The time series data market used to be a province for weather statistics and stock price averages. But as the wave of data generated from “internet of things” devices continues to escalate, one company is betting that the market for time series technology will become much more significant in a wide range of uses beyond the number of days without rain or the ups and downs of Wall Street.

“What most people don’t realize is how big this space is,” said Evan Kaplan (pictured), chief executive officer of InfluxData Inc., at the company’s InfluxDays conference Wednesday in San Francisco.

IoT sensors drive demand

It’s an interesting bet because the picture is beginning to change dramatically as IoT sensors in everything from cars to wine shipments start to generate mountains of data on a scale that was previously unimaginable. At the InfluxDays event, for instance, representatives from MuleSoft Inc., recently acquired by Salesforce.com Inc., described how one of its many IoT-connected customers was generating 12 billion transactions per year.

“The journey in IoT is super important,” Kaplan said during an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE. “Sensors speak time series data.”

Tools for Kubernetes

On Wednesday, Kaplan’s six-year-old company, formerly called Errplane,  released the latest version of InfluxDB 1.7, designed to provide developers with new features to query and process time series data generated from IoT devices and cloud-based containers. The latter feature highlights InfluxData’s response to input from its open-source contributor community that Kubernetes is growing rapidly as a key tool for enterprise data management.

The latest release followed a previous move by the company in December when it rolled out new features to give developers more control and utilization of containers through scaling based on metrics collected through InfluxData’s technology. The move late last year was applauded by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, of which InfluxData became a member last November, for its alignment with CNCF’s project goals.

“Kubernetes is a force of nature out there,” Kaplan said. “You have to pay attention to it.”

Courting the developer

InfluxData now claims more than 450 customers, including brand names such as Cisco Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and Tesla Inc. Two additional statistics revealed by the company on Wednesday offered an indication of its growing influence among its most valued constituents: developers.

The company now has more than 1,000 open-source contributors and 14,600 GitHub Stars, a bookmark metric within the vast website where users can designate a repository for future use. The company is keenly aware of its influence within the developer community, usually the entry point into a potential customer opportunity rather than via the chief information officer, according to Kaplan.

“We come up from the developer who finds the platform,” Kaplan said. “The company is oriented toward builders. We build cool stuff for people who like to build cool stuff.”

High on the “cool” factor for many developers is apparently InfluxData’s Telegraf, a plugin server agent that collects and reports data. The plugin can gather data from a wide range of sources, including Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services Inc.’s CloudWatch and MongoDB.

In March the company disclosed that the growth of agents supported by Telegraf had increased more than 80 percent in a 12-month span. “Telegraf is the most popular open-source project we have,” said Paul Dix, founder and chief technology officer of InfluxData. “It is all over the place. We’ve actually had competitors write plugins for Telegraf.”

Google takes an interest

The competitive arena for InfluxData could become hotter because it potentially includes one gargantuan player: Google LLC. In September, the search giant quietly announced a Cloud Inference API, billed as a scalable system to make it easier for developers to obtain insights from time series datasets.

The application programming interface is fully integrated with Google Cloud Storage and can handle datasets in the tens of billions of event records, according to a company release. InfluxData has built a relationship with Google and announced a new Telegraf agent for Google’s Cloud IoT Core just last month.

“They’ve been really strong supporters of our work,” said Kaplan, when asked about whether he was concerned about Google’s interest in monitoring time series data.

The dialogue at Wednesday’s event offered a clue for why a major industry force like Google might be interested in the time series data space. InfluxData executives made the point that as computer systems become more complex, the need to observe data in real-time has become greater because of an important factor: computers need to become smarter too.

Managing time series data in the enterprise is a key bridge to what will ultimately become autonomy, as evidenced by the move towards self-driving cars. Observability of mountains of data is a foundation for machine learning and InfluxData’s CEO is positioning his company to write key chapters in that story.

“It’s a journey to automation and eventually to autonomy,” Kaplan said. “We want to be the platform for that journey.” And he’s willing to bet the company on it.

Kaplan also spoke to SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE recently about the company and its opportunity:

Photo: SiliconANGLE