A few weeks ago I wrote a piece here about Moogsoft which has been making waves in the service assurance space by applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to the arcane task of keeping on keeping critical IT up and running and lessening the business impact of service interruptions. It’s a hot area for startups and I’ve since gotten article pitches from several other AIops firms at varying levels of development.
The most intriguing of these is a company called Grok which was formed by a partnership between Numenta, a pioneering AI research firm co-founded by Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who are famous for having started two classic mobile computing companies, Palm and Handspring, and Avik Partners. Avik is a company formed by brothers Casey and Josh Kindiger, two veteran entrepreneurs who have successfully started and grown multiple technology companies in service assurance and automation over the past two decades—most recently Resolve Systems.
Josh Kindiger told me in a telephone interview how the partnership came about:
“Numenta is primarily a research entity started by Jeff and Donna about 15 years ago to support Jeff’s ideas about the intersection of neuroscience and data science. About five years ago, they developed an algorithm called HTM and a product called Grok for AWS which monitors servers on a network for anomalies. They weren’t interested in developing a company around it but we came along and saw a way to link our deep domain experience in the service management and automation areas with their technology. So, we licensed the name and the technology and built part of our Grok AIOps platform around it.”
