Many see Splunk Inc. as the big big data company. They’ve got a lot of seven-figure deals filed away with large enterprises that implement their platform for bottom-up projects built from scratch by data scientists. So who would believe Splunk will be the ones to finally package big data into use-case ready products for smaller scale businesses?

Access to the computing foundation layer will help Splunk build easy-to-use products for industry verticals, according to Susan St. Ledger (pictured), president of worldwide field operations at Splunk. Her company is tapping ecosystem partners in the open-source community, the likes of Apache Spark and Flink experts, for the parts necessary to knock out specific business use cases. But just because Splunk is deep in the weeds of those big-data analytics frameworks doesn’t mean users have to soil their hands.

“We’re masking the complexity of those from the users,” St. Ledger said. “So instead of you having to do your own Spark environment and your own Flink environment, and having to figure out Kafka on your own and how you subscribe to it, we’re giving you all that. We’re masking all that for you and giving you the power of leveraging those tools.”

St. Ledger spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf18 event in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. They discussed Splunk’s foray into use-case ready products. (* Disclosure below.)

Many hands attack big problems in slim verticals

The end game for users of Splunk’s big-data platform is really digital transformation, St. Ledger said. “We started in [information technology] and security, but the reason for that is they were the first ones to truly do digital transformation,” she said.

So who isn’t ultimately aiming to digitally transform? No one; that’s why Splunk is just as applicable in other business units, St. Ledger said. For example, some Splunk customers are now using it in customer service applications. “Who would ever think ten years ago or even five years ago of Splunk as a customer experience platform?”

Splunk is opening the aperture to its ecosystem with microservices, application program interfaces and cloud integrations to help build solutions. “It’s really about the big problems that each of those verticals are trying to solve as opposed to the one corner use case that you could solve for one customer,”  St. Ledger said.

Improved machine learning technology will enable Splunk to get from a messy data platform to use-case ready solutions for industry verticals, St. Ledger said. “Machine learning helps drive actionable outcomes so much faster.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Splunk .conf18 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk .conf18. Neither Splunk Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE