IT Searchbox Zen

02.06.08 | Category: Simplicity, Zen Search

Drue with Team PagloPaglo is a search company named after the Italian explorer Francisco Paglo. There may be Italophiles in the company, I didn’t find them at today’s Lunch 2.0 event.

I did meet an engineering team with an appreciation of Japanese Zen aesthetics. “You’ve stumbled upon the company’s two Japanophiles,” Chris Waters, Co-Founder and CTO of Paglo, said of himself and Eric “Scanner” Luce, the online application architect.

Drue Kataoka and Dave KelloggPaglo is a search engine, which the company is billing as “Google for IT,” explained CEO Brian de Haaff. Their approach to tackling the complexity of the classic “IT headache” is a great example of Zen Simplicity.

Paglo applies an elegantly simple approach to the very complex area of IT management, involving a company’s heterogeneous devices, applications, and users– all answers are found through the search box. Watch an excerpt of my impromptu interview here:

Kudos to Dave Kellogg for another great Lunch 2.0. His short, to the point speeches are always met with much applause.

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7 Comments so far

  1. Thomas Han 02.07.08 at 8:14 am

    Hi Drue,

    Thanks for photos and coverage on Paglo for those of us who couldn’t make it to L2.0 this time up in the city.

    If you get a chance to ask Paglo, are they a competitor of Splunk.com? That’s another “Google for IT” start-up in SF that I’m aware of, sounds like they’re in the same space? Just curious.

    TIA,
    Thomas

  2. Chris from Paglo 02.07.08 at 2:22 pm

    @Thomas: Paglo is quite different from splunk. Paglo does universal search for IT—we search all types of IT data, regardless of source—whereas splunk is focused on search log file information.

    Paglo is also different in that it is online, and completely free.

    Drue, thanks for coming to our lunch. Hopefully you learned something about IT. I certainly learned about Zen. I had never thought of what we engineers do as being Zen … though we do always strive for elegance.

    Cheers,
    Chris.

  3. Johnvey from Splunk 02.07.08 at 3:39 pm

    To set the record straight, Splunk is equally as universal as Paglo is: we index any IT data information, whether it be log files, configuration files, source code, binary information, PID files — whatever exists on your system. Additionally, we index data coming in over TCP, SNMP, and messages queues. If that’s still not enough, you can write a script that outputs your data to stdout, which then gets timestamped and indexed just like anything else. To say that Splunk in focused on log files is just bad market research.

    Splunk is also the first ‘Google of IT’, and has been since 2005 (see Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/2005/12/16/splunk-software-administration-cx_df_1219splunk.html).

    Don’t take my word for it though. Download your free copy of Splunk and do a head-to-head for yourself — that is, if Paglo will even let you into their beta.

    - J

  4. Robert Young 02.07.08 at 5:48 pm

    The Paglo technology was very interesting – lets IT see through the data jungle and get to the core information in a simplistic way.

    Nice pairing with the Valley Zen – help us see things in a new, fresh way. Simplicity help us get to the core messages and bring out the true value, and new values not realized yet.

    Having spent much time in Japan myself, both business and personal, it’s nice to see other cultures and companies adopt some new ideas from abroad. Lots of great stuff elsewhere which can easily be adopted if we go out and take a look.

    Look forward to seeing more!
    - Robert

  5. Ben Park 02.07.08 at 5:59 pm

    Hi Drue, it was great meeting you at the Paglo Lunch 2.0 event. I hope to run in to you at other events soon.

    Ben

  6. Blake Commagere 02.08.08 at 5:47 pm

    Nice meeting you at Lunch 2.0 today! Using search to solve IT problems is a very interesting approach. I know Splunk uses a client download on each machine in your network to collect data – and I would suspect Paglo does the same. I’d love to know what each of these companies does to ensure that a given network has full coverage with their client download – otherwise searches wouldn’t be representative of the entire network.

    Furthermore, from a security perspective one of the biggest headaches for IT has always been laptops – sales teams are constantly travelling, and are not always on your own network. It is not clear to me how those situations are handled by these solutions. Presumably, they have the clients constantly indexing data and transferring it to a central repository.

    I suppose I could read their whitepapers and probably answer all these questions :)

  7. Devin Holmes 02.19.08 at 11:53 pm

    Hi Drue,

    Just getting around to reading your posting on Lunch 2.0 now. As a former corporate IT guy, I found what Paglo is doing to be fascinating. Wish they had been around 5 years ago when I was living in the corporate IT world.

    Love your site btw. You’ve got a new fan!

    Devin
    CEO – Startupers!

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