Uber Freight moved its IT service management operation off ServiceNow and into Jira Service Management (JSM), with help from Exalate.
The migration delivered around 130,000 tickets into JSM, covering the most recent 15 months of service desk history, and was completed in about two months without disrupting the service desk.
About Uber Freight
Uber Freight is the logistics arm of Uber Technologies, founded in 2017 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. It runs a global freight platform that connects shippers and carriers, with operations across North America and Europe.
Uber Freight has grown into an end-to-end enterprise logistics suite, with managed transportation services, transportation management systems (TMS), freight forwarding, customs brokerage, and consulting in its product line.
Internally, its platform engineering team is responsible for the broader Atlassian footprint at Uber Freight, including the tooling that supports the IT service desk teams referenced in this case study.
The Starting Point: a Hard Contract Deadline and a Complex ITSM Estate
Uber Freight’s ServiceNow contract was set to expire soon, and renewing it for another cycle wasn’t where the team wanted to spend the budget.
The platform engineering team already owned the company’s Atlassian footprint, so consolidating ITSM into JSM was the natural direction.
The team weighed doing the migration in-house against bringing in outside help. The volume of historical data, the transformation work involved, and the cost of getting it wrong made the case for working with Exalate.
“After recreating our ServiceNow configurations and scripts in Jira, we faced the significant challenge of migrating more than 100,000 historical and active tickets to the new platform. Given the scale and complexity of the migration, maintaining data integrity while meeting tight project deadlines was critical. Exalate stood out as the ideal solution due to its proven track record, reliability, and strong customer feedback, giving us confidence that we could execute the migration successfully and with minimal risk.”
Theo aka. Thiyagarajan Anandan (He/Him)
Sr. Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering
The Challenge: What Made This ServiceNow to JSM Migration Harder Than a Standard Lift-and-shift
The migration covered around 140,000 tickets across Incidents, Request Items (RITMs), and Service Catalog Tasks from the most recent 15 months of history, with older records archived separately rather than migrated into JSM.
ITSM migrations are always bespoke. This one had a few specific constraints to work through:
- Character limits: JSM has character limits that ServiceNow doesn’t, so some field values needed to be transformed during the move.
- Data model mismatches: ServiceNow and JSM don’t share the same data model. Many ServiceNow field types either don’t exist natively in JSM or behave differently, so a real portion of the work was translating ServiceNow’s schema into something JSM could hold without losing meaning.
- Deactivated user accounts: Many original ticket and comment authors were from deactivated accounts, but user attribution still had to be preserved in the migrated data.
- Timestamp constraints.: The Jira API doesn’t support backdating, so comment timestamps couldn’t be carried over natively.
- Parent-child ticket relationships: Ticket hierarchies had to survive the migration intact, since they’re load-bearing for complex request workflows.
There was also a hard rule from Uber Freight, reflecting the mature security and data governance practices the company operates under: no external party gets direct access to production. Whatever the migration approach was, the Uber Freight team had to stay in control of its own systems throughout.
Why Exalate: Live, Bidirectional Between ServiceNow and Jira Service Management
Exalate runs as a live, bidirectional sync between ServiceNow and JSM. That mattered here for a few reasons.
Both systems could run in parallel during the migration. The Uber Freight service desk kept operating in ServiceNow while data was continuously synced into JSM in the background, so day-to-day incident handling, request fulfillment, and SLA tracking carried on without interruption. There was no big-bang cutover and no forced downtime window.
The Uber Freight team chose the cutover moment themselves, once they were satisfied that the datasets on both sides matched and that their service desk was operationally ready to run on JSM.
Running both systems in parallel also changed the shape of the change management problem. Instead of asking service desk agents to switch tools overnight, the team had weeks to work in JSM on real tickets while ServiceNow was still authoritative. By the cutover date, the team wasn’t being onboarded onto a new platform; they were already running on it.
How Exalate Handled the Hard Parts
Groovy scripting inside Exalate handled the data transformation work that a standard migration tool couldn’t.
Specifically:
- Field-level transformation logic managed the JSM character limits, so long ServiceNow values were converted during sync rather than rejected or truncated automatically.
- Deprecated or non-existent fields from ServiceNow were mapped to their closest JSM equivalent during sync, or transformed into a format JSM could store, so nothing was lost in translation.
- Comments from deactivated users were routed through a generic user account, with the original author’s name embedded in the comment body so attribution was preserved in a readable format.
- Original ServiceNow creation dates were carried over via API calls.
- Parent-child ticket hierarchies were preserved using Exalate’s scripting logic, keeping the structural integrity of complex request workflows intact.
Exalate Services delivered this engagement directly, working hands-on with the Uber Freight team through collaborative sessions. The same migration model is also delivered by Solution Partners across the Exalate partner network, with Exalate as the underlying sync platform either way.
No external production access was handed over, and there was no black-box handoff at the end. Uber Freight engineers configured, tested, and validated the sync as the migration progressed, so by go-live, they were already operating the platform they’d be supporting.
“Exalate enabled us to accurately map and migrate data between ServiceNow and Jira, preserving critical historical information, timestamps, and ticket records in the new platform. The migration was completed within our required timeframe and provided the audit trail and data integrity we needed. We would strongly recommend Exalate to any organization facing a complex, high-volume migration where reliability and accuracy are essential.”
Theo aka. Thiyagarajan Anandan (He/Him)
Sr. Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering
Results
- The migration was completed in about two months, from planning to delivery.
- Around 130,000 tickets were migrated into JSM with user attribution, ticket hierarchies, and original creation dates intact.
- Live tickets were prioritized for a fast cutover, with historical data moved in a subsequent phase, so day-to-day service desk work was never blocked.
- ServiceNow was decommissioned on schedule, which avoided another renewal cycle of license spend and got Uber Freight to value on its JSM investment faster than a slower, more cautious migration would have allowed.
- The Uber Freight service desk team was already operating in JSM at go-live, since they’d been involved in the configuration throughout, which kept change management overhead low.
What’s Next For Uber Freight
“With the move to Jira Service Management, we have been able to expand our Atlassian footprint and further streamline our operations through in-house customization of workflows and automation of repetitive tasks. This has reduced our reliance on external resources for complex ServiceNow scripting and ongoing maintenance. The move to JSM has also enabled greater data visibility and integration across multiple Jira projects, improving collaboration, efficiency, and scalability across our organization.”
