“If you ever want to be inspired, just go out and talk to a customer!” said Splunk CEO and president Doug Merritt, motiving the keynote audience with a high-energy start to Splunk.conf 2016, held at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resorts in Orlando, FL. In addition to introducing some exciting new initiatives that Splunk is rolling out to benefit employees and clients alike, customer success stories were detailed and some client representatives showed up to attest to the value that Splunk has brought to their organizations.

Merritt outlined the vision for the enterprise; how the company has been innovating for both its employees and its clients; and how it’s been actively listening to suggestions — and how those suggestions have created new initiatives that Splunk is rolling out this year.

The future of Splunk

“In five short years, the world has changed; [for example, traveling to Orlando] I took Uber to the airport, I used an online boarding pass, I used Wi-Fi on the flight … a fundamental [change in the] use of data,” Merritt said.

He expressed that machine data is one of the main building blocks driving digital transformation, and Splunk is at the vanguard.

Partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Mike Clayville, VP of Worldwide Commercial Sales and Business Development at Amazon Web Services, LLC (AWS), went onstage during the keynote to speak about how his company works closely as a partner with Splunk. “In our partner ecosystem at AWS, who can keep up with us on innovation? Splunk is one of [those partners] … Splunk is there to innovate, and to innovate on your behalf,” said Clayville.

He went on to say that cloud is here to stay and that smart clients are recognizing that now. “One piece of advice I’d give to customers — now is the time to get started, to begin that journey … a journey that will create a long-term, strategic competitive advantage,” said Clayville.

Cloud is considered to be the new normal, he said, and most clients don’t want to own data centers, they want to be able to use already proven technologies to drive their core business. Splunk provides an enterprise machine fabric to collect, store, analyze and share any data that is critical to decision making, he added.

How clients successfully “Splunk’ed” their businesses

There were quite a few company success stories, for Splunk, detailed as follows:

• Yelp — Splunk was initially deployed only in engineering, but its expanded value was recognized and it was soon pushed into non-technical areas, including the establishment of a food delivery platform, a natural extension of Yelp’s service.
• World Bank — Splunk was brought in for security use cases. But as the bank needed to consolidate tools, Splunk has allowed World Bank to move around from customizable tools; there’s no longer a need to customize, the tools are there already so that the client can build what they need, quickly.
• Insight Engines — As a builder of natural language search engines, the company used Splunk to develop custom visualizations. This outlines the search in natural language, by source types, allowing employees to do complex searches instead of code. “A product that’s making your most productive people to be more productive … enabling your novices to be ninjas,” said Grant Wernick, CEO and cofounder of Insight Engines.
• Accenture — The company entered into an alliance relationship to integrate Splunk products and cloud services into its application services, security and digital offerings. When it was searching for a platform provider, “We need[ed] to bring opportunity, innovation [and] better value for money to drive profitable growth. We looked at dozens of technology and platforms … and Splunk stood out as a clear winner, choice number one,” said Jeff Chancey, managing director of Technology at Accenture LLP.
• Groupon — Splunk Enterprise platform is used across a range of operations and business use cases, including infrastructure and application health monitoring, order monitoring, mobile usage, customer behavior analysis and merchant performance. Splunk solutions give Groupon real-time insights about customer usage, behaviors and preferences so that it can constantly improve its user’s experience.

Security

It’s recognized that the threat landscape is rapidly evolving. And Splunk is recognized by Gartner as a “visionary leader” in enterprise security, outpacing every other vendor, according to Merritt.

Merritt introduced the rollout of Splunk Enterprise Security 4.5, providing an adaptive response, “glass table” views and threat detection content. Additionally, User Behavior Analytics 3.0 helps organizations detect cyberattacks and insider threats to their digital environments.

Free dev-test license; no data shut-off

In order to promote open experimentation, starting on November 1, 2016, Splunk will provide a free 50G dev-test license to users for six months.

Of all the new features of Splunk Enterprise 6.5, one of the most anticipated is that there’s no more metered search shut-off, leaving mission-critical data always free to access. In previous versions, users were allowed to exceed only five times in a month. Splunk has listened to its customers and has changed that parameter, Merritt explained.

Investments in education and non-profits

Splunk is pledging to spend $100M over 10 years for research, education and non-profits. For Splunk employees, this translates to $5,000 a year per employee for education and certification.

With Splunk4Good, Splunk wants data to not just make for better business, but for a better world. Splunk wants to make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to non-profit organizations, everywhere, Merritt concluded.

Stay tuned for the complete video below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk.conf 2016.

Photo by Splunk.conf 2016 keynote session