ScienceLogic is a leading software and service vendor that delivers intelligent automation and observability solutions for AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) and IT Operations Management (ITOM). Pulse 2.0 interviewed ScienceLogic founder and CEO Dave Link to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Dave Link’s Background
What is Dave Link’s background? Link said:
“I grew up in Pennsylvania near Penn State University. This provided a rich academic environment for me during my formative years and gave me the opportunity to attend university classes during much of my senior year in high school. I majored in geology at Denison University, but right before obtaining my bachelor’s degree I went to a career fair on campus and had a recruiting interview with CompuServe. Something about computers just hooked me–likely the relation between the research I was working on that year and the data modeling and computation it required–and so after a competitive interview process with eight interviews and a math exam my first job out of college was with CompuServe.”
“I was particularly fascinated with the behind-the-scenes world of compute infrastructure and networking – particularly all the cloud and global X.25/X.75 packet switching global networking technology that was so foundational for what later would become our global internet. I continued my career at IBM and held multiple product and management roles there, including leading development of internet and ecommerce products. I took a very service-centric approach to make sure these products were tailored to the business needs of companies, including IBM’s very large enterprise customers where complexity and scale are critical priorities.”
“This, in turn, led to a broader fascination with the early days of SaaS. I left IBM and moved to a startup with less than 20 employees. Eventually, that career grew from the early days of virtualized and complex hosting solutions, evolving to a full application management stack. In due course I was promoted to senior vice president at Interliant, Inc. and was tasked with growing the company’s presence in the ASP/MSP market. Interliant grew rapidly and went public, ultimately selling to Time Warner. I worked at Interliant for five years until July 2003. In each of these roles, I confronted similar technological and organizational challenges: developing high-quality network and infrastructure solutions that demanded advanced telemetry and real-time operational insights across complex IT environments. These experiences laid a strong foundation. The following month, driven by a clear conviction and practical insight, I leveraged what I had learned to design a more innovative and effective approach, ultimately leading me to start ScienceLogic.”
History Of ScienceLogic
Can you share ScienceLogic’s history? Link shared:
“In 2003, I co-founded ScienceLogic with two partners, Richard Chart and Christopher Cordray, with the hope of transforming the IT operations management industry through smart IT. It was definitely a bootstrapped effort at first, as we lacked the financial resources of our venture funded competitors. The garage at my home and basements in my cofounders homes in the Northern Virginia area served as our first headquarters.”
“As the mid 2000s roared on, we built solutions based on technology that was both intelligent and scalable to keep up with global customer demands. As we started to rack up wins, our customer base grew and by 2008 we were achieving $6+ million in annual revenue. Investors were also taking notice as we received 260+ unsolicited inbound calls and ultimately received more than $15 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates in 2010; $15 million in 2012 from Intel Capital; and $43 million in Goldman Sachs-led Series D funding in 2015.”
“Today, we serve 70,000+ organizations across the globe directly and through partners who leverage our products to help run and operate IT infrastructure. We pour all of the momentum we have accrued back into our product innovation, which keeps us churning out new solutions and market leading product capabilities. This includes the ongoing rollout of our Skylar AI suite of advanced generative AI capabilities that we think will redefine productivity, creativity, and decision-making across our marketplace.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Link cited:
“The year 2003 was obviously huge, not just because it’s when we founded the company but also because the initial ScienceLogic platform we released that year was truly something the industry had never seen before. We developed an innovative multi-tenancy model that transformed IT infrastructure management by offering strong visibility and control through a single service provider management lens, regardless of how diverse or best of breed the IT environment might be for each of the individual customer’s infrastructure tenancy that our platform managed. We also delivered it as a super integrated full-stack solution so the set-up time was minutes to discovering very large networks and datacenter operating environments. Ease of set-up, comprehensive integration and seven functional capabilities (most often sold separately) all intelligently integrated into one solution was a huge customer value driver and industry breakthrough. Lastly, we had to build a super slick user interface that was intuitive at the time with built-in automation and workflows that made it easier for the customer to do their job. The UI popped and stole the show with early customers achieving a graphic view of millions of heterogeneous technology telemetry we collected so you could identify problems visually at a glance.”
“Reaching $6 million in annual revenue in 2008 was a significant milestone for us as well, especially because that performance got us included in Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 IT Services Companies list and America’s Inc 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies list, which we made a couple years in a row. Some of our subsequent awards and recognition milestones include prominent coverage in both Gartner Market Guide 2022 and Forrester Wave 2022; customer-focused Trust Radius awards; specialized CRN Edge Computing 100; and multi-year inclusion in the Deloitte Fast 500, Red Herring Global 100, NVTC Tech 100, and Inc. Power Partners lists as well as numerous industry leading product awards. Just this year, we achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization for our ScienceLogic Government Cloud, were recognized as Visionary in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, and designated as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AIOps Platforms, Q2 2025. We also won the 2025 AI Breakthrough Award for Predictive Analytics Platform of the Year for Skylar Analytics and took hom the Bronze Stevies American Business Award in the artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions category and were named to CRN’s Cloud 100 list for the sixth year running, all underscoring our momentum.”
“To that end, I’d also say that our strategic acquisitions over the years also count as major milestones – key points in our evolution where we truly understood how a particular technologies could complement our customer outcomes and enhance our existing product portfolio. We acquired AppFirst in 2016 to grant IT administrators deeper visibility into what apps and services run across a company’s servers, virtual machines, and cloud instances. Then in 2021, we acquired Restorepoint to enter the Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) configuration management and change control domains. And just in 2022 we acquired Zebrium to add automatic root cause analysis of complex, modern applications logs to our platform wheelhouse. These acquisitions have directly supported and influenced the direction of our product roadmap, and the award-winning Skylar AI suite wouldn’t be the same without them.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Link noted:
“The original vision was to build a comprehensive IT service view that overcame silos and had the flexibility to maintain strong ITSM even as IT technologies and human resources skills continued to change rapidly and evolve over time. As I cover in the book we published last year, “Innovation: Journey and Outcomes for the AIOps Revolution,” we realized that disparate solutions to monitor and manage specific technologies would not be enough to provide rapid team resolution due to their siloed nature. So, we instead combined monitoring across a varied set of technologies into a unified service view that could rapidly assist IT professionals in clarifying contextual insights across the infrastructure, security, and operating system technologies that supported the underlying service view, thus quickly addressing or even preventing issues and outages.”
“That novel approach is what fueled our early growth. I think the narrative of our technology since then has continued to evolve in a way that’s largely driven by advances in AI, compute, storage, and networking architectures. We’ve responded to these advances with new generations of management tools that can handle traditional data center and hybrid cloud resources while also proactively running and operating newer tech-stacks that incorporate GenA and automationI. With each new compute architecture, you have new applications that enable functions that were not previously possible in the prior compute stack. As the Industry transitioned from mainframe to client server, then to cloud, and now to generative AI, a growing gap emerged. Traditional management tools failed to evolve in step with these shifts–they couldn’t bridge the divide across increasingly diverse compute architectures or keep pace with the rapid innovations in application development needed to fully harness these advances.”
“Related to this, I would say that our technology has also progressed along the axis of extensibility to deliver high fidelity solutions across the wide spectrum of compute architectures. We’re known for the flexibility and scalability of our products that help connect all systems seamlessly so customers can innovate. We’re continually evolving our technologies to meet the real time agility and system support needs for all these heterogeneous technologies that must work well together if IT teams are going to stay ahead of the organizational demand curve. Now more than ever before we care about the health of the service which could have underlying devices, technologies and components across many heterogeneous systems and compute architectures. That requires a special focus on smart automation and correlation across billions of telemetry items.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competitors? Link affirmed:
“There are a lot of differentiators, but certainly a major one has to do with navigating unprecedented levels of complexity. We have articulated that the variety, velocity, and volume of telemetry has changed such that machines and smart, unsupervised analytics are required to separate the signal from the noise in IT operations. And we’ve backed up this view with solutions that leverage such capabilities at the scale of even the largest globally distributed enterprise IT environments.”
“We differentiate ourselves by our ability to support these capabilities in large scale settings. Not every company can manage the depth and breadth of data we’re able to collect from the IT estate; that gives us the edge in the analysis, remediation, and automation of IT workflows. And not every firm can consolidate different tools found in the IT ecosystem. Our recent research shows that 47% of surveyed organizations are unable to monitor all of their on-premises, cloud, and edge devices and that 39% of organizations are prioritizing tools consolidation in order to do so. We’re helping them do it at the deep infrastructure and operational levels through monitoring, analysis, and automation to tackle tools sprawl and streamline operations across a wide spectrum of use cases.”
“We provide this all in a unified platform – one that gets smarter over time and offers seamless automations. We leverage extensive machine learning and GenAI to proactively identify and prioritize issues – and then recommend or even auto-resolve how to address the root of the issue so it doesn’t happen again. Another way of saying this is that, for us, the ‘R’ in MTTR means resolution – not simply to restore services or just recover from an outage, but to actually resolve the issue so it doesn’t return.”
Key Priority In AIOps
Can you share an example of a key priority in AIOps, and how your company is trying to address it? Link pointed out:
“There is a critical need for more observability into IT systems and operations. This has always been important, but the complexity of AIOps at scale and the broad access needed to deliver real-time data make observability across dynamic systems even more important… and more difficult to achieve. Enterprises need to rely on the right observability tools to gather a deeper understanding of the “why” behind performance issues by analyzing data from logs, metrics, and traces to quickly assess the internal state of a system and, when issues occur, swiftly conduct root cause analysis (RCA) and identify remediation steps.”
“Strong observability puts the whole organization on more informed and proactive footing – which in turn helps minimize outages and MTTR while enhancing cybersecurity and compliance. There should be real-time visibility into performance across on-premises, cloud, hybrid, traditional AI, and even Generative AI infrastructure environments. Observability is also enhanced by leveraging AI and machine learning to monitor and predict potential issues.”
“We work to deliver this observability by integrating key IT management functions such as monitoring, automation, and analytics into a single cohesive system–the ScienceLogic AI Platform. Our use cases cover ITOps automation, business service alignment, IT tools consolidation, digital transformation, infrastructure monitoring, compliance visibility and more for large enterprises, public sector agencies, telecommunication companies, and service providers.”
“We also see the importance of a future-forward approach. What comes next after AIOps? Technology is constantly evolving and AI and automation are unlocking new capabilities each day. At ScienceLogic, we envision a coming state of Autonomic IT, where IT environments run themselves, self-heal, and self-optimize. To enable our clients on their journeys to Autonomic IT, we created the Skylar AI suite of advanced AI capabilities– Skylar Automated Root Cause Analysis, Skylar Analytics, and Skylar Advisor.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Link concluded:
“We’re particularly excited about the ongoing rollout of our Skylar AI suite of tools that harnesses the power of generative AI and unsupervised machine learning for IT operations. We’ve already released Skylar Automated RCA, which dramatically accelerates the process of diagnosing root causes from logs and Skylar Analytics for unsupervised analytics with deep data exploration and visualization. Later this year will bring another new release – Skylar Advisor, a highly personalized AI advisor tailored to the IT user’s role and preferences.”
“Other ongoing goals we’re pursuing into the future always include further enhancements to the ScienceLogic AI Platform.”
“AI is replatforming the economy and software development is shifting from application centric to data-centric-designs with data being a fundamental input for application development. That places ScienceLogic at the forefront of evolution for this next generation of GenAI Observability and other business centric applications. We have an incredibly exciting road ahead with immense potential!”
