Cloud Analytics Startup Sumo Logic Exits Stealth, Raises $15M

Startup Sumo Logic has emerged from stealth mode to unveil its cloud-based log management and analytics service that leverages big data to deliver real-time IT insights.

Sumo Logic's software-as-a-service (SAAS) solution eliminates the need for expensive premises-based solutions, time-consuming software upgrades and ongoing system maintenance, the company said. Using powerful algorithms, the service provides enterprises with operational and security insights from their log data in real time, at a petabyte scale.

"Until now, enterprise log management solutions have consisted of expensive, complex deployments that are difficult to scale and have been unable to deliver on their promise of true analysis and insights," said Kumar Saurabh, acting CEO and vice president of analytics at Sumo Logic, in a statement. "Based on our decade-long experience in the space, we understood that a fundamentally different approach was needed. We're excited to now unveil our cloud-based service and deliver the first platform that can provide valuable operational insights across enterprise log data in real time and at unprecedented scale."

"With growing demand to collect, analyze and leverage event and log data generated from multiple sources, the cloud presents a scalable foundation for these problems to be solved in more efficient manners," said Jonah Kowall, research director at Gartner, in a statement. "Additionally, the flexibility of these solutions offers end users a larger degree of choice when selecting a technology. The cloud-and, more specifically, multi-tenant SAAS deployments-uniquely allow the technology provider to analyze and build trend data across customer organizations, therefore enriching the datasets of each individual customer."

Using Sumo Logic, IT operations teams can perform rapid troubleshooting and root cause analysis across the entire IT infrastructure, DevOps teams can quickly analyze and resolve production application issues, and IT security teams can uncover security risks and ensure compliance.

Key tenets of Sumo Logic's next-generation approach include:

• Cloud-Based Service: A multitenant, secure, reliable and highly available service that provides managed collection and retention. Unlike premises-based solutions that are expensive and complex to deploy, scale and maintain, the Sumo Logic service has a low total cost of ownership, can be deployed instantly, scales elastically and requires zero maintenance.
• Patent-Pending Technology: Powered by Sumo Logic's Elastic Log Processing and LogReduce technologies.
• Elastic Log Processing: A modular, linearly scalable architecture that enables log analytics at an unprecedented petabyte scale.
• LogReduce: Adaptive algorithms that reduce millions of logs into a small number of patterns.
• Real-Time Forensics and Push Analytics: Interactive analytics and forensics are driven by an intuitive Web-based user interface, with a query language for navigating mountains of data in real time. The Push Analytics engine provides proactive detection and notification of trends, changes and anomalies.
• Expert Community and Global Trends: Sumo Logic's cloud-based approach uniquely connects users, enabling native sharing and social insights; the service mines global trends and anomalies across customer organizations.

"Our organization generates tremendous amounts of log data, and we didn't have the ability to interactively query it in real time," said Jan Fernando, platform architect for Web content management at Limelight Networks, in a statement. "We are excited to be working with Sumo Logic. Their real-time processing and intelligent parsing of our log data allows us to generate insights we couldn't have achieved before."

ArcSight veterans Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh founded Sumo Logic in April 2010. Bruno Kurtic (Sensage) and Domingo Mihovilovic (SugarSync, Siebel) joined the company in founding leadership roles. And the product team includes experienced software developers with deep domain experience across log management, security and big data.

Backed by Greylock Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and angel investor Shlomo Kramer, Sumo Logic recently closed a $15 million Series B round of funding. The new funding brings the startup's total venture capital backing to $20.5 million. The company will use the funds to accelerate its engineering and go-to-market activities, Sumo Logic officials said.

"The log management market is ripe for disruption," said Mike Speiser, partner at Sutter Hill Ventures, in a statement. "My partners at Sutter Hill and I are excited to lead the Series B financing at Sumo Logic and help build the industry's leading cloud-based company."

"Enterprises continue to log data at exponential rates, both behind the firewall and increasingly across external clouds," said Asheem Chandna, partner at Greylock Partners, in a statement. "We're proud to be founding investors in Sumo Logic in 2010, and look forward to continuing to work closely with the Sumo Logic team in delivering the industry's leading next-generation solution."

"This is an exciting day at Sumo Logic, as we emerge from stealth to unveil our solution and announce our Series B financing," Sumo Logic's Saurabh added. "We are privileged to have strong partnerships with the industry's preeminent venture capitalists, and their continued support in our mission to provide enterprise customers with real-time operational and security insights from log data at unprecedented scale and ease of deployment."

The company's board of directors includes Beedgen, Saurabh, Chandna, Kramer and Speiser. Sumo Logic's leadership team and board of directors have played key roles in building multiple industry-leading companies, including ArcSight, Check Point Software, Imperva, Palo Alto Networks, Siebel Systems and Veritas.