Thought Leaders in Big Data: Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we take an example from each and really build on the use cases so we get a visceral feel of what specifically is going on.

Vance Loiselle: Let’s start with the second one first – media. Netflix is a customer of ours. They have a couple of big trends in the space. One is, they do a lot of stuff in the cloud. Two is, they have a lot of customers. Three is, their applications are growing rapidly.

They were able to take data in real time that comes from their infrastructure and their applications – whether it be their network and the underlying infrastructure that runs their applications. They can feed that data into our cloud which allows them to very quickly analyze the information coming in to pinpoint problems that might be happening in their network and analyze it to make sure they have the proper security posture in their network. They also use it for forensics anytime they run across any kind of issues. They can very quickly search the data and understand what patterns occur to figure out the root cause of the problem they might have experienced. As a result, they significantly reduce their mean time to investigate and resolve problems.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of problems are we talking about? What kind of problems are you helping them do root-cause analysis on?

Vance Loiselle: When Netflix rolls out a new network on their campus, they want to make sure that the wireless network roll-out is successful and if there’s any glitches in the roll-out, they want to make sure that they can uncover any issue that they might be having. Similarly in their internal infrastructure, as they roll out new internal applications like Google apps, they want to be able to make sure that everybody’s getting a good experience. If there are any problems with it, they can investigate the underlying root cause of the issue. It’s very much an availability-focused area.

Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say you’re addressing issues in the DevOps area, largely speaking?

Vance Loiselle: Yes. It’s focused primarily on corporate IT and corporate enterprise initiatives that their VP of IT Ops runs. It’s very much focused on IT Ops related things.

Sramana Mitra: Is it the same kind of use cases in media or e-commerce as well?

Vance Loiselle: If you take customers in e-commerce, for example, customers would use us both for availability and performance to make sure their applications are running successfully and performing at the proper level and be able to quickly investigate those problems. In some cases, those customers also use it for analytics – to understand how their products are being sold and being delivered to their customers. So they can get better insights into, “Are my shopping carts checking out on time? Are coupons being used effectively? Am I having higher than usual abandonment rate on the products that we are selling?” It can be used both for internal infrastructure and application availability, but it can also be used to understand insights about what’s happening from click-screen analytics on the website itself.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic
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