ScienceLogic brings AI to IT operations

Dave Link says he founded ScienceLogic because of his belief that after working in IT operations for much of his career he considered the discipline to be broken.

“It was broken very badly because you often had each technology discipline – network, the security vertical, the database vertical, the systems administrator, the storage layer — with its own tool,” the ScienceLogic chief executive told Computerworld.

“What I believed was, operationally, that wasn’t fast enough. Because you really needed to see it all in one place, contextualised in terms of what related to a [particular] service,” the CEO said.

Enterprises’ ops teams are now often faced with an unwieldy mix of cloud services, frequently from multiple providers, and on-premises gear, as well as new application deployment models, such as containers, and a massive growth in data sources.

“When we started the company I wanted to create a big data lake, and build it in such a way that I could have multi-tenanted views of infrastructure for different departments or different locations or different customer outcomes,” Link said.

ScienceLogic’s platform is intended to offer a unified overview of an organisation’s IT infrastructure, whether on-premises or cloud based, through to application performance and the impact on services. And, Link said, it does it in a “highly automated and intelligent way where it kinds of works out of the box rather than having somebody need to tag or associate systems with a service”.

The company’s platform allows relationships to be automatically mapped and tracked across infrastructure, apps and businesses services, and bring IT data from across an enterprise together into a real-time data lake.

“The holy grail of what’s happening now in our industry is making sure you understand where a problem is emanating from – and you’re cutting across many different layers, many different APIs, many different data sources, merging them all together and using machine learning to look for patterns and anomalies,” Link said.

ScienceLogic falls into the category of AIOps: A term originally coined by Gartner for “algorithmic IT operations”, but which the analyst firm now uses to refer to “artificial intelligence for IT operations”.

AIOps platforms are “software systems that combine big data and AI or machine learning functionality to enhance and partially replace a broad range of IT operations processes and tasks, including availability and performance monitoring, event correlation and analysis, IT service management, and automation,” the analyst firm says in its Market Guide for AIOps Platforms.

Gartner is predicting that by 2023, some 30 per cent of large enterprises will use AIOps platforms and digital experience monitoring technology exclusively to monitor non-legacy IT — up from an estimated 2 per cent in 2018.

In Australia, ScienceLogic has seen steady 40 per cent year-on-year growth for the past three years. Local growth has been “very, very consistent,” Link said. The company has had an ANZ presence for over half a decade now, with local sales, support and professional services teams.

“If there’s one trend line that we’ve seen here, at least when I look at our global customer base, the enterprises in Australia and New Zealand are embracing an ‘as a service model’ at a faster pace — and i think they’ve beyond crossed the chasm in my opinion,” he said.

“Sometimes people get caught up in a capital budget versus operating budget just from an expense perspective – we don’t see that happening in Australia.”