The Context

For a product like Primo, integrating with our customers’ HR systems was a must from day one of the company.
— Martin Pannier, Founder & CEO of Primo

We talked to Martin Pannier, founder and CEO of Primo, an IT-as-a-service start-up from Paris, who walked us through why integrations are a core part of their product, why they decided to use Kombo, and how they leverage our unified API that allowed them to connect more than 100 customers within the first six months of our partnership.

Given the nature of the product, Primo’s need for integrations started almost as early as the company itself. Already two months after he started the company, Martin’s question was not whether they needed integrations, but who to partner up with.

HR integrations were the third overall feature that we built in our company because our core product offering centers so much around onboarding and offboarding employees.I can’t even say integrations are a core part of the value proposition. Without integrations, there is no value proposition. Our customers don’t come to us for the HR sync, but the HR sync is a given.
— Martin Pannier, Founder & CEO of Primo

The Challenge

Martin and the team did not consider building in-house due to the complexity and overhead it would introduce to such an early and lean team.

Instead, it was a straightforward decision to look around and pick the best out-of-the-box solution that would allow them to seamlessly extract and sync all the data points they need to have from their customers’ HRIS systems.

The main ones that are core to their product:

• Start date and end date to enable smoothly planned onboarding and off-boarding‍
• Team and department to be able to customize SaaS and MDM settings‍
• Employee personal email to enable the new employee to complete their IT onboarding before receiving a work email‍
• Personal address to ship devices directly to them

We allow our customers to customize either the SaaS or the equipment and the MDM settings based on each new employee’s team. For example, if you have a DevOps team, you may want them to have the highest security settings and most constraints on their devices – settings you may not need for someone on another team.
— Martin Pannier, Founder & CEO of Primo

The Decision & Outcome

Primo initially picked another integration provider as Kombo was just getting started as a company when Primo first started looking for unified API providers for their HR integrations.

After one year, however, the Primo team made the switch to Kombo for better European coverage of the long tail, and a better-suited pricing model for their needs.

Martin emphasized the ease with which they switched from the previous provider to Kombo.

It took us four days and one engineer to complete the migration and implement Kombo. The docs were very clear and easy to follow, and the support team was excellent.
— Martin Pannier, Founder & CEO of Primo

Some of the reasons Martin mentioned for the switch are:

• a pricing model that scales with the customer
• a better HR coverage for the long tail in Europe
• better security and compliance for EU customers, and
• exceptional customer support

We’ve been really impressed with the product Kombo built within only 18 months of starting the company and already building a better HR coverage and product because of the focus on this vertical.

On top of that, we’ve liked the eye-to-eye collaboration with the customer success and support team: having a joint Slack channel where the technical team is always available and helpful and the responsiveness to building new integrations we requested.
— Martin Pannier, Founder & CEO of Primo

The Primo team has connected over 100 customers through our unified API within only six months of working together. They have been one of the fastest customers we have to migrate and integrate the product internally but also roll it out with their own customers.

We’re very happy with our partnership with Primo so far and look forward to further supporting their growth.