Lakeside Software takes equity investment in the latest sign of the end user experience wave

Monitoring vendor Lakeside Software has a long track record of impressing us with their products and winning awards, so it was nice to see last week that they had taken outside investment to speed up their product development.

The size of the investment from Insight Partners was not disclosed, but I got on the phone with CEO and founder Mike Schumacher to find out what they have planned.

Lakeside will be increasing headcount across most of the company, but in particular, they plan to double their engineering team by the end of the year. Mike said that they simply have more ideas on their roadmap that they want to be able to get to faster.

Lakeside also plans to grow their business team by hiring a CFO, a CRO/sales leadership, and a new CMO. (Tal Klein, the previous CMO, left in December to get back to the security space by joining Rezilion.)

Monitoring has been around forever, but with the current wave of emphasis on employee experience, end user experience monitoring is having a big moment. Lakeside was founded in 1997 and has been self-funded up until now, but clearly it’s a good time for them to take investment and go to the next level.

Most recently, I took a look at Lakeside SysTrack 9, which brought automation features for user self-help and assisting help desk personnel with healing machines. Before that, we looked at AIOps, which uses pattern matching to find issues, as well as Lakeside’s use of  natural language user interfaces. We’re looking forward to seeing what they have to show off this year at Synergy and VMworld.