Freshworks has announced its decision to acquire FireHydrant, an AI-powered software provider that deals in AI-driven incident management.
The acquisition intends to utilize the provider’s core IT Operations Management (ITOM) capabilities, combined with Freshworks’ IT Service Management (ITSM) to create a unified AI-native ServiceOps solution.
This solution will also be designed to address issues to resolve customer experience-based operations by keeping them in the loop on possible server outages.
Having now signed an agreement to acquire the software provider, Freshworks intends to utilize the acquisition to bring its customers simplified operations, disruption prevention, and assured reliability in IT services.
Service teams currently face serious challenges when it comes to system downtimes and outages. And as the digital world becomes increasingly more intertwined with the physical world, more concerns arise when such issues emerge.
This can cause significant disruption to the daily lives and needs of its customers, as well as possibly exposing them to risks of increased cybercriminal activity, reducing customer trust.
Another challenge outlined by both companies is siloed ITOM and ITSM. This separation can result in multiple teams reacting rather than proactively stopping these incidents before they reach global customer levels.
This can worsen incidents for customer-facing teams, when IT operations are typically first to identify system outages, service teams will not be immediately aware of the issue.
This lack of context means that siloed teams are unable to identify patterns, customer updates, and system alerts, reducing response times.
This disruption can also affect not only the customer experience but also the standards an enterprise holds within the market space.
However, through the acquisition, Freshworks will hope to enhance the capabilities of its Freshservice product and address these challenges to ensure these two management teams aren’t separated.
Dennis Woodside, CEO and President of Freshworks, explained how the deal will enable Freshworks to pursue its vision for team unification, improving overall productivity and communication for its enterprise customers.
“We believe the FireHydrant technology will contribute to our vision of unifying IT and employee experiences where service, asset, and operations management converge with AI to drive business continuity and efficiency,” he said.
“Our Employee Experience (EX) business continues to demonstrate durable growth, powered by our expansion upmarket, into more departments and into adjacent markets and this acquisition will further accelerate our Freshservice momentum by unifying critical IT capabilities for our customers.”
By creating an AI-native ServiceOps solution, this strategy aims to deliver three key benefits, ensuring that technology failures are handled promptly by introducing clear communication methods and effective prevention systems.
Unified Visibility
By bringing these two management teams together, it creates a seamless path between two separate systems, connecting alerts and response activities all into one viewpoint.
This solution means that service teams can experience fewer handoffs and have knowledge of problem ownership when it arises.
This improves customer communication quality by informing CX teams of the status, impact, and current progress regarding the issue rather than forcing them to chase siloed teams for updates.
Faster Response
By utilizing AI, FireHydrant can identify incidences and offer guidance to the right teams through logical steps.
By targeting the specific teams, customer-facing ones can reduce their overall alerts and prioritise the disruptions that are affecting their users.
This means that service teams can provide their customers with speedy updates and well-informed responses to avoid friction.
Proactive IT
This combines the two companies’ service, asset data, and post-incident analysis to track recurring incidents.
By utilizing Freshservice and FireHydrant, teams can identify any repeated customer issues to target preventive action.
This enables CX leaders to shift from reactive customer issue support to stopping them before they reach the customer.
Who is FireHydrant?
FireHydrant is a software company and platform that offers software-as-a-service for incident management and reliability.
This incident management platform allows FireHydrant customers to respond, detect, and learn from arising technology incidents.
It also provides manual task reduction offerings such as on-call management capabilities, major incident response techniques, and AI-integrated analysis abilities.
The platform is designed to reflect real-world challenges, ensuring that incident responses are consistent, automated, and traceable.
Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant, highlighted how this acquisition can allow Freshworks to simplify its workflow and reduce pressure during system incidents.
“Freshworks shares the core philosophy that has guided FireHydrant since day one: software should make life less complicated for the people using it.”
“We built FireHydrant to eliminate the chaos and pain of incident response and now, with Freshworks, we are creating what we’ve always believed should exist: a unified, end-to-end operational and reliability platform.”
