This week, ServiceNow announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based observability platform, LightStep. Founded in 2017, LightStep has quickly grown to be one of the most trusted platforms in the industry, with large customers including GitHub, Twilio, and Spotify. ServiceNow is looking for this acquisition to “help deliver deep operational insights for enterprises, expanding beyond DevOps to every team involved in these modern, digital businesses.” The amount of the transaction was undisclosed, but it has been said to be one of ServiceNow’s largest purchases to date.
Why This Transaction
The York IE Team chose this as the transaction of the week in order to highlight the spate of observability platform companies being acquired in the last year. Along with ServiceNow, IBM and Datadog have also taken a dive into furthering their overall observability and monitoring capabilities. IBM acquired Instana, hoping that its application performance monitoring and observability platform will further advance its hybrid cloud and AI technologies. Datadog, looking to take more control of the three pillars of observability data (logs, traces and metrics), acquired Timber Technologies, whose product Vector is “a vendor-agnostic, high-performance observability data pipeline.” All three of these acquisitions are staples in this trend of modern, digital businesses giving their cloud solutions and applications insurance that their product is running and performing at its highest level for their customers.
According to Hosting Tribunal, 94% of enterprises are already using a cloud service, while 30% of all IT budgets are being set aside for cloud computing. With this being said, there needs to be some sort of adoption to make sure these systems are performing properly on a daily basis. Companies, like the ones listed above, have realized this and are putting their trust into these observability platforms to give them real-time alerts on when their applications have an issue or will have an issue in the near future. Quick insights that are derived from running these platforms on your applications give development teams the context they need to take the correct actions when debugging a problem. These are some key factors behind the recent surge in observability platform adoption across businesses globally.
