Markus Zirn, VP of Product & Solutions Management at Splunk, joined theCUBE during the second day of Splunk.conf13 in Las Vegas, talking with co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier about his company’s ecosystem, content and revenue.

Zirn agreed to talk about the applications built on the Splunk platform.

“The ecosystem is fundamental to Splunk; what would the iPhone be without the iTunes store?” asked Zirn. “The content is fundamental.”

Attracting developers, fostering apps

As you might know, Splunk released SDKs in Python, PHP and Java, trying to encourage third-party developers to build and sell apps on the Splunk app market.

“We’re delivering solutions to different types of segments: security, IT, etc, so we need content to turn this horizontal platform into a specific solution for our customers. We need the best market place where they can find great content.” Like Dave Vellante and John Furrier added,  “It’s all about the apps.”

Elaborating on the strategy for the product, Markus Zirn explained: “The ecosystem is a variety of different players. On one hand it’s the developers among our customers, on the other hand it’s the people who build content and who want to make money out of it. With the new apps.splunk.com – our new marketplace – we’ve actually put in better mechanisms for people to monetize the content.”

“The systems integrators take a lot of this content and put it into solutions for our customers. We have initiatives for every single one of those target groups,” boasted Zirn.

Building Big Data revenue

Furrier directed the discussion towards the system integrators, as the indirect sales are related to the ability to integrate. What exactly is being integrated with Splunk that is driving value? Furrier also asked about the role of API and the Splunk’s process of evolving.

“APIs are fundamental for our inter-operating,” Zirn replied. “We are a platform for machine data. You have to be open and inter-operate. If you are not inter-operating, you are not a platform. You have to have content that people build on top it; if you don’t, you’re not a platform.”

As for the relationship of Splunk with the open source community, Zirn admitted to “using a lot of open source in our product. Hunk is a play together with the ‘open source of the future’, Hadoop.”

“There are ecosystem applications that have not been created by Splunk, but by the ecosystem, and we are fortunate to have such a vibrant ecosystem. It accelerates innovation,” said Zirn.

• Instant gratification

“We do add weekly/monthly new inputs. Splunk is not only building analytics from machine data. Machine data comes from a lot of different devices and there’s an app for all those different devices. If that app exists, things just get faster. Instant value is something that we’re absolutely fanatical about. We want to be that different enterprise software where everything’s fast – like instant gratification,” admitted Zirn. “With these applications, we want to be thought leaders.”

What’s the business model?

“In stage one what was important to us was to get as much content into the marketplace. You want a community based approach and a lot of content, even if it is for free. In Stage two you want to pull in serious ecosystem partners that want to build this content, and you even have the ability to monetize their content. The new store that was announced today has a feature called Directory listing – where we allow our ecosystem partners to link out to their sites, and there they can transact.”

Right now “we are at the borderline of Phase One and Two,” admitted Zirn.

When theCUBE co-hosts asked him about the biggest satisfaction of being involved with Splunk was, Zirn stated: “We are at the cusp of getting really big. I’m just super excited about the next years ahead and what the ecosystem will do for Splunk.”