ServiceNow has acquired yet another company, despite its CEO’s insistence that there will be no “big” deals anytime soon. This time, the software company has acquired Pyramid Analytics, an Israeli company with expertise in data science and preparation. The goal is to build additional context and semantics into the software stack.
“Pyramid adds an analytical and semantic layer that allows both humans and AI agents to define metrics in a trustworthy way,” said Charles Betz, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. register Friday. “Natural language queries are one expression of that, but the deeper value for customers is to bring analysis closer to action. Rather than treating semantics purely as a design-time issue and analysis as a downstream reporting use case, we embed trusted, shared meaning directly into workflows, making them suitable for automation by agents.”
Grabbing Pyramid Analytics is the latest in a series of acquisitions that ServiceNow is using to build a software stack that ranges from ticket ingestion and workflow monitoring to using knowledge graphs to understand what and why behind the objects that appear in a customer’s CMDB. The company’s acquisitions of Data.World and Veza are also examples of this direction.
“The most important signals are not about the natural language query itself, but about the semantics,” Betz says.
ServiceNow says that once Pyramid Analytics functionality is included, customers will be able to run dashboards within the system that display information.
“For example, AI-driven insights can automatically surface issues, open and route cases, recommend the next best action, and drive solutions across IT and the business, all in one connected workflow,” Guarav Rewari, general manager and senior vice president of data analytics, said in a blog announcing the deal.
Pyramid provides a “standard” definition of business, Rewarit wrote, which allows humans and AI agents to act with more confidence in business decisions across a customer’s IT estate. He said this will allow ServiceNow to move beyond domain-specific use cases and connect to data outside of ServiceNow’s traditional purview.
“With Pyramid Analytics, we deliver high-value solutions across IT, HR, supply chain, and other areas that combine data connectivity, AI-powered queries, workflow automation, and trusted governance,” Rewari wrote.
News of the deal comes about two weeks after CEO Bill McDermott told investors during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that no more “major” M&A is planned.
“And as it relates to future M&A, we don’t have any major M&A on our roadmap,” he said. “What happened, I feel like you guys had Moveworks. It took nine months to shut it down. You shut down Moveworks right away… and then Armis and Veza came to you within a few days. So, you were probably a little concerned about what was going on with ServiceNow. And because of the worry, you lost about 100 in market cap. I realized I lost a billion dollars. Now I don’t have to worry about it and I can get my market capitalization back.”
Since the January 28th call, ServiceNow stock has fallen an additional 8.27%.
Financial details of the Pyramid Analytics deal were not disclosed. A ServiceNow spokesperson said: register The company said the acquisition was not material to its financial results and described it as a “tuck-in.”
“Pyramid is a smaller, strategic tuck-in that strengthens our data and analytics capabilities,” the spokesperson said. “It’s not important to our business.”
Betts said the deal was likely close to being done when McDermott made those comments, although “the optics aren’t the best.”
“I took Bill McDermott’s comments as an attempt at a very large balance sheet-building transaction,” Betts said. register. “Pyramid is substantially smaller than a deal like Armis and looks more targeted than a broader portfolio bet. In that sense, this is consistent with a strategy of filling specific gaps rather than pursuing transformative M&A. Also, the timing. Bill said that just a few weeks ago. Perhaps the Pyramid deal would have gone too far to reverse.” ®
