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February 22, 2016

Ops Analytics Startup Gets Funding Boost

Venture capitalists continue to pour money into big data development as vendors accelerate their shift to real-time analytics at scale.

The latest example comes from operational analytics startup Wavefront, developers of a hosted platform that includes a query engine and an analytics language used among other things to gauge IT performance. Wavefront said last week it has raised $11.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The Palo Alto, Calif., company said it has so far raised $20.5 million.

Joining Sequoia Capital in the most recent funding round were Sutter Hill Ventures and the Webb Investment Network. Bill Coughran, a Sequoia partner and former senior vice president of engineering at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), will join Wavefront’s board.

The startup is focused on the torrent of data generated by servers, enterprise applications and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Its analytics platform is designed to visualize and query a range of operational data metrics such a computing load and performance. These metrics can then be used to prevent platform outages by reducing false alarms and software failures.

Wavefront’s analytics platform targets enterprise IT performance and always-on availability of mission-critical software-as-a-service applications. It seeks to go beyond traditional monitoring to analyze performance in real time to detect and prevent IT outages. The platform also is touted as helping enterprises improve capacity planning and IT resource utilization while tracking the interactions between devices, software and users.

Coughran noted that enterprises currently scaling their IT operations are encountering the same issues hyper-scalers such as Google came up against a decade ago. The difference, he asserted, is that enterprises no longer have to build their own solutions to reduce downtime for services like application delivery.

The startup stresses that its platform delivers a “single pane of glass view” across IT operations that can both break down data silos while boosting collaboration with DevOps teams delivering new applications. It works by collecting data points like computing performance from systems and networks used to deliver applications. At the same time, the platform collects business metrics.

That, the startup claims, allows enterprises to monitor and correlate all of the components within their stack in real-time. That instantaneous capability is being promoted as the fastest way to predict and prevent IT outages.

Among the drivers of data overload is the emerging Internet of Things. Wavefront and other analytics platform vendors are increasingly pitching their tools as a way to leverage real-time data from millions of embedded sensors, connected devices and industrial equipment.

As more enterprise deploy hybrid cloud infrastructure is deployed to leverage cloud flexibility and scaling while retaining sensitive data on-premise, analytics vendors like Wavefront are increasingly focusing on monitoring cloud-delivered software services and application performance. Among Wavefront’s customers are the online file-sharing Box Inc. (NYSE: BOX) and e-commerce vendor Clover Network Inc.

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