The Armis deal signals more than a security expansion for ServiceNow. It reflects a deliberate platform power play—anchoring trust, visibility, and governance as AI accelerates and enterprises consolidate around fewer, more authoritative platforms.
Omdia view
Summary
Security and the headline $7.75bn price tag have dominated industry conversations around ServiceNow’s late 2025 announcement that it intends to acquire Armis. Yes, Armis is a serious cyber exposure management player. Yes, this massively helps ServiceNow show up more credibly in security conversations. But, for this analyst at least, the more interesting story isn’t in how ServiceNow is adding more advanced security capabilities; it’s that ServiceNow is also buying massive platform gravity. And it’s doing it at a price that shows how serious it is about dominating the enterprise platform and AI era.
The economics of the deal matter—not because of the headline number, but because of what ServiceNow is buying and how the acquisition signifies the vendor planting a flag. As has been the case with all ServiceNow’s acquisitions, this won’t be a feature tuck-in—it will usher in an important re-anchoring of its platform.
Security as a vehicle for platform power
A clear strategy has underpinned ServiceNow’s impressive growth over the past decade: when workflows and processes are fragmented, real value is created by digitizing and connecting them end to end. It is this vision that has enabled ServiceNow to expand from its IT service management roots into a truly cross-functional platform.
But in an enterprise platform race increasingly shaped by AI and risk, infrastructure-centric platforms can only scale so far. This is why this acquisition is so important for ServiceNow—because security sits above the organization, and not just inside it. Security buyers—including CISOs, cyber-risk owners, and OT security leads—are important budget holders who don’t just shop for new tooling. They shape architecture. They force standardization. And, perhaps most importantly, they have a huge influence over digital buying decisions.
So, for ServiceNow and its aspiration to become a control plane and AI platform for the enterprise, this deal will not only strengthen cross-functional adoption of its solution, but it also increase its authority across the enterprise.
AI isn’t just accelerating productivity; it is rewiring trust and governance
AI has massively disrupted enterprise platform dynamics and economics. Yes, there’s a significant productivity opportunity businesses are chasing, but this opportunity also introduces new risks and security complexities. We’re still only a few years into the great AI disruption. Even at this early stage, intent and adoption are accelerating faster than most enterprises can govern or operationalize.
But AI is only one—albeit a very significant—part of the challenge. Modern enterprise workflows now span more systems, APIs, cloud services, and devices than ever before. Data is fragmented across platforms and tools that were never designed to work as one. And as organizations layer new AI-driven interactions on top of already siloed technology estates, they are opening new operational and security risks by default, not by design. And this is where many enterprise AI strategies are getting messy. It isn’t that businesses lack intent or inspiration, but more that they face permission and security blockers in executing on a vision. That permission comes from trust—and this acquisition is ServiceNow signaling that it will soon be in a position to credibly govern and secure AI-driven platform action across the enterprise.
What Armis gives ServiceNow isn’t just security—it’s truth
Armis gives ServiceNow continuous visibility into what exists across IT, OT, IoT, and unmanaged environments. That matters not only because it provides insight on what may be exposed, but also because AI-driven orchestration without visibility can quickly become an operational liability. It puts ServiceNow in a position to deliver a platform proposition that not only advances and digitizes work, but that also governs and secures it. Make no mistake: this is as much a platform play as it is a security one.
Despite stock market nervousness, the deal economics make sense
When this deal was announced in late December, there was skepticism around the $7.7bn price tag. It was widely reported that Armis had been valued at around $6.1bn in a late-2025 funding round based on a reported annual recurring revenue of $340m. All things considered, the price ServiceNow is paying does represent a significant valuation uplift—something that modestly rattled ServiceNow’s stock on the day of the announcement. That perspective, however, must be balanced against the strategic upside this deal creates for ServiceNow—not just in near-term cross-sell, but in expanding its long-term platform reach across security, risk, and AI-driven operations. And it is this strategy around broadening the Enterprise platform reach and the opportunity that unearths the true potential of this strategic move.
True enterprise platforms that will digitize, operationalize, and secure cross-functional business processes and workflows end-to-end represent a new and massive market opportunity. In 2025, Omdia estimated that the long-term opportunity for enterprise platforms that sit at the center of digital operations, governance, and AI-driven action will scale north of $350bn (see further reading section). This is not a single, neatly defined market—but the result of multiple legacy enterprise spend pools converging into a small number of dominant platforms. This doesn’t mean ServiceNow is evolving into something that will replace every tool, but it is becoming a dominant platform where cross-functional complexities can be resolved, and where impactful business decisions can be made and governed. This acquisition will enable ServiceNow to capture more of that potential revenue pool.
Encouragingly for ServiceNow, enterprise technology buyers are already behaving in line with this platform-first acquisition and consolidation approach. In our latest workplace transformation survey of over 500 business and IT decision makers, consolidating fragmented tools into integrated enterprise platforms emerged as the joint top priority expected to deliver the strongest ROI over the next two years. Platform consolidation showed up on equal footing with improving employee productivity and collaboration, and even ahead of AI adoption itself in this survey.
The ordering of priorities here is telling, as it shows how businesses are starting to think more maturely and strategically about AI investments. Going forward, AI’s value will increasingly be dependent on the platform environment it sits within. It is this shift in enterprise technology investment intent that underscores the true potential of this acquisition for ServiceNow. By strengthening its platform capabilities, the company is better positioned to support businesses that are evidently prioritizing fewer, more capable platforms, whilst also looking to anchor AI, automation, and governance into a single, secured operational layer.
This deal also highlights how platform control points can matter just as much as capabilities
Platforms like ServiceNow will increasingly become the control points through which digital buying decisions, governance, and automation flow. ServiceNow’s acquisition of Armis is consistent with this trajectory—not just as a strengthening of its security capabilities, but as a reinforcement of its platform aspirations and growing authority in this emerging category. ServiceNow is leaning into security as it recognizes how important it will be as part of the platform economic models that are beginning to emerge, including enabling trust, governing AI-driven action, and allowing end-to-end operational outcomes at scale.
It is important to remember that platform authority isn’t something acquired by just broadening capabilities. Success for ServiceNow here will depend on how effectively Armis is integrated into ServiceNow’s data, workflow, and AI layers. However, ServiceNow has historically adopted an approach where acquired capabilities are re-platformed into its offerings as opposed to just being bolted on. This is an approach that has served them very well over the years. ServiceNow will just need to work hard to ensure that the integration or re-platform effort does not bring with it additional levels of platform complexity. Finally, security buyers are certainly influential, but they can also be unforgiving. As ServiceNow positions itself more firmly as a control point and security ecosystem player, expectations around trust, accountability, and execution will also rise.
Appendix
Further reading
ServiceNow bets big on OT security with its Armis acquisition (December 2025)
Market Landscape: Core Digital Enterprise Platforms (October 2025)
Reuters, “Cybersecurity firm Armis valued at $6.1 billion in latest funding round” (retrieved January 6, 2026)
Survey data taken from Omdia’s Workplace Transformation & Enterprise Platforms Study (email below for information on accessing)
Author
Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst, Workplace Transformation
