ScienceLogic targets new use case aimed at frustrated CMDB users

ScienceLogic, which offers an infrastructure monitoring platform, late last year began selling a package catering to a new use case: incident response. The offering leverages the range of monitoring data that ScienceLogic already collects in order to keep CMDBs accurate and then enable a variety of automation with the goal of improving incident response. The company reports growing interest in this application, and also touts significant impact for customers already using it.

ScienceLogic may not have the cachet of some of the newer breed of monitoring vendors, but it knows how to serve an important customer segment – service providers – and that has allowed it to rack up an extremely large user base. With 60% of direct customers coming from this category, ScienceLogic boasts an enormous 47,000 organizations as users. Although not on the cutting edge in terms of capabilities, the company is modernizing, with plans under way to enhance its ability to scale and the recent addition of agent-based data collection. Given that its customer base – which consists of enterprises and government agencies, in addition to service providers – often lags behind the cutting edge, we think its technology investments are likely to match customer needs.

Context

ScienceLogic has been around since 2003, and has raised $84m from funders including Goldman Sachs. It doesn't share financials, but told us that GAAP revenue is up 46% year over year so far.

The company targets very large users, with 60% of its customers being MSPs, followed by enterprises at about 30%, and the rest coming from government agencies. It doesn't report the number of direct customers, but its website boasts 47,000 organizations as users, many of them employing ScienceLogic via service providers. Average annual contract value for direct customers is $125,000.

Customers include Sephora, the Social Security Administration, Cisco, AT&T and CDW. The bulk are in North America, although ScienceLogic is hoping to grow its international presence, and reports that 24% of its sales pipeline is outside of North America.

Products

ScienceLogic positions its product as a central tool for consolidating a range of monitoring data, including the infrastructure data that ScienceLogic collects and data from third-party tools, like New Relic's APM product. Users can track service-level KPIs and view dependency maps. For about a year, ScienceLogic has been selling a package catering to a new use case, one aimed at improving incident response. It does so through deep integrations with adjacent tools including ITSM products and CMDBs.

ScienceLogic says it commonly hears businesses complain (as do we) about challenges with keeping CMDBs up to date, particularly in more modern application and infrastructure environments that change frequently. Because it now uses both agent and agentless technology to collect data for monitoring purposes, and also ingests data from third-party tools, it detects changes across users' infrastructure.

The company has developed deep integrations with CMDBs from the likes of ServiceNow to sync that change information. ScienceLogic argues that using that more trustworthy CMDB allows businesses to better do things like automate ticketing and incident response actions, processes that don't work well when impacted devices don't appear in the CMDB. Some of those automation capabilities are available from ServiceNow, others via ITSM and other partners. ServiceNow claims that its customers are able to dramatically reduce the time it takes to create and assign tickets as well as fix problems.

While ScienceLogic had been enabling this automated CMDB management application for several years, it noticed an uptick in interest recently, and as a result designed a packaged offering that does discovery and mapping and is designed for the ITSM use case. It reports that it is both upselling existing customers and targeting new ones through a new buyer entry point – the IT service manager. ScienceLogic reports that it is extremely busy responding to customers and potential customers that are particularly interested in using it to improve their ServiceNow implementations.

We think that with this offering, ScienceLogic is addressing notable pain points that we hear about from enterprises, particularly those with large, complex technology deployments and those already invested in tools like ITSM platforms and CMDBs. While we suspect that implementation and integration requires an investment of time and effort, once in place, ScienceLogic's offering appears to have a positive effect on mean time to repair.

Innovation and roadmap

ScienceLogic has developed and is working on technology that will keep it relevant as its customers modernize their environments. For instance, it is now offering agents, via technology it acquired with AppFirst, that enable customers to collect more granular data, as required by firms using technologies like containers, and to deliver more granular application mapping.

Separately, ScienceLogic recognized that its back end, which is based on SQL, can't scale to the volume of data being collected via its new agent technology. Thus it is developing a new back end designed to better scale to the volume of data that customers are collecting, and expects to implement it in the next couple of quarters. This is a key development, because monitoring environments that can't keep up with the growing data demands of customers will be replaced.

ScienceLogic has also been upgrading its UI, doing so by workflow rather than rolling out a soup-to-nuts update. This is a necessary investment because ScienceLogic's UI is somewhat dated.

Competition

For MSP customers, one of ScienceLogic's notable competitors is CA Technologies, although others of the Big Four, namely BMC, represent competition as well. Similarly, LogicMonitor successfully targets MSPs, although it was developed as a SaaS offering, and most ScienceLogic deployments are on-premises.

With its positioning as a central repository for IT operations data, we think ScienceLogic may compete with Datadog, which is often used by customers in such a way. Zenoss is also modernizing its offering to include agent-based data collection, and is investing in its SaaS offering. It represents competition in the enterprise market.