In SiliconANGLE’s ongoing coverage of the 2012 Splunk conference in Las Vegas, Jeff Frick and Jeff Kelly spoke with Splunk CMO Steve Sommer about Splunk’s innovation in the big data space, emphasis on user experience, marketing strategy and cutting through the hype to ensure Splunk customers get what they need from data.

Regarding Splunk’s approach to big data Sommer explains, “The founders of Splunk originally realized it was extremely hard to manage applications and complex IT data centers and they came up with a brilliantly simple way to collect these massive streams of machine generated data and to make it searchable and analyzable to better run business. Whether they’re managing servers, virtual machines, networks, applications, or websites…We have [approximately] 4,400 customers using Splunk to better manage applications, infrastructure, security, compliance and websites based on that machine data that goes into Splunk and they can do the alerts and analytics to figure out exactly what’s going on.” He adds that customers are leveraging large amounts of data, including those that don’t come from the data center but from sources like flood engines and power generation equipment, GPS phones, social media, and using Splunk to gain better insights from it all.

User experience is key for Splunk, which is why, as Sommer explains, it has earned the moniker, “Google for the data center,” for its simple search bar that allows customers to find exactly what their looking for within massive data streams. Sommer notes that Splunk actually has many patents on the complex technologies to make functionality simple for customers. Jeff Frick asks, “How can you make it even more simple?” such that it can be made actionable on a mobile device. Sommer suggests making Splunk simpler and available for anyone to use involves making Splunk into a platform. He notes that Splunk has developed APIs so that “any developer can create these very simple apps with beautiful visualizations, leveraging the functionality of Splunk and the data that’s in Splunk in any way that that end user wants to consume it.” Mobile is impacting the business – running reliable mobile apps is challenging because the underlying networks of mobile infrastructure are very complicated.  “Splunk’s ability to take data from all the different sources, the end cell phone or smartphone, the mobile operator network data, your own application server data [and] correlate it, let’s people have much better views on the service levels their providing. Companies like ADP Mobile are using us for exactly that purpose.”

Jeff Kelly asks about timing, inquiring as to why Splunk is really “hitting its stride” as a big data corporation now. Sommer explains that Splunk is focused on the “real driver for big data,” which he considers machine data. The data that provides valuable business intelligence, like customer transactions, Sommer adds, is “often in a virtual world, not a physical store.”

Jeff Kelly notes that people have not always understood what big data was all about and, more specifically, the importance of machine data. Sommer explains that Splunk has taken steps to communicate the utility and significance of machine data. Splunk’s marketing strategy has focused on core users, protecting a perpetual software license for its free product as well as effective branding. “The high-level people have been more focused on traditional structured data…We’ve been able to educate people that machine data is just as valuable or probably more valuable than your traditional more business intelligence use cases. And, that’s why we refer to Splunk as a platform for operational intelligence.” Taking data and making it valuable for people within different positions within a company, from finance to IT, and being able to see and analyze it in real-time.

Jeff Frick follows up to ask how Splunk helps companies understand what big data can do for them without feeling overwhelmed. Sommer notes that there is a lot of “hype” around big data that leads companies to invest a lot of money in data scientists and teams. Splunk, however, allows companies to start small in a manner that is tailored to their specific needs. Sommer sees Splunk implementation as a linear process: “Most of our customers don’t start thinking they’re going to change the business with this machine data. They start thinking we’re going to troubleshoot, we’re going to monitor root cause analysis…then we’re going to start being more proactive and alert…then we’re gonna see how are we doing as a service provider with our SOAs and KPIs. And, then they realize, if we partner with the business side, we can take this data and understand really valuable insights for the business.” Sommer gives the example of an online services provider that can use Splunk to help determine which customers have declining usage patterns and which parts of the service do they tend to use more.

Sommer concludes discussing changes in the data world. He explains that traditionally there were silos of data throughout the enterprise, the people looking at data, the people running security, etch. Yet, now, with Splunk, you can correlate data from anywhere, which is why Sommer says, “with Splunk, all you need is a browser and your imagination…Splunk has a browser interface.”