I first met Spiros Xanthos about ten years ago while he was at Pattern Insight, a search and data mining company he co-founded and that was eventually acquired by VMWare in 2012. Spiros always struck me as an inspirational entrepreneur with the innate ability to deeply understand the needs of customers and the limitations of the technology currently available to them. From my early interactions with him, it was obvious he had the rage to master company-building and humility to learn — hallmark traits of the type of entrepreneur I’ve always aspired to partner with throughout my career.
We kept in touch over the years and fortunately, right around the time we were forming Unusual Ventures, Spiros came to us with a hypothesis he was working through with his co-founder Mayank Agarwal, a superstar technologist with tenure at both Microsoft and VMware. Their vision was clear — given the rapid migration of applications to cloud-based microservice architectures deployed using a bevvy of open source projects like Docker, Kubernetes, etc., Spiros and Mayank felt doing observability the right way required another leap forward. They felt in order to fully optimize microservices and container-based workloads enabling flexibility and scale, an end-to-end view into how these services come together was required. Meaning, the enterprise needed a complete solution of logs, metrics, and full stack traces to paint the entire picture.
This led Spiros and Mayank to create Omnition, a SaaS company with the vision to innovate in distributed tracing, improving monitoring across microservices applications. At Unusual, we were immediately impressed with their thoughtfulness about the product strategy and go-to-market plans, and shared their vision for the opportunity to reshape the future of observability across the enterprise. The combination of that shared vision, their deep domain expertise, high integrity, and their enthusiasm for our approach of strengthening founders at the seed stage through Unusual Academy and our Get Ahead Platform, led us to welcoming Omnition as Unusual’s inaugural portfolio company in May of 2018.
Fast forward a short 15 months later, and today is the culmination of our journey together, as Splunk officially acquires Omnition to help the IT software company deliver on its mission to be a leader in observability and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for organizations at every stage of their cloud journey. By adding Omnition to its portfolio, Splunk will deliver insights to its customers across the entire enterprise application stack, including on-premises data centers, cloud based applications, and infrastructure.
For Team Unusual, this is a little bittersweet, as we’ve watched the Omnition team make tremendous strides over the past year. Fulfilling their potential as great founders, Spiros and Mayank have recruited an incredible team, delivered on their vision for the product, and demonstrated significant traction. At the same time this is a fantastic outcome for the entire team at Omnition and we can’t wait to watch the impact you all will have at Splunk. The Splunk Team is certainly fortunate to have gained such a brilliant, talented, and humble group, and the Unusual team is all the better for having had the opportunity to work with you. Thank you for trusting us to be your partner on your journey.
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