Since joining the ranks of the ~100 US-based companies with $1B+ in revenues in early 2016, ServiceNow has made several notable tuck-in acquisitions. When viewed in aggregate, the business problems and the technologies the acquirees had focused on (the IoT, machine learning, chatbots, and mobile development) show that ServiceNow wants to become a more strategic partner to its customers. The acquired companies are described below:
DxContinuum (1/17): The machine-learning specialist will help ServiceNow prepare for and expand into IoT automation (leveraging machines to more intelligently route IT, HR, customer service, or other requests with higher accuracy).
Qlue (5/17): Qlue's virtual agent technologies will be integrated across its workflows on its platform for IT, HR, customer service and security. ServiceNow aims to leverage Qlue to help to facilitate communication flow between companies and their customers. Qlue will also be added to ServiceNow's Intelligent Automation Engine.
Telepathy (9/17): The UK-based UX specialist will help ServiceNow optimize and reduce user experience friction across its areas of focus (human resources, customer service, and security) through its design expertise/principles.
SkyGiraffe (10/17): ServiceNow will use SkyGiraffe's platform and expertise in mobile development and its ability to pull data from systems of record and quickly visualize said data on widely used front-ends like Tableau or Slack.
The acquisitions are very complementary to ServiceNow's goal of delivering consumer-grade experiences to its customers. Collectively, these acquisitions bring ServiceNow a path to helping organizations with application development, knowledge management, performance analytics, reporting, and subscription management. The company moved quickly in integrating DXContiunuum's machine-learning algorithms to help its customers predict outages, routing, workflow, outcomes, and benchmark performance―the more recent mobile-oriented acquisitions show that ServiceNow is thinking ahead to the cross-platform world that is in front of us, and has recognized it needed to expand its mobile capabilities.
Key mobile application platform trends now revolve around cloud-based services, which enable developers to access backend integration services — including API services and analytics — to build advanced apps that connect systems of record with systems of engagement. As a result, while current mobile services support a funneling of geolocation timing, going forward, analytics capabilities that support machine learning will make the user experience more meaningful. Next-generation mobile apps will be able to deliver customer insights and engagement in order to provide marketing groups with feedback loops that can help analyze the success of marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including mobile, web, and chatbots.
VDC’s recently published report “App Factories Slow to Emerge” showed that large organizations (organizations with more than 1,000 employees) were beginning to meaningfully invest in resources and tools to expand their B2E mobile app deployments. In fact, the primary audience for 44% of the mobile applications being developed by large organizations were B2E apps. Like many enterprise vendors, ServiceNow will need to furnish its customers with business apps that deliver consumer-based intuitive experiences; SkyGiraffe provides them with a solid platform to get the ball rolling.
View the 2017 Enterprise Mobility & Connected Devices Research Outline to learn more.