Serviceaide Expands IT Service Platform With Wendia Acquisition

The acquisition will bring together Serviceaide’s Luma service automation platform, which is fully automated and suitable for high-speed deployments and multitenant public clouds, with Wendia’s technology, which is more customized.

Intelligent IT and enterprise service management technology developer Serviceaide this week said it is acquiring one of its peers, Wendia, in a move to create a more complete IT service platform.

Serviceaide is the San Jose, Calif.-based developer of the Luma Digital Service Management Suite service automation platform, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed up service requests without the need for a human to get involved in the process.

The Serviceaide platform supports a company’s internal IT users’ service requirements, as well as works with businesses to support their external users, said Wai Wong, Serviceaide CEO.

[Related: Enterprise IT Service Management Market Is Heating Up]

Those users could range from desktop users in a company to the citizens of a municipality looking to access government resources, Wong told CRN.

“Our focus is on using AI to make the service desk more optimal, efficient and cost-effective,” he said. “We provide Luma as a single-point contact for services and support.”

Wendia is the Wiedlisbach, Switzerland-based developer of the Point of Business, or POB, enterprise service management platform.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is slated to close in the next few days, Wong said.

Serviceaide decided to acquire Wendia as a way to offer a more complete platform to potential customers, Wong said.

Serviceaide’s Luma platform is fully automated and suitable for high-speed deployments and multi-tenant public clouds, he said. Wendia’s technology, however, requires customization for business’ particular requirements, which leads to longer deployment times, he said.

“So now we get the best of both worlds,” he said. “We can offer fast deployment with our product and custom deployment with the Wendia product.”

Serviceaide decided an acquisition was a better approach than a partnership because of the integration possibilities, Wong said.

“The technologies need to work together in a more cooperative way,” he said. “We want to keep both sides aligned for the same results. If we only partnered, we would have some misalignments.”

Serviceaide gets about half of its revenue through a mix of reseller and services partners, as well as business process outsourcing and IT outsourcing partners, Wong said.

Wong said Serviceaide’s primary competitors come in two forms.

For services customers requiring a dedicated virtual agent approach, competitors include Espressive and Moveworks. On the end-to-end service desk enablement side, competitors include BMC, Cherwell, ManageEngine and ServiceNow.