ServiceNow kicks off Knowledge 2021 with Lightstep acquisition

The ServiceNow team have a busy couple of weeks lined up. The firm’s flagship event, Knowledge, will see a packed schedule of customer stories, solution announcements, and executive briefings. But before the event kicked off, ServiceNow grabbed the limelight by announcing its latest acquisition – application monitoring and observability pioneer, Lightstep.

While ServiceNow’s heritage is firmly in the ITSM space, over the past few years, the firm has moved into other business service areas, fuelled by an enterprise appetite to shift service management best practices outside of IT. More recently, the firm extended again to position itself as the defacto platform of platforms, managing workflows from different business areas and across diverse systems and tools. And the recent acquisition of Intellibot nudged ServiceNow further along on this path, offering clients the opportunity to integrate legacy systems through RPA while APIs support integrations for modern tools and platforms.

While this has moved the firm well beyond its traditional stomping ground to the benefit of other business areas, there is still a critical need to focus on the evolving IT landscape. The acquisition of Lightstep, then, serves as a reaffirmation from ServiceNow that they are still focused on innovating within their core and across its sprawling portfolio.

ServiceNow has a clear vision for Lightstep. To quote from their latest press release, the acquisition “will help DevOps teams build, deploy, run and monitor state-of-the-art, cloud-native applications. Lightstep’s solution analyzes system-wide metrics and tracing data in real time to understand the cause and effects of changes to application performance, reliability, and development velocity.”

Lightstep’s client list is a testament to the value the firm’s solutions bring to enterprises. Clients include GitHub, Spotify, Twillio, GrubHub, and a raft of other born-in-the-cloud disruptors and firms reliant on technology and high-quality software to power their business.

Increasingly IT leaders are looking for solutions that help them gain more visibility across their environments. This latest investment from ServiceNow will offer another tool in the toolbox—providing better and faster insights and enabling teams to ramp up development activities without losing sight of performance and quality.

We can expect the next two weeks to be packed with other announcements from ServiceNow as the firm continues to bring new solutions and services to market.