Cribl is a company that enables open observability and defies data gravity, giving customers radical levels of choice and control. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Cribl Senior Director of Market Strategy & Competitive Intelligence Nick Heudecker to learn more about the company.
Nick Heudecker’s Background
Heudecker has been at Cribl for three years, where he runs market strategy, competitive intelligence, analyst relations, and technical alliances. And Heudecker said:
“Prior to Cribl, I was a VP of Research at Gartner, where I covered data management broadly. Before that, I worked for various startups in areas as diverse as advertising, aerospace, and education, among others.”
“My primary responsibilities are broadly scoped, but I’d say my role, and the role of my team, is to position Cribl as the leading data solution for IT and security teams. This includes creating thought leadership, managing financial and industry analyst relations, content creation and marketing, as well as interacting with customers and prospects. In many ways, my team is the face and voice of the company.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Heudecker explained:
- “Our core product is Cribl Stream, an observability and data streaming platform for real-time processing of logs, metrics, traces, and O11y data that enables the ITops/SRE/SecOps/O11y teams to collect the data they want, shape the data in the formats they need, route the data wherever they want it to go, and replay data on-demand; thereby enabling customers to observe more and spend less, to have choice and flexibility, and to provide control over their data.”
- “Cribl Edge provides the flexibility and control administrators love from Stream, now running at the edge. Combined with automatic log discovery and metrics production Cribl Edge is designed to support today’s modern distributed microservice architectures. Cribl Edge is centrally managed, configured, and version controlled for easy expansion and low cost of ownership. Cribl Edge allows IT, SRE/DevOps, and SecOps teams to avoid vendor lock-in.”
- “Cribl Search is reshaping the data search paradigm, empowering users to uncover and analyze data directly from its source. Effortlessly sift through data in the major object stores like AWS S3, Amazon Security Lake, Azure Blob, and Google Cloud Storage, and enrich your insights by querying dozens of live API endpoints from various SaaS providers.”
Macroeconomic Effects
Has Heudecker seen any specific bottlenecks in your sector of work recently? Heudecker acknowledged:
“Oddly, no, we haven’t, even with our current climate of macroeconomic uncertainty. Cribl’s products have a strong value proposition. Even as companies are looking to cut costs in IT and security, Cribl is seen as a force multiplier for overworked, understaffed teams. Because we give customers the power of choice and control over their data, we’re crucial to letting them deliver on cost optimization, cloud migration, and platform consolidation projects.”
Evolution Of Cribl’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Heudecker noted:
“Good question! We work with the largest companies out there, and their environments are complex. Many are multinational and have to comply with a variety of data privacy regulations, data retention rules, and governance requirements. Additionally, they may have internal rules about which teams or groups can see given data sources or write to specific destinations. Mix in hybrid deployment scenarios and massive data volumes, and you can start to see the complexity of a real-world deployment.”
“Those requirements have helped us mature our software for fine-grained access control and authentication, and optimize software internals to support huge volumes of data processed across globally distributed deployments. Watching the product and engineering teams address these challenges has been remarkable.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Heudecker cited:
“There are so many. Clearly, getting our Series C funding was exciting, followed quickly by Series D. Winning multiple awards for our culture is also great to see, and really supports our differentiation as building a generational company. Most recently we announced our $100 million ARR milestone in record time, growing from $1 million to $100 million in ARR in less than four years.”
“Personally, the most significant milestone has been creating the observability pipeline market category from scratch. Prior to Cribl, no one had heard of observability pipelines. We had to educate the industry analysts, the prospects, and the partners. Now, it’s a flourishing market category with many companies seeking to stake a claim. We created that, and that’s pretty cool.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Heudecker about customer success stories, he concluded:
“iHerb.com is the premier online shop for health and wellness products, offering 30k+ items to 9.5 million customers in 185+ countries. As they’ve grown, iHerb could no longer dedicate the required time and resources to sustain their open-source data platform. Switching to Cribl has significantly cut costs associated with infrastructure, latency, engineering time, and downtime. As an online retailer, iHerb was processing 2TB to 3TB of weblogs daily, so configuring sources and keeping systems up to date was eating up valuable engineering time.”
“The decision to switch from open source to Cribl Stream came at just the right time, as the amount of data iHerb processed daily, doubled. Their data now flows seamlessly from sources like Kafka and Fluentd to destinations like S3, Loki, Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), and Splunk.”
