ServiceNow acquires Lightstep and enters application performance monitoring – TechCrunch

According to data from Crunchbase, this morning ServiceNow announced that it will acquire Lightstep, an application performance monitoring startup that has raised more than $70 million. The two companies did not share the purchase price.

ServiceNow hopes to use Lightstep’s capabilities to enhance its IT operations products. With Lightstep, the company should be able to provide customers with a way to monitor application performance, with the goal of detecting problems before they develop into major problems that cause website or application paralysis.

“With Lightstep, ServiceNow will change the way software solutions are delivered to customers. This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now they will be able to build and run their software faster than ever before, and with confidence Embrace the new era of work,” Pablo Stern, Senior Vice President and General Manager of IT Workflow Products at ServiceNow, said in a statement.

Ben Sigelman, the founder and CEO of Lightstep, believes that a larger organization is an ideal foothold for his company. “We have always believed that the value of observability should be extended to the entire enterprise to provide greater clarity and confidence for each team participating in these modern digital businesses. By joining ServiceNow, we will jointly realize this vision for our customers and Help change the world of work in the process […], Sigelman said in a statement.

Lightstep is part of the application performance monitoring market. It works with companies such as Datadog, New Relic, and AppDynamics, which Cisco acquired in 2017 a week before its planned $3.7 billion IPO. This seems to be an area that has aroused the interest of large corporate suppliers, who are picking smaller start-ups in this area.

In November last year, IBM acquired APM startup Instana, and then acquired Turbonomic as a supplementary technology at the end of last month for $2 billion. Being able to monitor applications and keep them running is critical, not only from a business continuity perspective, but also from a brand loyalty perspective. Even if the application is not completely shut down, but it runs slowly or usually malfunctions in some way, it may annoy the user and eventually cause the user to turn to a competitor. This type of software enables customers to observe and detect problems before they affect a large number of users.

Lightstep was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in San Jose, California. It raised $70 million from investors such as Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, Red Dot Capital, and Harrison Metal. Customers include GitHub, Spotify, and Twilio. The transaction is expected to be completed this quarter.