A simple fact with data is that the more of it an enterprise is generating, the more difficult it becomes to effectively manage and analyze. For the biggest players in the tech world, keeping data controllable is of prime importance, which is good news for the ones selling that ability.

At this year’s Splunk.conf event, Cory Minton, principal systems engineer at EMC, and Simeon Yep, director of Global Strategic Alliances at Splunk, Inc., sat down with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and John Furrier (@furrier), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. The duo talked about the partnership between their two companies and what it’s enabled.

Simplifying for customers

To set the stage for their current business dealings, the two representatives looked back at how it had begun. The partnership between EMC and Splunk “began towards the latter half of last year, and it’s just been great,” Yep shared. “The fact that they bring a hardware solution to us … [and] we create software, it’s just a great marriage, from a technology perspective,” he added.

Minton noted: “Splunk is growing as an enterprise app, and it’s consuming infrastructure at a greater and greater rate every year,” adding that its leading to the examination of EMC’s Splunk usage.

Yep explained: “Part of the partnership was the whole idea of making things simple, and it actually began with trying to do something along the converged infrastructure line. It’s a great story, where everything is packaged together, you get reliable, frictionless deployment. And so we’re really trying to make it easy for people to deploy.”

Provenance approaches

Minton picked up from there to explain the underlying issues many customers have with handling their data. “Part of the big challenge for many customers is that … data provenance. Where did the data start from? So if you want to have this enterprise machine-data fabric, that data may be cloud-native, and that may be a good place to host it because the provenance of where that data began is there,” he said.

He continued: “But in many of our customers, that’s not the case. They’re not cloud-native applications; they may be looking at data that comes out of the data-center that’s very much in operational context. And so we understand customers are still going to deploy Splunk in on-premise scenarios.”

Solutions management

Minton shared: “Really, what we want to do as a solution kind of organization is we want to talk to customers about what their needs are. … How can we help you take advantage of this broad portfolio within Dell-EMC. And then we want to do the homework behind the scenes … we want to go through and validate and give customers that cloud-like experience, but with on-premise hardware,” Minton shared.

Yep acknowledged that while the current relationship with EMC is a cherished one, it will by no means be monogamous. “For us, we’ve always been historically agnostic as far as when we recommend what you should deploy to. And we’ve always sold software,” he began.

“The reality is that, with these partnerships … what we can do is, we can build really great reference material … and it makes life so much easier for that customer, or for partners … that want to deploy it. And so I see it as … down the road we may be able to partner with other people in a similar fashion.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE