ServiceNow's $7 Billion Armis Bet: The CMDB Finally Grows Teeth

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ServiceNow is in advanced talks to acquire Armis for $7 billion, barely two weeks after announcing its $1 billion Veza deal. This is not a security company acquiring another security company. This is an IT operations platform attempting to eliminate the boundary between asset management and asset defense.

ServiceNow's entire value proposition rests on the configuration management database: the canonical record of what exists in the enterprise. But CMDBs have always been crippled by a structural deficiency. They catalog what IT provisions and manages. They remain blind to what IT never touched. Every unmanaged IoT sensor, OT controller, shadow cloud instance, and medical device represents a gap in the operational truth that ServiceNow sells to enterprises.

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