Agentic AI security focus of ServiceNow acquisition targets

As the race to agentic AI-powered customer experience -- and employee experience, too -- presses on, ServiceNow has gone on an acquisitions binge this year, with two more companies in its sights.

Just this month, ServiceNow has been involved in three acquisitions. This week, the company closed its acquisition of Moveworks, an autonomous AI search and IT support assistant with close integration ties to the Now platform. The acquisition had been in the works since March, for $2.85 billion in cash and stock.

Earlier in December, ServiceNow said it had agreed to acquire Veza, an AI-first identity management platform whose graph technology integrates with ServiceNow. After the deal closes, ServiceNow will have new capabilities to manage human and AI access to critical data, applications and systems.

Finally, although neither company has made an official announcement, numerous outlets are reporting that ServiceNow is in the late stages of negotiations to acquire Armis, an Israeli AI security company. Armis's Centrix platform enables visibility, risk management and security for an organization's connected hardware and software assets. If the acquisition goes through for a rumored $7 billion, it would be ServiceNow's most expensive acquisition to date.

ServiceNow is building a "platform of platforms" to manage its own AI agents -- as well as other companies' -- in customers' enterprise IT stacks, said Liz Miller, analyst at Constellation Research. Each acquisition is a building block that will likely strengthen ServiceNow's ability to deliver secure workflows, build observability, and manage AI agent and human identities as they access data through MCP servers.

Perhaps more importantly is the way each acquisition presents itself as modernizing operations for end users, whether they are an organization's customers or employees, such as sales reps.

"Every company that they're buying brings a different experience that's based on AI," Miller said. "They're not buying companies that don't have some type of AI-forward, experience-forward strategy."

Moveworks, Veza and Armis would cap off an active acquisition year for ServiceNow. Other companies acquired this year include:

• Cuein, a conversation intelligence platform that analyzes service interactions to derive insights on customer or employee sentiment, intent and satisfaction.
• Quality360, an AI tool for compliance automation from Swedish IT services provider Advania.
• Logik.ai, AI-driven CPQ.
• Data.world, an enterprise data catalog that adds a semantic layer to ServiceNow, which structures data for AI.

Of all ServiceNow's acquisitions, the leap to acquire Armis would be the biggest, considering the price and the fact that ServiceNow already has considerable IT asset management capabilities. Armis would sharpen ServiceNow's ability to secure customer and employee experiences, a much more complicated task with AI agents in the mix of actors on enterprise networks, Miller said.

"The Armis thing is so hot, it's so good in this age where our bots are going to have to sell to our customers' bots," Miller said. "We're very used to old-school security motion -- how to identify people by judging keystrokes, looking at the data you're providing in your identity packet, and making sure you have multifactor authentication. We can actually differentiate between the terms 'authentication' and 'authorization,' and make them two very different motions. Now do it for bots."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.