Big Data Digest: Rise of the think-bots

A company could, for instance, use the Sumo Logic cloud service to analyze log data to troubleshoot a faulty application, for instance.

While companies such as Splunk have long offered search engines for machine data, Sumo Logic moves that technology a step forward, the company claimed.

"The trouble with search is that you need to know what you are searching for. If you don't know everything about your data, you can't by definition, search for it. Machine learning became a fundamental part of how we uncover interesting patterns and anomalies in data," explained Sumo Logic chief marketing officer Sanjay Sarathy, in an interview.

For instance, the company, which processes about 5 petabytes of customer data each day, can recognize similar queries across different users, and suggest possible queries and dashboards that others with similar setups have found useful.

"Crowd-sourcing intelligence around different infrastructure items is something you can only do as a native cloud service," Sarathy said.