Amritsar, NFAPost: software-as-a-service (SaaS) customer engaging solutions provider Freshworks Inc. has acquired information technology (IT) orchestration and cloud management platform Flint.
This acquisition will aid Freshworks’ IT support service portfolio Freshservice by bringing a number of new automation tools to it.
Singapore-based Flint, with a major workforce in Pune, India, provides automation and cloud computing capabilities to IT organisations, allowing them to quickly adapt to the needs of an increasingly remote workforce.
This acquisition is Freshworks’ third buyout in the past one year, including Natero Inc. acquired in May 2019 that added customer success to its customer engagement portfolio; and AnsweriQ Inc., acquired in February that helped bolster the capabilities of its artificial intelligence engine — Freddy AI.
Through the acquisition of Flint, 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.
Chennai and California based Freshworks was already looking at expanding its ITSM services and ITOM capabilities prior to Covid-19 pandemic, and having these capabilities has now become more important in view of teams working remotely.
“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 automation, Freshworks takes the legwork out of tedious, repeatable tasks so IT teams can focus on high impact work,” Freshworks Chief Product Officer Prakash Ramamurthy said.
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 integration effort.
“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,” Flint’s former Chief Technology Officer Abhishek Pande said.
