Case Study: Zendesk achieves a 90% reduction in engineering time on compliance with FOSSA

How Zendesk Automated Workflows and Simplified Compliance

Zendesk, a global leader in support and customer engagement software with more than 200,000 customers and 1,000+ repos, faced slow development and heavy overhead from a legacy scanning tool that produced roughly 10,000 results per scan, many false positives, and wasn’t integrated into CI. Legal and engineering teams spent dozens of extra hours each month on open source management, so Zendesk turned to FOSSA to streamline compliance.

FOSSA implemented its SCA solution and automated policy engine across Zendesk’s CI/CD pipelines, adding developer-friendly workflows, auto-approvals, and contextual, actionable remediation guidance. The deployment cut engineering time to resolve compliance issues by over 90%, reduced legal time spent on compliance by 50%, delivered significantly fewer false positives (FOSSA users see ~47% fewer false-positive vulnerability issues vs competitors), and sped up CI/CD insights and reporting—freeing teams to focus on product work.

Zendesk

Patrick Lonergan

Associate General Counsel