Accenture reduces risk and gains deployment efficiency with Salto

Accenture's HR Managed Services team operates a highly customized Zendesk-based HR portal deployed across major enterprise clients. This Employee Experience Platform solution serves millions of customer employees globally, providing essential HR service delivery. However, managing configuration changes across so many independent Zendesk environments introduced operational challenges.

"Given the fact that this is a highly customized, HR-specific offering that we've created on top of Zendesk, we have to manage a lot of configuration related to the specific deployment for those clients.", says Andy Swiston, Enterprise Technology Solutions Architect.

Each client account runs on a separate Zendesk instance, requiring meticulous management of configuration changes between development, testing, and production environments. Accenture initially built internal tools to help manage this process, but these solutions had limitations.

Rollback capabilities and sandbox to production deployments

Accenture initially invested in  building an internal configuration management solution. This homegrown approach proved limited, lacking essential features such as comprehensive object migration and rollback capabilities. Although ongoing infrastructure costs were minimal after initial development, addressing functional gaps would have required significant additional investments.

"We previously had limited migration capabilities and no rollback features," said Swiston. "Salto addressed these critical gaps."

By adopting Salto, Accenture overcame these limitations, gaining immediate access to advanced automation, comprehensive rollback functionalities, and admin-friendly tools that greatly surpass their original solution.

Reducing deployment risk

Given the complexity of managing multiple Zendesk environments, Accenture sought a solution to reduce the risks associated with manual deployments.

"The architecture within Zendesk is not necessarily geared for a lot of the things you would expect from a platform-as-a-service type of tool… Managing those deployments inherently creates a lot of risk." By implementing Salto, Accenture has significantly improved deployment accuracy and reduced risk. Previously, manual configuration changes introduced the potential for errors and required additional testing and verification. Now, with Salto’s automated change tracking and rollback capabilities, Accenture has greater confidence with automated deployments. This also reduces the risk of deployment-related downtime and helps ensure a seamless experience for both HR teams and end users. "It does save a lot of that reputational risk. It’s hard to explain these days to a customer that there is still manual activity… it’s not a good excuse", added Swiston. 

Streamlining deployments and saving valuable time

With frequent updates across multiple environments, the team needed a way to efficiently manage configuration changes without excessive manual effort. By implementing Salto, Accenture automated much of its deployment process, reducing the time spent on manual steps and minimizing errors.

"Salto saves our team's effort. So individually, it doesn't have an enormous impact for each deployment—we're talking about saving an hour here, an hour there—but across multiple clients, multiple environments, weekly deployments, etc., it starts to add up from a financial perspective," said Swiston.

By eliminating redundant manual work and increasing deployment reliability, Salto has become a core part of Accenture’s change management strategy, allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than troubleshooting deployment errors.

Scaling across multiple clients with Salto

As Accenture continues to expand its HR Managed Services offering, Salto is playing an integral role in standardizing deployment processes across all its client environments. Currently, Salto is fully deployed in some major client accounts, and Accenture has plans to scale it across more customers to maximize efficiency and risk mitigation.

Swiston emphasized the strategic business impact, noting, "Issues with your employee portal erode client confidence. We rely heavily on client references to win new business, and negative feedback regarding deployment speed or errors could significantly impact our competitiveness. Salto helps protect and strengthen our market position by ensuring smoother, more reliable deployments."

"For Zendesk in particular, you have a product that’s grown quickly. In the beginning there potentially wasn’t a need for DevOps automation tools like Salto. But as they have grown and added a lot of features and app-building capability, I think you definitely need the capability that Salto delivers”, concluded Swiston.