This time of year, complete with Thanksgiving, re:Invent and December
holidays around the world, ends up feeling like a natural moment to
pause, reflect, and plan for what’s ahead.
This is especially
true this year, as it also marks my half-year anniversary as CEO of Sumo
Logic. I have a strong sense of why I joined, what I’ve learned since
leading the incredible team of Sumos, and where I see us going in the
future.
Why Sumo Logic?
I built my career in the security
and observability spaces. As a result, I’ve known and admired Sumo Logic
for many years, especially the platform’s ability to deliver powerful
insights about customers’ cloud infrastructure and applications through
its solutions.
As I did my due diligence – on my own and as an
operating partner at Francisco Partners (FP) – it was evident that I was
not the only one who felt this way. What I found is that Sumo Logic
customers absolutely adore the products. They use the capabilities in so
many unique ways to solve their observability and security use cases.
In fact, the more sophisticated and challenging the problem is to solve,
the more they love Sumo Logic.
Why logs?
At its core, it
comes down to the platform’s ability to manage and analyze the most
fundamental and naturally generated artifact in technology – logs. In
other words, not only is this the “atomic level” of observability and
security data, but it is a natural byproduct of the application
development process.
This is why we work so closely with our
customers to ensure that you can ingest and analyze logs in all shapes
and sizes — structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Only then can
this data be useful for all organizations and function equally as the single source of truth.
Too often, we’ve seen organizations doing otherwise, with unfortunate results:
- Critical
initiatives like DevSecOps become impossible. Without agreement on the
data, developers, SREs and security operations fight about whose
information is the “most right”. - Developer work is focused
unnecessarily on non-IP work. Too much of their time is spent on manual
instrumentation for observability and security purposes instead of
auto-instrumentation. - Cutting-edge capabilities like AI/ML, LLM,
etc. are less effective because you are running them on top of sampled
or aggregated data, like metrics, alone.
Sumo Logic brings teams together through the power of logs.
Sumo
Logic aims to shift that paradigm, and we’ve already done it in various
organizations. By starting with logs, a data source that everyone can
agree on, we help to build consensus and trust in a single source of
truth.
Of course, the observability and security markets are
separate, but underlying technology can help both. The ideas of common
collection and open standards have been around for decades but were
always impeded by the issue of how to capture everything without
instrumenting up front. As futurists, we often fall in love with things
in tech, but that doesn’t mean they fit the use anymore.
I see a
new path forward for us, paved with the infinite power of logs. You can read our guide to log analytics and log management to learn more. From massive legacy organizations developing green field projects built on cloud architecture to the necessary digital transformation required for a modern planet racing to figure out how to scale climate tech, it all begins iterates and ends with logs. Using raw data and not just a
sample, I’ve seen how we can simplify the complexity across teams. When
it’s less complicated, developers, observability and security teams can
establish common frameworks and build toward even greater innovation.
What’s to come for Sumo Logic?
Change
is never easy, so I want to first thank all of the Sumo Logic
customers, partners, vendors, and our employees for their ongoing
support, patience, and trust during the transition to becoming a private
company.
I see a path forward for us – to become the most
powerful, cloud-native, big-data platform that can handle logs and the
analytics capabilities to auto-generate most of the insights necessary
to observe and secure applications and infrastructure.
We have
plenty of innovations releasing in the coming months and further down
the roadmap, and I am excited to showcase what Sumo Logic is working on. I
am equally thrilled to see how our customers and partners will continue
to innovate in your markets as you use our platform to turn powerful
insights into impactful action.
Learn more about Sumo Logic’s SaaS Log Analytics Platform.
