ServiceNow Agrees To Buy An Integration Partner

ServiceNow on Tuesday said it had reached an agreement to purchase Intréis, one of its integration partners, in a play to build out its governance, risk and compliance practice.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based developer of IT and business management solutions did not disclose the financial terms of the deal to acquire the private consulting firm, whose business entirely consists of bringing to the enterprise market ServiceNow's platform.

Intréis, based in Chicago, was founded less than two years ago and shares 60 mutual customers with ServiceNow, according to Kris Markham, the company's co-founder and CEO.

[Related: ServiceNow Acquires Neebula For IT Operations Management Boost]

"Intréis at its core is a solutions integrator focused on ServiceNow as a technology platform," Markham said of his company.

Intréis helps customers develop internal service processes, then implements them via ServiceNow's cloud platform. The company, however, is not a reseller -- it instead works with the ServiceNow sales team and performs the initial implementation of the software, he said.

Markham told CRN the acquisition was motivated by Intréis' domain expertise in corporate governance and compliance processes. He said his company will not remain as an autonomous entity, but instead will be wrapped into ServiceNow's solutions practice.

Intréis' founders chose ServiceNow as their sole vendor partner in 2013 because ServiceNow offered the first platform to allow organizations to integrate risk and compliance strategy into the way they run their IT and business processes, Markham said. That works "because everything is on a single system of record."

"It gives us an opportunity to disrupt the GRC [governance, risk and compliance] space," he said. "We do have an opportunity here to completely redefine how organizations look at risk and compliance."

PUBLISHED FEB. 24, 2015