Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Nguyen, CEO of LogDNA (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Of the 2,500 customers, what is the split? How much is enterprise? How much is mid-market? How much are hobbyists?

Chris Nguyen: 20% are the mid-market up. We’re slowly moving towards the enterprise side. Every year has been an evolution.

Going up market gives a lot of confidence. When you power someone like IBM, it gives us confidence that we have an enterprise-ready product. I love the fact that Watson is with us. That gives us so much confidence.

In the early days, people questioned if this is an enterprise-ready product. Having full compliance and seeing validations gives us the confidence that we can build more upmarket products. We did things methodically. I never want to lose focus on why customers love us and the type of customers that love us. How do you have the energy and resources and focus?

Sramana Mitra: What else should I have asked you about your business that I haven’t asked you?

Chris Nguyen: We clearly identified the opportunity in the space. It comes down to who is that company that can execute for that future. 

Sramana Mitra: Whom are you seeing in deals?

Chris Nguyen: Our competition is more the open source avenue. The other competition is from cloud. The cloud space is fragmented. I think we’ve been earning customers through unique ways.

LogDNA is easy to use. You’re up and running quick. You can not only migrate efficiently but also train efficiently. We’re built for scale. We have a design-centric approach with our product. 

Sramana Mitra: What is your positioning vis a vis the open source guys?

Chris Nguyen: When you entertain open source, you believe that you can scale the open source aspect well. There’s an inflection point when you rely on open source.

When you do over 1TB a day, you realize that you need a lot of FTEs against this. Then you take a step back to determine what is your core competency. If managing an observability stack is one of them, that’s fine.

The companies that gravitate towards us say, “It’s not a core competency. Can you help us out?” Elastic has its benefits, and it has its challenges. When you think of it from a total cost perspective, we resonate really well.

Sramana Mitra: Do you see customers transitioning from open source to you?

Chris Nguyen: I do. Some of our biggest customers had Elastic. My core value proposition is a scalable solution that could be deployed on premise. For example, IBM Cloud had Elk. They had their challenges. The opportunity for us was to showcase why it’s great from a usability perspective. and behind the scenes, why it matters a lot from a compliance and scale perspective.

Sramana Mitra: Does the market understand that you are the logical evolution if people are hitting scalability walls?

Chris Nguyen: We educate them one step at a time. We still have a small and nimble team. How do we convey our messaging and our strength? We just literally scratched the surface. It’s nice to have investors who are household names. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Nguyen, CEO of LogDNA
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