Description
Scott Bekker, Analyst and Moderator from ActualTech Media, interviews Selector Co-founder and CEO Kannan Kothandaraman about how Selector started. Kannan explains how the platform enhances existing network monitoring tools by automating the time to insights for a faster mean time to repair (MTTR).
Video length: 5:39
Speakers:
Scott Bekker, Analyst and Moderator, ActualTech Media
Kannan Kothandaraman, Co-founder and CEO, Selector
Transcript
Scott: Hello, this is Scott Becker with ActualTech Media. I’m a moderator and analyst with ATM, and I’m happy to be here today with Kannan Kothandaraman, who is co-founder and CEO of Selector. Kannan, thank you so much for joining us and welcome.
Kannan: Thank you, Scott. Glad to be here.
Scott: Tell us a little bit about how you came to be the co-founder and CEO of Selector.
Kannan: Thanks, Scott. I was previously head of products at Juniper, where I was responsible for networking products. My co-founder Nitin and I started Selector roughly three years ago to solve a key problem in the network and AIOps space.
Scott: Well, that’s a great lead-in. The first thing that I wanted to ask you, which is: what is broken in current network monitoring and management tools that led to the creation of Selector?
Kannan: The current problem with network and application monitoring is they are very siloed. As the complexity of infrastructure is increased, multiple sources of data are required to run operations and they’re all siloed. Teams have to manually process the incoming data to figure out what is happening. If something is broken, how do they fix it? That’s what we set out to solve with Selector AI.
Scott: I know AI is really important to your solution. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about where the AI comes into the tool.
Kannan: Absolutely. For network operations and SRE teams, the number of data sources coming in is growing and the complexity of the data and the volume of data are exploding. There are two key uses of AI and ML that we use at Selector. First is to process incoming data to analyze the behavior. Are the data and the infrastructure performing per SLAs? Automating away from rules and manual analysis is the first use of AI/ML.
And second, once you have different streams of data coming in, how do you correlate them together? If something is broken, was the issue within the applications? Was it a human error with configuration? Or was it a network issue of bringing together all of that in one correlated analysis. That’s the second use of AI/ML that we provide at Selector.
Scott: Okay. Great. Bringing in the data and then helping correlate it. Makes sense. As far as current network monitoring and management tools go, does this replace them or does this augment those tools?
Kannan: It augments them. There are a lot of monitoring tools already in place. Our solution augments them. You take existing monitoring and tools data coming in from them and help automate how you make sense of how you derive insights out of that.
Scott: Gotcha. I also understand that your offering is a managed service. What are some of the benefits of this being a managed service?
Kannan: Good question. That’s one of the key value props and differentiators Selector brings in. No matter where the customer’s data resides, where their infrastructure is, Selector provides a fully managed service. Your data can be on-prem. It can be distributed. It can be in the cloud. Regardless of where the solution is deployed or where your data is, users and our customers do not have to manage or maintain anything. It’s a complete, managed service that we provide to our customers.
Scott: That’s great. And as far as those customers go, what’s the sweet spot for Selector? Are there industries or types of organizations that benefit the most?
Kannan: Yes. We have a broad set of customers that span across multiple segments. If an organization is managing its own network, is providing service and applications using that network, that’s somebody that you can bring a lot of value using our solution.
Scott: That’s great. And the last thing that I wanted to ask you was, if somebody wants to get started with Selector or find out more, what’s the best way for them to go about that?
Kannan: Our website selector.ai is the best resource for anybody who wants to get more details about the solution as well as our offerings.
Scott: Okay. Great. Well, Kannan, thank you so much for coming on and uh and telling us about Selector. It has been really interesting.
Kannan: Thank you, Scott. I really appreciate the time.
Scott: If you enjoyed this conversation and you want to find out about more leading-edge companies, visit us on actualtechmedia.com, or I’m sorry, visit us on our YouTube channel, which is actualtechmedia.