Splunk Inc. shares shot through the ceiling in 2017, climbing 62 percent year-over-year. What’s the company’s recipe for such sizable gains? For starters, there’s no such thing as too many cooks in Splunk’s kitchen, i.e., the SplunkTrust community of helpers.

“We’re not just a group to rubber stamp anything that Splunk does. But we’re also not a group to just sit there and complain about things we don’t like,” said Chris Kurtz (pictured), system architect and Splunk evangelist at Arizona State University and SplunkTrust member.

SplunkTrust trustees are devout Splunk users — customers or partners — who lend their expert hands to other Splunk users and to the company’s product developers. “It’s really very much a give and take” between Splunk and members, Kurtz explained. He spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf2017 event in Washington, D.C. (* Disclosure below.)

SplunkTrust feedback enhances platform

In helping fellow users out of technical jams, SplunkTrust members get the lowdown on pain points and hand it to Splunk. Their feedback helps Splunk engineers polish and debug the platform. Kurtz personally helped hone Splunk’s table datasets feature that simplifies data prep and analysis. Trustees also score advanced previews of beta or earlier potential product releases for critique.

“Splunk is generous and open enough to give us that access, and we take that very seriously — to be able to help guide Splunk into making their product the best it can be,” Kurtz said.

Interestingly, Splunk’s sometimes poo-pooed pricing is not on Kurtz’ list of cons. The pricing model is commensurate to the value his university derives from it as a catch-all for a whole range of data tasks. Because it’s schema on-demand, it’s use case on-demand, he stated.

“Every single good use case in the beginning was standing around the water cooler, having a drink and saying, ‘I wonder if we combine data set A and we combine data set B, we come up with something that nobody was asking about,'” Kurtz said. “And now we see something that we can help fix, we can help grow, we can make more efficient.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf2017. (* Disclosure: Splunk Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Splunk nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE