You can observe a lot by watching

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Welcome to Runtime! Today: why a shakeup in the fast-growing observability market could be underway as businesses start to think differently about data, the early returns for Microsoft Copilot are in, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.

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Needles in haystacks

A drumbeat has been building behind observability technology for several years now, but several factors are converging in early 2024 to suggest it is about to become a huge market. Spending on cloud infrastructure and platform services surged 320% from the first quarter of 2018 to the same period last year, according to Synergy Research, and the hangover from that party is starting to set in.

If that five-year-period had a mantra, it was "build now, worry later." Those days are over, and the companies that poured all that money into those cloud services are facing pressure from their business leaders to cut costs and improve productivity while maintaining uptime and performance.

Observability tools promise better visibility into application performance and faster resolution of the inevitable problems that will happen when software is deployed at scale, and they are gaining converts because the average enterprise can no longer get away with average software.
"Every company in the world is now a software company," said Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs, echoing Marc Andreessen's famous line. "Your competitiveness as a business is directly related to your ability for your software engineering team to ship changes."
But cost is one of the biggest issues with the current generation of observability tools that feed on application data, which is growing very quickly.

Observability grew out of the realization that tools used to monitor the health of on-premises data centers were not designed for cloud environments with ephemeral infrastructure, container runtimes, and all the other bells and whistles that make up the "cloud native" movement.

"We borrowed the term from control theory," said Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which was an early pioneer of this concept. "Observability is a mathematical dual of controllability and it means how well you can understand the inner system state just by observing its outputs."
There are three data types that traditionally define observability tools: metrics, logs, and traces. Metrics provide a picture of the current state of play, logs record events as they happen for later examination, and traces help troubleshoot how something innocuous happening in one part of an application can cause big problems for another part of that application.
For a long time, most companies used different vendors to gather data across the different legs of the observability stool, but vendors have started to standardize on OpenTelemetry, which provides a common framework for ingesting observability data and is widely supported.

When money was cheap, companies were happy to throw all the data they had at observability tools hoping to discover as much as possible about how their apps actually run.

The next generation of observability thinkers is working on ways to separate application data from the measuring sticks, which would change the way observability companies monetize their data.
"Some of our customers view these larger, more traditional observability tools as data stores — very expensive data stores," said Corey Harrison, co-founder and CEO of Flip.AI.
Flip's goal is to take application performance data stored across any number of different internal tools and silos and apply some generative AI magic on top while allowing customers to retain that data in-house, under their control.
"The other thing that I think is a big driving force in the market that we're seeing with earlier-stage companies is the growth of adoption of ClickHouse, another open-source, very low cost but high performance analytical database system," said Danel Dayan of Battery Ventures. "It's just becoming incredibly easy and frictionless and a lot easier to manage."

Read the full report on Runtime here.

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Mild turbulence

Copilot for Microsoft 365 could be the biggest test of Microsoft's ability to generate revenue from its investments into OpenAI, and the early returns are mixed, according to The Wall Street Journal.

At $30 per user per month, Copilot was always going to be a tough sell for businesses that are paying almost that much already for a whole suite of productivity software including Word, Excel, and Teams. The good news for Microsoft is early testers like the meeting summaries it generates through Teams and companies such as Dow plan to purchase thousands of seats this year.

The bad news is Copilot actually hindered the completion of many everyday business tasks, such as creating spreadsheets or Powerpoints, according to the Journal's report. Companies also balked at having to sign up for 300 or more seats in order to test the software, a requirement Microsoft loosened last month after pushback.

Enterprise funding

Sierra launched out of stealth mode with $110 million in funding to back ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Googler Clay Bavor's new enterprise AI agent company.

Bugcrowd landed $102 million in Series D funding to grow its bug-bounty program around the world.

Meter raised $35 million in new funding to build out its portfolio of data-center networking technology.

Marqo scored $12.5 million in Series A funding to help companies manage unstructured data strewn throughout their systems.

LimaCharlie raised $10.2 million in Series A funding for its cloud security data platform.

The Runtime roundup

Akamai announced plans to add 10 edge computing locations by the end of March and 75 by the end of the year, as it hopes to challenge the Big Three cloud providers with a more distributed approach.

Cisco plans to lay off thousands of workers as it looks to restructure its business to focus on higher-growth opportunities, according to Reuters.

SAP said Punit Renjen, who was expected to take over as chairman from co-founder Hasso Plattner in May, will step down following "a difference in perspective" and that Pekka Ala-Pietilä is the new proposed replacement for Plattner.

More than half of mainframe owners plan to maintain or increase their use of the technology over the next few years despite the proliferation of modern alternatives, according to a recent survey.

Slack turned ten years old on Monday, and The Verge had a nice retrospective of the role it played in changing enterprise software and workplace collaboration.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams blamed IBM for the meltdown of its remote learning system after telling students to work from home instead of taking a snow day.