As the Startup50 team puts the finishing touches on the Big 50-2016 Startup Report (which we plan to post in the next week or two), we’re previewing a few of the startups that have earned their way into the final report.
Today, we look at BigPanda, a well-funded startup that applies data science concepts to monitoring in order to intelligently consolidate and correlate IT alerts.
Startup in the spotlight: BigPanda
What they do: The BigPanda platform consolidates alerts from multiple IT monitoring tools into related incidents. This approach not only provides engineers with a single pane of glass for alert management, but it also helps IT teams separate signal from noise in order to spot critical issues faster and reduce MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution).
Problem they solve: As computing and application environments have evolved over time, IT incident-response workflows and enterprise org charts have not. Enterprise infrastructure, in other words, is not keeping up with our cloud-based, mobile, and social world.
As virtualization, cloud, SaaS, and mobility have moved into the mainstream, Ops professionals have been forced into a reactive, firefighting role. Adding to the problem are other current trends, such as the rise of open-source software, micro-services, and the emergence of DevOps.
Open source, micro-services, and DevOps are not bad things – anything but – however, each carries with it risks that often undermine operational stability.
Further complicating this problem is the fact that Ops teams follow outdated incident-response workflows that were designed for dotcom-era production environments. As a result, many organizations hire personnel whose skills best map to that dotcom reality of yesteryear, skills that are inadequate for today’s IT challenges. And, of course, Ops budgets have remained flat or have dropped, further eroding the Ops team’s ability to monitor, maintain, secure, and manage all of the moving parts that make up today’s complex IT infrastructures.
To put it simply: IT Ops professionals get too many alerts from too many places far too often to make sense of them. This signal-to-noise imbalance creates huge risks.
How they solve it: BigPanda has developed a data science platform that centralizes and intelligently correlates high volumes of IT alerts, enabling teams “to detect and resolve critical issues up to 90% faster than with traditional approaches.”
BigPanda enables IT teams to keep up with the explosive scale and complexity of modern data centers by centralizing alerts and events into one platform, while also automatically correlating alerts across various monitoring tools.
Ops teams also receive contextual data with alerts mapped to code deployments and infrastructure changes. Teams are able to automatically route notifications to popular collaboration and ticketing tools, such as Jira, Slack, PagerDuty, and ServiceNow.
Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
CEO: Assaf Resnick, founder and CEO. Assaf was previously a principal at Sequoia Capital and an analyst at Moody’s.
Year Founded: 2012
Funding: BigPanda is backed by $30 million in VC funding. In May 2016, the startup secured $5M in follow-on funding from Pelion Venture Partners, adding to its $16M Series B, which it announced in October 2015. Other investors include Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Sequoia Capital. Mayfield Fund and Sequoia Capital also funded BigPanda’s $7M Series A.
Competitive Landscape: This is a messy market sector. As I see it, while BigPanda must compete in the IT monitoring and alerting space, most of the companies (and open-source projects) within that space actually benefit from integration with BigPanda.
For instance, PagerDuty is often listed as a BigPanda competitor, but BigPanda is quite happy to route consolidated intel through PagerDuty. Moogsoft is probably the most direct competitor, but wait a few months, and that could change.
As of now, this space is in a gold-rush phase, and I expect it to remain that way for at least a couple more years – a lifetime in tech.
Customers Include: Wix, Caesars Entertainment, Gap, NewsCorp, Autodesk, Getty Images, GrubHub, Rocket Fuel, Inrix, and Endurance.
Why they’re in the Big 50-2016: BigPanda did well in online voting, have raised a respectable amount of funding, have a solid roster of customers, and they are uniquely positioned to tackle the very real pain point of IT alert overload.
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