A new generation of IT operations tools have emerged that are collectively referred to as “AIOps”. As the name implies, they are IT operations tools that leverage artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML). To explore things more, VMblog recently spoke with industry expert Kannan Kothandaraman, the co-founder and CEO at a company called Selector.
VMblog: Let’s kick things off by having you explain a bit about Selector.
Kannan Kothandaraman: Selector empowers network, cloud and application operators with data-centric multi-domain analytics, driving transition to AI/ML-based operations intelligence. As the industry’s first network-aware operations intelligence platform, Selector Analytics converges Networks, Applications and IT systems observability across heterogeneous data sources, and provides actionable insights.
VMblog: What made you found this company?
Kothandaraman: Selector was founded by former Juniper executives, myself and Nitin Kumar in 2019.
We saw that cloud providers can build large and complex cloud infrastructures while enterprises, service providers, financial institutions, and retailers are struggling to manage their own infrastructure. The key insight was that cloud builders have built in-house observability tools not available to enterprises and service providers.
We set out with a vision to build the first network and IT operations intelligence platform that combines network and application observability with actionable insights from any data source to eliminate downtime.
Prior to our seed round we already had a terrific mix of networking, application and data science expertise, having held leadership positions at Juniper, Cisco, AWS and Nutanix.
VMblog: Tell us about your funding news, such as investors, amount and what you plan to do with the funding?
Kothandaraman: Series A round for $28 million, bringing total funding to $33M. Series A round of funding was led by Two Bear Capital, SineWave Ventures, and Atlantic Bridge, and joined by Comcast Ventures and Azure Capital Partners. The new funds will be used to execute Selector’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy, invest in R&D, and expand its market reach in North America. The platform is already successfully deployed by multiple Fortune 500 customers.
VMblog: What are the problems you’re solving for your customers?
Kothandaraman: Current monitoring solutions are siloed, i.e. focused on metrics or logs or events.
- Operators have to correlate data across multiple heterogeneous data manually
- Operators lack automated insights, and have to look at number of dashboards to make a manual correlation
- Siloed collaboration – Both siloed data sets and siloed organization
VMblog: How do you see Selector as different? Both from a company and product standpoint.
Kothandaraman: Competitive solutions are siloed, i.e. focused on metrics or logs or events, and have to correlate data across:
- Heterogeneous data from variety data sources
- Lack of automated insights. Operators have to look at number of dashboards to make a manual correlation
- Siloed collaboration – Both siloed data sets and siloed organization
Kothandaraman: The AIOps market is ripe with opportunity, and expected to grow by over 20% between 2021 and 2027. With our new funding, we are eager to execute on our execution strategy to provide the best AIOps observability solution.
