ServiceNow and VMware Make Key AIOps Acquisitions

ServiceNow, an  IT workflow management and optimization company, announced a finalized agreement on Jan. 22 to acquire Israeli AIOps company Loom Systems. This comes one day after IT infrastructure solutions provider VMware publicized its plan to acquire Nyansa, creators of network-focused AIOps platform Voyance.

In the company's analyst release, ServiceNow noted the goal of the acquisition is to extend “both ServiceNow’s IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) solutions, which help companies unlock productivity and drive operational efficiency on a single platform.” 

Loom Systems CEO Gabby Menachem speaks optimistically of the acquisition:
“By joining forces, we have the unique opportunity to bring together our AI innovations and ServiceNow’s AIOps capabilities to help customers prevent and fix IT issues before they become problems.”

Meanwhile, VMware's acquisition of Nyansa is driven by the former's longer-standing goal to “accelerate VMware’s delivery of end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for LAN/WAN deployments within our industry-leading SD-WAN solution,” according to VMware’s VeloCloud VP/GM Sanjay Uppal. Nyansa CEO Abe Ankumah has expressed that “joining forces with VMware provides an amazing platform for Nyansa to continue executing on the vision of a new networking paradigm: an analytics-powered and software-defined virtual cloud network that connects clients to containers in dynamic and distributed enterprises.”

AIOps is January 2020’s acquisition star

AIOps—a relatively new application of machine-learned or artificial intelligence (AI)—leverages AI/ML to analyze large volumes of data across a variety of systems. For both Loom Systems and ServiceNow, AIOps becomes incredibly relevant when dealing with the abundance of data produced by system logging and monitoring. With AI/ML at the head of log and monitoring analysis, companies can more proactively identify potential issues in their systems and increase root cause analysis (RCA) accuracy, which in turn would reduce time to resolution and help improve service level agreement (SLA) adherence.

Meanwhile, VMware and Nyansa are applying AIOps straight to networks themselves. VMware has been vocal over the last year about enabling and expanding the power of SD-WAN—particularly, for VMware’s SD-WAN offering VeloCloud—and have turned to Nyansa’s AIOps platform to help make that happen. Leveraging AI to constantly monitor and analyze network performance, users can more quickly identify weak points, potential issues, or root causes to failures in network functionality, as well as improve resolution time. 

As companies continue to look for improved process efficiency, we’re likely to see AIOps as a growing trend for 2020. AIOps may prove to be the edge vendors are looking for to provide standout ITSM, ITOM, networking, and a plethora of other IT tools for all markets and industries.

Neither acquisition’s financial information has been released, but ServiceNow’s purchase is slated for completion by the end of calendar Q1 2020, and VMware’s by the end of its financial year Q1 2021.