Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The Cloudcast – #123 – Monitoring the Clouds from the Cloud



Topic 1 - Let’s talk about your background (PhD, UCLA) and how you went from academia to having a startup funded by Sequoia. That’s a pretty radical jump.


Topic 2 - Give us the basics of how Thousand Eyes works. How much is standard (agents) and how much can be customized for specific environments?


Topic 3 - One of the biggest takeaways we had from AWS re:Invent was the number of companies that make various layers of tools (New Relic, DataDog, Boundary, Cloudability, etc.). Some of them only focus on one layer, but Thousand Eyes takes a more holistic approach. Talk about your architecture and why you’d want to tackle such a large problem space?


Topic 4 - We personally really like the move to more and more “management” tools being SaaS based, for a number of reasons. We see that you have former Meraki people on your board. How do conversations go when you introduce this delivery method? Is it considered new or fairly standard at this point?i


Topic 5 - What are you hearing as the more important elements that companies want from SaaS-monitoring? I’m seeing APIs to various services (AWS, Github, etc.), intelligent algorithms and some level of community/collaboration. What else?

Topic 6 - With all these great SaaS-based management companies/tools coming out, do you see them consolidating (startup/startup merging), exits via the large vendors (eg. Oracle, HP, Cisco, VMware, etc.) or are markets like AWS growing fast enough to build a large stand-alone business for a while?