Earlier today we announced a revolutionary set of new platform services and capabilities. As such, I wanted to provide more context around this and our strategy. While this new announcement is very exciting, we have always been pushing the boundaries to continuously innovate in order to remove the complexity and cost associated with getting the most value out of data. Whether it’s build-it-yourself open source toolkits or legacy on-premise commercial software packages, the “data tax” associated with these legacy licensing models, let alone the technology limitations have prevented universal access for all types of data sources and more importantly users.
This strategy and the innovations we announced address the digital transformation taking place industry- wide, led by the mega trends of cloud computing adoption, DevSecOps and the growth of machine data. For example, IDC recently forecasted public cloud spending to reach 203.4 billion by 2020, while Bain & Company’s figure is nearly twice that at $390 billion. Whatever number you believe, the bottom line is that public cloud adoption is officially on a tear. For example, according to Bain, 48 of the 50 Fortune Global companies have publicly announced cloud adoption plans to support a variety of needs. In the world of DevSecOps, our own Modern App Report released last November substantiated the rise of a new Modern Application Stack, replete with new technologies, such as Docker, Kuburnetes, NoSQL, S3, Lambda, and CloudFront that are seriously challenging the status quo of traditional on-premise standards from Microsoft, HP, Oracle, and Akamai.
However, the most significant, and arguably the most difficult digital transformation trend for businesses to get their arms around is the growth of machine data. According to Barclay’s Big Data Handbook, machine data will account for 40 percent of all data created by 2020, reaching approximately 16 zetabytes. (To put that number in perspective, 16 zetabytes is equivalent to streaming the entire Netflix catalogue 30 million times!) Since machine data is the digital blueprint of digital business, it’s rich source of actionable insights either remains locked away or difficult-to-extract at best because of expensive, outdated, disparate tooling that limits visibility, impedes collaboration and slows down the continuous processes required to build, run, secure and manage modern applications.
Seven years ago, Sumo Logic made a big bet: disrupt traditional Big Data models with their lagging intelligence indicators by pursuing a different course: a real-time, continuous intelligence platform strategy better equipped to support the continuous innovation models of transformational companies. Now this need is becoming more critical than ever as the laggards make their shift and cloud computing goes mainstream, which not only will drive those market data numbers even higher, but also put the squeeze on the talent necessary to execute the shift.
That’s why Sumo Logic’s vision, to “Democratize Machine Data”, now comes to the forefront. To truly enable every company to have the power of real-time, machine data analytics, we believe the current licensing, access and delivery models surrounding machine data analytics are also ripe for disruption. Our announcement today provides essential new innovations – ones that are only achievable because of our market-leading, multi-tenant, cloud-native platform – that remove economic, access and visibility barriers holding companies back from reaching their full data-insight potential. They are:
- Sumo Cloud Flex: a disruptive data analytics economic model that enables maximum flexibility to align data consumption and use with different use cases, and provide universal access by removing user-based licensing. While this was purpose-built and optimized for the massive untapped terabyte volume data sets, it’s also applicable to the highly variable data sets.
- Unified Machine Data Analytics: New, native PaaS and IaaS-level integrations to our cloud-native, machine data analytics platform to support data ingest from a variety of cloud platforms, apps and infrastructures. These additions will enable complete visibility and holistic management across the entire modern application and infrastructure stack.
- Universal Access: New experience capabilities such as a contextual and intuitive user interface to improve user productivity and public dashboards, and improved content sharing for faster collaboration with role-based access controls (RBAC). With this innovation, machine data insights are easier to access for non-technical, support services and business users. Over time, we predict ease-of-use initiatives like this will be one of the drivers to help close the current data scientist/security analyst talent gap.
With our new innovations announced today, plus more coming later in the year, Sumo Logic is positioned to become the modern application management platform for digital transformation, delivered to our customers as a low TCO, scalable, secure service. That’s because machine data analytics will be the layer that provides complete visibility to manage the growing complexity of cloud-based, modern applications, which is sorely needed today and in the future. As the leading, cloud-native machine data analytics service on AWS, we service more than 1500 customers, from born-in-the-cloud companies like Salesforce, Twilio and AirBnB to traditional enterprises, such as Marriott, Alaska Airlines and Anheuser-Busch. Our platform system on average analyzes 100+ petabytes of data, executes more than 20 million searches, and queries 300+ trillion records every day. While these numbers seem massive, the numbers keep growing and yet we are only at the beginning of this massive opportunity.
Other machine data analytics options such as cobbling a solution together with old technologies, or trying to build it on your own fall short because they don’t address the fundamental problem – machine data will just keep growing. To address this, the data layer must be re-architected – similar to the compute layer – to utilize the power of true distributed computing to address a problem that is never over – the volume, velocity and variety of machine data growth – and to do so in a way that meets the speed, agility and intelligence demands of digital business. You can’t put old, enterprise application architectures on top of the cloud and expect to be prepared.
Sumo Logic’s ability to flexibly manage and maximize data and compute resources – the power of multi-tenant, distributed system architecture – across 1500+ customers means our customers have the ability to maximize their data insight potential to realize the holy grail of being real-time, data-driven businesses.
We invite you to experience the power of the Sumo Logic for free. As always, I look forward to your feedback and comments.
