As the roles and sources of data continue to expand for so many companies, automation is increasingly becoming a necessity, not just to pull that data into storage, but for determining what sorts of questions should be asked in its analysis.

At the 2016 Splunk.conf event, Jon Rooney, senior director of Product Marketing at Splunk Inc., and Andi Mann, chief technology advocate at Splunk, joined John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and John Furrier (@furrier), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about Splunk’s expanding interests and applications, as well as where they see things going from here.

Mingled energy

Both guests were enthusiastic about the conference, largely due to the engagement with customers it enabled.

“There’s a great vibe at this show,” Mann said. “I mean, it’s something I’ve just heard from this company is that customers are such a part of their life-blood, and they love to be here, love to be with each other, love to learn about stuff, they love to tell each other how good things are going. When they listen to the keynotes, you can really feel the buzz going. People are just really into what we do and the results we get, and that gives us a lot of energy.”

Growing from the base

Rooney and Mann also shared some insights into how Splunk was working to grow while holding onto its core principles.

“In hiring and growing, and how we treat our customers, we really try to not let go of the things from the early days,” Rooney said. “Going back about three to four years, we wanted to make sure that the fundamental things that Splunk did well – the data ingestion, the correlation, the visualization – we made sure that that was a platform, that was extensible, that was something that not only we could build on, but our partners could build on.”

He continued: “And then over time, what we found the more we talked to customers, the more we heard about how they were using the product, we wanted to focus on ‘what are the pillars of the business?’. And that’s why we really doubled down on IT operations and security, to build out these solutions … that are hyped-focused on those users … but still take advantage of everything great with the platform.”

Disruptive synergy

Rooney explained: “Ultimately, if the big driver of this is businesses want to move faster, they want to do more and they want to learn faster, you can’t do that stuff manually. Infrastructure is good, it has to be software-driven, it has to be data-driven. … Ultimately, all the ditch-digging is done by the technology so that the people are freed up to actually add value.”

Rooney also shared information on some of the areas that are currently seeing the biggest growths of interest from customers and developers. “The paradigm for working with Splunk from the beginning was ‘get it all in one place and ask questions of it,’ he said. “And that’s still massively powerful, it’s still a powerful use-case for a lot of customers, but I think there’s a huge opportunity from the analytics side to say, ‘How about your data starts to tell you some things? How about your data proactively does some pattern recognition, does some predictive things, does some threshold analysis?’”

He continued: “And now, all of a sudden, you can expand the scope of the type of data you put in. Essentially, you’re gaining this scale that you wouldn’t normally have, because the software’s doing more of the work. It’s not just answering questions, it’s coming up with the questions for you.”

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