What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need to innovate and transform the business?
As a global leader in IT infrastructure and services and part of the $20 billion IT services provider NTT Ltd., Tokyo-based NTT is widely acclaimed for delivering a secure and connected future that empowers people, clients and community, transforms businesses and technologies and drives innovative outcomes.
With high customer expectations, the company’s impressive organic growth and its industry-leading position setting the backdrop, NTT was looking to accelerate its delivery of IT services to its customers, improve business performance and optimize employee efficiency by leveraging data and technology.
Paramount among NTT’s concerns for maintaining customer satisfaction and accelerating IT services delivery were to:
- automate and improve the process of data exchange between various external applications and NTT’s ServiceNow IT Service Management Software,
- replace the outdated integration platform legacy integration tool with a new integration platform that will contain existing customer data and transition seamlessly to allow continued operations without any downtime, and
- ensure adherence to the company’s high standards for service quality by improving the process of documenting company projects and processes.
Built on top of the SnapLogic Platform, NTT used ⋮IWC legacy integration tool to SnapLogic Accelerator – an accelerator that requires no coding and automates code migration to address specific issues and challenges, including: - manual migration of existing code to a new integration solution (SnapLogic) affecting employee productivity and complete code migration,
- smooth transitioning to SnapLogic without downtime that might affect customer service,
- absence of thorough documentation of implemented past projects and processes, making the transitioning process even more challenging.
Which customer did you implement this on?
NTT
Describe your strategy and execution to solve the business challenge.
At a macro level, SnapLogic was used to replace the outdated legacy integration tool integration platform and act as a bridge between external applications and NTT’s ServiceNow ITSM Software. Leveraging SnapLogic’s capabilities, NTT achieved optimal business performance and improved process and project documentation, accelerating time to value and improving customer satisfaction.
At a micro level, ⋮IWC legacy integration tool to SnapLogic Accelerator connected the dots between the new SnapLogic integration platform and the outdated legacy integration tool integration platform. The innovation is particularly evident in the development of an accelerator that is able to migrate code/integrations from an outdated integration platform to SnapLogic fast and easily. ⋮IW Cisco legacy integration tool to SnapLogic Accelerator automatically gathers existing code/integrations from legacy integration tool and transfers them to SnapLogic by reusing legacy integration tool configuration and components. The accelerator lessens the time needed to migrate the existing integrations from legacy integration tool to SnapLogic, eliminates a significant percentage of manual work associated with it and ensures there is no impact on the end systems or end clients. The accelerator enabled the new integration platform to function seamlessly, thus improving business performance and accelerating IT services delivery.
The planning phase consisted of:
- Researching and analyzing how to transition from an outdated integration platform to SnapLogic fast, easily, and without loss of existing data
- Researching and analyzing legacy integration tool as an integration platform
- Defining the approach
- Designing the solution
The ⋮IWC legacy integration tool to SnapLogic Accelerator was built following SnapLogic best practices and reverse engineering. The design of the accelerator included mapping apples-to-apples of the original functionality of legacy integration tool to a respective code in SnapLogic that reuses the legacy integration tool XSLT configurations and staging capabilities and creates a piece of code that basically replicates legacy integration tool behavior in a different platform. All of the mechanisms –HTTP calls, XML and XSLT transformations, queueing, and keeping the lifecycle of a ticket, among others –are preserved. After the code is exported from legacy integration tool, it is imported into SnapLogic, and with just a configuration and some unit testing, the code is ready to go live.
Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution?
- 1 FTE from ⋮IWConnect for building the accelerator
- A team of ~25 people – SnapLogic developers, legacy integration tool developers, Quality Assurance engineers, Project Managers – for migrating all of the existing clients fast and efficiently with the best quality
What were the business results after executing the strategy?
As a result of the innovative SnapLogic Migration Accelerator, NTT experienced a wide range of benefits that positively impacted its business performance, customer relations and employee efficiency, including:
- An exponential improvement of business performance as a result of the fast and easy replacement of an outdated integration platform with a new one
- Complete, automated and secure migration of existing code to SnapLogic
- Smooth transitioning to a new integration platform while keeping the existing code intact and maintaining operational efficiency
- Increased employee productivity as a result of the elimination of manual code migration or writing code from scratch
- Ensured service quality by improving control and traceability of the company’s projects and processes
- Enabled NTT to provide a unified client experience through NTT’s Digital Services Platform
What was the ROI the customer gained from executing the strategy?
⋮IWC legacy integration tool to SnapLogic Accelerator has delivered a wide range of benefits for NTT and its employees. Among them:
- The existing code is migrated from legacy integration tool to SnapLogic automatically, thus saving employees time and delivering value to customers as quickly as possible.
- The accelerator facilitates secure and smooth transitioning from one integration platform to another without affecting NTT’s clients and their systems.
- Time-effective integration migration project has resulted in a 50% increase in delivery speed.
- Standardized project documentation allows processes to be easy to follow and decreases chances for errors.
- Costs for delivering IT services to clients have been reduced while also delivering higher-quality services on a more consistent basis.
