Not often have I spent two weeks in August in a “winter” climate, but it was a great opportunity to spend some time with our new team in Australia, visit with prospects, customers and partners, and attend a couple of Amazon Web Service Summits to boot.
Here are some straight-off-the-plane observations.
A Local “Data Center” Presence Matters: We now have production instances in Sydney, Dublin and the United States. In conversations with Australian enterprises and government entities, the fact that we have both a local team and a local production instance went extremely far when determining whether we were a good match for their needs. This was true whether their use case centered around supporting their security initiatives or enabling their DevOps teams to release applications faster to market. You can now select where your data resides when you sign up for Sumo Logic Free.
Australia is Ready For the Cloud: From the smallest startup to extremely large mining companies, everyone was interested in how we could support their cloud initiatives. The AWS Summits were packed and the conversations we had revolved not just around machine data analytics but what we could do to support their evolving infrastructure strategy. The fact that we have apps for Amazon S3, Cloudfront, CloudTrail and ELB made the conversations even more productive, and we’ve seen significant interest in our special trial for AWS customers.
We’re A Natural Fit for Managed Service Providers: As a multi-tenant service born in the Cloud, we have a slew of advantages for MSP and MSSPs looking to embed proactive analytics into their service offering, as our work with The Herjavec Group and Medidata shows. We’ve had success with multiple partners in the US and the many discussions we had in Australia indicate that there’s a very interesting partner opportunity there as well.
Analytics and Time to Insights: In my conversations with dozens of people at the two summits and in 1-1 meetings, two trends immediately stand out. While people remain extremely interested in how they can take advantage of real-time dashboards and alerts, one of their bigger concerns typically revolved around how quickly they could get to that point. ”I don’t have time to do a lot of infrastructure management” was the common refrain and we certainly empathize with that thought. The second is just a reflection on how we sometimes take for granted our pattern recognition technology, aka, LogReduce. Having shown this to quite a few people at the booth, the reaction on their faces never gets old especially after they see the order of magnitude by which we reduce the time taken to find something interesting in their machine data.
At the end of the day, this is a people business. We have a great team in Australia and look forward to publicizing their many successes over the coming quarters.
