ETR Insights recently caught up with the Vice President of Information Technology at a large tech enterprise. Our guest shared thoughts on eliminating redundancy, streamlining data warehousing and analytics, and how companies should invest to best administer a hybrid remote environment. Additionally, we discuss the unsustainable nature of ingestion-based pricing and where Splunk, Datadog, and New Relic are likely headed. In troubled economic times, this Vice President advises judicious spending but insists on continued innovation, lest you be left behind when we emerge from the recession.
Elastic, a well-known open source technology in the search space, is coming under pressure as some competitors are easier to configure and use. Our guest would only ever consider the enterprise-wrapped version of Elastic. “If you need a service and it goes down, you need someone to call to help you get it up and running. You can't always count on something open source to do that.” His organization has not yet been exposed to Elastic on the security side but does find the main players in the observability and monitoring space, such as Datadog, Splunk, or New Relic, to be expensive. “Particularly in a space that generates a lot of data, those bills can rack up really quickly, and if you don't have a good contract in place, you could have some unpleasant surprises.”
Similarly, he notes that Splunk’s ingestion-based model is not sustainable, with exponentially increasing amounts of data being consumed. “You're always being asked to put more and more in there so you can relate and search on it, but every one of those new feeds comes with a cost, and then it jumps up quite significantly.” Our guest anticipates Splunk, Datadog, and New Relic will ultimately get to feature parity and begin a “race to the bottom.”
ETR Data: In the data visualization model above, we see that despite significant year-over-year declines in overall Net Score, Datadog still leads the Observability peer group within ETR's Information Security sector. On a survey-over-survey basis, Splunk captured the fastest deceleration, whereas New Relic increased its Net Score positioning.
Additional Vendor Commentary – CDN & Security with Cloudflare and Fastly
CDN providers Cloudflare and Fastly offer a central overlay to mitigate some risks and allow users to respond very quickly and protect themselves until the underlying products can be fixed. “If you didn't have that, you would be somewhat exposed until the actual vendors were to issue a fix, and then you might be struggling to push that out depending on how many instances of that are out there. It could take days, or it could take weeks.” Our guest finds the two comparable but notes Cloudflare is more prominent in the market. His organization's decision to favor Cloudflare over Fastly was made primarily from a vendor consolidation perspective, a sentiment that has been repeatedly cited in numerous iterations of ETR's Macro Survey.
ETR Data: In the data visualization model above, ETR plots the major CDN players Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly within our Information Security sector. Cloudflare now dominates the peer group in both market Pervasion and ETR's overall spending intention Net Score.
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