Big-data analytics company Splunk Inc. is committed to expanding its business to broader enterprise solutions and maintain its market growth. Following recent acquisitions, the company’s aspiration is to bridge the gap between developers and information-technology teams to enable organizations to work across their entire data landscapes, according to Rick Fitz (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of the IT Markets Group at Splunk Inc.

In August, Splunk announced the acquisition of the cloud application monitoring firm SignalFX Inc. for $1.058 billion, in its largest-ever deal. In September, the company bought Omnition, which provides distributed tracing to improve monitoring across microservices applications.

“I saw the distance between IT operations and development, and I said, ‘That’s interesting because it’s being driven by this new application architecture cloud,” Fitz said. “I didn’t want to be left behind. I wanted to actually be able to build a bridge for IT operations into this future.”

Fitz and Karthik Rau (pictured, left), vice president and area general manager of SignalFx, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf19 event in Las Vegas. They discussed the plans after Splunk’s acquisition of SignalFx (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Aligned culture and customer focus

To bridge development and IT, Splunk provides a data platform that allows teams to monitor and observe data, regardless of data source or application type. “We’ve actually spent a lot of time trying to invest into the streaming world of dealing with things in stream, and these guys [SignalFX] have perfected that for metrics,” Fitz pointed out. “Combining what they’ve already done in tracing with Omnition just doubles down on this future of his application architecture.”

The aligned culture of the companies helps in the business combination process. “When we started a partnership conversation with Splunk, it just became very clear that there was a tremendous amount of product fit, vision fit, culture fit, values fit,”  Rau said. “Everything was just so aligned that we realized that we could do so much more together as one company.”

Rau also sees alignment with Omnition. “These are very similar philosophies around leveraging the power of analytics and monitoring,” Rau stated. “We just actually focused on different parts of the problem because we’re both relatively early in this effort. So, we effectively doubled up the team’s capacity overnight and accelerated a roadmap by several quarters.”

Splunk’s strategy for making the combination work is to focus on customer needs and expectations, according to Fitz. “These guys were running 100 miles an hour. We gotta get them to go to 1,000 miles. And we’re really going to make adjustments to the business case in order to achieve that,” Fitz said. “What we’re here to do is to shepherd this organization in its entirety to the greatness that I think we all see out there, and we’re going to do that very carefully.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Splunk .conf19 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk .conf19. Neither Splunk Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE