UPDATED 17:52 EDT / APRIL 22 2022

BIG DATA

Observe poised for growth based on data observability from enterprise apps

While much of the focus in the enterprise world has been on software applications, understanding the data generated from apps has become just as important.

This is the premise for Observe Inc., a five-year-old startup founded on the belief that enterprises are data rich and information poor. There is a business need to get answers for key questions from data, and Observe’s technology addresses this challenge.

“People are realizing that the differentiation is not so much the application, it’s understanding of the data,” said Jeremy Burton (pictured), chief executive officer of Observe. “Can I understand who my best customers are and what I sell today? If people came to my website and didn’t buy, why not? All of that they want to analyze.”

Burton spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit San Francisco event. They discussed growth of the observability market, the firm’s relationship with Snowflake Inc., and the future of building businesses on cloud platforms. (* Disclosure below.)

Examining telemetry data

Observe emerged from stealth in October, 2020 and its leadership team included former executives from Splunk Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., Oracle Corp. and Snowflake. The observability market has attracted a crowded field of competing companies focused on discrete solutions for log analytics, metrics monitoring and application performance management.

It is the latter area which represents a major business opportunity for Observe. “If I can understand my data better than my competitor, then I’ve got an advantage,” Burton said. “It’s about time somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot. That’s observability.”

The emergence of companies such as Observe to provide solutions in the enterprise data observability space demonstrates the evolution of platform technologies in a cloud world. The data warehouse giant Snowflake was built on top of the AWS platform, and Observe built its observability business on Snowflake.

“The Observe story is closely knit with Snowflake because of all of the telemetry data we store in there,” Burton explained. “Snowflake’s aspiration is to manage not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. They’re doing for the big data world what Oracle did for the relational data world 25 years ago.”

Building on platform

What has changed over the last quarter of a century has been a shift from building businesses on operating systems to creating on top of platform infrastructure. This has also altered the scale of revenue that can be generated for businesses based on cloud.

“If you look at the revenues of AWS, it is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with Windows,” Burton said. “The opportunity for folks like Snowflake and Observe is an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracles and SAPs of the old world. In tech, if you want to predict the future, look at the past.”

The future for Observe is focused on product rollout and growing its customer base. The company successfully closed a funding round last year, and Burton indicated that Observe would have an announcement soon.

“We’ve only been selling the product for a year, and we have 10 petabytes of data under management,” Burton said. “We’re starting to get some really interesting enterprise customers. We’re adding all of the tracing visualizations so people will be able to do the kinds of things that back in the day you could do with the New Relics and App Dynamics. You’re going to be able to do that with Observe.”

Watch the complete interview below and be sure to check out more of theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco event. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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