ServiceNow to acquire observability innovator Era Software, helping businesses turn data-driven insights into action

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, has 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 towards 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 towards 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 organisations deliver better outcomes across all their technology investments, capitalising 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 Persen and CTO Robert Winslow. Persen was previously a co‑founder and CTO at InfluxData, where he helped engineer the InfluxDB time‑series database.

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.

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