The energy around the .conf2012 Splunk conference has been a fascinating watch.  In one of the segments viewable on the SiliconAngle channel, Guido Schroeder, the SVP of products for Splunk dropped in on theCube with Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick to talk about the state of Splunk and what makes it the opportunity to the enterprise that it is.

Schroeder discussed his background of over 10 years at SAP, and in coming over to Splunk, how much the leadership and management make it a great experience.  The company is geared towards growth at every level.  Splunk is a different offering to the enterprise, especially when compared to BI.  One big difference is the lack of a notion of modeling or schema effort.  What Splunk identifies is what data is interesting to the customer, but doesn’t require a modeling effort.  Also the viral nature of product is different as well.  And this is something Splunk gotten absolutely right.  Customers can download the free product, try it, find use cases, and grow it.  This is a very deliberate use-case approach that looked at the base issue of getting to information.  It also has changed the way the product is sold.  Opposed to long sales cycles, the customer essentially does the selling themselves.  With a free model, the product naturally scales out and this marks a different way of getting the product sold.

From the beginning Splunk has focused on concrete use cases and working and innovating with customers.  The company continues to do this and is driven by what the customers are telling them.  This is part of Splunk’s formula for success.  By starting in the datacenter, the product easily moves into other areas as new use cases come up.  With a concerted mission to stay flexible, the efforts are to become more of a platform that supports use cases.  At the core are principles that make this a viable platform.  Attention to re-use allows the company to focus on making this optimized platform, and includes those features such as index, search, and visualization.  A principle of modular features pushes innovations that keep the product fresh and flexible, such as implementing developer interfaces.  Efforts to keeping it very clean, from UI perspective are very obvious.  The SDK basically adds language specific wrappers on top, in order make it easier to consume for different developers.  This is another example of how Splunk’s growth drives new things being done in the architecture, opening up consumption by developers, becoming more modular and going after interoperability.   Altogether, with an awareness that these things don’t exist in a silo, they need to look after infrastructure, applications, security, and beyond.

To the future of Splunk, Schroeder discusses the breadth of efforts, and how this calls for prioritization.  With much pride in being an agile shop, the focus on strategies encapsulate the road ahead and on into long-term goals.  With such a dynamic range of applications and uses – such as the magnitude of the big data story, enterprise scale, virtualization, an ever-broadening set of applications, and a new Splunk cloud-based product, a storm of efforts are going on.  Currently scalability and performance are very high in the evolving product story.  New clustering availability gets them to the next level of resiliency.  There are a number of acceleration features that are also evolving the product.  The product releases are also codenamed after ponies, a charming backstory that I will leave to the video very much worth watching.