Covering the Splunk Conference live from Las Vegas this week, theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante managed to track down Rich Collier, Prelert’s Principal Solutions Architect, to discuss the current event and the new developments of the company. trying to explain the general excitement of the people attending the event, Collier stated they primarily come here to learn new things, as this is “the intrinsic aspect of this conference.”

Why Prelert built on Splunk

For those unfamiliar with the company, Prelert has built an anomaly detection application that sits on top of the Splunk platform. Despite being fairly small with a headcount under 20, the company already sports offices in London and Boston, making predictive analytics software for IT operations, trying to provide the users with a set of tools that enhance the way that they look at data. It is similar to the way statistics has helped other things, from weather forecasting to election predictions.

Vellante wanted to know whether there was any particular industry focus for Prelert, or was it horizontal? “It’s really across the board,” said Colliers. “We’ve got users that are social media companies, security companies, banks, insurance companies, basically anyone trying to get more value out of their data with less human effort.”

Vellante summarized some of the features of Prelert: it beefs up Splunk, making it more scalable and more functional, providing deeper function, and there’s also a performance aspect. He wanted to know how this was working out, as both companies evolve all the time.

“We certainly spend a lot of time with Splunk at a corporate level, understanding things; we work a lot with the product Management team and discuss how we can work together better and we’re very much in-tune with the engineering roadmap. Splunk was so impressed with what we’ve done, they wanted us to be heavily involved with the new Splunk 6 app framework,” boasted Collier, “because of all the new changes that were involved there.”

Are you typically selling to the IT function? or increasing the business function? Vellante prodded Collier to talk more about who their customers are. “When we first released our app we were in the sweet spot of IT ops and performance management crowd – traditional data center monitoring, infrastructure, application monitoring and so forth. With our most recent release, we’ve started getting a lot of traction in the security context. We do have some customers who’ve been using us on business data, but the big push is now in the security side.”

Always searching for the unknown unknowns

“If you can’t search for it, how do you know what’s out there?” rhetorically asked Collier. “I think a lot of security experts are now coming to grips with using more of our statistical method to find what’s different in their data, instead of relying on traditional tools,” said Rich Collier, and Vellante added it’s about “finding out what you don’t know.”

Looking at the automation of things, Furrier asked Rich Collier what the next leg of their journey was. Not aiming short of perfection, Collier replied: “We want to make our technology so ubiquitous that everyone can use it.”