From Startup to ServiceNow: The Story of ITapp

This is part of a series I’m writing to inspire myself and other builders by shining a light on companies that ServiceNow has acquired. If you’re dreaming of building something yourself, these stories aren’t just history, they’re playbooks with lessons we can learn.

What Was ITapp?

Founded in 2012 and based in San Jose, ITapp set out to make managing cloud infrastructure easier for businesses. They did this with visual app assembly, faster intergrations, and a streamlined, cost-effective approach to cloud orchestration.

Back then, I wasn’t building full-stack sites yet and didn’t realize the significance. In hindsight, it’s clear this was a big deal. ITapp wasn’t just offering cloud management, they made it easy. Look at Netlify and Vercel: both wrap complex infrastructure from AWS or Google Cloud in an easy-to-use package. ITapp was doing something similar.

On their website in 2015, ITapp made some big claims:

• 75% faster installation in HA mode

• 80% faster integration time

• 75% less complexity in app assembly

• 40% lower cost than competitors

It wasn’t just hype. The integrated with AWS, Azure, OpenStack, Citrix XenServer, and VMware. They weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel; they wanted to make it easier to drive.

The Founders: Seasoned Builders, Not First-Timers

ITapp’s founding team was stacked with enterprise veterans:

• Brajesh “BG” Goyal brought deep technical and product experience from Oracle and NetApp, and would go on to lead product integration of ITapp at ServiceNow after the acquisition.

• Brian Krug, previously a VP at Cisco, co-founded ITapp and later served as VP of Product Success at ServiceNow before founding AppFaktors.

• Giridhar “Gigi” Padmanabh came with cloud experience from newScale (acquired by Cisco) and became a Senior Director at ServiceNow.

• Andrew Tahvildary, though not a founder, was an early advisor and investor. Bringing in battle-tested engineering leadership from his time at Primavera, newScale, and later companies acquired by Oracle, EMC, and Apple.

This wasn’t a bunch of first-time founders learning as they went. These were people who had built and shipped real enterprise software at scale, and were now playing to win.

The Product: A Next-Gen Cloud Management Platform

ITapp positioned itself as a next-gen cloud management platform with a visual, policy-driven approach to provisioning and orchestration. You could:

• Visually assemble full-stack applications

• Attach custom storage and networking containers

• Manage quotas and delivery across multiple cloud providers

• Automate deployments with integrated CI/CD pipelines

It was part cloud broker, part orchestrator, part DevOps enabler, built with the enterprise in mind.

4. The Acquisition: ServiceNow Buys In

In April 2016, ServiceNow acquired ITapp for $15 million.

It was a quiet but strategic move. At the time, ServiceNow was aggressively expanding beyond its help desk roots into broader IT Operations Management (ITOM) and cloud-native tools. ITapp wasn’t about giving ServiceNow new capabilities from scratch, it was about accelerating their existing cloud management roadmap.

As Sri Chandrashekar, then VP/GM of ITOM at ServiceNow, put it:

The goal: take ITapp’s tech and integrate it deeply into the Now Platform, giving ServiceNow-native experiences for cloud provisioning, governance, and policy enforcement.

Where It Is Today: From ITapp to Cloud Management to Cloud Accelerate

ITapp’s DNA lives on in ServiceNow Cloud Management, officially launched in May 2017. Over time, the product has evolved, been repackaged, and now sits under Cloud Accelerate as part of the AI Ops Enterprise offering.

What started as a standalone cloud orchestration platform has become a foundational element in how ServiceNow helps enterprises manage cloud at scale—wrapping it in workflows, automation, and policy enforcement powered by the Now Platform.

What We Can Learn

Here are three takeaways for builders and product-minded folks:

1. Solve real problems, not just trendy ones.
ITapp didn’t try to ride the latest hype wave. They focused on pain points, complexity, cost, integration time, and built something that made a difference.

2. Deep enterprise experience matters.
The founding team knew their buyers, their constraints, and how enterprise IT works. That domain knowledge gave them credibility and clarity.

3. Integration can be more valuable than innovation.
ServiceNow didn’t need a shiny new product. They needed a way to deliver cloud management faster. ITapp gave them a shortcut.