Thought Leaders in Big Data: Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I think we understand what you’re doing. What are the big trends you are seeing? I want a more granular perspective on the trends you are seeing in the space that you are primarily active in.

Vance Loiselle: Obviously, analytics, cloud, and big data are all big trends everybody’s talking about. If you peel back a layer, one of the things that you see is that the move to cloud has resulted in organizations basically having three approaches they need to take.

One is they have to figure out how to get to AWS, a software layer, or a rack space quickly. In parallel, they still have a large internal infrastructure they need to run. One of the trends we see is that organizations are looking to, for lack of a better term, retool how they manage that infrastructure and those applications because they don’t want to use the 15-year-old legacy monitoring tools that they have used in the past. They’re shifting. Instead of looking at an approach that looks at data like summary metrics about their infrastructure and their applications, they’re getting right to the root of the data. They’re looking at the actual machine data that these devices are spitting out. That shift is driven, quite frankly, by the fact that companies are embracing private, public, hybrid cloud. All of that is causing a change in the industry where organizations are looking to change the way that they manage all of these infrastructures.

The second thing related to that is that the move to cloud has also resulted in organizations and CIOs taking a different approach to their relationship with their vendors. In the past, you bought some software and you would run it and take accountability for getting success with it. Now, they’re looking to evolve that and they may have solutions that are running from Workday and Salesforce. Some of the times, they don’t even know to what extent their employees are using various applications. There can be the “shadow IT” out there where employees are just signing up with the credit card for various things they need to accomplish.

One of the trends that we see is organizations, instead of trying to wrangle in all of the IT solutions, just want to get a better visibility into what’s going on. We allow them to quickly plug in our analytics tool and understand the footprint of what they’re using and provide visibility into the analytics of what’s going on in all of those various applications – whether they’re run in a SaaS mettle or run internally. They want to get one complete view of all that infrastructure and applications.

Sramana Mitra: Follow on question to that is, where do you see the blue sky opportunities? Where would you point entrepreneurs who are starting to look for ideas?

Vance Loiselle: We’re just in the second innings of harnessing the data that’s at people’s fingertips. We’ve said for years we’re in the information age. Whether it be from social tools or the devices being used, they are generating data. If somebody were to think and focus in an area on their career and what to do next as entrepreneurs, there’s a ton of opportunity in the data space in general. I think there is opportunity in providing solutions to challenges out there that focus on data science as a discipline and specifically in the marrying of unstructured data and structured data and providing turnkey industry solutions to companies.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Vance Loiselle, CEO of Sumo Logic
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