ServiceNow Acquires Raytion For GenAI-Powered Multi-Site Search

ServiceNow, which has been building out its GenAI-powered search capabilities for years, has acquired Raytion which the company said will give it the ability to search across all of a company’s enterprise knowledge systems including ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Atlassian.

ServiceNow Wednesday unveiled the acquisition of Raytion as a way to expand its Now platform’s GenAI-powered search and knowledge management capabilities.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based AI-focused digital workflow technology developer also said it has made a strategic investment in telecom services provider Prodapt, and is working with Boomi to elevate customer experiences through AI-powered self-service capabilities.

The news completed what was a very busy day for ServiceNow which earlier on the same day discussed its second fiscal quarter 2024 financials and said it has parted ways with its President and Chief Operating Officer Chirantan “CJ” Desai.

ServiceNow declined to discuss the dollar value of the Raytion acquisition.

Dorit Zilbershot, vice president of AI product management at ServiceNow, told CRN that her company has been building consumer-grade search capabilities since its 2019 acquisition of Attivio, a developer of cognitive search technology. Zilbershot joined ServiceNow with that acquisition.

“One of the things we knew was that, when it comes to the enterprise, there’s more than one system where customers are holding information,” she said. “There's a lot of silos. You go to ServiceNow, maybe you go to Salesforce, and maybe to Atlassian. There's a lot of these knowledge systems. But employees as well as customers just want to have a single box where you describe your problem and the content should just come in.”

That is what ServiceNow gets with Raytion, which partnered with Attivio in the past and since that acquisition partnered with ServiceNow, Zilbershot said.

“They've been a partner for us for customers who want to use it to connect to other systems in the enterprise,” she said. “And now we're integrating that capability into our search engine and making sure that customers find it super easy to break those silos, make it easy to share between different systems, and create a unified and seamless help experience inside an organization.”

While ServiceNow had a partnership with Raytion, the company felt an acquisition would be better for the long-term, Zilbershot said.

“Our customers expect simplicity, and they want to connect with a single vendor,” she said. “And we want to really have this fully integrated into our platform so we can fully control the end-to-end experience of the administrator as well as the employees and the customers. And especially with generative AI, data is key, and having access to data and being able to apply our RAG, our retrieval-augmented generation, capabilities across data in the enterprise is a value multiplier for us.”

As the leader in the search connector domain, Raytion partners with multiple companies including search vendors such as Microsoft, Zilbershot said. ServiceNow will continue to honor all existing commitments to ensure the acquisition doesn’t create disruptions for customers, she said.

“We do intend to develop and integrate ServiceNow-specific adapters in the coming months so customers will see new improvements in our AI Search product. But as we do that, we are evaluating our plans for the existing standalone connector business, so more to come on that. We're still committed to all existing contracts Raytion had, and will provide two years of product support at minimum for most customers.”

Raytion has traditionally had a direct sales model, but ServiceNow will make it part of its channel-focused technology, Zilbershot said.

With the acquisition, ServiceNow gains about 40 people, Zilbershot said. This includes Raytion Founder and CEO Valentin Richter who going forward will be ServiceNow’s vice president of product management reporting to the company’s senior vice president of AI product and platform management.