New Balance steps up IT operations

When you're in the business of helping athletes perform at their peak, your own operations need to run like a well-oiled machine. New Balance, the iconic athletic footwear and apparel company with over 7,000 employees and over $5 billion in annual sales, discovered their IT infrastructure wasn't keeping pace with their ambitious growth plans.

The company's aging Computer Associates service desk was creating operational silos across their global organization, while security and IT teams struggled with disparate tools that provided only fragmented visibility into their expanding infrastructure. As New Balance sprinted toward their goal of over 180 stores worldwide, they needed an enterprise-level solution that could unify service management while providing comprehensive asset discovery and dependency mapping.

Markus Gaulke, platform manager for IT Service Desk, knew the company needed to lace up for a major transformation. After evaluating multiple ITSM solutions, he selected Freshworks' integrated platform, implementing Freshservice alongside Device42’s advanced ITAM to create a unified approach to IT operations spanning IT, HR, facilities, and loss prevention. The phased implementation has enabled New Balance to establish a single source of truth for inventory assets while building comprehensive business service dependency maps essential for change control and strategic planning.

The company

Founded in 1906, New Balance is a leading manufacturer and retailer of athletic footwear and apparel with over 7,000 employees and more than $5 billion in annual sales, operating over 180 stores globally.

The challenge

Behind New Balance's reputation for quality and performance lay a frustrating reality: their IT operations were struggling to keep up with the company's pace. The legacy Computer Associates service desk that had served them for years was increasingly becoming a liability rather than an asset.

"As with many organizations, we had multiple tools to do multiple things," explains Markus Gaulke, Platform Manager at New Balance. This patchwork approach meant different departments were running in separate lanes without unified visibility into the organization's complete IT infrastructure.

The fragmentation created real business risks. Without integrated change control processes, IT teams were essentially flying blind when making critical infrastructure decisions. They couldn't effectively assess the ripple effects of changes across their complex environment that spans retail operations, manufacturing facilities, and corporate offices. For a company managing both customer-facing stores and behind-the-scenes manufacturing, this lack of visibility was more than an inconvenience—it was a competitive disadvantage.

As New Balance continued expanding their retail footprint, they needed enterprise-level ITSM capabilities that could scale with their growth while providing the transparency and control required for complex change management. The existing system also lacked the flexibility to support departments beyond IT, limiting the organization's ability to standardize service delivery across the entire business.

The solution

Rather than trying to patch together their existing systems, New Balance decided to start fresh with a complete platform overhaul. After evaluating multiple enterprise ITSM solutions, Gaulke selected Freshworks' integrated approach, combining Freshservice with Device42 for comprehensive IT operations management.

The decision came down to simplicity and power working in harmony. "We chose Freshservice, because the transition was fairly seamless," says Gaulke. "We really just turned one tool off and turned the other tool on. It's very easy to really configure this type of product."

Implementation help came from Whitlock, which worked closely with New Balance to plan and deploy the global rollout of Freshservice and Device42. Working with Markus and the team, Whitlock helped New Balance achieve broad and rapid success.

But ease of implementation was just the starting line. The real race was about creating a foundation for enterprise-wide transformation. Device42's advanced discovery capabilities gave New Balance the comprehensive asset visibility they'd been missing. Using multiple protocols including XML, SSH, WMI, and SNMP, the platform automatically discovers and maps every component of their hybrid infrastructure while data enrichment and normalization ensures clean, categorized information.

"We wanted to have a single source of truth for all of our inventory assets to be inventoried and also have the transparency and the visibility of everything that's existing in our network," explains Gaulke. "For the purpose of change control, so we can actually see what these business services depend on."

New Balance took a methodical approach to implementation, starting with one major site to perfect their processes down to the room level before expanding globally. This strategy ensures consistency and data quality as they scale the solution across all locations.

Impact 

Perhaps the most telling success indicator has been the organic expansion beyond IT. "One of the benefits is that we started with IT, and now we bring in a bunch of other workspaces, such as facilities, loss prevention, HR, and all the other business departments," notes Gaulke.

The transformation in asset visibility and change control capabilities has been dramatic. The comprehensive dependency mapping now enables IT teams to understand the business impact before making any infrastructure changes, significantly reducing risk and improving service reliability.

Team productivity has also increased as a unified platform eliminates the frustration of juggling multiple disparate tools. "Most of our people now really see and recognize the value of what a true CMDB can bring. And we're getting really good adoption rates," says Gaulke.