Blue Medora: Blue Medora rebrands as observIQ, focused on disrupting observability space

GRAND RAPIDS - On the heels of divesting from one of its two primary business units, software developer Blue Medora has rebranded and relaunched its retained business. GRAND RAPIDS - On the heels of divesting from one of its two primary business units, software developer Blue Medora has rebranded and relaunched its retained business. The company, which now goes by the name observIQ, announced Tuesday morning the name change and its intentions on disrupting the observability space. The first step in those efforts comes with the launch of its new open source log agent, which is designed to monitor I.T. infrastructures and software. "We're a little unique as we focus on very high tech and focused products," observIQ CTO Mike Kelly told MiBiz. "We're focused on the IT industry and high tech industry to help them monitor their infrastructures and all the software they're using. "We learned a lot over the years in terms of what works and what doesn't in the space. We focused a lot on the VMWare business (which they divested from), but the entire time we had been expanding to work with other companies like Google, Microsoft, Relic to expand their ability to monitor what is going on inside their IT environments. With obsevIQ, we're really refocusing those efforts." Earlier in the month, Grand Rapids-based observIQ - then Blue Medora - announced the sale of a key business unit, selling it off its True Visibility Suite team and products to Silicon Valley software giant VMWare Inc. observIQ had a long-standing partnership with VMWare, developing a metric monitoring integration that became crucial to VMWare's vRealize platform, which is an A.I.-driven product that gives I.T. teams the power to implement self-driving capabilities to facilitate hands-off operations. True Visibility Suite now moves forward as a VMware solution. "A lot of the reason that we're rebranding as observIQ is because of that long relationship and that long history (with VMWare)," observIQ CEO Bekim Protopapa told MiBiz. "When people think of Blue Medora, they automatically associate it with VMWare and working closely with them. "For the last five years, that was a really good thing and was a big part of the synergy we enjoyed together with VMWare. ... For the go forward, with the retained business and products, it wouldn't make as much sense. It would just be confusing for people to think of us and VMWare and not understand our new brand and message." Aside from the new open-source log agent launched by obserIQ, Kelly said that the long-term plan is to come out with a platform that customers can sign up for and use to monitor. Kelly also said that he saw some glaring needs in the observability space, which observIQ looks to address. Log agents are installed on all servers and operating systems to gather, send and parse system logs. Kelly and his team want to improve upon what is already out there. "What's out there right now tends to be fairly slow and uses a lot of resources," Kelly said. "You can imagine if you have something running on your laptop in the background and it starts to eat up all the resources, that's a problem. Well, that's a problem at a hyper scale as well if you're talking about some of the largest companies in the world dealing with this on every one of their systems."