 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering SumoLogic Illuminate 2018. Now, here's Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are wrapping up a full day coverage here at SumoLogic Illuminate at the Hyatt San Francisco Airport. It's been a great day, 600 people here, and we're excited to wrap our day with the founder, co-founder of SumoLogic, Christian Bieden, co-founder and... CTO, actually. CTO, very good. So, Christian, love to get your perspective on this event. I think it's the second year you've had the event. It's grown a lot since last year. Kind of your perspective as you walk around and look at all these people that are completely engaged in something you started years ago. Yeah, I know. It's humiliating in many ways, and humbling, I guess, is the word that I'm looking for. I mean, these are, look, we are doing this. We are building software, and that's always how I've looked at it. We're building software to service now in order for people to use it, right? And we're not necessarily building it for ourselves, even though, in Sumo case, we actually use it ourselves as well, which is also very cool. But ultimately, what we create so people can actually, we create things so that to make people's lives easier, and nothing really kind of tells that story, like coming out to a user conference. And I'm so happy that we are doing these. We kind of did it for the first time last year, and it was a resounding success. I think we by and large doubled this year, and customers coming back from last year, start recognizing some folks that I hadn't met before, you know, on the road, et cetera, they're coming back here, that's a good story, and more folks, and it's humbling. Yeah, it's great. So talk about when you got started, because you've been around your software engineer at a bunch of companies before you started Sumo. So what opportunity did you see, right? It's a leap of faith to start a company, but luckily we're here, it happens a lot. What was the opportunity that you saw? Was it fixing a problem that you had, which is often the best way, or did you see something new on the horizon that you wanted to jump on? Yeah, you know, as much as I would like to see that, say that I saw something on the horizon that I wanted to jump on, and partially I think we did, but it's really more about trying to fix something that we felt was broken. You know, I was at ArcSight, so was my co-founder for a long time, ArcSight was a fantastic company. We built a, it's a very nerdy thing, it's called a security information event management system, but it's basically a system that allows folks to bring in security data from all these different places, and all these different devices, and then actually manage detection, and incident response around it. And that was a great story, ArcSight went public, I was an early engineer there, so that was basically best case scenario, right? Right. And I'm very happy, and I'm very thankful, all the way back to the folks that hired me there, and made that company successful. So what we did observe, however, and then ArcSight, that needs to be said, was sort of a classic enterprise software product, where we would be sitting there in the office, we would write the code, and then we would compile it, and we put it on a CD, and we send it to customers, and then how this works, then it maybe doesn't work properly, and then we had to sort of somehow try to sort of, debug by telepathy, and I don't know if you can do it, but I will publicly admit that I can't. So it just felt like it was a very inefficient way of doing things. We felt customers were struggling way too much with the sort of deployment installation upgrading, and all the software, all the things that didn't really have anything to do, they were just prerequisites to actually use it. We observed that a lot of enterprise software categories got disrupted from 2004, with SaaS players like Salesforce, and then we used, so we had integrations with Remedy at some point, and then service now came around, and pretty much obsolete to them, right? Right, right. And so we were aware of those stories, and we came back in the other side days. And at one point in 2008, we actually went to see Vanne Vogels, who I'm sure you know, with the CTO of Amazon, and obviously of AWS as well, and do one of his patented, he's a fantastic speaker, one of his patented talks, where he basically ran a group of folks, it was in Stanford actually, through the advantages of AWS, and this was in 2008, right? They were like, I think AWS was maybe 2000, I think they started in 2006 or so, right? They had like S3. Or either shows or anything, right? Yeah, they didn't, exactly. There was no re-invent or anything like that. And I remember that we went there, and we had heard about it, but we didn't really know. It sounded weird, but interesting. So we went, and then we walked out of there, and we were like, holy shit, this is just, I mean, you can't roll back time, right? Right, right. And this is just a completely different model, and what he really, what he brought across well, what we received was that, hey, now as a software developer, you can actually build services without having to know all this gnarly data center stuff. And not that that's not interesting, but you just can't know everything, right? Because what I feel like they really did is to turn the data center into an API. Right, that's one of my favorite. That was a great line, like re-invent 2013. Yeah, exactly. And so, that appeals to me, right? And so, what happened after that was this sort of idea that, hey, there's this thing that is suddenly possible that we could use without having to first hire half of Google, right? Right. Or, because we don't have to worry about this aspect anymore, and maybe that gives us a chance to sort of do some things differently than they were done before in our limited, sort of in our domain, basically, right? And I remember just parking lot discussions. It literally happened right after that talk. So, that sort of started the idea, right? And so, there was a little bit of buying into this vision, and that's kind of the, yeah, we certainly bought into that vision big time, because it was obvious to us that this was going to win. And then also, just trying to apply that to what we knew. And that ultimately led to the founding of Sumo in 2010. And so, what was the first application, your first go-to-market application? You know, we have basically one product. It's a platform on top of which you can do monitoring, troubleshooting, you know, security analytics, business analytics to some degree. And so, there's always been just Sumo, right? But the Sumo platform started with a strong focus in 2012, with a strong initial focus on basically application monitoring and troubleshooting, right? So, it was not actually initially a security-focused product. Which is funny, because you came from security, the immediate preceding company. Every, you know, all of the early sales guys, you know, they looked at all of our LinkedIn's, and it wasn't just me, it was my co-founder, and of course, a lot of the original crew, right? And they just went straight out and tried to sell security, but that's not what we had at the time. So, we had some very interesting discussions. I'm sure I'm not talking out of turn there. But, you know, we have a passion for security as well, and you know, it's not that we didn't want to do it, it's just that in the beginning you have to focus. Right, right. And you have to look at what is the thing that you can build first. You know, obviously you have to, like, vision in your head of how you lay out all the things, and it was clear that we were going to get there eventually, but not in the beginning. Right. Well, so, I'm sure you know, Fred Letty, we've interviewed him a ton of times at ServiceNow, he mentioned ServiceNow, he's a fantastic guy, really terrific guy. He's a very, very good guy, yeah, I know him a little bit, yeah. And, you know, he talks, and we talk about it a lot, you know, nobody has a line item on a budget for Q4 to buy a new platform. So, even if you want to build a new platform, you can't go to market out of the gated platform. You got to have some app that somebody does have a light item and some budget to buy. But if you plan it right and you put the right foundation, then that gives you that opportunity to expand into lots of different applications. It looks like you guys are doing a lot of that now as kind of the roles and the people that are using the tool is growing inside of the company. Absolutely. And, you know, we're doing this to some degree because we always wanted to do it. The other part of it, and this is especially interesting when it comes to security, is even though the original go-to market wasn't focused on security, you know, people would bring us in and then start using us for security for log management and those types of things for sort of the information management use cases in a classic way of saying this. But, so they almost tracked us there, right? And it's not that we didn't want to go there, it was just like, man, we got to focus on something. You know, we can't do like five million things at the same time. But it was very clear that, you know, what the, you know, I'm going to, that's going to sound very grand, but like it was very clear that what the market wanted, you know, as it was like, you know, was, you know, a security solution that is cloud focused, right? In the cloud and for the cloud, and that's, you know, we've been like patiently working on that. I think, you know, we have, we have established ourselves as the sort of leading monitoring and, you know, troubleshooting platform, you know, vendor, we've been used in a lot of companies, you know, old school companies. We have lots of on-prem workloads, you know, companies that are doing cloud transformation. We have obviously lots of cloud workloads. And then, you know, of course, you know, all of the new guys who are just 100% in a cloud and, you know, I talk to customers here, it's not even, they're not even thinking about it twice. They would not go with an on-prem vendor, right? So we hear all the time about the benefits of cloud, obviously from the business point of view, but from your point of view, from a founder, from, you know, building a company to piggyback on this trend and to see the speed of adoption and innovation and Docker and Kubernetes and, you know, it just rocks and roll. We can speak a little bit, you know, kind of making that platform decision and how different is it for you as the founder of a software company to build a cloud native software company versus a traditional company that you did before? Yeah, so we did it because we thought it wasn't going to just be better, but also easier. Remember the telepathy thing? Yes, yeah. We couldn't figure that one out. So we figured, you know, if we just run the damn thing ourselves, it'll be easier. It turns out that we were probably a little bit wide eyed about that, you know, running a large, like running a platform as a service on a very large scale and our scale level from the beginning was reasonably large and now it's very large, brings with it a new set of problems because now, you know, we, you know, we want to have the responsibility for keeping it up, right? You know, it's a dial tone type situation. You pick up the phone, there's a dial tone. This is how we look at it, right? And in terms of what someone needs to provide in terms of availability and all these things. And so that's hard. The reality is that I would do it again because I think it's still better than the old world because at least right now, we have control over the environment which we didn't have before. So now, you know, Sumo is fully multi-tenant. So that is a fully multi-tenant, you know, data management platform. That's a fairly tall order from an engineering perspective. I think we did pretty well, but oh man, we learned a lot about operating things, trust me. So, you know, but I do think that is fundamentally better. And you know, there's always some pain, right? And you know, that pain, I'm actually, you know, this pain that we have today, it feels like a pain that is like, that makes more sense and is more easily manageable than the sort of the way that it was before anyways. And the other thing, and this is where it gets kind of, you know, goes full circle is that what we go through is exactly what our customers are going through as well, right? Because they now all pretty much everybody, every new project at this point becomes a web app of some sort, you know, they, you know, their users are going to expect them to have sort of dial tone type properties, right? And so we have very much, you know, we have very much the same as our customers that way, right? We probably started a couple of years earlier because, you know, we just did, right? And so we probably, in some cases, know a little bit more, we just have a little bit more kind of muscle memory on these types of things. But, and I think that gives us to some degree the right to serve them. But, you know, we are with all these things, when we have customers visit the office, right? They're technical guys, engineers, ops, et cetera. They sit in a room and you wouldn't be able to tell that they're not from Sumo. You know, when we bring all the, you know, technical and product folks to a customer for, you know, a session of some sort, you know, they wouldn't be able to tell that, you know, that those guys are from Sumo and not from their own company. Because we all look the same, we all like, you know, have the same mannerisms and it's the same basic crowd, right? And so we're very much like our customers and I think we can empathize tremendously and I think that's important. And that fuels a lot of what we're doing. Right. So last question, you've been at this for a while, as you look forward, what are some of your priorities, what are some of the things that you're keeping an eye on as you move out of 2018 and beyond? That's a good question. Yeah, I do like to look forward. I'm trying to wrap my head around this whole serverless business, which, you know, it seems to gain so much momentum and it's such a sort of, you know, crazy, you know, out of left field type of idea that, but people are just clinging to it and it hit a nerve, right? Right. But it feels like the natural, you know, kind of in state of this constantly shrinking of the unit. Yeah, basically the virtual unit, right? To no unit. No, this is why I think it's really super interesting and I think that's probably also why so many people like, you know, jumped onto it even though it was, you know, really wild, right? And again, Amazon brought this out even before they had support for Docker, right? Imagine that. And then they backtracked and built a container service and it was like, what are you guys doing? You already had the future invented. So that's something that I'm trying to wrap my head around, right? And the other thing is always, of course, about, you know, trying to do what we are doing today better, you know, going all the way through the layers of the architecture, trying to figure out what have we actually learned because we did learn a bunch of stuff, a lot of stuff actually. And, you know, how can we continue to sort of make our system, you know, perform better and also how can we bring down, how can we kind of look at the economics of the whole thing? Data keeps growing, right? And ultimately processing data costs money. Customers have as much data as they have. This depends on what kind of business they have. They'll have a lot more tomorrow. And they will have a lot, absolutely. And so, you know, some very fundamental kind of platform level things are sort of, you know, we're discussing on some level, as I'm sure everybody else is in the market as well. But those are the things that I'm looking at right now. Great. Well, thank you for taking a few minutes of your day and congratulations on your success. It's got to be super fulfilling to walk around and see all these people jumping on what you started years and years ago. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thank you. He's Christian, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE where it's SumoLogic Illuminate. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.