As a best practice, centralizing log data makes a lot of sense. For the observability and monitoring solutions that can collect, store, and analyze this centralized data, it’s a great source of revenue. Forward your logs to us. See all your data in a single pane of glass. Get seamless root cause analysis and troubleshooting…
For the companies forwarding logs to another solution, though, it’s a potential source of revenue that’s being forwarded away. If logs are a byproduct of your services, log forwarding might seem to be a great way to offload potential headaches onto another solution. After all, creating new products requires a lot of time and engineering resources, and you want to make sure resources are being used wisely.
But what if another company were to build a log solution for your enterprise (complete with dashboards) that expands your products and generates additional revenue for your company, and you don’t need to pay anything for it? Given the opportunity to have a solution built for you—all without engineering resources or additional costs—would you still choose to forward your log revenue away?
Generate New Revenue Streams Through the Powered by Hydrolix Partner Program
This is exactly what the Powered by Hydrolix program offers—custom log solutions built from the ground up for your specific use case. Through the Powered by Hydrolix program, Hydrolix builds enterprise-grade, white-label solutions for collecting, storing, and analyzing log data. The use cases go well beyond observability and include verticals ranging from AdTech to cybersecurity and AI/ML training.
With the Powered By Hydrolix program, Hydrolix doesn’t get paid until you get paid. In other words, Hydrolix builds the solution and then uses a revenue-sharing model. There are no upfront costs. The Powered by Hydrolix program is designed to help maximize the value of your log data for both your business and your customers—all while generating a low-risk new revenue stream.
This is the model Hydrolix used for building TrafficPeak, an Akamai observability solution. Hydrolix built the solution in a matter of months. The solution generated $8 million in TrafficPeak revenue in 9 months and attracted 180 customers (including some of the largest streaming and media broadcasters, airlines, banks and retailers in the world) in its first year.
This post will cover:
- The value of building a logging product
- Why Hydrolix is the best choice for white-label log solutions
The Value of Log Data
In 2017, The Economist declared that data was the world’s most valuable asset—even more so than oil. It’s a well-known fact that many companies (such as Meta) derive much of their value from the data they collect and store. A great deal of that valuable data comes in the form of logs—timestamped records that tell a story about your customers, your infrastructure, even the future of your company. Major enterprises typically keep that data proprietary or sell it—they don’t just give it away.
Your log data—including and especially the log data that your customers generate—has tremendous value. While your customers may also want the option to forward logs to a solution that works best for them, there are multiple benefits to building internal features that maximize the value of log data.
Build New Lines of Revenue
Diversifying revenue streams is critical for long-term success and profitability. Enterprises that generate large volumes of log data already have something of value to offer their customers. The next step is to productize that information. Adding new product lines is an established method for creating new revenue streams.
Create Opportunities to Upsell
Depending on your business model, log solutions can be an opportunity to upsell existing customers. That includes moving customers from a free to paid tier or enhancing pro or enterprise offerings.
Generate Buzz and Keep Your Brand Innovative
Product launches are opportunities to activate marketing, advertising, and PR campaigns. It’s also a chance to get the attention of news outlets, potential investors, and prospects. Just as importantly, developing new products signifies that your brand is relevant, innovative, and creating new value.
Provide Convenience and Added Value for Customers
Both prospects and customers want added value, and convenience is also a top priority. Forcing customers to use additional tools and set up log forwarding is inconvenient. It’s a missed opportunity to add value to your platform.
If your customers are forwarding log data, they’ll need to context switch and use another platform’s UI to get a better understanding of how your enterprise’s services are performing. Ideally, they should have the opportunity to do that directly in your platform’s UI.
Additionally, not all customers will necessarily have a third-party tool (such as an observability solution) where they can forward logs. This puts the onus on customers to integrate and pay for additional tools (instead of consolidating tools further). And it may put you at a competitive disadvantage against solutions that offer more visibility into log data.
Understand Your Customers Better and Improve Your Product Roadmap
Log data can provide a detailed record of how customers are using your platform. For example, you might be able to get a better understanding of which features are being used most regularly, which features are having performance issues, and so on. You can then use this information to make data-driven decisions about your product roadmap. Combined with other methods such as surveys, focus groups, and early access customers, you can give customers exactly what they want instead of guessing (and potentially missing the target) on new features.
Provide Accountability and Transparency
For a brand to succeed, trust is critical. Accountability and transparency are key to building trust. Internal log solutions give you and your customers an opportunity to see exactly how your products are working. You can more easily provide necessary information to support teams and reduce MTTR (mean time to resolution) when issues arise. If something goes wrong, you can use a log solution to create an RCA (root cause analysis) and find and mitigate issues, rebuilding trust after outages or other unexpected problems.
Why Build With Hydrolix?
There are many good reasons why you should stop forwarding your logs away and build an internal solution. However, many enterprises have limited resources or might not want to take on the risk of building a solution themselves.
That’s where a partner like Hydrolix can help you build a log solution while mitigating the risk and minimizing the amount of resources your organization needs to build it. Let’s take a look at why the Powered by Hydrolix program is a good choice for building a white-label log solution.
Streaming Data Lake Architecture
Hydrolix is a streaming data lake designed for ingesting, storing, and analyzing high volumes of log data. It uses high-density compression (20x-50x) and S3-compatible storage for cost-effective, long-term storage. You can pass these storage savings onto customers, increase your margins, or both. Hydrolix also includes real-time streaming ingest and sub-second query latency even on trillion-row datasets, providing efficient real-time analytics capabilities for use cases ranging from observability to AdTech.
Multi-Tenant Infrastructure
Hydrolix can design multi-tenant, single-tenant, and even hybrid-tenant solutions to best fit your customers’ needs. A multi-tenant solution will help reduce costs and compute resources while a single-tenant solution can provide a white-glove option for premium tiers and large customers that have custom requirements and a need for additional security and privacy.
Read how Hydrolix designed a solution that combines single- and multi-tenancy for Akamai.
Marketing, Technical, and Professional Services Support
Building and delivering a log solution is just the first step. From the technical side, Hydrolix provides tier two support, professional services, and live and peak event support. Hydrolix also provides go-to-market support including sales enablement, collateral templates, and demand generation. Hydrolix will continue to iterate and improve the product and work towards ensuring long-term success and increased revenue.
Reduced Risk
Diversifying revenue is critical—and yet actually creating those new revenue streams can be very challenging, especially when it comes to building new products. Even with extensive R&D, building, and testing, there is no guarantee that a new product will be successful. To make matters more challenging, building a log storage solution may divert from your organization’s primary focus and require new, complex domain knowledge as well as additional talent. This increases the costs and potential risk further.
Because Hydrolix provides the domain knowledge, underlying technology, and resources to build the solution, and there are no separate costs, you can minimize the risk associated with building a new product. With Hydrolix, you can go through an extended proof of concept to get a complete understanding of how the technology works and how it can best fit your use case.
Proven White-Label Partner
Hydrolix is a proven white-label partner. One example of success is TrafficPeak, an Akamai observability solution powered by Hydrolix. To learn more, read these testimonials about the solution:
- How Akamai used TrafficPeak to monitor the biggest football game of the year
- How Elkjøp (a TrafficPeak customer) used TrafficPeak to stop a massive DDoS attack
These testimonials also provide examples of the kind of collateral that Hydrolix’s go-to-market team can create for white-label partners.
The Next Step: Starting the Conversation
A new partnership needs to start with trust. Contact us to start a conversation about Hydrolix can work for your particular use case and learn about our team and the underlying architecture of Hydrolix’s streaming data lake. This can include demos of both Hydrolix’s streaming data lake architecture as well as other white-label solutions we’ve designed. A proof of concept can include an MVP (minimum viable product) and provide the evidence you need to take the plunge and stop forwarding your log data away.
Learn more about the Powered by Hydrolix program and sign up for a proof of concept or demo.
