SkyGiraffe and the Rise of Mobile-First Work: A Builder’s Reflection

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.

Today, we look at SkyGiraffe, a company that took on a challenge nearly every enterprise faces, and did it with clarity, conviction, and craft.

The Mobile Work Problem No One Was Solving (Well)

In 2012, nearly everyone still worked from the desktop.  I remember ServiceNow telling folks “use safari on the iPhone”.  Eventually they came around and set up what is now known as the “Classic Mobile” application.  Here’s a link I can find referencing wiki page on ServiceNow’s Mobile docs. 

SkyGiraffe saw this gap. Their insight was simple but powerful: employees needed real, secure access to business data on the go, without the traditional overhead of building mobile apps from scratch.

They didn’t just want to make mobile access easier, they wanted to make it fast, scalable, and native. For everyone.

The Founders Behind the Vision

SkyGiraffe was born from the experience and vision of Boaz Hecht and Itay Braun.

Boaz brought a rare combination of entrepreneurial grit (from his time leading ClubSMS and SRL Group) and consulting insight from Deloitte. His later role as VP of Platform at ServiceNow reflected his product-first mindset and belief in removing friction for users.

Itay came from a deeply technical background, including roles at Microsoft and startup leadership at TWINGO. He was a teacher, an architect, and a builder, equally comfortable in a data stack as he was explaining SQL to a room of learners.

Together, they formed a team that understood both the pain of enterprise software and the elegance needed to solve it.

What SkyGiraffe Built (and Why It Worked)

SkyGiraffe offered a no-code platform for delivering mobile apps that could tap into existing enterprise systems, Oracle, SAP, SQL, cloud, on-prem, you name it.

Using a "meta-data architecture," their platform auto-generated mobile applications directly from enterprise data structures and workflows. These apps worked natively on iOS and Android, supported offline access, and came with built-in capabilities like maps, contacts, notifications, and more.

No front-end coding. No heavy scripting. Just point, connect, and deploy.

In other words, they abstracted away the hardest parts of mobile enterprise development, and gave companies a way to build hundreds of apps quickly, securely, and beautifully.

The Acquisition: October 2017

ServiceNow acquired SkyGiraffe in October 2017. The move was part of a broader mobile-first push, following its acquisition of the design firm Telepathy just weeks earlier.

By integrating SkyGiraffe’s tech into the Now Platform, ServiceNow aimed to:

• Enable native mobile versions of every packaged app, starting with ITSM

• Let customers build apps in days, not months

• Offer offline support and native mobile experiences with zero code

As CJ Desai, ServiceNow’s Chief Product Officer, put it: “Our work lives should be as mobile-friendly as our consumer lives.”

SkyGiraffe helped make that possible.

What Lives On Today

While the SkyGiraffe name may no longer be on a website, its DNA lives on.

ServiceNow’s Mobile App Builder, Mobile Studio, and native mobile capabilities owe much to SkyGiraffe’s foundations. The speed, flexibility, and ease of delivering mobile experiences are now part of what people expect from the Now Platform, and SkyGiraffe was a huge leap forward in that direction.

Many of the team members, Boaz, Itay, Yev, played key roles in shaping ServiceNow’s mobile strategy during their time there.

What they are up to now?

Today Boaz Hecht together with two of the original SkyGiraffe team, Josh Russ & Yev Goldin joined forces start 8Flow.ai, proof that great teams often stick together and keep building

Itay Braun has since co-founded Metis which was just acquired in March of 2025 by Dynatrace. Metis, “Enabling developers to own their Database”.  They enabled development teams to proactively take a preventative and holistic approach to database code. 

What Modern Builders Can Learn

1. Solve a real pain with elegance.
   SkyGiraffe succeeded because they saw a painful problem (mobile access to enterprise data) and solved it simply, without compromising on enterprise-grade quality.

2. Your architecture matters.
   Their meta-data-driven approach didn’t just work, it scaled. Good architecture creates leverage and makes your product 10x more valuable in the right hands.

3. Design for the future, not the past.
   While others were focused on making legacy systems work a little better, SkyGiraffe designed for the mobile world that was coming. That’s what made them acquisition-worthy.

Final Thought

Acquisitions like SkyGiraffe aren’t just footnotes in a company’s history. They’re inflection points. They remind us that bold ideas, when paired with thoughtful execution, can shape the direction of entire platforms.

To all the builders out there: keep solving real problems. You never know where the next good idea might take you.