Ensono Cuts Costs with Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow

If you’re a Snowflake customer using ServiceNow’s popular SaaS application to manage your digital workloads, data integration is about to get a lot easier — and less costly. 

Snowflake has announced the general availability of the Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow, available on Snowflake Marketplace. The connector provides immediate access to up-to-date ServiceNow data without the need to manually integrate against API endpoints. With just a few clicks, you can get ServiceNow data directly in your Snowflake account and combine it with other data sources, including ERP, HR and CRM systems. Once configured, the data will automatically refresh based on your desired frequency. 

Additionally, because the Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow is a Snowflake Native App built in the Data Cloud using the Snowflake Native App Framework, it leverages Snowflake’s built-in security and simplified governance capabilities. Customers get a fully managed service with no additional access fees set by Snowflake. 

Ensono, a managed service provider and technology adviser, joined the initial preview phase of the Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow and began using it as part of its customer portal and data warehouse modernization project (watch their Show Me Your Architecture webinar here). The company was able to work with the connector throughout the course of the project, and its ease of use and ability to streamline data delivery helped Ensono achieve a remarkable 30% reduction in costs compared to the prior solution. Here’s how.

Ensono, a global firm with more than 2,900 associates worldwide, offers flexible, personalized technology services and solutions for organizations across a variety of industries. To monitor the performance of mainframes, servers and cloud systems, the company needs to analyze relevant metadata and promptly address any concerns or issues. ServiceNow is Ensono’s primary system for both internal service ticket tracking and customer ticket management — and a valuable source of data for performance analysis. 

To extract data from ServiceNow, the company had been using a legacy tool to replicate data to other systems, including SQL Server databases, the Envision portal, its data warehouse, SLA tracking and reporting. 

During the data migration part of its modernization efforts, Ensono found itself syncing four different instances of ServiceNow, each requiring a separate server and license. Multiple teams were needed to maintain the complex environment. Additionally, data delivery to the Envision customer portal was heavily manual and inefficient, and internal and external ServiceNow service tickets were getting bogged down. 

The process quickly became costly and took away valuable time from other IT projects that could have added value to the business. In addition, the legacy tool caused performance issues to the source system due to the resource strain from the APIs.

To manage these challenges, Ensono engaged Evolution Analytics, a data analytics consultancy. Adopting Snowflake as a platform gave Ensono a single source of connected data to use across its enterprise. And the Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow enabled both an initial load of historical data as well as incremental updates, giving Ensono a way to get ServiceNow data directly into its Snowflake account within minutes.

The Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow makes it possible to move ServiceNow data into Snowflake quickly and easily. With control over how frequently it is refreshed, Ensono can be sure the latest ServiceNow data is always available. These updates improved the output of the Envision portal. 

The company was also able to seamlessly share performance data with their clients through Snowflake Secure Data Sharing. This foundation makes rolling data out to customers a minor change for Ensono, allowing them to scale and support more customers easily. Also, customers can see only their own data, which preserves privacy.

Additionally, there is no longer any performance impact on the source system because there are no APIs — all of the analytical work is done in Snowflake. And Ensono’s end customers were not impacted by all the changes and updates. Some of their bigger clients are building out processes to automate the loading of data into their own ServiceNow instances, so they can see their Ensono tickets tracked in the system.

The connector has helped Ensono save on resource and hardware costs, not to mention licensing fees. Previously, multiple teams worked for hours on data integration; Snowflake now handles it all in minutes. Each ServiceNow instance used to require a different server for a target database and a license; with Snowflake, no additional hardware or licenses are needed. Consolidating the systems and removing extra hardware and licenses also reduced the amount of time and resources spent on maintaining the legacy tool’s VM costs and SQL Server licenses. 

With the implementation of Snowflake, Ensono’s data philosophy changed to one that is built on ease of ingestion. If it needs to share data with other parties, it will use Snowflake Secure Data Sharing to simplify the collaboration process. If an additional system or application needs to be connected to Snowflake, Ensono will leverage Snowflake-provided connectors where available, making it easy to link systems.

This also ties into a broader Snowflake benefit: being able to scale on-demand to exactly the size you need to deliver top performance. No need to build an extra-large server and let it sit idle, or exceed the threshold of a legacy system and have to deal with the choke point. Snowflake’s scalability ensures Ensono always has the right amount of resources at all the right times.

To learn more about Ensono’s work with Snowflake and the native Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow, watch our Show Me Your Architecture webinar, How Ensono Leverages ServiceNow Data in Snowflake to Deliver Better Customer Outcomes. Try out the Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow by installing it from Snowflake Marketplace. It’s available with no additional access fees set by Snowflake and uses Snowflake credits for compute and storage. You can also explore the product documentation and go through the QuickStart.