Sumo Logic has appointed Chris Malone as Chief Executive Officer and Conor Burns as Chief Financial Officer as the company expands its agentic artificial intelligence platform for cybersecurity and cloud operations teams.
The leadership appointments are intended to support Sumo Logic’s next phase of growth as it develops additional AI-powered capabilities across security information and event management, log analytics and observability.
Malone brings more than two decades of experience leading mission-critical software companies through periods of growth and transformation.
He joins Sumo Logic after spending 12 years at Applause, a software testing and digital quality company. Malone most recently served as CEO of Applause and previously held the roles of President and Chief Financial Officer.
During his tenure, he helped scale the company’s platform and strengthen its strategic focus across software testing and digital experience quality.
As CEO of Sumo Logic, Malone will guide the company’s product strategy, commercial expansion, and development of AI agents designed to support security and cloud operations professionals.
Burns also joins Sumo Logic from Applause, where he most recently served as Senior Vice President of Operations. He previously held several financial leadership positions at the company, including Vice President of Finance.
Before Applause, Burns served as CFO of EPFR and held roles at SSRX, Ciber, HP and Liberty Mutual.
As Sumo Logic’s CFO, Burns will oversee the company’s financial organization and support its investment priorities as it scales the platform, expands customer relationships and develops additional AI capabilities.
The appointments reunite Malone and Burns after their previous work together at Applause. Their experience managing the growth of a software platform is expected to support Sumo Logic as it moves from conventional analytics and automation toward increasingly autonomous security and operational workflows.
Sumo Logic provides an Intelligent Operations Platform that unifies security and operational data generated across cloud infrastructure, applications, networks and other modern technology environments.
This information is commonly referred to as telemetry. Telemetry can include application logs, security alerts, system performance measurements, user activity, and other machine-generated data that helps organizations understand what is happening across their digital infrastructure.
Large enterprises may generate enormous volumes of telemetry every day. Security and operations teams must analyze that information to identify cyberattacks, application failures, performance problems and other issues requiring attention.
Sumo Logic enriches, correlates and adds context to telemetry so that employees and AI agents can make decisions using higher-confidence information.
Enrichment adds relevant details to raw events, such as the identity of a user, the importance of a system or the known risk associated with an IP address. Correlation connects events that may appear unrelated when examined individually but form a meaningful pattern when analyzed together.
Contextualization helps explain why a particular event matters to the organization. This is especially important for AI agents, which require reliable information about systems, users, permissions and prior activity before they can recommend or perform an action.
Sumo Logic believes telemetry will become a foundational resource for enterprise AI because autonomous systems need accurate and current information about the environments in which they operate.
The company’s Dojo AI platform is designed to help security and cloud operations teams detect threats, investigate incidents and improve system performance.
Agentic AI differs from conventional generative AI in that it can perform multistep tasks rather than merely answering a question or generating content. An agent could collect information from several systems, investigate the cause of an alert, recommend a response and potentially execute approved actions.
In cybersecurity, these capabilities could help organizations investigate suspicious activity, identify affected systems and respond to threats more quickly.
Within cloud operations, AI agents could analyze logs and performance metrics to identify the cause of an outage or why an application is responding slowly.
However, autonomous systems can only act reliably when they receive accurate and well-organized data. Sumo Logic is positioning itself as the intelligence layer between enterprise telemetry and AI-powered decision-making.
The company said its platform can provide the context required for AI systems to move from experimentation into operational use.
Under Malone’s leadership, Sumo Logic plans to continue developing both the context and agentic layers of its platform. The objective is to help organizations move toward autonomous security and operations while maintaining trustworthy information and appropriate controls.
Sumo Logic combines agentic, AI-powered SIEM and log analytics in a single platform.
A SIEM system collects and analyzes security information from across an organization. It can help teams detect threats, investigate suspicious activity and demonstrate compliance with security requirements.
Log analytics examines records produced by applications, infrastructure and other systems. These records can reveal software errors, unauthorized access attempts and patterns associated with performance problems.
Combining these capabilities can give security and operational teams a more complete view of an incident. A cyberattack may initially appear as a security alert but also create unusual application behavior, system errors or changes in cloud resource usage.
Sumo Logic’s platform is intended to connect these signals and help teams determine what happened, why it matters and what action should be taken.
Malone said the company’s combination of an AI-first platform, partner relationships, customer base and experienced employees creates a strong foundation for continued development.
The leadership changes also received support from representatives of Francisco Partners.
Mark Ties, Senior Operating Partner at Francisco Partners and Chairman of Sumo Logic’s board, said Malone brings the strategic vision needed to advance the company’s mission of making digital systems more secure, reliable and responsive.
Francisco Partners Deal Partner Evan Daar said Malone and Burns will work with Sumo Logic’s existing leadership to deliver AI innovations that provide measurable value to customers and partners.
Sumo Logic plans to share additional details about the Dojo AI platform during Black Hat USA, taking place August 3 through August 6 in Las Vegas.
KEY QUOTES:
“Sumo Logic has a clear market advantage: a trusted AI-first platform, a strong partner ecosystem, loyal customers, and employees who are passionate about the mission.”
“Telemetry will fuel the agentic era, and Sumo Logic sits at the center of that, translating massive amounts of data into the context AI agents need to act with confidence.”
“Our Dojo AI agents use that foundation to help customers stop modern threats and improve system performance by putting AI to work across security and observability.”
Chris Malone, Chief Executive Officer of Sumo Logic
“Chris brings the strategic vision to help Sumo Logic deliver on its mission: making the digital world secure, fast, and reliable in the agentic era.”
Mark Ties, Senior Operating Partner at Francisco Partners and Chairman of Sumo Logic
“We’re thrilled to welcome Chris and Conor to the team, where, along with current leadership, they will help Sumo Logic deliver AI innovations that bring true value to our customers and partners.”
Evan Daar, Deal Partner at Francisco Partners
