Kalyan Ramanathan, VP of Product Marketing for Sumo Logic, dropped by to discuss the company's machine data analytics platform and a new pricing/licensing model for large enterprises that the company is calling "Cloud Flex."
Ramanathan stressed that Sumo Logic understands that all operational and machine data cannot be treated the same. Some data is highly important while other data is of less importance. Some must be watched over the long term and other data has a very short life expectancy. Some data must be accessible at high speed and with low levels of latency while other data can be accessed at slower speeds.
Unified Machine Data Analytics
The challenges all organizations face is that their IT infrastructure is increasingly complex and has many moving parts. Each of these parts is generating large amounts of operational and machine data. Analysis of this data can be very challenging because it is stored in many places and kept in many different formats. Sumo Logic's idea is to unify both the storage and to provide equal access to make predictive analysis much easier.
The company's approach is to offer native support for quite an array of machine data formats, real-time monitoring of these data sources, real-time correlation of data and even provide data conversation to optimize analytics.
The company plans to support the following data sources:
- Cloud — Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, Pivotal, and Google Cloud platform
- Container — Docker, Kubernetes, MESOS
- Applications — onelogin, CrownStike, PCI apps
Broad support of major applications is planned as well.
Universal Data Access
Furthermore, the company is beta testing access mechanisms that offers new, easy-to-understand, user interface, public dashboards to executives can easily review the data, and make it easier to share data to better support collaborative analytics.
The company's goal is to support just about every major access point devices, tablets and PCs.
Cloud Flex
The company understands that some enterprises have a cyclical pattern of business, that their revenue stream isn't constant. Traditional, volume-based pricing models are not attractive for this type of business. So, the company is planning to offer a different approach that allows the enterprise to obtain a cloud-based pricing model that better fits their flow of business by incorporating an understanding of their different needs to retain volumes of data, what type of analytics they require, how many individuals need access to the analytics and even support a seasonal pricing model.
Snapshot analysis
Sumo Logic is hoping that the combination of "unified" data, "unified" access mechanisms and a variable pricing model will be attractive to large enterprises. It also hopes that the data and access features of its products will be of interest broadly to the industry.
While the variable "Cloud Flex" pricing appears to be a new wrinkle, the challenge the company faces is that there are many suppliers of tools supporting the gathering of operational and machine data to support data analysis and the generation of insight. These suppliers are using similar messaging to present their products to the market. Unless the Sumo Logic works hard, their interesting messages could easily get lost in the noise.
I hope to speak with one of the company's customers to learn more about how their products are being used, why they were selected over the others and what benefits customers have received.