Its All About the Data . . .

We hear the phrase all the time and deservedly so given the explosion in digital data. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have helped consumers gain a certain level of context around the data by enabling us to search the past, find out what’s happening now, and connect with our friends.  We are also continuing to see a whole slew of new services that are innovating and providing more context to the end user.

One of the bigger questions that remains, however, is where is the equivalent on the IT side?  The traditional enterprise search market has matured, is consolidating, and primarily focused on structured data.  We believe there is a huge opportunity with the “dark matter” in the IT world, which exists in raw log files generated from web, application, and database servers.  It’s a massive amount of data – in aggregate far more than what exists on the web – that still needs to be indexed, searched, and better understood.  It is data that actually pre-dates the Internet and is as old as any computer system but without any affordable search solution until now . . .

We are extremely excited to announce our recent investment in Loggly, a SaaS solution for storing, reporting, and alerting around log data.  Loggly will provide developers and admins a way to easily and affordably search log data.  The true value will be in being able to correlate data across your back-end in near real time for application debugging, operations monitoring, security auditing, analytics, and a whole bunch of applications we haven’t even thought of.  Think Twitter for your IT machines with the appropriate context added.

Loggly founders Kord, Raffy, and Jon bring a wealth of experience around log data, search, and building great product.  We are excited to partner with them and look forward to learning more about their discoveries!

Also, see Loggly’s blog on the funding announcement.

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