Video: Axiom Exec on Bringing Simplicity and Clarity to Observability and Log Management

almost every organization that I know has an observability product many of them love that product they just hate the price hey Channel insiders welcome to another episode of Channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it channel to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso my guest today is kendle Miller Chief extrovert at Axiom an independent software vendor that built its own data store from the ground up to create a better observability and storage product that Kendall says is far more economical than the competition Kendall welcome how are you I'm doing well thanks for having me Katie thanks so much for being here your title immediately jumps out at me I've never heard of a chief extrovert before so right off the bat I have to ask what is that the the role that I play at axom is that that bubbly extrovert externally um I'm involved in sales I'm involved in marketing um I handle our Partnerships but um when they need a person who can speak on behalf of the company be bubbly uh that kind of thing that's where they put me I really want to talk about why we're here today which is to talk about Axiom so when it comes to your company what do you do who are you and at the core who do you serve we've been in business uh about four years initially building an observability product in the metric space and when we got started realized pretty quickly the data stores underlying almost every observability product out there uh I don't want to say we're trash I would say are dated right like there's just there's problems because they were built along time ago before some things about the internet had fundamentally changed with the cloud um also we you know we we've made some advancements and research around uh compression and querying Etc so we went uh back in a hole and built our own data store um from scratch which gives us an incredible advantage in a couple of different ways but primarily um what makes Axiom different is there's no hot storage Cold Storage uh you know companies charge people to have hydrated data dehydrated data whatever their term is custom metrics uh you know that it's all just data and it can all be hot it can all be live it never needs you never need to pay extra for a certain kind of storage um at axiim we can ingest that data and query it for 10 years the same we can for 10 days and so it it gives us a really unusual advantage in the observability space people use us as long-term storage and then send data on to uh you know another observability platform you can use this in the security space for long-term storage because you have to store certain amounts of data for forever especially if you're in financial services or all kinds of different things um at the end of the day we're just another observability product our key differentiator is uh the economics underlying everything that we do are wildly different and we pass that on to the consumer you can ingest more data you don't have to sample you can keep it longer uh because we built it from the ground up to enable that do you have a metric that you could share with us where a customer was able to save X after switching to axium it's really hard to say because it can vary so much but uh I think on average if a customer is using Amazon cloudwatch we are often 20x more affordable so I don't mean 20% I mean 20x uh so 20 times more affordable it is a wild wild improvement over uh these other options and and there are others that the number is much much bigger um if you're spending too much on observability you're going to be shocked uh at the the price savings that you get with us often times I have to be careful about it when I talk to a customer cuz they don't believe me um which frankly when I met axm and they told me what they did I said I don't believe you and then they sat me down and told me how they did it I said holy hell I want in let's talk about your customers what verticals do they usually tap into is it everyone because it it does sound like a pretty ubiquitous product when we're talking about industry who's your ideal customer anyone who's running any kind of SAS product or anything online needs a logging observability partner um they are sending logs some where we cover all kinds of vertical from iot to finance to security like you name it everyone's using us our um ideal customer profile gosh is is is Broad we target the Enterprise that has long-term storage needs so again that can be across different verticals um we see a lot of interest in fintech in security companies any anything that's highly regulated tends to really need something like what we're doing so that's uh government Healthcare whatever I mean there's there's lots of different things now there's there's certain lines where having an external Source like us really makes sense and certain lines where you need to keep all of that internally and build everything internally and you know we really hope you avoid that and go with us but uh yeah the bigger Enterprise companies with lots and lots of data that need insight into everything they're doing now that said one of the big use cases that we have is uh e-commerce because people want to be able to track every single user interaction where did they go when did they stop did they put it in the cart and then stop did they get all the way through the cart and then run out of why did they buy what was the entire user journey and with lots and lots of customers uh that ends up being a lot of data and um a lot of other providers just can't provide that affordably enough to be useful so you talk about being able to build it inhouse if somebody wanted to what are the things that people have run into of trying to do that themselves and what is the difference what are you hearing from your customers when they use Axiom to to answer these issues instead so there's a lot of Open Source tools out there or other software that's been around for a long time Prometheus elastic search there's reasons to build things inhouse they're just always as going to be um however we think we're the best place to send your data because managing that in-house ends up taking just a lot of time a lot of money even if you just have like two Engineers managing elastic search in internally at your company you're probably looking at $150,000 to $200,000 per engineer in today's market so you're you're pretty close to you know a quarter of a million to a half a million dollars just to maintain your own internal database and then you're probably doing it poorly because it's not the only thing you do it's a side project for you and you're using tooling that is dated that is difficult to use that costs a lot of money to keep that storage so you know going with axium you're going to save just a tremendous amount of money and a tremendous amount of Heartache people often buy axium for the cost savings compared to other options and we get a lot of people who migrate from uh older data stores older observability Services because of our economics so even though people choose it for the economic reasons they tend to still be surprised by just how big the economic difference is um and then I think the second thing that we hear a lot is um other software requires a tremendous amount of training for their Engineers to get them up and going with it and axim is intuitive enough that they can deploy it across an organization engineers get it very quickly and can become power users very quickly but sales and marketing teams can make sense out of it because of how uh simple and easy it is to use do you have a use case that you might be able to walk me through in which a real customer you were able to successfully take them all the way through to the point of full deployment and and fully up and running on Axiom there's a customer that we worked with recently called happen who is a heavy user of of uh AWS lambdas so AWS lambdas are are have some complicated issues around them specifically because you know they uh if you're unfamiliar with a Lambda it's a serverless like you give a function to Amazon Amazon runs the function and then gives you the result of the function back and you don't care how that's spun up or what that looks like it's also done very very very quickly and so you can scale incredible workloads with you know uh hundreds or thousands or tens of thousand thousands of lambdas Spun up very very quickly but then you need those lambdas to report back to log something we had happen move from cloudwatch which is Amazon's built-in observability tool to axom and uh they found axium was much easier to use um there was no none of this again rehydrating logs or uh dehydrating logs hot storage versus cold storage um the ability to just have everything be queriable immediately for as long as they need and uh it's this they ended up going and writing a open-source uh piece of software that enables the ingestion of serverless logs to axom um because this use and it it wasn't a huge lift they just wanted a few key features so they open sourced that it is going to be relevant to other customers which you know I love when a partner goes and does that kind of thing uh where they're a customer SL partner and they're actually building something for other customers to be able to use but uh that Lambda use case is very very common increasingly companies are using something like Lambda they send it to cloudwatch uh the cost savings they get with Axiom is substantial the user interface they get with Axiom is substantial you know the improvements on that and then um you know the hot storage Cold Storage hydrated rehydrated whatever just goes away give us everything use it search it immediately and that's AWS lambdas as opposed to the Google Cloud Pike and the AWS FAS of course so just keep that in mind bu uh what is it like to partner with a vendor or a hyperscaler in this case that is as big as AWS what is it like to partner with AWS I mean Amazon is a beast of a company they have lots and lots of Partners and it's really hard to stand out now they they have a couple of different programs for organizations like us um we're in something called ISB accelerate where someone in Amazon has identified what we've built and sees it as key and substantial and probably going to grow and probably going to make waves um and they put us through a special kind of program to accelerate us to handhold us to make sure they're giving us resources because they believe we can really make a difference in the Amazon Marketplace and we're going to be doing something that's relevant to their customers so we get a little bit of extra handholding I've partnered with Amazon in the past before where we don't have that and it's a lot harder to make yourself stand out but once Amazon has identified you as somebody different we work very closely with the partner manager there uh I I meet with them every week where they talk me through hey you know here's some of the things you need to work on next here's how to get Amazon's attention um you know we're doing a training uh the end of next week I think where we're going to bring in the entire sales team talk about what are the things that am Amazon cares about that Amazon sellers care about you know I I don't just want my partner manager to know who we are I need the the sellers at Amazon to know who axiim is I want to know um how are they incentivized so that we're selling in the right way that that meets their incentive you know that's something that we always ask in in Partnership conversations is how are you incentivized so that we make sure we meet those incentives and how does partnering with a hypers skill or like AWS factor into you being a differentiator in this space is there anything that they do in particular uh aside from what we just went over that really helps you to you know be bigger better faster stronger so actually uh some of the interesting history around axium is we built this data store knowing there was some things coming from Amazon specifically on the Lambda side that were going to allow us to query at the kind of scale and speed that we needed to query at we built this before it was actually available from Amazon and then we had to wait a little bit longer than we anticipated for Amazon to open that up and make that possible but the technology that underlies axm is built Cloud native in such a way that that literally five years ago what we're doing is impossible that's part of why we're so far out in front of our other um customers so yeah the things that Amazon has built have enabled us to exist as a company have able us to have the the kind of size and scale and leverage that we have it's not necessarily unique to Amazon anymore as the other clouds catch up but I mean the reality is when you talk about hyperscalers you know I think it was a year and a a year and a quarter ago Q4 Amazon grew by an entire Google cloud in one quarter right Amazon's so far out in front of the other hyperscalers uh that it's it's it's really not even close like yes people use Microsoft cloud yes people use Google Cloud there there are lots and lots of them but Amazon is so so so much bigger being able to transact on the marketplace is a big deal it's not something that everyone does but there's a mostly almost every large customer with Amazon is uh on some kind of commit spend and so they commit to Amazon we're going to spend this much with you this year and when a company like Axiom is available in the marketplace with AWS buying axm through the marketplace counts towards that commit spend and so um it it eases the transaction process they don't have to go through a different procurement process with us because it's on Amazon's paper they can literally click a button on Amazon's website and go with us immediately and then uh it also counts against their commit spend so if they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with another service and they move over here and it's going to count towards something they've already committed with Amazon that's that's a benefit for them a lot of times so there's lots of advantages for our customers that we partner with Amazon there's also we literally wouldn't exist if Amazon hadn't made some of the leaps and bows that they've made in the last few years where if at all do you overlap with the it channel is there ever a point where you're working with msps or vars that are already a part of your client's sort of partner system uh and and how does that impact Axiom anytime a large organization is going through the procurement process I mean this is why we're in the Amazon marketplace right is is it Smooths the procurement process now again when very large Enterprise customer says hey we want to buy axio we only buy it through this partner we go on board with that partner figure out how to make that partner happy and then service that uh that end customer like that's that's fine I I don't care I mean I can go build the relationship with that gigantic Enterprise customer and make them trust me and make you know when they're at the point where they're saying I want to buy Axiom and here's the channel uh I'm going to do everything I can to remove as much friction as possible from that right I don't care if I have to give a percentage to a VAR I want to get that customer on board and I want to make that smooth and easy for them and um I know that there are vars msps Etc that have those relationships that make it smoother so we we do spend time training uh msps and vs um this is what our product looks like this is where it fits but where we see the vars and The msps Leverage us is when they've been trying to get into an account for a long time or they know this account you know uh is spending a ton of money on something they didn't sell we're a very very compelling easy sell uh into those accounts you know hey what if I could save you as zero off your bill maybe two zeros off your bill I mean it's it's kind of crazy sometimes the the the difference in the economics and so a VAR or an MSP having that kind of pitch really does go a long ways and them getting into accounts they wouldn't otherwise be in where most companies are offering a step change and Improvement it's really unusual and part of the reason I work at Axiom is it's really unusual to have a product that is a generation ahead I mean we are so wildly far out in front of our competition in certain ways it's just kind of mind-blowing it's it's exciting so my last question for you today Kendall is if I'm an IT buyer and I am running into all the issues that we've been talking about throughout this entire interview where can I reach out where can I learn more and how can I get started with Axiom yeah so I mean come to ax. reach out to sales ax. ping me on LinkedIn it doesn't really matter anyone will respond almost every organization that I know has an observability product many of them love that product they just hate the price and even if that's the only pain point that you have reach out to axium if you need long-term storage reach out to axum if you're sick of paying for custom metrics uh Hot and Cold Storage all of that reach out to axum we we make these problems go away thanks again to my guest Kendall for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening to this episode of Channel Insider partner POV you can check out all our episodes on Channel insider.com and never miss an episode when you subscribe to our YouTube channel @ Channel Insider newws and Trends And subscribe on our podcast platforms as well check all of those out on channel Insider partner P.S simplecast dcom and if you've got a question for me or you want to be on the show you can email me at partner poov Chanel insider.com once again I'm Katie boso thanks for watching and I'll see you next time n

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