ServiceNow opens $7.7B ticket titled 'Buy security company, make it Armis'

Customers will be able to see vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and close them with automated workflows.

After over a week of speculation, ServiceNow announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity heavyweight Armis in a $7.75 billion deal that will see the workflow giant incorporate a real-time security intelligence feed into its products.

The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026. ServiceNow said it will finance the transaction with a combination of cash and debt.

Once the deal is done, ServiceNow plans to join its CMDB (Configuration Management Database) – which maps all of an organization's IT assets – with Armis’ data discovery tools to let customers see vulnerabilities, prioritize their risks, and close holes with automated workflows. The two companies already have several integrations that connect Armis data and insights to ServiceNow, but expect the acquisition will deepen those links.

ServiceNow’s security revenue is currently around $1 billion a year. The company hopes buying Armis will triple that figure.

In its statement, ServiceNow said customers will no longer have to rely on a patchwork of software solutions to keep their estates safe.

“Modern cyber risk doesn’t stay neatly confined to a single silo, and with security built into the ServiceNow AI Platform, neither will we,” Amit Zavery, president, chief operating officer, and chief product officer at ServiceNow said in a statement.

Armis has 950 employees, annual recurring revenue of $340 million, and is headquartered in San Francisco. It is a 2025 leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cyber-Physical Systems Protection Platforms.

Also this month, ServiceNow announced the acquisition of Veza, an identity access tool to manage AI agents and control who and what has access to its customers’ systems.

The company has been on a spending spree this year with deals to acquire Armis, Cueln, Data.World, Logik.ai, Quality 360, and Veza.

Forrester vice president and principal analyst Charles Betz told The Register on Tuesday that the Armis acquisition is a “serious expansion” of ServiceNow’s capabilities.

“Armis gives ServiceNow massive volumes of data that they have not previously had before in their CMDB,” he said. “This takes their existing discovery tools’ capabilities and makes them an order of magnitude more powerful. That’s the big economic boost.”

He said that, taken together with the Data.World acquisition, it signals that ServiceNow is looking at how it manages data “very strategically.” Data.World is a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform built for large enterprises. It takes vast corporate data sets and makes them searchable and mappable.

“This is a strategic pairing because a) they’re going to have massive new volumes of data that come in and b) with the Data.World acquisition they have the ability to develop and use that data strategically and bring it into contact with AI,” Betz told The Register. “It’s a strategic play. It says we’re in this for the long haul.”

Even prior to the acquisitions, he said ServiceNow is in a league of its own when it comes to ITSM. He said that while Salesforce’s recent announcement that it launched its own ITSM tool is the most credible threat to ServiceNow, the latter company is years ahead in terms of development.

“As a company, ServiceNow doesn’t have any comparables,” he said. “Salesforce is five years behind. I stand by what I said. They’re still the most credible threat, but being the most credible threat still doesn’t mean you’re really a threat. If you have a cat and a mouse in the room, the mouse is the most credible threat to the cat.”

The one area that ServiceNow customers will be watching is how well the company integrates Armis, Data.World, and the other acquisitions into its platform, Betz said.

ServiceNow’s Heath Ramsey, the company’s group vice president of outbound project management for the AI platform, last week told The Register the company will treat its new acquisitions the same way it has treated previous buys, meticulously integrating code bases to create a better platform.

“That kind of approach has allowed us to not only acquire companies, but we build that into the code and the ability and the capabilities of the platform to ensure that our customers are able to get access to it very, very seamlessly, and that it all works together,” he said. ®