Less than a month after announcing that it had surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, Cribl Inc. unveiled a new partnership on Wednesday with Elasticsearch Inc.

The observability company’s strategic collaboration with Elastic will provide customers with increased data flexibility; improved capabilities for security information and event management, or SIEM; and simplified migrations to the Elastic Cloud. Additional features include an enhancement of Elastic’s search capabilities with optimized data and support for meeting regulatory standards throughout the data lifecycle.

Abby Strong, Cribl

“Partnerships with companies like Elastic enable our customers to get more value,” said Abby Strong, chief market officer of Cribl, in an exclusive interview for this story. “It adds more data visibility for Elastic users and improves their SIEM capabilities. We are building the future of data for IT and security.”

Deeper integration

The partnership announced on Wednesday will bring a deeper integration between the Cribl portfolio and Elastic’s cloud platform. Cribl Packs, a framework for Cribl Stream customers to build and share configuration models across deployments, will offer customers out-of-the-box content that maps common log types to the Elastic Common Schema. The goal is to help customers ingest and manage the largest and most complicated security and observability pipelines.

“At our heart, we are an integrations company,” Strong said. “As data continues to grow at a 28% compound annual growth rate, customers are going to need a tiered strategy to keep all of this data.”

Cribl’s alliance with Elastic is also designed to enhance the on-premises and cloud migration process to Elastic Observability, an extensible full-stack observability platform built on artificial intelligence and search. AI can play an important role in unifying logs, infrastructure metrics, application traces and user experience data into a manageable resource.

“We have quite a lot of customers that are using AI-enabled tools,” Strong noted. “Those AI solutions can only be accurate if they are getting the right data. Elastic has been very focused on building a platform for people creating AI-enabled applications.”

Enhancement for OpenTelemetry

Wednesday’s announcement included the news that, in partnership with Cribl, Elastic would be enhancing the OpenTelemetry, or OTel, data integration process. OTel is an open-source observability framework, and the latest joint solution streamlines the transfer of OTel data into Elastic.

OTel is supported by a wide variety of open-source and commercial analytics tools, including many provided by the largest cloud providers. The framework offers enterprise users a more efficient way to observe and track down network problems.

“We have a lot of customers that are using OTel already,” Strong said. “It’s all about choice and control.”

Cribl’s collaboration with Elastic adds to a growing list of alliances the observability company has formed within the past year. Since April, Cribl has announced partnerships with CrowdStrike Inc. and Exabeam Inc., and has continued to expand its joint initiatives with Amazon Web Services Inc..

“We are constantly expanding our ecosystem,” Strong said. “We’re lucky to be partnered with these leading tooling companies for data and security.”

Providing choice

Cribl’s approach to observability has been to position itself as an impartial solution, what one investor characterized as a form of neutrality akin to Switzerland. Cribl doesn’t try to compete with existing data stores; instead it seeks to accommodate all of them.

This has given it a tailwind financially, as demonstrated by the announcement last month that it exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than four years, becoming the fourth fastest infrastructure business to reach what is known as “centaur” status.

“When folks ask what we sell, the best answer is that we give them choice,” Strong said. “We don’t come in and tell them this is the architecture they have to have. We want to give them choice and control over whatever they have in their environment today. Put the data where it has the most value to you.”

This value proposition comes at a time when businesses across a wide range of industries are trimming costs. Cribl believes that by offering its customers choice over where data should be placed, it will ultimately save businesses money.

“Nearly all of our customers are budget flat or budget down, and they’re trying to figure out how they can do more with less,” said Clint Sharp, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cribl, in a recent interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “We help them eliminate noise and waste. We help them control their costs. We help give them choice about their vendor relationships and their data storage, and where they think that the best place to put each class of data is.”

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