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R E P O RT R E P R I N T
This Impact Report was published by 451 Research as part of our
syndicated Market Insight subscription service and subsequently
licensed for commercial use by Moogsoft.

Moogsoft jumps on the AIOps

bandwagon as it rebrands
product and broadens targets
N A NCY GO HRING
11 APR 2017
With its latest product release, the event management provider has delivered a modernized UI and new mobile app,
and is pushing to attract more DevOps and IT operations users.

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Moogsoft has introduced a number of changes with its newest release, including a total redesign of
the UI, a new brand the product is now called Moogsoft AIOps and a mobile app. AIOps, or algo-
rithmic IT operations, is a relatively recent term that suggests that algorithms, often in the form of ma-
chine learning, bring a level of analytics required in modern, complex application environments. The
reworked UI is a welcome update and some of the new capabilities should begin to help the event
management provider deliver more value to an expanded set of end users.

T H E 4 5 1 TA K E
With the latest version of its product, Moogsoft is reaching out to users beyond its typical level 1 re-
sponder customers, inviting DevOps and IT ops professionals to think of it as a central source of in-
formation that they can all employ to collaborate with each other when performance problems occur.
Appealing to a broader user base is a good strategy for growth and given the companys position as
a collector of events from an array of tools for a variety of roles, its in a good position to succeed.
We think theres more that Moogsoft can do to attract new users and expect it to consider developing
targeted capabilities that might be more useful to particular roles. Were also hearing the company
emphasize its history of developing and honing machine-learning technologies and while the term is
being overused in the market, we believe Moogsoft can set itself apart from the competition by clearly
articulating how its machine-learning techniques can bring more value to customers.

CONTEXT
Moogsoft reports that business continues to hum along, with 200% bookings growth year over year and numer-
ous new seven-figure deals. Customers range from vendors delivering SaaS products to enterprises just begin-
ning the transition to modern infrastructures. It does better than many firms we talk with at acquiring customers
via partners, reporting that more than 30% of new business comes from indirect sales. The company has more
than 100 employees, up from 90 when we wrote about it in June 2016.
Last year, Moogsoft raised a $30m series C and reported that it was on the path to profitability. Total funding to
date from investors including Northgate Capital, Wing Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Cisco, SingTel Innov8
and HCL Technologies is $51.3m.

PRODUCTS
Moogsoft just unveiled a new release, an update that represents a significant redesign, new branding and new
positioning aimed at targeting more types of users. The redesign looks dramatically different, with a cleaner layout
and some added features that should improve usability. For instance, customers will start with a new home-screen
dashboard that shows top-level stats about total number of events and situations and mean time to repair, with
similar stats also displayed by an individual users team. The home-screen dash shows the health of services, indi-
cating which might be experiencing problems.
A team room shows incidents that individuals are working on. Each situation page is now laid out in a Kanban-
style workflow, where incidents progress from opened to assigned,in progress and resolved. We particularly like
the way that the incident room page surfaces similar recent situations, including a similarity rating. Users can dig
into a recent situation to potentially quickly find guidance on how to solve the current problem. Were seeing more
vendors similarly mine historical activity to help users find solutions and think that Moogsofts implementation
should improve mean time to repair rates for customers.
The company offers users a couple of opportunities to submit feedback that helps inform its machine-learning
algorithms. One such opportunity is after a situation is resolved when users are presented with a pop-up where
they can rate the situation. A low rating will result in similar situations being less likely to pop up. Customers can
control whether users are required to rate each situation. Similarly, users can indicate that something is the root
cause rather than a symptom of an alert in a way that also informs Moogsofts machine-learning engine.
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The incident room now has integrations with commonly used monitoring tools from the likes of AppDynamics,
New Relic and Splunk. End users authorized to access such tools will see them embedded in the incident room,
where a query is automatically triggered based on information in relevant alerts.
We believe these integrations should support Moogsofts efforts to position its product as one that can serve as a
central gathering place for different roles in a business, beyond the level 1 responders who have been its typical
user. DevOps professionals, for instance, are more likely to find value in Moogsoft if they can see an incident di-
rectly correlated to data in their APM tool of choice. Another way that the company is reaching out to new users is
via a new mobile app that it thinks will appeal to engineers. It reports that its customers have expressed interest in
wanting to open up Moogsoft to engineering and operations organizations so these new features respond to that
demand. We think catering to a few user roles is a smart strategy that should drive growth for the company and
that ultimately may spur development of new capabilities targeted at DevOps personnel. For instance, while the
new version adds a search capability, its basic. A sophisticated event-querying capability would make Moogsoft
more useful to DevOps pros as a troubleshooting tool.
The new version has been rebranded as Moogsoft AIOps, a departure from the previous Incident.Moog branding.
We think the new branding is risky given that AIOps is a relatively new term that some people may not be familiar
with and that isnt well defined. That said, the buzz around the concept of AIOps is growing and as such Moogsoft
may have timed its adoption of it right, before the term gets overused and diluted.

COMPETITION
Moogsoft may begin to feel some competition from PagerDuty, which last year unveiled a new event manage-
ment service that correlates events from a variety of monitoring tools and does event suppression. It also com-
petes with BigPanda, although the latters offering is available only in a SaaS delivery model. While Moogsoft has a
SaaS offering, it has very few customers deploying it in production, indicating that Moogsoft and BigPanda likely
appeal to different types of customers. At the very large end of the market, Moogsoft could encounter Rocana,
which collects and analyzes a sizable volume and variety of events.

SWOT A NA LYS I S

ST R E N GT H S
Moogsoft has successful relationships with
resellers such as HCL and Trace3, with indi-
rect sales accounting for more than 30% of
new business.
WEAKNESSES
The company has been slow to attract users
to its SaaS offering, an indication that its
likely losing out against SaaS-only rivals.

O P P O RT U N I T I E S
As a central tool for analyzing events from
a variety of sources, Moogsoft could develop
additional capabilities that would help boost
its appeal and utility to new kinds of users.
T H R E ATS
The company faces emerging competition
from the likes of PagerDuty and Rocana with
fresh takes on event management.