Digital workflow giant ServiceNow has acquired Era Software to give enterprises “unified observability at scale”.
ServiceNow said the acquisition builds on its 2021 takeover of Lightstep, which gave it a foothold in observability. ID forecasts the market will be worth more than $9bn globally by 2025.
Ben Sigelman, General Manager of ServiceNow’s Lightstep business unit, said:
“Digital transformation succeeds or fails based on unified observability.
“Together, ServiceNow and Era Software are set up to deliver a unified and seamless observability experience within one solution, designed to scale.”
A Look at the Observability Market
Analyst Gartner describes observability as the evolution of monitoring into a process that offers insight into digital business applications, speeds innovation, and enhances customer experience.
The power provided by the cloud means applications are crunching more data than ever. This data can provide invaluable insights to enterprises if interpreted correctly.
Other key players in the Observability market, based on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, include Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Honey comb and IBM. Huge tech companies that play in tangential markets also feature, including Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle and Alibaba.
ServiceNow said that the combination of Lightstep with Era would help bring together fragmented siloes of application monitoring for DevOps teams. Ultimately, this will save businesses money because they won’t be running distributed logging applications on cloud architecture.
Seattle-based Era started life in 2019 and has raised $22.3m in investment, according to Crunchbase.
CEO Todd Persen said: “At Era Software, we created solutions to simplify the complex challenges of managing large volumes of observability data, with a particular focus on log management.
“We have always believed that observability should span across the enterprise. We are excited to join ServiceNow, as we further build a customer-centric model of observability that can help transform the way people work.”
A busy year for ServiceNow has also seen it acquire Hitch to boost employee experience and workforce planning. The firm has also made headlines through the announcements of several tech alliances. These included the likes of Qualtrics and 3CLogic.
Just last week, Zoom continued its enterprise push by announcing a tie-up between ServiceNow and its chat tool, as it looks to take the battle to Slack and Teams.
ServiceNow also revealed that it will publish its Q3 results on Wednesday, 26 October. The vendor beat analyst expectations in Q2, with sales rising almost a third in constant currency.
The Era acquisition is expected to close in Q4 of this year. ServiceNow did not disclose financial terms.
