In the three years that Clint Sharp, the Splunk Corporation‘s Director of Product Management, Big Data & Operational Intelligence, has spent at Splunk, he’s seen the company grow from 400 to 1,400 employees. Sharp attributes Splunk’s success to its ability to help “customers solving real business problems.”

In addition to their mission to “provide value on top of the data, wherever the data rests,” Sharp also called out that “[Splunk’s] security markets are going gangbusters.” As the company continues to grow, Sharp said, CEO Godfrey Sullivan sees the “biggest opportunity in being able to offer intelligence in data on the move.”

Splunk Areas of Growth, Innovation

Splunk sees the push into “real time and being able to provide value on top of data in flight” as essential in the Big Data space. That doesn’t mean, though, that other areas of their company aren’t booming: “We’ve got more and more security customers on board everyday,” Sharp said, adding, “Enterprises are concerned about their security posture,” and a “newer, better approach” is exactly what Splunk intends to offer.

That said, Sharp admitted that Splunk has “a lot of competition from open source,” but suggested that since there’s “still a lot of assembly required there,” the folks using open source are “probably not [Splunk’s] customer any way.”

Yahoo: Splunk Newest Use Case

Sharp also commented on some of Splunk’s biggest recent news. In a joint press release, Yahoo discussed how it uses Hunk, a Hadoop-based product created by Splunk, to look at its data at rest. Yahoo also uses Hunk to help them run Hadoop more efficiently across a wide network. Sharp explained that Hunk helps Yahoo analyze the data they generate about themselves and streamline how they operate their Hadoop clusters.

A major factor in Splunk’s relationship with Yahoo, said Sharp, is the fact that Yahoo has a colossal amount of data. “Yahoo’s been doing this for so long,” Sharp commented, “a lot of the technology we’re seeing emerging — they build them first in house.” With such a history, Sharp suggested that Yahoo must generate nothing short of “petabytes of data a day.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataSV 2015.

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