Shhh…. Engineers working (hard!)

How do you make the world’s most popular cloud-based log management service even better?

Simple.  You start from scratch with an all-new version using feedback from your 3,500+ active customers to give them exactly what they really want to solve their operational problems—faster and easier than ever before. How do you keep Marketing quiet when this is being built? Well… that’s harder.

Amazon.com wasn’t built in a day, neither was the second generation of Loggly.  While we didn’t change our focus on the customer, the second generation of Loggly really is all-new and this foundational release took time to get it right. Our engineering-led company was cranking away and working hard, but in Marketing we kept quiet, or tried really hard to.

In the world of legacy enterprise software sales, this time of “extended pregnancy” would be filled with roadmaps selling you on the vision, passed by sending suit-wearing sales teams to key accounts and closing deals based on promises.  The General Availability (GA) launch would be of an not-quite fully baked product that would still take months, people and services to get the first customers live.  So yesterday…

Our audience, cloud-centric companies, those primarily doing business in the cloud are more demanding.  Their problems need solutions, now, not promises. Rollout and onramp time can be hours if not minutes.  Yesterday’s proof of concept, is now See-Try-Buy that takes life in get-my-hands-on-it-now trial.  Our customers need a service they can rely on from day one, to answer the frontline challenges of the business and then scale efficiently with them.

It’s impossible to really keep a secret nowadays (iPhone 5 leaks anyone?), and we weren’t totally quiet.  Leading up to the launch we hosted VIP previews at events and gathered user experience feedback to continually optimize the product. We worked with dozens of customers in multiple versions of our BETA, held live preview webinars, and signed up hundreds of people for first access to the new product… but it was really hard to keep all the details quiet.  With our mascot Hoover rocking the VIP 8-bit tuxedo shirt it was only able to be controlled, not contained.

Last Tuesday, the day of launch we hit our 200^th Generation2 signup at 8pm, and a few hours later we had our 100^th new user sending logs to us.

Now just over a week in, registrations and activation trends are strong and we’re having great conversations with larger companies who were waiting for our product to mature.

All good things take time, well, it’s a great time to be at Loggly and an even better time to be looking for a best log management solution… and now we can talk openly about it.  Loggly, open for business, again!

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