by Randy Glein
Sumo Logic has announced an $80 million equity financing led by DFJ Growth. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with CEO Ramin Sayar and the Sumo team to help them bring machine data to life with powerful and predictive analytics that improve the performance, reliability, and security of mission-critical enterprise IT systems.
The world has gone digital, awash in a sea of bits, much as predicted by Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital, his seminal book on the coming of the digital age published 20 years ago. Machine-generated data is at this heart of the digital age, growing exponentially as more nodes are added with each additional connected device. One pain point impacting enterprises is the explosion of machine data generated by business and IT systems, and the inability to react to that data in a timely fashion. A fundamental challenge lies in building the analytics and intelligence capabilities to yield real-time insights and actionable information at the massive scale required.
The need for real-time analytics of massive data sets has given rise to the approach pioneered by Sumo Logic, which has reimagined how large data streams get ingested, indexed, searched, processed, and analyzed by using advanced machine learning techniques and data processing methodologies, all delivered seamlessly to customers as a cloud computing service. Attacking this tsunami of machine data requires the power, fortitude, and agility of a sumo warrior, purpose-built to wrestle that data to the ground and meet the tsunami head-on. This is where Sumo Logic is winning the battle.
A decade ago, enterprise IT was a barren wasteland in terms of new innovation. Large enterprises were dealing with the hangover from Y2K projects and digesting expensive enterprise-wide ERP system deployments. These projects were typically monolithic in nature, highly customized, and required extensive training and implementation to become useful. Counter that with the environment today, where we are in the midst of an extended period of transformative innovation in the enterprise IT landscape that is rapidly changing how we use technology and software in business. Several trends have emerged to reinvent the enterprise software industry, and as a result, specialized cloud-based platform applications have risen to prominent, market leading positions in multiple areas: customer relationship management (Salesforce), finance (NetSuite), human resources (Workday), planning (Anaplan), content management (Box), and collaboration (Yammer). (Note: Anaplan, Box, and Yammer are DFJ Growth portfolio companies). Likewise, Sumo is well positioned to define a new cloud platform centered on machine data analytics, providing actionable insights that lead to improved performance, availability, and security of mission critical software applications and IT infrastructure — the analytics cloud.
We believe Sumo Logic is driving the formation of the analytics cloud, and has quickly emerged as an innovative leader in our increasingly digital world. So we jumped at the opportunity to work with Ramin Sayar and his amazing team. We are thrilled they invited DFJ to be part of their journey.
Randy Glein is a managing director for DFJ Growth
@rglein
