Live in 90 days
How deadline pressures helped three companies implement ITSM and scale fast
While “move fast and break things” may be the mantra elsewhere in software, the goal in IT is to keep things humming in the background. Downtime isn’t an option.
But long, cautious timelines carry their own risks: software out of date by the time it goes live; scope creep; or, perhaps worst of all, “shadow workflows” that continue in tandem as the team aims to implement a new approach.
Some IT teams are getting it just right. Whether because of deadline pressure from an expiring contract with a legacy system or the practicalities of rapid expansion, they’re rolling out new implementations fast. Here are three companies that found the focus and support to stand up service management software with lasting success in less than 90 days.
Deadlines offer a modernization forcing function
At Seagate, a global data storage business, the time had come to replace a legacy ITSM platform that had served roughly 30,000 employees for years. The old platform limited the potential for AI and automation. With a renewal date looming in 90 days, Seagate’s IT team rolled up their sleeves and stood up a Freshservice instance before the old contract expired to avoid potentially losing critical capabilities overnight.
"We used this opportunity to have a fresh beginning, and we did it the right way so that we can scale," says Vinod Pasi, VP and global head of IT infrastructure at Seagate. Rather than migrate old workflows into new software, the team redesigned ticket categories, SLAs, and routing rules from scratch. Within a year, Freddy AI Agent was deflecting 32% of incoming tickets, and first contact resolution hit 94%, 27 points above the industry standard. "Nobody remembers what our previous platform was," Pasi says. "Adoption has gone very well, and people are happy."
Read more: Seagate’s 3-month, 30,000-person IT overhaul
We used this opportunity to have a fresh beginning, and we did it the right way so that we can scale.
Vinod Pasi
VP & Global Head of IT Infrastructure
Keeping up with the pace of growth
American Oncology Network (AON) was expanding rapidly, and onboarding new clinics to its network of cancer care providers needed to be speedy and smooth. Any glitches could impact clinicians and patients. The organization employed a team with the sole purpose of maintaining the ITSM system. This wasn’t sustainable amid the pace of acquisitions.
So, the organization looked for a platform that could go live quickly, didn’t require a dedicated team, and could easily add new organizations to the broader business. They implemented Freshservice in less than 30 days and absorbed new clinics and hundreds of users in a single weekend. The real proof came during Hurricane Helene in 2024, when the storm knocked out power across western North Carolina. AON's monitoring system detected a network dropping at an Asheville-area clinic within minutes, triggering a response that had satellite internet running there within three hours, before the region even had running water restored.
"It's just worked, and we don't have to throw a lot of time at it,” says William Keeney, AON vice president of IT operations. “That's the most important thing for us to scale and continue to support the organization's growth."
Read more: AON scales cancer care across 100 clinics
How McLaren, New Balance & more turn service performance into a competitive edge
Building ITSM from scratch, fast
A slimmed-down business always needs seamless transitions and rapid impact. Embecta, which provides insulin delivery, had spun off from its parent company to become an independent medical technology company. Its IT team was tasked with building an entire technology ecosystem with a fraction of its former workforce, and no time to wait on developers. Freshservice didn’t require coding expertise or months of implementation, so the company could spin up a self-service portal and chat in no time, rolling out quickly to finance and HR teams shortly thereafter, too.
"One of the biggest changes for us in implementing Freshservice versus the ITSM platform that we had before is the flexibility and the speed in which we're able to deploy things and make changes," says Madeline Coluccio, Embecta's associate director of IT process and program management.
Freshservice now supports seven functions and more than 150 workflow automations, resolving upwards of 240,000 tickets a year.
Read more: Embecta stands up enterprise service from day one
