An abundance of data is the blessing and curse of the digital era. While the ability to gather huge amounts of data is great, static data can’t create value or drive business decisions. Businesses need fast access to clean data for effective analysis. Enabling the insights essential to build a competitive edge.

“Data is awesome, but we all have data to get to decisions first and actions second,” said Doug Merritt (pictured), chief executive officer of Splunk Inc.

Merritt spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf19 event in Las Vegas. They discussed key announcements from the conference and Splunk’s new strategy and branding (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.) Questions and answers have been condensed for clarity.

Furrier: It’s the 10-year anniversary of Splunk .conf. What are some of the key things being delivered at this event that people should know about?

Merritt: What we’re trying to communicate with the Data-to-Everything [Platform] is that you need a very multifaceted data platform to be able to handle the huge variety of data that we’re all dealing with … [and] what we’ve been doing with the platform and the depth and breadth of what we been working on honestly for four-plus years, it really … has come together in a unique way at the show.

Now we can operate on data in the stream when it’s in motion. We, obviously, still have all the great properties of the Splunk index … [and] we can go get data wherever it lives across the distributed Splunk environment, but increasingly across more and more distributed data environments.

Furrier: The success of a platform comes from two things: ecosystem and apps. If you’re a platform that’s enabling value, you’ve got to have those. Talk about how you see the ecosystem success and the app success. Is that happening?

Merritt: It is happening. We have over 2,000 apps on our Splunkbase framework, which is where any of our customers can go and download the application. Why aren’t there 20,000, 200,000, 2,000,000 apps out there? A piece of it is we have had to up the game on how you interface with the platform, and for us that means to a stable set of services — well-mannered, well-articulated, consistently maintained services. And that’s been a huge push with the core Splunk index.

So, that investment to make sure we got an effective and stable set of services has been key. But then you complement that with the amazing set of partners that are out there and making sure they’re educated and enabled on how to take advantage of the platform. Then feather in things like the Splunk Ventures announcement, the Innovation Fund, and the Social Impact Fund, to further double down on, “Hey, we are here to help in every way.”

Furrier: Talk about some of the changes with the platform and business model, such as consumption charges.

Merritt: Without action, there’s no point in gathering data, so that is absolutely squarely where we’ve been focused … translating that data into value and into actual outcomes, which is why our orchestration automation pieces are so important. We really are customer-centric, and whether you want a more liberal data volume or whether you want to switch to an infrastructure, we’re there. And our job is to help you understand that value translation on both of those because all that matters is turning it into action.

When you get to a certain threshold, we stop charging altogether. Once you get above tens of terabytes or hundreds of terabytes, just put as much data in as you want.

The foundation of Splunk is that we’re the only technology that still exists on the index side that takes raw nonformatted data — doesn’t force you to cleanse or scrub it in any way — and then takes all that raw data and actually provides value through the way that we interact with the data with our query language. That design architecture, I’ve said it for five/six years now, is completely unique in the industry. Everybody else thinks you’ve got to get to the data you want to operate on and then put it somewhere.

The way that life works is much more organic and emergent. You’ve got chaos happening, and then how do you find patterns and value in that chaos? Let’s make it easy for you to put that data in, to find those nuggets. But then once you know what the pattern is, now you’re in a different world. Now you’re in the structured data world of metrics, or key performance indicators, or events, or multi-dimensional data that is much more curated.

Furrier: I notice also at the event there’s a focus on verticals. Can you comment on the strategy there? Is that by design?

Merritt: That is definitely by design. So we launched with an IT operations focus, we went in progression over the years to security operations focus, and then are doubling down with Omnition, SignalFX, VictorOps [acquisitions]. And now Streamlio is a new acquisition on the DevOps and next-gen AppDev buying centers.

As a company in how we go to market and what we are doing with our own solutions, we stay incredibly focused on those three very technical buying centers; but we’ve also seen that data is data. So, the data you’re bringing in to solve a security problem can be used to solve a manufacturing problem or a logistics and supply chain problem, or a customer sentiment analysis problem. So, how do you make use of that data across those different pine centers? We’ve stood up that verticals group to continue to seed the opportunity within those different verticals.

The overall platform is completely agnostic and horizontal, the solutions on top — the security operations, IT ops, and DevOps — are very specific to those users, but they’re using the horizontal platform.

Furrier: The new branding — Data-to-Everything — jumps out to me as it’s not product-specific. It’s a whole next-level Splunk. What is the vision?

Merritt: When I thought about the issues that are blockers to Splunk eventually fulfilling the destiny that we could have, the number one is awareness. Who the heck is Splunk? People have a very high variance of their understanding of Splunk; log aggregation, security tool, IT tool. And what we’ve seen over and over is it is much more of this data platform, and certainly with the announcements it’s becoming more this data fabric or platform that can be used for anything. So how do we bring awareness to Splunk?

Everything is solvable with data, so we’re trying to really reinforce the importance of data and the capabilities Splunk brings. Cloud becomes a really important message to that because it makes it so much easier for people to immediately try something and get value. But on-premise will always be important as well because data has gravity, data has risk, data has cost to move, and there are so many use cases where you just never push data to the cloud. And it’s not because we don’t love cloud. If you have a factory that’s producing 100 terabytes an hour in an area where you’ve got poor bandwidth, there’s no option for a cloud connect there of high scale. So, you’d better be able to process, make sense of, and act on that data locally.

Furrier: Data for good is a current topic, with a lot of entrepreneurs for profit or nonprofit doing ventures for good. Can you talk about that?

Merritt: [Data for good] is a constant theme within Splunk. We’re really excited about what we’ve done with Splunk4Good as our nonprofit-focused entity. And then the Splunk Social Impact Fund, which is trying to put our money where our mouth is.

With every invention and with everything that occurs in the world, there’s the power to take it and make a less noble execution. There are always potential harmful activities, and then there’s the power to actually drive good. And data is one of those: Data can be used as a weapon and can be used negatively. But it also needs to be liberated so that can be used positively.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Splunk .conf19 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk .conf19. Neither Splunk, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE