Empowering Business With AI And Data: Dinis Guarda Interviews Ariel Assaraf, CEO And Co-Founder Of Coralogix

In the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast, Ariel Assaraf, CEO And Co-Founder of Coralogix, discusses how AI is transforming business operations with enhanced tools for data observability and Coralogix's innovative approach to real-time streaming analytics and AI integration. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.

Ariel Assaraf is an entrepreneur and technology leader with over 15 years of experience helping companies unlock the power of their observability data. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coralogix, a leading in-stream data platform for full observability for logs, metrics, tracing, RUM, and security data. Ariel served in Israel’s elite intelligence unit, 8200, where he developed a data extraction platform and created unique intelligence tools by connecting intelligence and tech units. 

During the interview with Dinis Guarda, Ariel Assaraf discusses AI's impact on business transformation and data optimisation:

"AI is going to stand on the heels of digital transformation, or is AI a transformation in its own right that contains digital transformation?

With AI, you don’t need the best talent in the world anymore to do something that’s good enough for your business. It’s going to re-accelerate digital transformation and bring everyone to the start line.

Companies that will utilise AI in a better, more efficient way, so that they can actually offer to their customers as value, will survive. The rest will just disappear—just like any other revolution.

AI is a lot more like the Internet revolution than anything else. We can't even think of companies that didn't adjust to the internet because they're not here for decades now. Maybe Kodak or Blockbuster are the only examples that come to mind.

The opportunity for businesses to close the gap much faster and with a lot less knowledge is what’s going to open up that door to new companies that will serve those clients of the ones that wouldn’t adjust to this new world."

Coralogix: Data analytics with in-stream solutions

"Coralogix is now serving thousands of customers worldwide in practically every country. We operate in eight regions, with offices in five countries, and employees across 30 countries. It's a very global company with over 500 people, and our growth over the past few years has been significant.

What we do differently at Coralogix is analyse everything in-stream. All the data is processed on the fly, as it enters the system, and then written to the customer’s own storage. This allows us to run remote queries on the customer's storage for complex event processing and insights that drive business outcomes.

We started as a simpler logging product in 2015, but the observability space is one of the most crowded. For the first few years, we struggled to find our path. In 2019, I became CEO, and we pivoted towards creating something truly unique — streaming our data, which allowed us to analyse in-stream while keeping our customers' data under their control.

Our initial groundbreaking technology was stateful streaming. It allowed us to analyse data and transform it in-stream without storing the actual raw data. We created an entire mechanism that stores only the state data needed, making our system very resilient while providing real-time insights.

We didn’t want to store the customer data on our own servers. We know how valuable data is, and we want our customers to maintain control over it. We designed our system so that the data is stored on the customer’s own storage, in an open format, which they can query outside of Coralogix. We don’t own their data, and we don’t charge them for retention, which sets us apart from the competition.

Once we implemented our remote query system and streamlined our architecture, we saw significant growth. We moved from a handful of customers to hundreds and now thousands, all in less than six years.

In B2B, validating an idea is like playing chess. It’s a complex game, and you have to ask the right questions to ensure you’re solving a problem that customers actually need. Early on, we learned to validate our ideas by asking customers what they would truly be willing to pay for, rather than assuming we already knew the answers.

The Coralogix AI Centre provides observability and security for AI models. This addition to our platform expands our capabilities, enabling us to support more complex and evolving use cases. AI is a powerful tool, and we aim to provide our customers with the ability to monitor and secure AI models as part of their broader observability strategy."
 

Transforming data analytics with AI integration

Ariel explains how Coralogix is innovating data analytics by integrating AI to provide real-time streaming analytics for large companies:

"Coralogix uses embedded DBs across CFKA streams. Each service in Coralogix knows how to write the state it needs from the data, without requiring the raw data into the embedded DB.

What’s special about Data Prime is that it queries logs, metrics, traces, and RUM all at once. You can even join different data types. This gives a true single pane of glass, not just stitched together products.

We committed to a five-minute response time over chat, 24/7. At the time, we were only 10 people, all developers except for me. I took it on myself, and I connected a chat interface into the app. Whenever an issue came in, it popped up on my phone, and I answered it anytime, even in the middle of the night.

Today, we serve thousands of customers with response times under 20 seconds. We allocate a technical account manager to every customer, ensuring that our support remains fast and efficient.

We’ve developed the Observability Maturity Model, which helps organisations move from basic telemetry to solving problems faster, then monitoring production intelligence, and ultimately extracting business-level insights from observability.

The gap between what you get as a consumer and what you get in the office is closing. The consumer experience, like with ChatGPT, is better than what you get in B2B. This is driving the shift in data analytics, making it more accessible to everyone across the organisation.

We believe democratising data is crucial. It doesn’t make sense for only engineers to use it. Now, organisations will be able to use this data to drive business outcomes, create a common language, and automate processes across departments.

AI is not here to cancel jobs. It’s going to empower engineers, enabling them to build faster and better. Customers will expect more, and engineers will need tools to meet those expectations. Our job is to ensure they can do this securely and with performance in mind."

AI transparency, safety, and consumer responsibility

Ariel Assaraf discusses the challenges of AI transparency and safety, particularly regarding its unpredictable and non-deterministic nature:

"If there’s one thing that’s very consistent about AI, it’s that it’s not consistent. It is not deterministic. How do you make something transparent if that something is completely unpredictable?

The best that we can aspire for is to add guard rails that will protect us from mistakes that will be catastrophic for our business and slow down adoption, and be able to audit and document and store all the AI interactions so we can learn from them.

Companies that will try to tame AI to become deterministic... those companies will slow down to the extent that they’ll just become irrelevant very quickly. The safety of the company is how do I prevent data leakage, breaking policies, and compliance... The safety of the consumer is, what about bad financial advice? Bad health advice? How do we protect ourselves from that?"

Consumers are going to have to start treating software like they're treating human beings. AI is not artificial at all, it is intelligence.. We’re as consumers going to have to use our judgment a lot better... educating kids from early ages on how to interact with AI... so they’re judgmental about the information that they’re taking in."

Concluding the interview, Ariel discusses Coralogix’s future as a comprehensive business decision-making tool:

“I would look at Coralogix as the future of Coralogix as a business decision-making tool for the entire organisation.

Questions won't be around anymore, like users will come to observe reality systems today and ask Where are the errors in my system? What servers are lagging? Where's the high latency? What about if I could ask the system which one of my services is causing me to lose the highest amount of revenue, or what part of my application is causing customers the highest amount of frustration?

Connecting signals from realism and monitoring how users interact with your software to the latencies that they're getting to the machines that serve them... and giving you one answer that’s saying the part in your banking app that’s causing you the highest amount of revenue loss is the currency exchange because it is slow.

We’re giving the answer from a technical perspective, but we’re serving the business. We’re helping with prioritising. We’re connecting it to revenue. We’re connecting it to customer experience.

We have a big advantage because in-stream analysis, the customer owns the data, readable format, semantic layer that holds all the keys or cardinality relationships between them. So we can actually address data in a natural language way... SQL or human language to SQL."