Christine Heckart, Chief Executive Officer, Scalyr

Christine Heckart, is a veteran of the technology industry having worked for iconic companies including Microsoft, Juniper Networks, Cisco and NetApp. She has led business strategy for multibillion-dollar businesses in critical roles including COO, GM, President, and CMO, and has experience across software, SaaS, hardware, and service business models. A member of the board of directors at Lam Research and 6sense, Heckart was named as one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology by the National Diversity Council and a 2016 Woman of Influence by Silicon Valley Business Journal. Heckart graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Scalyr 

Scalyr is the company engineering and operations teams trust for blazing-fast log management and increased observability. Unlike traditional log management tools built for IT cost centers, only Scalyr is architected for modern development techniques and practices. With Scalyr, engineers can go fast at scale, keep things simple, and share with their teams. Driven by purpose-built, streamlined database and the full power of its massively parallel cloud computing cluster, Scalyr is the fastest log management platform in the industry. Its search speed exceeds 1.5 TB/second, and 96 percent of queries complete in less than one second. Scalyr’s rapidly-growing customer base includes NBCUniversal, Business Insider, CareerBuilder, Grab, and Zalando, it has the highest rating in its category in G2 Crowd, and has been named a 2018 Cool Vendor by Gartner. Additionally, Scalyr was named a 2018 Forbes Cloud 100 "Rising Star" and won the 2018 SaaS Award for "Best SaaS Product for Web/App Development."

Jennifer Carl: Tell me about Scalyr’s mission.

Christine Heckart: The world revolves around connected applications and cloud-based services. We expect everything to be at our fingertips, with instant gratification. Scalyr delivers observability for the new stack, and we help DevOps teams find and troubleshoot operational problems with unmatched speed and simplicity. Downtime is lost revenue for the business and high stress for the operations teams. Scalyr dramatically improves the speed at which engineers find problems and resolve issues in today's cloud-based world, helping them rapidly identify when, where, and why problems occur to ensure the best possible experience for customers at all times.

Jennifer Carl: What were you doing before you became CEO at Scalyr?

Christine Heckart: I've held a variety of leadership roles at technology companies including Cisco, Brocade, NetApp, Microsoft, and Juniper Networks. I sit on Lam Research, a publicly traded company in the semiconductor equipment market, and on a private board. My primary experience is in creating and growing new businesses and new markets, and disrupting traditional markets with new technologies.

Jennifer Carl: How did you get your start in the technology industry?

Christine Heckart: I started my career in new product development at WilTel, a national service provider, where I defined and launched the industry’s first fast-packet 'cloud' service based on frame relay. I continued to specialize in defining and launching new services and eventually built a consulting firm to help service providers and vendors globally with their own efforts to create new business models and revenue streams. Juniper Networks eventually hired me and moved me to Silicon Valley, and I've been here for nearly two decades.

Jennifer Carl: What are your goals for the next 5 years? Where do you see yourself and Scalyr?

Christine Heckart: At its essence, Scalyr has a massively-parallel data processing engine combined with a blazing fast search capability optimized for machine data. Today, its used primarily to search machine logs and extract real time operational visibility. The technology is right place, right time as businesses in every industry and of every size move to cloud-based services and modern architectures. Our goal is to help companies ensure their services remain operational for their customers, giving them the visibility and tools, they need to spot problems and fix them in real time. We are a company of engineers, for engineers, and we understand the unique stresses and 7x24 responsibility that weigh down engineering teams. Our passion is to free developers to do what they love, which is to solve hard problems and create new innovation to make the world a better place.

Jennifer Carl: Give us your TechTip of the month

Christine Heckart: Your company and services are only as good as the experience you deliver to your customers.  We believe the truth is in the logs, so our advice is to live, log, and prosper.

Jennifer Carl is the Director of Software & Services Division Programs. Follow the Software team on Twitter at @SIIASoftware @SIIAJennifer