Russell Group University
35,000 Students · 5,000 Staff · Five Campuses
Replaced ServiceNow with the full GLPI, Zabbix and Wazuh stack under one managed roof.
The Challenge
This large Russell Group university had outgrown its legacy ITSM platform. ServiceNow had been in place for over seven years, covering service desk operations for 35,000 students and 5,000 staff across five campuses. Licence costs had escalated year on year, and the platform's scope remained limited to service management — there was no centralised asset lifecycle, no infrastructure monitoring and no security visibility.
The IT team was managing assets across multiple spreadsheets, monitoring was handled by a mishmash of tools with no central console, and security compliance reporting for GDPR was a manual, labour-intensive process. The university needed a unified approach but could not justify ServiceNow's enterprise pricing for capabilities they did not use.
The Solution — A Full-Stack Umbrella
Rather than replacing one single-vendor tool with another, the university chose the Echo-9 integrated stack — three best-of-breed open-source platforms working together under a single managed roof.
GLPI
Service desk for all campuses, unified CMDB with per-campus asset segregation, ITIL-aligned incident, problem and change management. LDAP integration for staff/student self-service portals.
Zabbix
Distributed monitoring with proxies at each campus feeding a central master. Network infrastructure, server health, Wi-Fi controller performance and classroom AV systems — all visible from one dashboard.
Wazuh
Endpoint security across 8,000+ devices, file integrity monitoring for critical research systems, vulnerability detection and automated GDPR compliance reporting. Security alerts feed directly into GLPI tickets.
"The umbrella analogy is perfect. Before Echo-9 we had a single expensive umbrella that only covered service desk — everything else got wet. Now we have a proper roof over ITSM, monitoring and security, all for less than we were paying for one proprietary tool."
— IT DirectorThe Results
The Future — Affordable Full-Stack Support
The transition from ServiceNow to the Echo-9 stack freed up 60% of the previous licensing budget. The university chose to reinvest this saving into an ongoing full-stack support agreement, covering GLPI, Zabbix and Wazuh under one SLA. This means they now receive proactive maintenance, monitoring health checks, security patch management and priority escalation — all at a cost lower than the ServiceNow licence alone.
Could Your Organisation Benefit from a Unified Stack?
Discover how much you could save by replacing fragmented or single-vendor tools with the Echo-9 integrated platform.