ServiceNow plans to add Era Software log management capabilities to Lightstep for a unified observability solution at scale

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire observability and log management innovator, Era Software. Following ServiceNow’s acquisition of Lightstep in 2021, Era Software will help provide customers with a unified observability solution at scale. Customers will be able to gather actionable insights that deliver value across the business, all within a single solution purpose-built for the era of digital business.

Observability is foundational to digital transformation as it provides developers with the necessary insights to understand the performance of strategic applications at scale, and how to translate that data into business value. Yet within large enterprises, observability often remains siloed and costly, creating a fragmented and complex experience for DevOps and SRE teams. Era Software’s innovative technology and customer-centric approach to log management complements and augments existing features within Lightstep, and accelerates ServiceNow’s path toward unified telemetry (logs, metrics, traces).

“Digital transformation succeeds or fails based on unified observability,” says Ben Sigelman, general manager of ServiceNow’s Lightstep business unit and co-founder of Lightstep. “Together, ServiceNow and Era Software are set up to deliver a unified and seamless observability experience within one solution, designed to scale.”

As a founding member of the OpenTelemetry project, Lightstep leads the industry in a vision toward unified telemetry. Together, Era Software and Lightstep will further extend critical, unified observability workflows, removing the confusing context switches that hinder DevOps and SRE productivity at most enterprises today. Unified telemetry allows teams to innovate fast with precision and control, helping modern organizations deliver better outcomes across all their technology investments, capitalizing on the promise of digital transformation.

"At Era Software, we created solutions to simplify the complex challenges of managing large volumes of observability data, with a particular focus on log management," said Todd Persen, CEO and co‑founder at Era Software. "We have always believed that observability should span across the enterprise. We are excited to join ServiceNow, as we further build a customer-centric model of observability that can help transform the way people work."

Since its inception, the Era Software team has engineered new approaches to log data management that resolves scale, performance, and cost issues associated with running distributed applications on modern cloud-native architectures. Seattle‑based Era Software was co‑founded in 2019 by CEO Todd Persen and CTO Robert Winslow. Persen was previously a co-founder and CTO at InfluxData, where he helped engineer the InfluxDB time-series database. Read more from Sigelman on his blog post here.

With IDC forecasting the growth of the observability market to reach $9.08 billion by 2025,¹ this announcement underscores ServiceNow’s organic growth strategy with a focus on talent and technologies that strengthen the Now Platform with new and enhanced features for customers. It follows other recent ServiceNow acquisitions, including Hitch Works, DotWalk, Mapwize, and Gekkobrain. ServiceNow expects to complete the acquisition of Era Software in Q4 2022. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Use of forward-looking statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" about the expectations, beliefs, plans, intentions, and strategies relating to ServiceNow’s acquisition of Era Software. Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding future product capabilities and offerings and expected benefits to ServiceNow. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update the forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the inability to assimilate or integrate Era Software’s technology into our platform; the inability to retain employees of Era Software after the transaction closes; unanticipated expenses related to Era Software’s acquired technology; potential adverse tax consequences; disruption to our business and diversion of management attention and other resources; and potential unknown liabilities associated with Era Software’s business. Further information on factors that could affect our financial and other results is included in the filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud-based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com

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¹ IDC TechBrief: IT Observability for Digital Infrastructure Operations, July 2022, Doc #US49358522

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