Ansible: Add value to your product with IT automation

A previous post introduced the Ansible Certification Program and briefly covered the value of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform integrations for Red Hat Technology Partners. In this post we’ll dive deeper into this topic and discuss four important benefits of developing Ansible Collections for Red Hat ISV partners. 

Think of IT automation with Ansible Automation Platform as the perfect way to help customers by automating repeated tasks, product updates, management, and provisioning of your product. Because of Ansible’s widespread adoption, chances are your customers already realize the benefits of its integration with your product and are looking forward to extending the use cases of Ansible inside their organization. 

Integrating your product with Ansible Automation Platform creates benefits for your customers and your business that extend beyond the ones we've already mentioned. 

Improve the customer experience

Improving your solution’s customer experience is a mix of different changes, but one thing stays constant - familiarity.

If businesses can work with Ansible for onboarding and using your product, there’s a good chance that the familiarity will simplify its early stages of use, improving the first impression and the overall experience. By improving the experience, you’ll help to minimize churn. 

The real impact of familiarity results in saved time by leveraging already existing know-how and not investing resources into learning new tech or processes. Let’s take a look at the example of Sensu. Their solution is an observability pipeline that delivers monitoring as code for any cloud infrastructure. They report that they managed to significantly improve their product experience by offering an Ansible Content Collection. 

“I tried your product a couple of months ago, but I didn’t finish setting it up for one reason or another. Then I saw that there was an Ansible Collection for it, so I tried again, and I got it set up and started using it right away across thousands of devices.”

Speed up the adoption of your product

Introducing new products into an existing environment often poses barriers, even when you have a far superior product. This is often rooted in the fact that people do not like change.

Using integrations with industry adopted tools like Ansible Automation Platform can help simplify the onboarding of your products into organizations already using these tools. Integrating them into their daily workflows can cause less friction as their Ops teams will already be familiar with the core platform unifying access across the whole ecosystem.

By simplifying adoption, there’s a lower chance for drop-off during onboarding and customer churn even before users get to test the solution. The higher success rate when adopting a new solution, the easier it is to build a community of happy early-users, boost referrals, and word-of-mouth marketing. 

Grow your user base

Onboarding a new solution is only the first step of a company-wide adoption process. One of the key requirements is the ease of adding new users and thus leveraging the new solution to its full potential.

This brings us back to the Sensu example. Before integrating with Ansible, they were facing two challenges - a drop off during the onboarding process and a sub-optimal user base within already onboarded businesses.

With the Sensu Ansible Content Collection in place, Sensu customers can now get better business results by expanding its usage and adding additional users with ease.

Minimize Customer Churn

Customers expect easy-to-use solutions in the modern age. Ansible integration makes that possible by giving businesses the ability to unify the automation of all their solutions. If your product becomes an integral part of a company’s solution network from day one, there’s no incentive to churn at any point in time.

Regardless of the industry, your business can gain a lot from adopting a customer-centric approach to all operations. With Ansible integration, you can offer a great customer experience that fosters long-term relationships with your customers. 

Start planning your Ansible integration 

Would you like to learn more about Ansible integrations and assess their fit with your product? Reach out to the team of Ansible experts at XLAB Steampunk. They will help you on the whole Ansible journey - from planning and designing the integration to its development, certification, support, and maintenance. 

Improve your user experience, simplify onboarding, automate management, and help increase the value for your customers with the Ansible integration. 

Contact XLAB Steampunk at steampunk@xlab.si to learn more.