Splunk Inc. is getting serious about this data platform thing. The company wants to get friendly with data from any source — not just the Splunk index. The idea is that a large, inclusive platform can ultimately get more juice from data — business insights, social impact, etc. — than a hodgepodge of software products.

“We believe, at the heart of every problem, is a data problem,” said Susan St. Ledger (pictured), president of worldwide field operations at Splunk. Think that’s an overstatement? St. Ledger named wildfires, the opioid crises, and human trafficking as examples of the issues people are attacking with data today.

“If everything’s a data problem, what you want is a platform that can operate against that data and remove the barriers between data and action,” she said. Splunk’s latest announcements home in on Splunk’s goal of analytics without borders. 

St. Ledger spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf19 event in Las Vegas. They discussed Splunk’s recent releases, its pricing model, and its social-good initiatives (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Platform rolls many point solutions into one

Splunk’s newly announced Data-to-Everything platform allows users to act swiftly across different data ecosystems. Its Data Fabric Search lets them query the Hadoop Distributed File System, Amazon Web Services Inc. S3 buckets, and more to come, according to St. Ledger. It also lets them “talk to” data with natural-language technology.

The Data Stream Processor in the platform offers a particularly unique capability. “We’re actually doing the ML on the livestreaming [data]. So … much more valuable than doing it in batch mode. The ability to create those ML models by working on live data is super powerful,” St. Ledger said. 

Customers who love formulating their own analytics use cases with Splunk will now have more ingredients at their disposal. And the more comprehensive platform may just win over those frugal small- and medium-sized businesses. Splunk is usually seen as the choice for deep-pocketed enterprises. But the economics and scale-out potential of a platform have something to offer smaller companies, according to St. Ledger.

“You can clutter up your environment with a bunch of point products doing all these different things and try and stitch them together. Or, you can go with the Splunk platform, which allows you to perform all of those same operations whether it be IT security or data analytics in general,” St. Ledger said. 

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