Splunk, Inc. (SPLK) is “One to Watch”

Splunk is a trail blazer in the increasingly dominant and ponderous world of so-called big data, providing a software platform that actively indexes complex enterprise data so it may be understood and acted upon, with a particular emphasis on harnessing machine data and making it easily usable by all. This kind of unstructured data, often generated by machines, represents a superb blueprint of the discrete operations of an entire enterprise; however, it is difficult to utilize this blueprint effectively via extant relational or multi-dimensional database technologies.

The powerful Splunk® platform is deployable in several configurations designed to meet the exacting needs of a specific requirement and the company is constantly working on new deployment options to satisfy ever widening markets. Splunk Enterprise™ software offers users a way to unlock the power of the complex, big data landscape, sensing the full-spectrum of machine data through end points. Everything from IT framework end points like mobile devices, servers, and websites, to hard infrastructure, like RFID tags, production facility sensors, or more rudimentary mechanical/security type hardware, are all scoped into a single feed that can be easily digested by even novice users.

Since the first product shipped back in 2006, Splunk, which was founded by a former Apple executive with the goal of transforming the big data landscape, has seen marked, continued success and is up 80% from its April 2012 IPO. Today some 4,400 of the world’s top enterprises in over 80 countries use Splunk’s software to provide operational intelligence that cuts through the fog of all that data being generated, revealing hidden kernels of truth at the bottom of massive data silos.

Technology like this is very attractive to all industries, irrespective of the sector they are in and thus the partner ecosystem is thriving for Splunk. Top industry players like Cisco and VMware are on board and the company even appeared alongside leading dev/test, demo/proof-of-concept pre-production cloud provider CloudShare, at the VMworld 2012 Conference in late August. There the two companies openly discussed how the Splunk App for VMware has granted CloudShare (an early beta-tester of the deployment) unprecedented penetration into underlying business metrics, trends in the customer base, and the overall performance of existing infrastructure. CloudShare uses Splunk to survey the entire enterprise, rendering state to the user, who thus achieves virtual presence, in what is for CloudShare an incredibly dynamic SaaS environment (quite a feat). By allowing actionable intelligence kicked up through monitoring to be aggressed immediately, Splunk is bringing a whole new paradigm to the customer service and troubleshooting space for companies like CloudShare, with the Splunk App for VMware fully capturing the value of virtualization layer data (from host operating systems/apps, network, storage, or the underlying server).

Even while users scale up into ever larger data sets, the Splunk engine is able to drive search results for rare key terms up to 10x faster than before, using a methodology that allows entire data buckets to be parsed in or out without even having to look at them. Even as this remarkable efficiency feat is being achieved, the new Splunk 4.3 allows for up to 10 simultaneous users per search engine on the same deployment, thanks in large part to a an incredibly streamlined UI that, in addition to being even more feature-rich, is also much more intuitive.

It is immediately apparent when using Splunk that the designers made every concession towards data visualization possible, with drag and droppable dashboard panels, as well as real-time and historical search results that auto populate into a window which back-fills the historical data for instant data contextualization. Similarly, the new Sparklines feature offers comprehensive data at-a-glance right underneath the real-time and historical data, so that key trend insights into the granular data are not missed. As one of the leading pioneers in integrated real-time/historical data feeding into a single dashboard, Splunk’s rich feature set of tools looks and feels highly evolved, because it is.

Analyst or executive, novice or pro, users can easily, rapidly generate compelling charts, tables, and data visualizations, all in an environment that is intuitive enough for any user to derive full functionality. Operational monitoring has also been expanded in the new Splunk 4.3, with robust per-result alerting capability that allows for complex conditional alerts to be fired off, increasing overall enterprise situational awareness.

Splunk 4.3 is now totally non-flash and thus is available to iPhone users and many others, effectively rendering the app platform agnostic. Just one more aspect of the company’s winning technology platform to be showcased at the upcoming 3rd Annual Splunk Worldwide Users’ Conference, to be held in Las Vegas during the second week of September (10-13). The conference will showcase Splunk’s platform as a one-stop shop for rendering highly-actionable, easily understood, and easy to work with operational intelligence on machine-generated big data. Some of the top minds in the Apache technology space, who truly understand the difficult requirements of Fortune 500 companies trying to get a handle on the surfeit of data, will be on-hand at the conference, with industry leaders from all over the world coming in to offer presentations on their own implementations of Splunk.

The recently posted Q2 financial data for SPLK shows total revenue was up handsomely to $44.5M, a 71% increase from the same interval last year, adding nearly 400 new customers, including license, expansion, and upgrades for big names like Allianz Insurance in the UK and Bechtel, as well as Pixar Animation Studios and even the U.S. Postal Service.

For more information on this dynamic software developer, please visit the Splunk, Inc. website located at: www.Splunk.com

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