Featured ScienceLogician

Chris Cordray
EVP Technology and Co-Founder

Chris is the mad scientist of EM7 and the master of our Skunk Works. He provides the vision to constantly innovate and rapidly drive new product feature development.

How has the product changed from what you originally envisioned?
"Probably the biggest difference is the way in which customers are actually using EM7. The product started out as a true all-in-one management appliance with all components delivered in a single box. The limitations placed on how much EM7 could scale to monitor derived from the hardware platform itself. It was a natural fit for a certain size of customer - from fairly small to mid-sized IT organizations - but the value lay in the truly comprehensive feature set that we were able to deliver in our appliance."

"Today, EM7 manages very very large networks - a natural offshoot of the growth of our customer base and product functionality to service larger customers dissatisfied by the framework solutions available. So even larger-sized organizations - from mid-sized companies to government agencies - can't "afford" the framework solutions that end up being too costly, take too long to deploy (if ever) and are too complex. These are the customers that pushed us to create the distributed architecture and extended feature set associated with larger installations."

What are you most proud about when it comes to ScienceLogic and EM7?
"Our staff - absolutely. Every single person in this company believes in the vision - what we do and why we do it. And it shows in what each person does, day in and day out."

What do you think are the biggest challenges for ScienceLogic and EM7?
"I would say the biggest challenge is staying on top of innovation while at the same time taking care of the rapidly expanding set of customer needs and delivering all of this with the high level of quality we have all come to expect. We've always prided ourselves on being extremely responsive to our customers, but that's far easier to do when you're a small company. We're growing so quickly, but growing pains are a good thing to have."

What's the future of EM7?
"Scalability and extensibility to support larger enterprises, for one thing. In addition, at the core of EM7 has always been a design philosophy to "Design Globally, Use Locally." Translated that means building a lot of additional customization and personalization features into the product that delivers exactly what each user needs, when and how they need it. We've done this all along, and in V5 the Dashboards in particular are a great example of this."

What do you do in the very little spare time you have?
"Spend it with my family of course. We're video game junkies and all love a good movie."

If you weren't heading up development of EM7, what would you be doing?
"Perhaps sad to say, but probably doing exactly what I am doing - developing this product, wherever I could do it. I honestly believe in it that much. This is the problem I've lived, and I decided one day that it was the problem I wanted to solve. I believe the mother of Invention isn't Necessity but Frustration."