsourcers and couldn’t find a resolution to most of their complexities. We stepped in and facilitated their migration to ServiceNow. After moving them to ServiceNow, we integrated all their tools with the platform and created a more efficient and productive infrastructure. Today, their system and processes are aluminized, not just in terms of single integration, but total integration of their entire IT landscape.

Of late, we have been aiding a few automotive companies in driving IT convergence. At an international level, we are working as service integration and application management consultant for a large financial institution—the goal is to improve the entire governance of their IT landscape.

What does the future hold for your organization?

Massimo: We will continue taking an end-to-end approach, and progressing as a technology service management company. We’re deploying capabilities for performance analytics and reporting. In the long run, we’d like to evolve geographically. We are currently working across Europe and the Middle East and are constantly seeking exciting and new projects.