Software-as-a-service (SaaS) unicorn Freshworks Inc. has acquired IT orchestration & cloud management platform Flint to bolster its IT support service portfolio, Freshservice. Through this acquisition, Freshworks aims to provide greater visibility for IT teams to better manage hybrid infrastructure, optimise spend and automate employee workflows, focussing specifically on IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) capabilities.
This is Freshworks’ second acquisition this year, after buying out AI solution provider AnsweriQ Inc. in February, which helped bolster the capabilities of Freddy AI, Freshwork’s artificial intelligence engine. In May 2019, Freshworks also acquired customer engagement platform, Natero Inc.
With this acquisition, Flint co-founders Ankur Gakkhar and Abhishek Pande are at present leading respective Freshworks’ teams—with Gakkhar spearheading the automation and cloud management product team and Pande heading the platform and technology integraion effort.
“Like many companies today, we felt the pressure of today’s remote environment as we went from 13 workplaces to 3,000+ home offices in a matter of days. IT automation is vital to help accelerate the transition to a remote workforce and resolve service issues faster. With the addition of Flint’s intelligent of automation, Freshworks takes the legwork out of tedious, repeatable tasks so IT teams can focus on high impact work,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, CPO at Freshworks.
Freshworks also said that with companies increasingly adopting remote working scenarios owing to the covid-19 pandemic, demand for IT automation tools has increased significantly, during this time.
“Flint’s orchestration platform and agnostic integrations intelligently automate entire IT and employee workflows and complex IT runbooks like employee onboarding, closed-loop request fulfilments, devops pipeline and cloud workload automations, requests or approvals. As part of Freshservice, the acquired Flint technology will also enable insight across infrastructure and apps, maintain service health and optimize cloud delivery and spend,” said Abhishek Pande, former CTO of Flint.
Singapore-based Flint provides automation and cloud computing capabilities to IT organisations, allowing them to quickly adapt to the needs of an increasingly remote workforce. Earlier in May, San Mateo, California-headquartered Freshworks also appointed Tyler Sloat as its Chief Financial Officer. The company recently also said that it has crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue.
