ServiceNow mulls buying Armis to gain full visibility into the IT stack
If the buy happens, the big question is will they integrate the codebase or keep it separate?
ServiceNow is reportedly nearing a deal to buy security software company Armis for $7.1 billion to give its customers full stack visibility of their IT estate and eliminate security blindspots, according to Bloomberg.
The companies may announce the acquisition this week.
Founded in 2016, Armis is a privately held company with large enterprise clients such as United Airlines, Colgate Palmolive, and Mondelez. The company's software continually discovers and monitors every part of a customer's technology stack including IT, operational technology, internet of things, and connected medical devices. It combines that with automated risk scoring and vulnerability detection to help IT teams root out risks to the system, enforce security polities, and stop threats before they hit operations.
The company raised $435 million last month during a funding round that saw it valued at $6.1 billion, and says it crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue in August.
ServiceNow told The Register it had no comment on news reports about the potential acquisition. Armis did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
At Forrester, analyst Charles Betz said the deal for Armis brings ServiceNow closer to offering customers a complete IT services platform in one place.
“It’s a huge market play,” he told us. “ServiceNow has had GRC, governance, risk, and compliance, at the higher level. They are well rated for GRC and so they’re kind of going top down. I mean security is essentially applied risk management. Basically they’re worked systematically down the stack … It really kind of shows in real time how we are seeing the emergence of a consolidated IT management graph.”
Earlier this month, ServiceNow announced the acquisition of Veza, an identity access tool to manage AI agents and control who and what has access to its customers’ systems.
Betz said one of the “non trivial” matters that customers and the market will be watching closely is how well ServiceNow can incorporate large acquisitions like Armis and Veza into its existing software.
“ServiceNow, historically, has avoided buying a portfolio of independent products. They are not like Computer Associates or HP back in the day,” he said. “ServiceNow has been extremely architecturally disciplined … The big question with both Armis and Veza is, are they going to maintain those legacy code bases and start risking going down the road of the old software portfolio vendors, or are they going to actually reimplement on the Now platform?”
ServiceNow has said that Veza will be integrated into its portfolio of security and risk products to give customers visibility into who and what has access across the platform, along with an auditable trail throughout connected applications.
If ServiceNow can pull off the integrations it will be a “big step” towards solving legacy data quality issues that are inherent in the CMDB environment, Betz said.
“ServiceNow will be the source of IT visibility in many organizations, and that means that then you can modernize more effectively,” he said. “You can control the IT portfolio more effectively. Your AI maybe operate more effectively, if you're moving in an agent mode.”