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IN4IT has announced the launch of a new Enterprise Observability platform planned for early 2025, promising a cost-effective alternative to existing SaaS observability solutions.
IN4IT, known for its cloud infrastructure services, states that the platform will leverage cloud object storage for data storage rather than the conventional per-GByte ingestion pricing model seen with other SaaS products. This approach is designed to allow businesses to efficiently monitor the performance and operations of their applications and processes.
Edward Viaene, IN4IT's founder, remarked, "Companies need a less expensive observability platform than what's currently available."
He further added, "With our new platform, we are focused on delivering features that cloud customers need at a much lower price point, reducing their costs by bringing their observability platform back to their own cloud provider."
The company believes the existing market solutions are overpriced, as Viaene pointed out, "Besides compute, there are cloud products that are more expensive than they should, VPN is one of them, and another is observability."
Viaene highlighted a case involving Coinbase, stating, "If you have outsourced your observability to companies like Datadog, it can be incredibly expensive. For example, it was widely reported that crypto company Coinbase spent $65M on Datadog in 2022 largely because they just had too many logs and events generating metrics. Other companies have a similar problem, albeit not necessarily on the same scale."
IN4IT claims its observability platform will specifically address log management concerns. Viaene commented, "We are focusing the personal element of our new observability platform on the log part. We have customers who are spending thousands per month just ingesting and maintaining logs. Some have used Datadog and stopped because it's so expensive and have now moved onto AWS products. They are still finding it too expensive. So, we are working with these customers now to design and implement this new platform."
The platform is currently in customer testing, according to Viaene, "It's not yet on the market, but we are currently installing and testing this product on our customers' accounts ready for a public launch in Q1 next year. We are looking at the core features they need and cannot do without. And then we aim to offer those at a much lower price point."
He continued, explaining the challenges with current SaaS offerings, "Companies are realizing that SaaS products can be very expensive. You would think that you could buy one SaaS product and then you're done. But what happens is that you find you sign up to one product, then another, then another. So, you buy three products, you have them for a month and it's, say, $300 per month. But then you want an extra option or two and suddenly you're spending $1000 per month with multiple companies, each of which will also charge to send the data. You are paying for extra systems that you don't need."
IN4IT's upcoming platform aims to improve user experience with an updated web interface and easier integration with identity providers like Onelogin, Okta, and Active Directory. "We are not building an SaaS product," said Viaene. "We are building something that the customer can just install within the cloud themselves. They will just pay the infrastructure costs which are quite low and some license costs. They are not paying for a whole suite of SaaS products for months per gigabyte ingested, where they may be paying for features that they might not actually need."
He detailed the project's focus saying, "We are looking at the core features required, because customers will often be just happy to have those core features at a much lower price point then have a range of unnecessary bells and whistles at a time when companies are looking to reduce their spending."
Emphasising on the logging aspect, Viaene revealed, "Observability is about logging and monitoring metrics. We are looking first at purely the logging part. We are looking at two tools: logging and getting alerts based on logs. We are producing a piece of software - not really SaaS - where you will pay for a license and then run it on your own infrastructure. There are products available that do similar things, but for the core features that we are offering, we will be doing it at a lower price."
Viaene explained why the company believes it can offer this at a lower cost: "The reason why we can do it at a lower price point is that the development of software is getting less expensive. A lot of people are talking about this. They're saying that SaaS companies might lose out because even the price to write code with generative AI tools is getting lower. We are partly using generative AI tools to speeds up the development. When many of these SaaS companies were funded, let's say, ten years ago, the cost they had to write code was much higher, and that's why the pricing is higher, so they must make a good profit. Our prices are lower, because it's not so much work now to create this kind of software with the modern tools that are available."
The new platform targets a diverse cloud environment deploying on AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft's Azure, and Digital Ocean. An Enterprise solution will cater to larger organisations requiring more than just a simple license agreement.
