Artificial intelligence is several things to today’s enterprises: an innovation area, operations facilitator and market differentiation factor, among others.

As the race for AI supremacy heats up, several companies are vying to drive new enterprise value area with it. One of those is Cribl Inc., the real-time log data processing platform that recently surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and boasts a third of the Fortune 100 in its customer base, according to Clint Sharp (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Cribl.

“Revenue is a reflection of the value that we provide to customers,” he said. “We’re one of the fastest growing companies in infrastructure software for that reason. [We’re] fourth fastest in infrastructure software behind Wiz, HashiCorp and Snowflake and just slightly ahead of Datadog. It’s a great company to be in; part of that reason is also our net dollar retention of 145%.”

Sharp spoke with theCUBE host Lisa Martin at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the company’s journey so far, key milestones it’s achieved and the evolving trends in the tech industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Transitioning beyond observability

The key to Cribl’s growth lies in innovation from first principles and an unwavering commitment to putting customers first. As data challenges continue to escalate and with a 25% compound growth rate, the company remains dedicated to making it easy for organizations to manage the ever-expanding tide of data, according to Sharp.

Notably, Cribl transitioned in scope from an observability pipeline to a multi-product data engine for IT and security. This transition was ingrained in the company’s DNA from its inception. The software powering all of its products was designed to handle stream processing, analytics of data at rest and data collection, according to Sharp. This evolution positions Cribl as a multi-product company, with offerings like Cribl Stream, Cribl Edge and the recently introduced Cribl Search.

“The Search product is the first search-in-place analytics solution that gives you the ability to analyze machine data, telemetry data and all types of classes of data that IT and security have, no matter where that is,” Sharp said. “It could be in your existing solutions, could be in your existing indexing solutions. It could be in a data lake. That’s where we’re seeing the biggest opportunity as customers want to store petabytes and exabytes of data cheaply in the cloud, in object storage.”

Cribl Edge and Cribl Search are specifically designed to manage large data volumes efficiently, providing cost-effective solutions in an era where data growth is outpacing budget increases. These advancements are a direct response to the burgeoning need for efficient data management and analysis in the AI space, marking a significant milestone in the company’s journey toward leading the industry, according to Sharp.

Another noteworthy development is Cribl’s support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. With today’s organizations facing monumental challenges in extracting data from Kubernetes clusters, Cribl Edge differentiates itself by offering centralized management, real-time introspection and search capabilities directly at the edge, according to Sharp.

“We expanded with Edge to be able to move the ability to route data to multiple places right at the collector and manage thousands and thousands of collectors centrally — and that’s a core value proposition,” he explained.

The ability to analyze massive amounts of data at rest in Amazon Security Lake without moving it positions Cribl as a strong player in the ongoing cloud migration, particularly in addressing the evolving needs of security departments, Sharp concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

(* Disclosure: Cribl Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cribl nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE