For the second year in a row at Splunk .conf, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, sat down with Steve Sommer, Splunk CMO , discussing the top announcements that revved the audience at the event today, as well as major changes in the way the company goes to market.

For starters, there were twice as many attendees as last year, with 1,800 customers and partners from 44 different countries, from over 1,000 companies, representing every part of Splunk’s ecosystem.

Explaining the NO LIMITS tagline for this year’s event, Sommer said that it has a double meaning, referring to no limits in terms of innovation, but also of no limits as far as the internal usage of the innovation is concerned.

From machine data + log files to full-on Platform

“Five years ago the person using Splunk was an absolute power user in the trenches, a sys admin, security analyst or a network manager, and they all loved Splunk, but nowadays the recent capabilities we announced make it easier for non-technical people to do all the analytics in Splunk. There’s been a transformation from the power users to a broader set of users,” said Sommer.

The company has a huge and passionate customer base, practically part of the brand itself. Explaining this fact, Sommer giggled that “It all comes from the software. I’ve been told that Splunk is the only software company where the marketing actually undermarkets the software.” And that was the reason there were no marketing guys on stage for today’s presentations.

Vellante and Furrier then prodded Sommers to talk in depth about Splunk Enterprise, Hunk, the Cloud Platform, and BugSense.

“Today we had four major messages: the brand new release of Splunk 6, which delivers fast analytics for anyone, Splunk Enterprise as a cloud-based service – providing the full power of splunk as a cloud service and enabling you to do hibrid views. We discussed the recent acquisition of BugSense, a really cool mobile analytics application toolset, and we introduced Hunk – which is still in beta. The Hunk applies all the powerful exploration, visualization and analytics in Splunk to the massive data at rest inside Hadoop.”

Vellante asked what was new in Splunk Enterprise 6 and Soomer replied: “Splunk comes now with Search Processing Languages. To do more complicated analytics you need to be a bit of an expert. We’ve added fundamental data models and pivots built on top of high performance analytics stores, which enable non technical people who don’t know the search language do do the kind of analytics and visualizations they want to do, and do it quickly.”

“Last year we announced Splunk Storm, which was targeted specifically at the cloud-based developers, we had a very good market traction – both with free and paid users – but we started to see a lot of demand from our customers and prospects for a full production solution, something that could scale to a few terabytes of data per day, something that would offer the full API, the full enhancements and customizations, the full app ecosystem that Splunk Enterprise offers. And that was our big news today, offering Splunk Enterprise as a Cloud Service for any companies that want to use Splunk, but don’t want to run it on-premise themselves.”

Talking about the recent acquisition of BugSense, Sommer explained: “We have a lot of customers using Splunk for mobile app management; BugSense is one of the leaders in looking at mobile device data, taking data directly from your handset/smartphone and correlating it with all the other data that’s part of your mobile application and infrastructure management problem. Now we can do comprehensive, end-to-end user analytics and app analytics by incorporating BugSense with Splunk.”

Keeping the data in place

“We have customers that love Splunk, who also have big data stores,” said Sommer. “Hadoop is really good for cheap storage, and we’ve been told customers dream of having Splunk on top of Hadoop. The marketing guys thought it was a dream, but the engineering guys came up with a concept called ‘Virtual indexing’ that enables people to use the UI of Splunk and do powerful analytics on Hadoop. We now have partnerships with leading Hadoop distributions, because they’ve seen a lot of customers fail in terms of getting value out of Hadoop. Six to nine month projects with no value compared to 30 minutes to an hour projects that generate value out of data stores that are locked up on Hadoop.”

Wrapping up the interview, Furrier fished for “the biggest surprises seen in the five-year journey at Splunk.”

“When I joined Splunk I could see it was a great technology and the people were getting value out of it; what I didn’t see back then was Splunk turning into a platform – where you could develop, create apps, where there would be an ecosystem of 430 partners and where marketing people like me and web intelligence people would be using Splunk to get business value and not just troubleshooting the infrastructure,” admitted Sommer.  Yet, here we are.