Many investors will explain how their finest investments have resulted from a referral from a trusted source. So when my phone rang and it was my old friend John Powell, co-founding CEO of Alfresco, former COO of Business Objects, I focused.
When he then started explaining the ‘devops movement’ and how it is transforming businesses both large and small, I sat up. You see you can think of ‘devops’ as the re-structuring of not just the IT department but in many ways the entire business once its DNA has been beneficially modified with the IT ‘gene’. Software is eating the world…but benevolently and from the inside. So this is more good news, since folks will also tell you that investing in a ‘movement’ or rather a company that can epitomize a movement is also the way to go. I personally am super primed for companies in this space since over a decade ago my own venture Tideway was pioneering automation in support of early-adopter ‘devops’ organizational structures seeking to build their own ‘clouds’ before they were termed that.
Specifically, product teams within high growth or modern companies are increasingly organized and operate in a decentralized and federated manner, with cross-functional product ‘feature teams’ working independently on the different application components or microservices that underpin a software product (e.g. search, payments, fraud check etc) and IT professionals in operations and quality assurance teams supporting their activity. This is DevOps in action, and is widely accepted as the most agile and efficient approach, provided that it is well oiled with good communication and good data. That’s where Dataloop comes in.
When I met the founder & CEO of Dataloop, David Gildeh, the picture really came together. Here was a leader of a team of expert entrepreneurs who were building a software product and company born from their frustration while running the rapidly scaling cloud division of Alfresco. History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes, so with each wave of technology architecture there are key elements e.g. configuration, event management, security etc that will recur but recast in a new form suited to the new architecture. However one thing that is clear is that amongst the various requisite functions: availability monitoring is the stand-out ‘aspirin’ for the devops ‘break-fix’ headaches and totally fundamental to the the success of this new approach.
They desperately needed a server monitoring solution that was adapted to rapidly scaling cloud-based businesses when running the previous company that they started. Most modern businesses are heavily dependent on rapidly improving their customer and partner facing web and mobile applications , whilst retaining a stable IT infrastructure and simultaneously managing costs. Being exposed to application roll-out delays or the slightest “downtime” is a significant and sometimes existential business risk, which can result in higher costs and loss of customers. Server monitoring is the process of collecting key data, for example, CPU utilization per application service per user and continuously scanning servers as a preventative measure to pick up and fix small issues before they escalate. It is critical to ensuring the reliable and cost-effective delivery of any online service.
Dataloop addresses the pain point of server monitoring for cloud businesses with a product engineered from the ground up increasingly granular, automated and collaborative environment of today’s DevOps-driven application infrastructure:
· Implementation is frictionless and can be completed in minutes, when monitoring setup typically require writing a lot of configuration management code
· The setup of checks, alerts and corrective action can be devolved from operations to development, with the latter able to write monitoring in any language and then export code straight to production
· Operations teams still retain visibility and control of monitoring across the organization, through dynamically configurable and real-time dashboards
In short, organisations using Dataloop empower their IT teams to collaborate productively and ultimately code and ship new applications or updates faster while simultaneously maintaining or increasing uptime for the same or lower cost. No other product on the market combines this compatibility with today’s applications with the sophistication to cope with today’s highly decentralized and fluid ‘business/IT’ organisations. This delivers a fundamental competitive advantage to many businesses, and for some will prove an existential factor.
So, we have a strong team of domain experts, leveraging their experience to address a pressing need in a manner that is elegant, comprehensive. This in turn is riding a wave of adoption of a fundamentally better way for businesses to harness software to win in their respective markets. I didn’t need the great references on the team to be clear that this was a bunch of folks with whom I would be privileged to partner.
