Case Study: Consolidation at Equinix Evolves into Innovation with the ServiceNow Platform

Equinix connects more than 4,000 companies directly to their customers and partners inside the world’s most networked data centers. Today, businesses leverage the Equinix interconnection platform in 31 strategic markets across the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific.

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What started as a standard IT tool-consolidation effort at Equinix has evolved into the creation of innovative applications and has transformed the way IT supports the business. Two-and-a-half years after go-live, more than 400 Equinix users work in ServiceNow under the guidance of Eric Fisch. Now, IT plays a crucial role in the success of departments across the enterprise.

Consolidating a patchwork of products The IT group at Equinix comprises five different teams that previously used combinations of three disparate tools as well as spreadsheets for service management. And all five teams faced similar problems in day-to-day operations:

• Lack of visibility – When users submitted incidents in Equinix’s legacy help desk system, they were unable to check the status of those incidents. There was no portal to summarize their activity and they were obliged to wait until IT responded. In reality, users often had to take the inefficient path of phoning technicians to obtain status. Manual processes – Users had to submit change requests in a legacy document repository system used for change management, which was not the optimal product for that task. The legacy system did not manage approvals, so users had to obtain approval via email, and then attach the approval manually to the change request.
• Poor checks and balances – Equinix is subject to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations, which demand audits that required IT to retrieve samples of change requests. This meant arduously reviewing all of the attached email approvals to document the change process.
• No integration – When an issue was logged in Equinix’s legacy bug tracking system and a change was required, a user had to create a change request manually in the legacy change management system, and then point it at the relevant issue record. There was no easy way to integrate the two systems.

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