Enterprise
Deso scales from 200 to 1,200 employees without hiring ops
Learn how Deso scaled from 200 to 1,200 employees without hiring a single ops person. Discover the IT automation strategy that saved $2.1M and cut onboarding from 3 days to 45 minutes.
When Deso started experiencing explosive growth in 2023, everyone was thrilled. The company had just closed their Series C, demand for their platform was skyrocketing, and hiring was in overdrive. But beneath the surface of this success story, CTO Marcus Chen was losing sleep.
"We went from 200 to 800 employees in under 18 months," Marcus recalls. "Every new hire meant new laptops to provision, new software licenses to manage, new access permissions to configure, and endless help desk tickets. My team of three sysadmins was drowning."
The breaking point came on a Monday morning when 47 new employees were starting across three offices, and the IT ticket queue hit 200+ requests. Something had to change.
Automation that actually works
Deso evaluated several options before finding a platform that could handle their unique challenges:
Multi-office complexity with offices in San Francisco, London, and Singapore
Hybrid workforce with remote and on-premise employees
Compliance requirements across different regulatory environments
Speed – they needed something implemented in weeks, not months
"The moment we saw the automated onboarding workflows, we knew this was different," says Sarah Kim, VP of People Operations. "New hires could be fully set up in under 30 minutes instead of 3 days. And they didn't need to wait for someone in IT to click through 15 different systems manually."
The Results: Scaling Without the Headcount
Here's what happened next:
Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Employees | 200 | 1,200 |
IT Ops Team Size | 3 | 3 (same team!) |
Avg. Onboarding Time | 3 days | 45 minutes |
Help Desk Tickets/Month | 850+ | 120 |
Employee Satisfaction (IT) | 3.2/5 | 4.7/5 |
Key outcomes:
$2.1M saved in avoided ops hiring and training costs
99.7% uptime maintained during 6x growth
Zero security incidents related to provisioning errorsThe
IT team focused on strategic projects instead of ticket triage
What made the difference
The biggest surprise wasn't just the time savings, it was the consistency," Marcus explains. "Before, every onboarding was slightly different depending on who was doing it and how busy they were.
Now it's the same perfect experience whether we're onboarding 5 people or 50 in a week."
Sarah adds, "Our new hires actually comment on how smooth their first day is now. In our last engagement survey, 'smooth technology setup' moved from #23 to #3 in what employees value most.
That's huge for retention when you're competing for talent."
Looking ahead
Today, with 1,200 employees and counting, Deso's ops team hasn't grown, but their ambitions have. They're now exploring:
Automated offboarding and compliance auditing
Self-service IT request portals for common tasks
Integration with their HRIS for even smoother people operations
If you'd told me two years ago we'd 6x our headcount without adding a single ops person, I wouldn't have believed you, Marcus says with a smile.
Now I can't imagine growing any other way.
