Fellowmind unifies sixteen companies on one service platform

When sixteen Microsoft partners merged to form Fellowmind, they inherited eighteen separate service management systems spread across five countries, a patchwork that made it impossible to deliver consistent managed services to thousands of external customers.

Fellowmind selected Freshservice to bring it all together. Fellowmind selected Freshservice to unify how it serves thousands of managed services customers across the region. The platform has since expanded into internal operations across security, legal, compliance, and HR.

As a result, the company scaled its managed services business dramatically and Freshservice was part of what enabled that growth without a proportional increase in headcount. 

The company

Fellowmind is a Northern European IT consulting and services firm with roughly 2,000 employees across the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Poland. The company provides business application implementations and managed services.

The challenge

In 2019, four leading Microsoft partners joined forces to form Fellowmind. Over the following years, twelve more companies were added to build Northern Europe's leading Microsoft services firm. The growth strategy delivered scale, but it also left behind a tangled operational footprint that extended well beyond IT.

Across five countries, teams were running eighteen different service management systems—including Jira, ManageEngine, and Zendesk—to handle the managed services Fellowmind delivers to thousands of external customers. Internally, business functions like legal, compliance, and HR had no shared service infrastructure at all, each operating in its own silo with no visibility into workloads, priorities, or outcomes.

Without common data, consistent processes, or a unified view of how the company operated across regions or departments, it was very difficult to come together as a company, according to Priem. The cost wasn't just financial, though eighteen systems with eighteen vendors and eighteen contracts added up fast. The deeper problem was capability. Fellowmind couldn't deliver a consistent experience to employees or customers, and couldn't pursue innovation, including AI. "Innovating and building for the future is impossible if you run different systems," says Priem.

What the company needed was a single platform that could unify how it serves thousands of external customers and standardize internal operations across five countries.

The solution

Fellowmind evaluated several solutions and selected Freshservice because it offered a unified platform. "We chose Freshservice because it gave us one coherent platform with one data model,” says Priem. “The competing systems we looked at felt more like patchworks.”

That unified architecture was essential for two reasons. First, Fellowmind is an MSP with its external customers interacting directly with the service platform, submitting requests, tracking issues, and engaging with delivery teams through Freshservice's portal. The platform is the front door to the company's managed services business. Second, Fellowmind wanted a foundation that could extend beyond IT into service management across every business function.

The rollout followed a country-by-country approach over eighteen months, beginning with Sweden as the pilot in Q1 2023 since it had the largest number of existing ITSM systems, making it the most complex environment. "We were sure that if we cracked Sweden, the rest would be easy," says Priem. Finland, the final region, was the most skeptical—the team there stuck with Jira until earlier rollouts and a full user acceptance test delivered proof of value.

Fellowmind paired the migration with a full-scale ITIL implementation, using the platform change to mature how the entire company worked. Freshservice, powered by AWS, gave Fellowmind the scalable foundation to run this dual-purpose operation—internal and customer-facing—on one platform.

The service management expansion followed naturally. Once IT and managed services were running, other departments saw what was possible and wanted in. Today, with 1,000 agents on the platform and roughly 175,000 support tickets flowing through annually, Fellowmind runs Freshservice across security operations, legal and compliance, and is actively rolling out to HR and other business teams, again with Sweden leading the way. "The reason we keep seeing Freshservice expanding is because people tell each other in the canteen about the good experience they have," says Priem.

For a company operating under NIS 2, the AI Act, and other European regulatory frameworks, having all service and compliance data consolidated on one platform across every department has proven especially valuable.

Impact

In the three years since consolidating on Freshservice, Fellowmind has more than doubled its managed services revenue from below ten percent of total revenue to more than twenty percent even as its delivery team grew only ten to twenty percent. With 2,000-plus external customers now served through the platform, Freshservice has become the unified experience customers see when they engage with the company.

"Freshservice is a direct part of our customer experience—this is a story not just of bringing systems together, but of bringing our capabilities together in a meaningful way," says Priem.

The platform has since expanded well beyond its original scope, giving Fellowmind a single service delivery layer that now extends across the entire organization.