Success Story: Provance uses Power Platform to transform IT service and asset management

As featured at Microsoft Partner Success Stories

Versatile, future-proof solutions for Microsoft-centric environments

After 20+ years in business, Microsoft ISV partner Provance decided to re-platform its leading Microsoft-centric IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) solutions on Microsoft Power Platform. The reason? The maturity of the platform and low-code approach allowed the partner to bring new features to customers more quickly, while also creating a unique ability for customers to easily customize ITSM and ITAM deployments to meet changing business needs.

Building on Power Platform, Provance benefits from all the native capabilities Microsoft delivers as part of the platform, helping focus its development efforts around ITSM and ITAM-specific functionality. Central to this approach is Microsoft Dataverse, which provides a shared data backbone that integrates easily with applications like Dynamics 365. “I think one of the reasons that so many organizations are quick to change service desk tools is that the product is not evolving to meet the new requirements of their business or the market. They get tired of having to integrate and bring data into the world of ITSM and ITAM,” said Roger Labelle, Director of Product Management at Provance. “With Power Platform, all the data is accessible in Dataverse and customers know that they have the power to easily configure Provance ServiceTeam products to meet future needs of the business.”

The versatility of ServiceTeam ITSM and ServiceTeam ITAM is a core reason Provance has seen strong demand from new customers—even those unfamiliar with the benefits of Power Platform. “Our use of Power Platform low-code capabilities for app development and workflows, on top of Dataverse with Power BI, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and Azure seamlessly woven together to support critical business applications, is a very clear value for customers,” continued Labelle. “It allows them to leverage their investments in Microsoft technology and control their own destiny to a larger extent, making us part of a much broader conversation around enterprise service management.”

“Power Pages is critical to our solution … It allows us to embed Power Apps components and connect data directly to Dataverse, helping end users more easily find information, take action on their own, check status of requests, and generally avoid the nightmare of back-and-forth emails with the service desk.”

— Roger Labelle, Director of Product Management, Provance

Power Pages: unlocking self-service value

One of the newest additions to Power Platform is Power Pages, which helps partners and customers build low-code, scalable, and secure business-centric websites. For Provance, this was an extremely important advancement, given that IT service teams need a portal interface to allow users to submit and track requests. “Power Pages is critical to our solution as a way to enable self-service for IT service teams and our MSP [Managed Service Provider] customers,” said Labelle. “It allows us to embed Power Apps components and connect data directly to Dataverse, helping end users more easily find information, take action on their own, check status of requests, and generally avoid the nightmare of back-and-forth emails with the service desk.”

Provance has recently deployed ServiceTeam ITSM in a large municipality in England that is heavily leveraging Power Pages functionality to support its service management goals. The city is using Provance’s robust IT services portal to enable employees to report issues, make service requests, or find information on city services. The portal has saved significant time for the city, and they are receiving approximately 300 requests weekly and growing fast. The Provance team is now helping the customer automate those inquiries on the backend, with Power Automate-powered automation flows that will make many service requests touchless and completely eliminate the need for an agent to review or take action on them. In addition to saving agent time, this will increase employee satisfaction because issues can be resolved more quickly.

“This is just one example of where we are working with a city council that is using our ITSM solution to support a broader strategy around enterprise service management,” said Labelle. “Because of the flexibility of our solution, we are enabling local governments to find new and unique ways to support residents. One city is looking at how they can implement a smart locker system that would allow residents to pick up communal equipment that they can request through the portal. There really is no limit to what they can enable due to our Power Platform foundation.”

“We have seen Power Platform grow in capability and popularity over the past three years. As an innovator and a consumer of Power Platform, we are very excited about the momentum and new Microsoft innovation, as well as the FastTrack ISV Programs. Microsoft’s success is our success and that of our collective customers.”

— Roger Labelle, Director of Product Management, Provance

Supporting broader Power Platform opportunities

One of the long-term benefits of deploying Provance’s enterprise-scale, customizable solutions is that customers capitalize on the opportunity to further invest in Power Platform across their organizations. “Our customers get to see how commercial applications are being built, which helps them visualize what they can achieve on their own with Power Apps to re-build legacy custom applications, enable citizen development, and more,” said Labelle. “More and more of our customers say, ‘we shouldn’t just license Power Apps for your application, we should license it per user so that we can use many applications and build our own.’ Equally, Microsoft customers already invested in Power Apps are looking for enterprise anchor applications to derive even more value.”

Provance also continues to explore new ways to leverage Power Platform to grow its own portfolio. Virtual agent bot capabilities are a new addition to its ServiceTeam solutions using Power Virtual Agents, and Provance is investigating how Open AI technology can be incorporated to further facilitate service management functions. Provance has also begun leveraging Power Platform to prototype a new solution for IT project delivery, which will allow IT teams to collaborate with internal or external customers on creating and modifying project requirements.

“We have seen Power Platform grow in capability and popularity over the past three years. As an innovator and a consumer of Power Platform, we are very excited about the momentum and new Microsoft innovation, as well as the FastTrack ISV Programs. Microsoft’s success is our success and that of our collective customers,” concluded Labelle.

To view the original Success Story in the Microsoft Power Platform for Partners site, click here.