October 30, 2013

Glassbeam instantiates a lot of trends

Glassbeam checked in recently, and they turn out to exemplify quite a few of the themes I’ve been writing about. For starters:

Glassbeam basics include:

All Glassbeam customers except one are SaaS/cloud (Software as a Service), and even that one was only offered a subscription (as oppose to perpetual license) price.

So what does Glassbeam’s technology do? Glassbeam says it is focused on “machine data analytics,” specifically for the “Internet of Things”, which it distinguishes from IT logs.* Specifically, Glassbeam sells to manufacturers of complex devices — IT (most of its sales so far ), medical, automotive (aspirational to date), etc. — and helps them analyze “phone home” data, for both support/customer service and marketing kinds of use cases. As of a recent release, the Glassbeam stack can:

*To a first approximation, this could be translated as “We help with machine-generated data, but we’d prefer not to compete with Splunk.” That said, 1% of Splunk’s customer base is more than 100% of Glassbeam’s, so I conjecture that Splunk has more customers in Glassbeam’s target segments than Glassbeam itself yet has.

The event-series part of the story is that Glassbeam ingests various kinds of text data, especially:

and “stitches them together”. Until this month’s “SCALAR” release, Glassbeam ingested data in batch form from the customers who collected it, but Glassbeam now wants to collect the “phone home” data itself.

Glassbeam technical notes include:

That’s about as much as I have. In particular, our discussion of data management wasn’t thorough, and I don’t know what those in-memory data structures are like nor exactly how schema-on-need is implemented.

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