Cloud startup Loggly helped Obama get reelected, and nabs $10.5M

During the Obama reelection campaign, a two-year old startup called Loggly caught the attention of the President’s chief technology officer, Harper Reed.

Reed headed a team of developers and data analysts who worked tirelessly to get the President reelected, and he needed a better way to gain visibility into the campaign’s cloud-based systems managing massive influxes of web traffic.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":806878,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"D"}']

The developers would log in to Loggly and fix any problems in real-time. If they got sidelined by another task, Loggly would alert them to any threats. Reed tells me he used Loggly alongside cloud tools like New Relic, an application performance and monitoring service.

“Our engineers did not have access to any infrastructure,” Reed tells me, referencing the lack of physical servers. “We were very automated and reliant on the cloud.”

San Francisco-based Loggly has a new cloud-based approach to managing web applications and secured $10.5 million in venture financing today. Reed is among the company’s most outspoken advocates.

Loggly competes against several other hot log data analysis companies, including Sumo Logic (see our piece about leading cloud “arm’s merchants), VMware and Splunk.

---

Editor’s note: Find out more about how log analysis is playing a key role in how businesses manage their infrastructure, now that the cloud is becoming pervasive. Our CloudBeat conference, Sept. 9-10 in San Francisco, will be tackling this and other revolutionary cases of enterprise cloud usage. Register today!

---

Loggly was originally designed for customers in sectors like e-commerce, gaming, and mobile advertising. Similar to the Obama reelection campaign, these companies are scaling infrastructure rapidly and storing massive volumes of data.

Loggly claims its customer base is growing rapidly, and that it has ample budget to spend on new technology. The company revealed today that its revenues jumped 5x in 2012 alone.

This growth caught the eye of Silicon Valley’s enterprise-focused investors.

[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":806878,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"D"}']

“I know the implementation problems and limitations of a large modern environment like Zynga,” says Matt Ocko, a founding partner at Data Collective, who was one of the earliest investors in Zynga.

“We were looking for the technology that could deliver better insight that technical and non-technical people could understand — and would work in the cloud,” he says. Ocko believes that Loggly is that solution and will continue to appeal to customers managing critical operations in the cloud.

Loggly raised the funding from Data Collective and Cisco, with participation from existing investors Trinity Ventures, True Ventures, and Matrix Partners. This new round brings Loggly’s total funding to $20.9 million.

Notably, Cisco has been among the companies betting on the future of the “internet of things” and connected devices. Its support of Loggly is helpful endorsement of the company. It also suggests log data is an important part of making sense of all of that accumulated data. Cloud consultant Ben Kepes has more on this, as well as some thoughts on Loggly’s latest Responsive Log Management platform, as well as some cautions on whether log analysis companies can remain independent as larger vendors build out similar solutions.

[aditude-amp id="medium2" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":806878,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"D"}']