Sumo Logic is a maker of a cloud-based log management and analytics platform that exited stealth earlier this year, after a $15 million second round of funding.  The company raised a total of about $20 million in capital to date and is now stepping into high gear with its new advisory board.

Sumo Logic brought in three Silicon Valley veterans to the board: DJ Patil of Greylock Partners, one of Sumo’s original investors, and security experts Gerhard Eschelbeck and Nir Zuk.

DJ Patil is Greylock’s resident data scientist, and happens to be credited with the co-invention of the term itself. He previously led LinkedIn’s analytics operation and has worked on a number of creative data-driven projects for government agencies amongst others.  Gerhard Eschelbeck in turn is the CTO and senior vice president at security software firm Sophos, and one of the innovators behind the widely-used CVSS cuberthreat rating system.

“Sumo Logic is delivering the next generation of log management and analytics for enterprises that want to get more out their log data without the added operations complexity and cost,” said DJ Patil. “We need to move from producing so much data to making data actionable. Sumo Logic’s service makes it easy for everyone in the organization to derive high-value, actionable insights based on their log data in real time.”

The third new member of Sumo’s advisory board is Palo Alto Networks founder Nir Zuk. His company offers firewall solutions for enterprise networking environments, and is currently taking some heat from Juniper now that its IPO is just over the corner.  Juniper itself is pushing into the security business lately, via a recent acquisition and – among other things- a lawsuit against Zuk’s firm.

The team behind Sumo Logic is well-versed in the enterprise demands behind big data trends, and the need for integrated security and analytics.  That being said, co-founder and acting CEO Kumar Saurabh recognizes the need for fresh perspectives from the industry’s leading data scientists.  Making data actionable and enabling systems to learn are just two of the issue’s his company’s set out to solve, and already Sumo Logic’s seen significant growth since launch in terms of the data it’s processing and the number of clients it’s taken in.

And Saurabh’s already set his sights on future problems to solve, knowing the massive amounts of data companies already have.  “Making those connections–that’s the next wave of innovation in IT,” he says. “Can they tell me proactively what needs to happen? That’s where our tool is helpful.”

Contributors: Maria Deutscher