Tricentis achieves total systems integration with ServiceNow

Tricentis relies on IT to help deliver software testing solutions worldwide
Tricentis is a market-leading firm specialising in advanced test automation tools. The company has a specific focus on DevOps-driven Continuous Testing environments for applications and web services that are inherently “always on” on the web, across mobile networks, and within the Internet of Things (IoT).

With ten office locations across the North American, APAC, and EMEA regions, Tricentis helps Global 2000 companies adopt DevOps and gain success by achieving test automation rates of more than 90%. Its integrated software testing solution, Tricentis Tosca, accelerates software testing to keep pace with Agile and DevOps. Unlike legacy test platforms, Tricentis Tosca is architected to enable sustainable test automation for fast-paced development processes.

Tricentis customers span all industry verticals. The firm describes its user base as any company that develops or uses software of any kind for its business processes. Tricentis highlights its unique selling proposition as quality assurance, based upon the fact that it delivers:

• 10x more effectiveness than conventional testing suites
• 90%+ increase in test automation rates
• 95%+ business risk coverage
• 90%+ faster testing execution time

Tricentis hunts for a consistent user platform
Prior to using ServiceNow, Tricentis did not use any formally defined IT service management solutions. The company was using multiple systems based on different technologies to track customer incidents, provide a level of customer relationship management (CRM) capability, and host its website. The main challenge was the lack of a consistent user platform for these systems and the inability to provide globally searchable content that would fit together seamlessly.

“The technical integration effort between our old systems involved considerable complexity and expense, because most system elements used interfaces that didn’t fit or dovetail with the others,” explains Alexander Kleeman, Manager of Operations at Tricentis. “It was really challenging to track and manage customer feedback and inputs in order to use the whole system effectively. This in turn hampered our ability to enhance our commercial and technical market propositions accordingly.”

Juggling a disconnected set of technologies, including some open source, Tricentis operated as best it could using a ticketing system to serve external customers. The system offered some functionality, but little ability to integrate and onward-manage the data it stored. The situation was compounded further as the company’s customer support team leaders required many reports for day-to-day operations. Senior management also relied heavily on KPI reports because the total operation was spanning such an extensive connected data set.

Tricentis had reached a point where it had 1,000 customer support tickets per month. At this stage, there was a realisation that the team was on the edge of a precipice—one where they would need to move to an enterprise-level solution. As this coincided with new sales channels opening in North America, the realisation was both clarified and reinforced.

To replace this set of multiple tools, Tricentis created an RFP and sent it out to market. ServiceNow was quickly brought onto the tender shortlist. With ServiceNow part of its evaluation process, Tricentis realised quickly that an even broader migration was possible than it had first envisaged or hoped for—one that also encompassed IT service management, content management, and end-user customer support.

ServiceNow provides a cohesive environment
According to Alexander, “In our RFP process, ServiceNow outclassed all other competitors in terms of incident management capabilities, customer communication channels, community and content management, knowledge management, customisation and integrations, reporting, and the overall cloud solution.”

Thanks to the ServiceNow cloud-based delivery, Tricentis could focus on actual business needs at the point of implementation rather than involve any kind of new CapEx-heavy IT infrastructure investment.

ServiceNow worked with Tricentis to create a proof of concept workshop, before the longer-term implementation was carried out, in partnership with WSP Consulting. The ServiceNow solution was ultimately implemented based on a complex and multilayered strategic plan. The executive team specified that they wanted to see the new service management platform implemented and live within two months. Work started in December and systems were live by January, starting with an incident management module for external customer support.

ServiceNow ensures ease of deployment for Tricentis
After the incident management module was implemented, the firm proceeded with the reporting available in ServiceNow IT Service Management. It also brought in the ServiceNow® Content Management System (CMS) application and only two developers were needed to work on this element of the implementation.

“Our use case was to upgrade our externally-facing customer support website and increase the level of service delivered to our customers through our own support organisation,” says Alexander.

“Introducing ServiceNow as an internal IT solution with a wider IT implementation was a task we started when the first project phase was concluded. Now we have a support website for our customers that includes user documentation, a discussion forum, and an incident management option,” continues Alexander. “Also, through ServiceNow, we have internal IT incident management and we are developing IT asset management to use for our external customers.”

Tricentis integrated its hosted-cloud solution into ServiceNow, which holds the entire customer user base, enabling the firm to monitor all aspects of its cloud operation from core services to data loads, spikes, and cloud service maintenance.

Additionally, Tricentis took the IT service management solution that it had applied to its external customers and applied those same functions to benefit its own employees. In the new support portal, the firm now has a global, searchable repository for users to search any data.

ServiceNow empowers Tricentis to open a core competency
Tricentis KPI reporting has improved significantly. Because the firm is a comparatively small company, it can be agile and does not need to manage its own underlying IT infrastructure. The result is that Tricentis can administer and manage content far more competently and work closer to its own core competency as a software testing specialist.

Tricentis also created a knowledge base for internal workers to share information about internal working practices and customer information. The company plans to add a level of gamification so that everyone gets more points based on the amount of intellectual property (IP) shared inside the system.

“Most of the challenge here was the fact that we had to reorganise our own business processes to be able to map them to ServiceNow,” explains Alexander. “The expectations were different from department to department.”

“We also use ServiceNow in ways that are not typical. For example, using ServiceNow Content Management System as a public-facing web page manager to create our website,” says Alexander. “We have modified our own implementation of ServiceNow to be able to do this and have won awards based on the support this has delivered.”

The Tricentis and ServiceNow roadmap
Tricentis is expanding its IT service management capabilities as acceptance of ServiceNow has grown across the organisation and more departments are setting up systems to coexist with ServiceNow. Consequently, more areas of the business will access and use ServiceNow in the future.

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