On the heels of IBM partnership, Celonis announces one with ServiceNow

Celonis, the late-stage processing mining startup with a gaudy $11 billion valuation, announced a new partnership today, this one with ServiceNow.

Celonis co-founder and CEO Alexander Rinke says that he and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott go back a long way, and that working together should provide big benefits for the two companies. “With ServiceNow, we can both increase the benefits that customers receive, ensure we’re helping businesses modernize their underlying processes and the systems those processes run on,” he said.

The two companies will be working together to combine the ServiceNow low-code workflow automation tool it announced in March with Celonis’ process mining tooling. Dave Wright, chief innovation officer at ServiceNow, says that by bringing together Celonis’ process execution expertise with ServiceNow’s automation, machine learning, robotic process automation and low-code app development capabilities, they can improve workflow for their mutual customers.

“This is about helping customers more deeply understand how work moves across the enterprise and applying those insights to accelerate digital innovation and predict how to make work better,” Wright said.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of a similar agreement with IBM announced in April, and gives the company another large organization to help it sell its software. Rinke says that the three companies can actually work together.

“This partnership is designed to benefit all of our customers and strategic partners including IBM Global Business Services (GBS). IBM GBS has experience with both ServiceNow and Celonis and could now combine both platforms to deliver much more rapid and substantial transformation of enterprise processes,” he said.

These big companies and investors see something here, and it’s a company that builds process mining software to help customers understand how work flows through their organizations, and from there how to make it more efficient through automation. Working together with these larger organizations should help drive Celonis’ business growth, while giving these larger public companies access to some sophisticated software that they can combine with software and services they are already offering.

ServiceNow has also been moving into automation in a big way in the last year announcing a number of moves to accelerate this shift. That included acquiring RPA vendor Intellibot and announcing no-code workflow building tools in March.

The $11 billion valuation came in June when Celonis announced a $1 billion Series D.