In full swing this week, Splunk’s fourth annual .conf gathering in Las Vegas kicked off this morning with two noteworthy announcements from the data management platform.  The first is a refresh on its Enterprise suite, making version 6 of its platform available today.  The second is a complete cloud version of its Enterprise suite, delivering a fully virtualized offering to appease the SaaS crowd.  Splunk Chairman and CEO Godfrey Sullivan will provide the first public demonstration of Splunk Enterprise 6 during his keynote session at .conf2013.

Democratizing Data

It seems Splunk is seizing an opportunity to democratize data, approaching the Business Intelligence sector with enterprise-grade, cloud-ready analytics.  If you ask Splunk, their new Enterprise solution is “bridging the data divide” with more speed and power to unlock data’s value and grant access to the necessary individuals within an organization.

Your complete guide to Splunk .conf2013

.

“Too many organizations are still struggling with a data divide between IT and the business,” said Sullivan. “At Splunk, we understand that the most successful organizations in the world give equal access to the data, regardless of skill level, to drive smart decisions that have true business impact. This is what inspired our product team to build Splunk Enterprise 6. We believe that everyone in the organization, from the system administrator to the C-level executive, should be empowered to find that ‘aha’ moment. Splunk Enterprise 6 bridges the data divide and unifies IT and business users around the tremendous value and ROI to be found in machine data.”

• So what’s new in version 6?  

“Splunk Enterprise 6 is the platform for machine data for everyone, with powerful analytics and performance that unlocks machine data insights to an entirely new set of users,” said Guido Schroeder, senior vice president of products, Splunk. “With an enhanced user experience, simple management of enterprise deployments and a rich developer environment, Splunk Enterprise 6 gives technical users the ability to define the meaningful relationships in the underlying data, enabling business users and analysts to easily manipulate and visualize data in a simple drag-and-drop interface. All of this, with amazing performance on low-cost commodity hardware.”

Watch LIVE coverage of Splunk .conf on SiliconANGLE.tv

.

Bigger than IT

This opportunity at data democratization is also a chance for Splunk to demonstrate its prowess in providing analytics for a very broad range of data sets, for an equally broad range of end users.  Delivering analytics “beyond IT,” Splunk Enterprise 6 has a bevy of new analytics tools including data models and pivot capabilities.  It’s Splunk’s chance to be introduced to new users, removing some of the “geeky” barriers that keep the marketing, accounting and HR departments one step removed from the data they need to achieve better efficiencies within their groups.  That means less IT-specific knowledge, coding or query languages are required to work with Big Data, improving productivity and usability.

It’s part of Splunk’s transition away from being known as just a machine log data tool, moving towards a generalized data management platform.  Having established itself very well in the machine data market, Splunk now faces a growing pool of competitors, including Logentries, a startup that announced $10 million in funding the same day Splunk unveiled Enterprise 6.  Loggly and Sumo Logic are two other competitors that round out this market, the ultimate goal being data democratization for the corporate masses.

Splunk’s transition strategy: more apps, bigger ecosystem

At Splunk’s .conf event this week, we’ll be on the lookout for more developments from Splunk that offer insight to the company’s efforts at leading this transition.  Partnerships have been key to Splunk’s development in 2013, most recently teaming up with Cloudera to tackle the regulated sector of government agencies, as well as Tableau for extended data visualization tools.

Splunk’s Q2 earnings call last month also provide clues as to what the machine data platform is focused on to thrive in this transition.  Wikibon Analyst Jeff Kelly notes Splunk’s vision, executed by smart leadership that “correctly understands the extent of the Big Data market opportunity and continues to invest heavily in people and product development.

“Wikibon forecasts the Big Data market to reach nearly $50 billion by 2017. In order to compete with IBM and others to gain its share of the Big Data pie, Splunk needs to move quickly to lock-in new customers and expand existing deployments.  To do that,” Kelly explains, “Splunk continues executing its strategy to be both a Big Data analytics platform and application company.”

On the platform front, in Q2 Splunk released three new software developer kits to GA, giving developers new tools to build analytics applications on top of Splunk’s machine data indexing platform. The three new SDKs – for C#, PHP and Rub – join three existing SDKs for Java, JavaScript, and Python.  The latest addition comes today, with the free availability of Splunk Storm, its cloud-based subscription service for developing and running applications in the cloud.  The free version is aimed at the developer community, another key factor in Splunk’s strategy to build an ecosystem atop its platform.

On the application side, Splunk in Q2 released its application for operational monitoring of VMware virtual environments and announced a new product called HUNK for analyzing and visualizing data in Hadoop.