For modern enterprise landscape, operational agility hinges on the seamless integration of IT systems. Organizations increasingly rely on multiple tools to support IT service management and agile development processes. However, without integration between these tools, data silos, manual processes, and delayed incident resolution can significantly impact business outcomes. This case study outlines how Forester Financial leveraged ZigiOps to connect BMC Remedy and Azure DevOps, enabling real-time collaboration, reducing operational inefficiencies, and improving customer service metrics.

About the Client: Forester Financial

Forester Financial is a leading mutual life insurance company serving over three million members across North America. With a history spanning more than 150 years, Forester offers a diverse portfolio of life insurance, investment, and retirement solutions. The organization is deeply committed to digital transformation as a path to long-term competitiveness and customer satisfaction. Its IT operations span a hybrid environment with enterprise-grade platforms for both support (BMC Remedy) and agile development (Azure DevOps).

The Need for Integration

As part of its digital evolution, Forester Financial adopted BMC Remedy for IT service management and Azure DevOps for agile software delivery. However, a growing disconnect emerged between the two systems. Support teams operated within BMC Remedy, while developers worked in Azure DevOps—often with limited visibility into each other’s workflows. This gap created friction during incident escalations and slowed resolution times.

Incidents reported through BMC Remedy that required development attention had to be manually recreated in Azure DevOps as work items. Once created, updates were often delayed, miscommunicated, or missed entirely. Support teams lacked insight into developer progress, and developers lacked context from the original support ticket.

As the volume of incidents grew, this manual handoff model became unsustainable and began to impact delivery KPIs and customer satisfaction scores.

Key Challenges

Forester’s IT and development teams encountered several persistent challenges:

• Manual Data Transfer: Incidents flagged in BMC Remedy required manual recreation as Azure DevOps work items, consuming valuable time and introducing human error.

• Asynchronous Communication: Updates made in Azure DevOps were often not reflected back in BMC Remedy, creating information gaps between teams.

• Operational Silos: Lack of synchronization between the platforms hindered collaboration and slowed down root cause analysis and resolution.

• Delayed Response Times: Without automated ticket handling and update propagation, the average time to resolve critical incidents increased.

• Compliance and Traceability Risks: Disconnected data made it difficult to maintain accurate audit trails, posing potential compliance concerns.

The overall result was reduced team productivity, higher mean time to resolution (MTTR), and increased business risk.

Solution Requirements

To resolve these issues, Forester Financial sought an integration platform that would:

• Provide out-of-the-box connectivity for both BMC Remedy and Azure DevOps

• Support both uni-directional and bi-directional data flows

• Enable real-time synchronization with low latency

• Offer a no-code interface to simplify configuration and changes

• Ensure data integrity and security across systems

• Scale to meet growing operational demands

• Deliver full auditability and compliance tracking

After a detailed vendor evaluation, Forester selected ZigiOps, a no-code integration platform, for its robust features, rapid deployment capabilities, and seamless support for both BMC Remedy and Azure DevOps.

Business Use Case: BMC Remedy Incidents to Azure DevOps Work Items

Primary Integration Goals:

• Create Azure DevOps work items automatically from new BMC Remedy Incidents marked for development (uni-directional)

• Synchronize updates between BMC Remedy and Azure DevOps once a link is established (bi-directional)

Uni-directional Flow:

When an incident is created in BMC Remedy and meets certain criteria (e.g., a custom field indicating “Needs Dev Support”), ZigiOps automatically creates a corresponding work item in Azure DevOps. Field mappings include summary, description, severity, attachments, and reporter information.

Bi-directional Flow:

Once the incident is linked, all subsequent updates—including status changes, field edits, and comments—are synchronized in both directions. When developers resolve the issue in Azure DevOps, ZigiOps updates the associated BMC Remedy ticket automatically, closing the loop for the support team.

Implementation and Technical Highlights

ZigiOps was implemented within Forester’s hybrid infrastructure over a period of two weeks. Key aspects of the deployment included:

• Mapping over 25 fields between systems, including custom fields and attachment handling

• Real-time syncing with latency under 10 seconds

• Conditional triggers based on custom logic (e.g., only escalate incidents above a certain priority)

• Token-based authentication and SSL encryption for secure data transfers

• Minimal resource impact due to lightweight architecture and centralized configuration

• Full audit log capabilities for compliance and governance

The no-code configuration interface allowed the Forester IT operations team to fully manage the integration lifecycle without writing or maintaining scripts.

Results and Business Outcomes

Following the implementation of ZigiOps, Forester Financial experienced significant operational improvements:

• Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) decreased by 28 percent due to instant handoff and synchronized updates.

• Manual workload for support staff dropped significantly, as they no longer needed to recreate or follow up on development tickets.

• Accuracy of ticket data improved, reducing rework and miscommunication.

• Cross-functional collaboration between ITSM and DevOps teams increased, creating a more agile response pipeline.

• Audit trails and compliance tracking became easier and more reliable due to unified ticket histories.

The integration also strengthened Forester’s overall service delivery framework, allowing the company to scale operations confidently while ensuring alignment across support and engineering functions.

Conclusion

The integration of BMC Remedy and Azure DevOps via ZigiOps empowered Forester Financial to transform a fragmented, error-prone process into a synchronized and efficient system. By automating the flow of data and updates between support and development environments, the company eliminated operational silos, improved response times, and enhanced service reliability.

If your organization is facing similar integration challenges across ITSM and development platforms, ZigiOps provides a secure, scalable, and code-free solution tailored to complex enterprise needs.

Want to know more? Discover how ZigiOps can help streamline your business workflows and unlock new levels of operational performance.