This week in big data has certainly been a very exciting one for Wall Street, not to mention the two companies that managed to earn themselves a huge financial boost.

The first one is Splunk, which went public this week.  It offers solutions that analyze machine data and logs, aggregate it all, and reformats the datasets into metrics and other visualized forms that make more sense to the business user.  Evidently, this concept caught the eye of not only clients but also of investors.

Splunk and its stakeholders made about 13.5 million shares available on the stock exchange, quickly gobbled up by the market at a price that exceeded the initial forecast of $8-$10 per share in a matter of minutes. SLPK is currently standing at $35.48.

The success of Splunk’s public offering is good news for not only the analytics firm but for the entire industry as well; a collection of vendors that have grown into this market in a remarkably short period of time.

A startup called Skybox Imaging had its own portion of the spotlight this week, thanks to a massive funding round. They raised $70 million in a third round of funding, but what’s more interesting is where this capital will be going.

Skybox doesn’t stray too far from its name: the vision is to fire up several satellites with state-of-the-art cameras built in, used to capture information about what’s happening below in previously inaccessible detail. This is where the analytics part comes in, and Skybox’s plan is to sell the data its scientists can distill from the photos to various industries.

Last but not least is this week’s OpenStack buzz, specifically the portion that ties in with big data. Dell and Rackspace are both advancing in this direction.