With a working experience spanning over 15 years and across many fields, from post-sales to developing cloud tools, Paul Sanford is currently the general manager of the Splunk Seattle engineering team responsible for delivering Splunk’s developer platform and Microsoft solutions.

Paul joined theCube host John Furrier to talk about his latest projects, and Big Data as part of the development process. Furrier predicted back in 2008 that “data was going to be the development kid of the future”, and obviously that moment has arrived. Paul Sanford pointed out that “all apps are new data”. What the Splunk team is trying to do is make it easier for any developers with knowledge of standard technologies (languages, framework, clearing capabilities) to hook in and build applications on top of Splunk’s data store.

Making the case for Splunk

Splunk is being used in DevOps all the time, precisely because it is an extremely easy to use product. All one developer has to do is download Splunk for free, install it, and put the application logs inside.

Developers and test organizations are using it to increase velocity, and to find out how the applications are behaving and performing, all the while changing the access to low latency, real-time information.  Apart from the traditional application logs, valuable data can be extracted from the APIs, services and devices, and then it can be used to deliver insights through analytics almost in real-time.

Languages & APIs

There are a myriad of languages being used today to build applications, and developers want to hook into a certain language based on the problem they are trying to solve. Splunk allows users to filter data of all kinds from plenty of sources, granting access to this data in a central location and allowing for new applications to be built using well-known web development techniques and technologies such as JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Backbone.js, JQuery and Django.

Splunk REST API, SDKs and application framework enable developers to build Big Data apps. Paul Sanford proudly highlighted that Splunk was Big Data before Big Data even existed. It is a highly versatile tool that allows almost any kind of data to be “splunked”, as long as it has an API.

As for the most amazing use of Splunk, Sanford mentioned one of the SDKs where a healthcare company was splunking pacemakers. The data on the devices was fed to Splunk to get a better insight on how they were performing, in order to build better devices in the future. So, Splunk is actually and ultimately saving lives.

Watch the whole interview above, to find out more about the current challenges for developers in Sanford’s opinion, the machine learning status, the predictive analytics and the early adoption of industrial internet.