Background
Deda.Tech is one of the leading fully Italian-owned IT companies, serving more than 4,000 customers across 50 countries. Deda Tech functions as an IT service provider, supporting organizations with diverse requirements from ISP, development, and AI, to managed services, cybersecurity, and IT compliance.
Challenge
As a service provider, Deda Tech needed a way of streamlining communications between customers’ unique tech stacks – ranging from modern open source projects, to enterprise components – with Deda.Tech’s own internal IT service management (ITSM) software systems and the tools used in their data centers.
The team had experience with flow-based development project Node-RED, and wanted to find a visual, event-driven tool that would allow them to decouple the incoming and outgoing data flows of their ITSM systems. Alongside, the tool needed to natively connect to RabbitMQ and required vendor support to enable Deda Tech to confidently push it into production.
“We had a number of services that did not communicate with each other, and we needed to apply a workflow logic to our internal and incoming data streams,” Deda.Tech IT Architect Antonio Zambon explained.
Upon finding n8n, they quickly experimented with the community edition – creating a workflow that allowed their ITSM system to run provisioning tasks on VMware instances.
Solution
Today, n8n is deeply rooted in Deda.Tech – acting as middleware that guarantees a smooth data flow between its internal ITSM software and customers’ external tech stacks.
The team runs two n8n instances on two single servers – one for public services that connect to external systems, and one for internal requests that run on the core of Deda.Tech’s data centers. They leverage their ITSM system to publish JSON payloads to a queue on RabbitMQ. n8n then receives the requests, consumes them, and runs the provisioning automations.
The initial workflow automating the creation of VMs on VMware has developed into a sophisticated workflow that automates server lifecycles for customers without needing to give external access to Deda.Tech hypervisors – from powering servers on and off and scheduling reboots, to taking data snapshots and backups.
“I'm impressed by n8n’s performance,” Zambon said. “In both environments the performance is astonishing given the fact that our two single VMs do not have synching or distributed executions of the workloads.”
Impact
n8n has had a profound impact on Deda.Tech, speeding workflows into production in just 30 minutes. When the team recently needed to develop a new workflow to send configuration items from their ITSM system to Salesforce, they turned to n8n to complete the task in half an hour.
“If I had to do it with the tools that we used before, I think that it would have taken about two days,” Zambon said. “Before n8n we had a low code tool, but it wasn't really low code at all, because inside the tasks we had to code everything – from the HTTP connections, to the authentications, and the API. But with n8n, you have everything at your fingertips.”
Additionally, n8n’s visual interface has helped streamline communications between departments, enabling colleagues who are not engineers to understand how workflows run and how they can contribute to continuous improvements.
“We like to think often of n8n as our super glue – it’s something you have always in your toolbox because it is always useful,” said Deda.Tech IT architect Giuliano Lesa
Next steps
With n8n embedded in Deda.Tech’s stack, the teams plan to roll it out more widely across different business units, as well as writing a custom node for their Thycotic Secrets Server, which would enable them to use Thycotic inside n8n to fetch Secrets.
