The Value of Easy: You Be the Judge

Last updated at Mon, 06 Nov 2017 18:29:07 GMT

Being the giant in the market means you can step on people if you don’t like what they say, how they say it, or if they indicate maybe, just maybe, they have a competitive solution or an opinion that that you don’t like.

We saw this happen last week when Chris Riley, a friend of Logentries and an active Devops practitioner, shared his opinion on how to approach log analysis implementation and why some more current, SaaS tools offer more effective and easier to use approaches.

He got stepped on.

A few weeks ago, we were also challenged when we highlighted some Logentries capabilities compared to what we believe are bigger, on-premise, more complex and expensive options in the market today.

At the end of the day this is par for the course. Nobody wants another company saying things about them that aren’t positive or flattering, even if they’re accurate.  Rather that squabbling among vendors or with bloggers and industry commentators, I’d rather highlight why we think a customer-centric approach is #1.

I firmly believe customers should come first, and we want to be customer centric in what we do. As such, I found myself wondering whether the value of “easy to try”, “easy to use” and “easy to buy” is really recognized and valued.

Easy to Try

For us, anyone can try our service, whether you’re in a big company or a small one. Whether you’re a developer, in IT ops, or a marketing manager looking into the value of logs for monitoring website activity, application performance, and end user behavior. You don’t need to talk with sales; and you don’t have to get the sales pitch if you don’t want it. You can get yourself set-up in minutes, ready to go, and give it a try. And, IF you want help, we’re here. Our customer success team is often the first contact that many of our customers have with us. If you have a large environment, and want to extend your trial and test it out on a large number of servers, sending Terabytes a day, no problem. We’ll gladly extend your trial, and let you validate our service does what we say it’ll do.

Easy to Use

Like I said, anyone can use Logentries. The best part about a free trial, and providing a free service is you don’t have to believe me. You don’t have to judge Logentries by what we say in our marketing materials. We recognize buyers, especially technical buyers in DevOps, don’t want to be marketed to. We believe our service, and our user experience should speak for itself. Do we have all the features of our competitors? Nope. In Splunk’s Q3 2014 earnings call, Godffrey Sullivan claimed their Enterprise version 6 release was their, “…biggest release ever with more than 2,000 new features.” Wow Godffrey. As a co-founder and chief scientist of Logentries, 2,000 new features is pretty darn impressive. As a believer that Usage Trumps Features, and elegant design is critically important, I wonder who designed the user experience for those 2,000 new features.

Easy to Buy

This one is even more simple for us. We list our pricing on our website. Many of our customers are individuals or members of small teams and have the option to go ahead and buy right away. But, we also have very large customers that require specific custom subscriptions to meet their unique needs. For me, the common bond is they all want a real-time, easy to use, affordable service that just works. I’m glad they’ve chosen us. But I recognize we need to earn their business every day, or they’ll seek alternatives, and our company won’t be able to prosper. If our customers aren’t happy, they’ll leave. Churn will kill us, just like it can kill (or severely hurt) any SaaS company.

The old days of relying on the CFO, CTO, or another executive to make the sole decision and mandate tools to their team is over. A new era of IT infrastructure and monitoring tools is emerging where users come first; they are the people on the frontlines building, debugging, managing and operating the systems and applications that run much of what we use every day. They should be the decision makers, and we are trying to enable that.

Don’t judge us by our words, judge us by our actions. Judge us by what we deliver and how we deliver it.