Nearly 11 years ago I was sitting in the Pardot office and one of our top sales reps, Jordan Rackie, stopped by asking if he could introduce his friend Craig Hyde to me. We sat down and started talking about Craig’s idea for a new business. The original idea didn’t go anywhere but Craig and I hit it off and eventually decided to start a company together called Rigor.
Craig’s background was helping large companies make their mission critical software run faster. Taking that general idea of helping software run better, the original goal was for Rigor to be software that helped make websites better. The product would run checks on web pages to make sure they worked, record if there were any broken links or problems, and log how fast it took for the page to load — web performance monitoring. Pingdom was a popular service at the time and the idea was to be a more advanced, comprehensive version of that product.
Craig’s first hire was Hubert Liu, an excellent Pardot intern, and they were off to the races. After talking to a variety of potential customers, and working on different modules over several years, including a temporary focus on load testing and scalability performance, the team arrived at digital experience monitoring and optimization. Web sites, web apps, and APIs were growing dramatically, and the more mission critical a service, the more it needs other systems continuously checking that everything works.
From an early listing on Archive.org, the old homepage of Rigor described the business as follows:
Rigor enables organizations to improve service quality and customer retention by monitoring the user experience of business applications and proactively diagnosing problems as soon as they start occurring.
Today, the homepage of Rigor describes the solution as follows:
Our Digital Experience Monitoring platform combines the power of synthetic monitoring with an intelligent optimization engine to help you find, fix and prevent the web performance issues impacting your user experience.
Over the years, Rigor signed up hundreds of customers from NBC News to Michael Kors to Dollar Tree. Ecommerce sites, web apps, and mobile apps (via API requests) are mission critical and need monitoring and optimization. Then, COVID hit and ecommerce exploded:
Demand accelerated. Digital transformation accelerated. Now, application observability from the inside out, and outside in, is even more important.
Enter Splunk.
Splunk is one of the world’s most successful software companies with tens of thousands of customers around the world using their software to make software better.
Over half of Rigor’s customers are already Splunk customers, so when they came calling as a potential acquirer, it was a perfect fit. Rigor’s monitoring and optimization solutions complement the other Splunk offerings.
Last week, Rigor’s acquisition by Splunk was announced and it’s a testament to Craig and his team for building an incredible business.
Congratulations to Craig and his team for an amazing outcome and I’m excited to see Rigor continue to grow and flourish.
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David Cummings, Khareem Sudlow
