Freshworks acquires IT orchestration service Flint

Customer engagement company Freshworks today announced that it has acquired Flint, an IT orchestration and cloud management platform based in India. The acquisition will help Freshworks strengthen its Freshservice IT support service by bringing a number of new automation tools to it. Maybe just as importantly, though, it will also bolster Freshworks’ ambitions around cloud management.

Freshworks CPO Prakash Ramamurthy, who joined the company last October, told me that while the company was already looking at expanding its IT services (ITSM) and operations management (ITOM) capabilities before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, having those capabilities has now become even more important, given that a lot of these teams are now working remotely.

“If you take ITSM, we allow for customers to create their own workflow for service catalog items and so on and so forth, but we found that there’s a lot of things which were repetitive tasks,” Ramamurthy said. “For example, I lost my password or new employee onboarding, where you need to auto-provision them in the same set of accounts. Flint had integrated with Freshservice to help automate and orchestrate some of these routine tasks and a lot of customers were using it and there’s a lot of interest in it.”

He noted that while the company was already seeing increased demand for these tools earlier in the year, the pandemic made that need even more obvious. And given that pressing need, Freshworks decided that it would be far easier to acquire an existing company than to build its own solution.

“Even in early January, we felt this was a space where we had to have a time-to-market advantage,” he said. “So acquiring and aggressively integrating it into our product lines seemed to be the most optimal thing to do than take our time to build it — and we are super fortunate that we placed the right bet because of what has happened since then.”

The acquisition helps Freshworks build out some of its existing services, but Ramamurthy also stressed that it will really help the company build out its operations management capabilities to go from alert management to also automatically solving common IT issues. “We feel there’s natural synergy and [Flint’s] orchestration solution and their connectors come in super handy because they have connectors to all the modern SaaS applications and the top five cloud providers and so on.”

But Flint’s technology will also help Freshworks build out its ability to help its users manage workloads across multiple clouds, an area where it is going to compete with a number of startups and incumbents. Since the company decided that it wants to play in this field, an acquisition also made a lot of sense given how long it would take to build out expertise in this area, too.

“Cloud management is a natural progression for our product line,” Ramamurthy noted. “As more and more customers have a multi-cloud strategy, we want to give them a single pane of glass for all the work workloads they’re running. And if they wanted to do cost optimization, if you want to build on top of that, we need the basic plumbing to be able to do discovery, which is kind of foundational for that.”

Freshworks will integrate Flint’s tools into Freshservice and likely offer it as part of its existing tiered pricing structure, with service orchestration likely being the first new capability it will offer.