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ServiceNow to acquire Belgian configuration management startup Sweagle
With more companies moving workers home, making sure your systems are up and running has become more important than ever. ServiceNow, which includes in its product catalog an IT Help Desk component, recognizes that help desks have been bombarded during the pandemic. To help stop configuration problems before they start, the company today acquired Sweagle, a configuration management startup based in Belgium.
The companies did not share the purchase price.
ServiceNow gets a couple of boosts in the deal. First of all, it gets the startup’s configuration management products, which it can incorporate into its own catalog, but it also gains the machine learning and DevOps knowledge of the company’s employees. (The company would not share the exact number of employees, but PitchBook pegs it at 15.)
RJ Jainendra, ServiceNow’s vice president and general manager of DevOps and IT Business Management, sees a company that has pioneered the IT configuration management automation space, and brings with it capabilities that can boost ServiceNow’s offerings. “With capabilities for configuration data management from Sweagle, we will empower DevOps teams to deliver application and infrastructure changes more rapidly while reducing risk,” Jainendra said in a statement.
ServiceNow claims that there can be as many as 50,000 different configuration elements in a single enterprise application. Sweagle has designed a configuration data management platform with machine learning underpinnings to help customers simplify and automate that complexity. Configuration errors can cause shutdowns, security issues and other serious problems for companies.
Sweagle was founded in 2017 and raised $4.05 million on a post-valuation of $11.88 million, according to PitchBook data.
The company is part of a growing pattern of early-stage startups being sucked up by larger companies during the pandemic, including VMware acquiring Ocatarine and Atlassian buying Halp in May and NetApp snagging Spot earlier this month.
This is the third acquisition for ServiceNow this year, all involving AI underpinnings. In January it bought Loom Systems and Passsage AI. The deal is expected to close in Q3 this year, according to ServiceNow.
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AWS launches Amazon AppFlow, its new SaaS integration service
AWS today launched Amazon AppFlow, a new integration service that makes it easier for developers to transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications like Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake and Zendesk. Like similar services, including Microsoft Azure’s Power Automate, for example, developers can trigger these flows based on specific events, at pre-set times or on-demand.
Unlike some of its competitors, though, AWS is positioning this service more as a data transfer service than a way to automate workflows, and, while the data flow can be bi-directional, AWS’s announcement focuses mostly on moving data from SaaS applications to other AWS services for further analysis. For this, AppFlow also includes a number of tools for transforming the data as it moves through the service.
“Developers spend huge amounts of time writing custom integrations so they can pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analysed; these can be expensive and can often take months to complete,” said AWS principal advocate Martin Beeby in today’s announcement. “If data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications have to be made to the integrations. Companies that don’t have the luxury of engineering resources might find themselves manually importing and exporting data from applications, which is time-consuming, risks data leakage, and has the potential to introduce human error.”
Every flow (which AWS defines as a call to a source application to transfer data to a destination) costs $0.001 per run, though, in typical AWS fashion, there’s also cost associated with data processing (starting at 0.02 per GB).
“Our customers tell us that they love having the ability to store, process, and analyze their data in AWS. They also use a variety of third-party SaaS applications, and they tell us that it can be difficult to manage the flow of data between AWS and these applications,” said Kurt Kufeld, vice president, AWS. “Amazon AppFlow provides an intuitive and easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public internet. With Amazon AppFlow, our customers bring together and manage petabytes, even exabytes, of data spread across all of their applications — all without having to develop custom connectors or manage underlying API and network connectivity.”
At this point, the number of supported services remains comparatively low, with only 14 possible sources and four destinations (Amazon Redshift and S3, as well as Salesforce and Snowflake). Sometimes, depending on the source you select, the only possible destination is Amazon’s S3 storage service.
Over time, the number of integrations will surely increase, but for now, it feels like there’s still quite a bit more work to do for the AppFlow team to expand the list of supported services.
AWS has long left this market to competitors, even though it has tools like AWS Step Functions for building serverless workflows across AWS services and EventBridge for connections applications. Interestingly, EventBridge currently supports a far wider range of third-party sources, but as the name implies, its focus is more on triggering events in AWS than moving data between applications.
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ServiceNow pledges no layoffs in 2020
You don’t need your PhD in economics to know the economy is in rough shape right now due to the impact of COVID-19, but ServiceNow today pledged that it would not lay off a single employee in 2020 — and in fact, it’s hiring.
While Salesforce’s Marc Benioff pledged no significant layoffs for 90 days last month, and asked other company leaders to do the same, ServiceNow did them one better by promising to keep every employee for at least the rest of the year.
Bill McDermott, who came on as CEO at the end of last year after nine years as CEO at SAP, said that he wanted to keep his employees concentrating on the job at hand without being concerned about a potential layoff should things get a little tighter for the company.
“We want our employees focused on supporting our customers, not worried about their own jobs,” he said in a statement.
In addition, the company plans to fill 1,000 jobs worldwide, as well as hire 360 college students as interns this summer, as they continue to expand their workforce, when many industries and fellow tech companies are laying off or furloughing employees.
The company also announced that it is taking part in a program called People+Work Connect, with Accenture, Lincoln Financial Group and Verizon (the owner of this publication). This program acts as an online employer to employer clearing house for these companies to hire employees laid off or furloughed by other companies. The company plans to post 800 jobs through this channel.
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Okta launches Lifecycle Management Workflows to make building identity-centric processes easy
Okta, the popular identity and access management service, today used its annual (and now virtual) user conference to launch Lifecycle Management Workflows, a new tool that helps IT teams build and manage IFTTT-like automated processes with the help of an easy to use graphical interface.
The new service is an extension of Okta’s existing automation tools. But the key here is that IT teams and developers can now easily build complex identity-centric workflows across a wide range of applications. With this, these teams can easily automate an onboarding process, where setting up a new Okta account also immediately kicks off processes on third-party services like Box, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Slack to set up accounts there. The same goes for offboarding workflows and username creation. A lot of companies still do this manually, which is not just a hassle but also error-prone.
“Adopting more technology is incredibly beneficial for enterprises today, but complexity is a significant side effect of a changing technology ecosystem and workforce. There is no better example of the potential challenges it can create than with lifecycle management,” said Diya Jolly, chief product officer at Okta. “Okta’s vision of enabling any organization to use any technology goes deeper than just access; it’s about improving how organizations use technology. Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows improves the efficiency and security of enterprises through its simple user experience and broad applicability, keeping organizations secure and efficient without requiring the complexity of writing code.”
Okta, of course, had lifecycle management features before, but now it is also putting its acquisition of Azuqua to work and using that company’s graphical interface and technology for making it easier to create these automation processes. And while the focus right now is on processes like provisioning and de-provisioning accounts, the long-term plan is to expand Workflows with support for more identity processes.
As Okta also stresses, administrators can also manage very granular access across the supported third-party tools like assigning territories in Salesforce or access to specific group channels in Slack, for example. For temporary employees, admins can also set up automatic de-provisioning workflows that revoke access to some tools but maybe leave access to payroll services open for a while longer. There are also built-in tools for automatically managing conflicts when two people have the same name.
“Millions of people rely on Slack every day to make their working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive,” said Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack, one of the early adopters of this service. “Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows has significantly increased efficiency for us by automating the provisioning and de-provisioning of users from applications in our environment, without us ever having to write a line of code.”
This new feature is part of Okta’s new Platform Services, which the company also debuted today and which currently consists of core technologies like the Okta Identity Engine, Directories Integrations, Insights, Workflow and Devices. The core idea behind Platform Services is to give Okta users the flexibility to manage their unique identity use cases but also to give Okta itself a platform on which to innovate. One other new product that sits on top of the platform is Okta Fastpass, for example, which allows for passwordless authentication on any device.
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OpsRamp raises $37.5M for its hybrid IT operations platform
OpsRamp, a service that helps IT teams discover, monitor, manage and — maybe most importantly — automate their hybrid environments, today announced that it has closed a $37.5 million funding round led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, with participation from existing investor Sapphire Ventures and new investor Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
OpsRamp last raised funding in 2017, when Sapphire led its $20 million Series A round.
At the core of OpsRamp’s services is its AIOps platform. Using machine learning and other techniques, this service aims to help IT teams manage increasingly complex infrastructure deployments, provide intelligent alerting and eventually automate more of their tasks. The company’s overall product portfolio also includes tools for cloud monitoring and incident management.
The company says its annual recurrent revenue increased by 300% in 2019 (though we obviously don’t know what number it started 2019 with). In total, OpsRamp says it now has 1,400 customers on its platform and alliances with AWS, ServiceNow, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
OpsRamp co-founder and CEO Varma Kunaparaju
According to OpsRamp co-founder and CEO Varma Kunaparaju, most of the company’s customers are mid to large enterprises. “These IT teams have large, complex, hybrid IT environments and need help to simplify and consolidate an incredibly fragmented, distributed and overwhelming technology and infrastructure stack,” he said. “The company is also seeing success in the ability of our partners to help us reach global enterprises and Fortune 5000 customers.”
Kunaparaju told me that the company plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts and product offerings. “The company will be using the money in a few different areas, including expanding our go-to-market motion and new pursuits in EMEA and APAC, in addition to expanding our North American presence,” he said. “We’ll also be doubling-down on product development on a variety of fronts.”
Given that hybrid clouds only increase the workload for IT organizations and introduce additional tools, it’s maybe no surprise that investors are now interested in companies that offer services that rein in this complexity. If anything, we’ll likely see more deals like this one in the coming months.
“As more of our customers transition to hybrid infrastructure, we find the OpsRamp platform to be a differentiated IT operations management offering that aligns well with the core strategies of HPE,” said Paul Glaser, vice president and head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. “With OpsRamp’s product vision and customer traction, we felt it was the right time to invest in the growth and scale of their business.”
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ServiceNow acquires conversational AI startup Passage AI
ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired Passage AI, a startup that helps customers build chatbots in multiple languages, something that should come in handy as ServiceNow continues to modernize its digital service platform. The companies did not share terms of the deal.
With Passage AI, ServiceNow gets a bushel of AI talent, which in itself has value, but it also gets AI technology, which should fit in nicely with ServiceNow’s mission. For starters, the company’s chatbot solutions gives ServiceNow an automated way to respond to customer/user inquiries.
Even more interesting for ServiceNow, Passage includes an IT automation component that uses ” a conversational interface to submit tickets, handle queries and take direct action through APIs,” according to the company website. It also gets an HR automation piece, giving the company an intelligent tool it could incorporate across its Now Platform in tools like ServiceNow Virtual Agent and Service Portal, as well as Workspaces in multiple languages.
The multilingual support was an aspect of the deal that appeals to Debu Chatterjee, senior director of AI Engineering at ServiceNow. “Building deep learning, conversational AI capabilities into the Now Platform will enable a work request initiated in German or a customer inquiry initiated in Japanese to be solved by Virtual Agent,” he said in a statement.
Companies are increasingly looking for ways to solve common customer problems using chatbots, while only bringing humans into the loop when the bot can’t answer the query. Passage AI gives ServiceNow much deeper knowledge in this growing area.
Passage AI, which launched in 2016, has raised $10.3 million, according to Crunchbase data. The company website lists a variety of large customers, including Mastercard, Shell, Mercedes-Benz and SoftBank. The acquisition comes less than a week after the company purchased another AI-focused startup, Loom Systems, one that concentrates on automating operations data.
The deal is expected to close this quarter. ServiceNow will be announcing earnings on Wednesday afternoon.
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ServiceNow acquires Loom Systems to expand AIOps coverage
ServiceNow announced today that it has acquired Loom Systems, an Israeli startup that specializes in AIOps. The companies did not reveal the purchase price.
IT operations collects tons of data across a number of monitoring and logging tools, way too much for any team of humans to keep up with. That’s why there are startups like Loom turning to AI to help sort through it. It can find issues and patterns in the data that would be challenging or impossible for humans to find. Applying AI to operations data in this manner has become known as AIOps in industry parlance.
ServiceNow is first and foremost a company trying to digitize the service process, however that manifests itself. IT service operations is a big part of that. Companies can monitor their systems, wait until a problem happens and then try to track down the cause and fix it — or, they can use the power of artificial intelligence to find potential dangers to the system health and neutralize them before they become major problems. That’s what an AIOps product like Loom’s can bring to the table.
Jeff Hausman, vice president and general manager of IT Operations Management at ServiceNow, sees Loom’s strengths merging with ServiceNow’s existing tooling to help keep IT systems running. “We will leverage Loom Systems’ log analytics capabilities to help customers analyze data, automate remediation and reduce L1 incidents,” he told TechCrunch.
Loom co-founder and CEO Gabby Menachem not surprisingly sees a similar value proposition. “By joining forces, we have the unique opportunity to bring together our AI innovations and ServiceNow’s AIOps capabilities to help customers prevent and fix IT issues before they become problems,” he said in a statement.
Loom has raised $16 million since it launched in 2015, according to PitchBook data. Its most recent round for $10 million was in November 2019. Today’s deal is expected to close by the end of this quarter.
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Reimagine inside sales to ramp up B2B customer acquisition
Robert Wahbe is the co-founder and CEO of Highspot, the sales enablement platform that reps love.
Slack makes customer acquisition look easy.
The day we acquired our first Highspot customer, it was raining hard in Seattle. I was on my way to a startup event when I answered my cell phone and our prospect said, “We’re going with Highspot.” Relief, then excitement, hit me harder than the downpour outside. It was a milestone moment – one that came after a long journey of establishing product-market fit, developing a sustainable competitive advantage, and iterating repeatedly based on prospect feedback. In other words, it was anything but easy.
User-first products are driving rapid company growth in an era where individuals discover, adopt, and share software they like throughout their organizations. This is great if you’re a Slack, Shopify, or Dropbox, but what if your company doesn’t fit that profile?
Product-led growth is a strategy that works for the right technologies, but it’s not the end-all, be-all for B2B customer acquisition. For sophisticated enterprise software platforms designed to drive company-wide value, such as Marketo, ServiceNow and Workday, that value is realized when the product is adopted en masse by one or more large segments.
If you’re selling broad account value, rather than individual user or team value, acquisition boils down to two things: elevating account based-selling and revolutionizing the inside sales model. Done correctly, you lay a foundation capable of doubling revenue growth year-over-year, 95 percent company-wide retention, and more than 100 percent growth in new customer logos annually. Here are the steps you can take to build a model that realizes on-par results.
Work the account, not the deal
Account-based selling is not a new concept, but the availability of data today changes the game. Advanced analytics enable teams to develop comprehensive and personalized approaches that meet modern customers’ heightened expectations. And when 77 percent of business buyers feel that technology has significantly changed how companies should interact with them, you have no choice but to deliver.
Despite the multitude of products created to help sellers be more productive and personal, billions of cookie-cutter emails are still flooding the inboxes of a few decision makers. The market is loud. Competition is cut throat. It’s no wonder 40 percent of sales reps say getting a response from a prospect is more difficult than ever before. Even pioneers of sales engagement are recognizing the need for evolution – yesterday’s one-size-fits-all approach to outreach only widens the gap between today’s sellers and buyers.
Companies must radically change their approach to account-based selling by building trusted relationships over time from the first-touch onward. This requires that your entire sales force – from account development representatives to your head of sales – adds tailored, tangible value at every stage of the journey. Modern buyers don’t want to be sold. They want to be advised. But the majority of companies are still missing the mark, favoring spray-and-pray tactics over personalized guidance.
One reason spamming remains prevalent, despite growing awareness of the need for quality over quantity, is that implementing a tailored approach is hard work. However, companies can make great strides by doing just three things:
- Invest in personalization: Sales reps have quota, and sales leaders carry revenue targets. The pressure is as real as the numbers. But high velocity outreach tactics simply don’t work consistently. New research from Monetate and WBR Research found that 93% of businesses with advanced personalization strategies increased their revenue last year. And while scaling personalization may sound like an oxymoron, we now have artificial intelligence (AI) technology capable of doing just that. Of course, not all AI is created equal, so take the time to discern AI-powered platforms that deliver real value from the imposters. With a little research, you’ll find sales tools that discard rinse-and-repeat prospecting methods in favor of intelligent guidance and actionable analytics.
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Bill McDermott takes reins as ServiceNow CEO sooner than expected with new CFO
It was pretty unexpected when former SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced he was stepping down in October after a decade in the position. He indicated at that point he would stay until the end of the year to help with the transition to new leadership — then ServiceNow hired him to be its CEO just a few weeks later. Today, the company announced, McDermott has taken over his duties earlier than expected.
The company also announced it has filled its vacant CFO job, hiring Gina Mastantuono, who previously served in similar roles at Ingram Micro and Revlon, and has more than 20 years experience in finance.
It was a game of CEO musical chairs when ServiceNow announced on October 22 that former CEO John Donahoe was leaving to be CEO at Nike, and it would be bringing in McDermott to replace him.
Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says all of these changes had a cascading impact, and once Donahoe decided to leave early, everything else happened much faster than planned. “The original plan was to have a transition in January, however there was an urgency on Donahoe’s side to get the Nike thing wrapped up. One of the key reasons to do this early [from a business perspective] is to get the sales team and sales kickoff aligned for 2020. The other reason is providing the same smooth transition for SAP’s co-CEOs Jennifer Moran and Christian Klein,” Wang told TechCrunch.
It is a time of transition for ServiceNow, having to replace both a CFO and CEO, but they landed two experienced pros, who should help continue to guide the company into the future. The company has stated that it hopes to eventually achieve a $10 billion revenue goal under the new leadership team.
As I wrote in a piece analyzing his move to ServiceNow, McDermott seemed to fully embrace that challenge, even though he has a ways to go:
McDermott has his work cut out for him. The company’s 2018 revenue was $2.6 billion. Still, he fully embraced the $10 billion challenge. “Well let me answer that very simply, I completely stand by [the $10 billion goal], and I’m looking forward to achieving it,” he said with bravado during today’s call.
Mastantuono has a lot in common with McDermott, who also came from a much larger organization to help lead ServiceNow to the next level. At her previous position at Ingram Micro she led finance for a company with $50 billion in revenue and more than 200,000 customers.
Mastantuono sees a company with great potential as she takes over to guide the financial side of the organization. “ServiceNow is highly regarded by its customers and has tremendous momentum and opportunity to enable digital transformation and help make work, work better for people,” she said in a statement.
The new leadership duo has its work cut out for it, but it’s a company with lots of room for growth. It will now be up to McDermott and Mastantuono to lead it into that next phase.
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Bill McDermott aims to grow ServiceNow like he did SAP
Bill McDermott has landed. Two weeks ago, he stepped down as CEO at SAP after a decade leading the company. Yesterday, ServiceNow announced that he will be its new CEO.
It’s unclear how quickly the move came together but the plan for him is clear: to scale revenue like he did in his last job.
Commenting during the company’s earning’s call today, outgoing CEO John Donahoe said that McDermott met all of the board’s criteria for its next leader. This includes the ability to expand globally, expand the markets it serves and finally scale the go-to-market organization internally, all in the service of building toward a $10 billion revenue goal. He believes McDermott checks all those boxes.
McDermott has his work cut out for him. The company’s 2018 revenue was $2.6 billion. Still, he fully embraced the $10 billion challenge. “Well let me answer that very simply, I completely stand by [the $10 billion goal], and I’m looking forward to achieving it,” he said with bravado during today’s call.
It’s worth noting that as the company strives to reach that lofty revenue goal in the coming years, it will be doing with a new CEO in McDermott, as well as a new CFO. The company is in the midst of a search to fill that key position, as well.
McDermott has been here before though. He points out that in the decade he was at SAP, under his leadership the company moved the market cap from $39 billion to $163 billion. Today, ServiceNow’s market cap is similar to when McDermott started at SAP at a little over $41 billion.
He also recognizes that this is going to be a new challenge. “I’ve seen a lot of different business models, and [SAP has] a very different business model than ServiceNow. This is a pure play cloud,” he said. That means as a leader, he says that has to think about product changes differently, how they fit in the overall platform, while maintaining simplicity and keeping the developer community in mind.
Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research said that ServiceNow is at a point where it needs an enterprise-class CEO who understands tech, partnerships, systems integrators and real enterprise sales and marketing — and McDermott brings all of that to his new employer.
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