Splunk Inc. today announced that pioneering computer scientist David DeWitt is joining the company in the role of vice president and technical fellow to support software engineering efforts.

DeWitt, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is joining Splunk after a more than four-decade career researching database technologies. Part of that time was spent outside academia, at major enterprise software companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Snowflake Inc. 

“David is one of the most renowned database thinkers in modern computing and we are thrilled to welcome him as we continue to turn data into doing across a wide spectrum of critical use cases,” said Shawn Bice, Splunk’s president of products and technology.

Prior to joining MIT, DeWitt spent more than 30 years as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. In the 1980s, DeWitt created Gamma, a pioneering parallel database that introduced several foundational techniques used by data management systems to this day.

Companies nowadays process far more information that can fit on a single server or cloud instance. Consequently, information and the work involved in processing it is split across multiple machines. Using a cluster of machines allows a database to run many computations in parallel instead of performing them one after another, hence the term parallel database.

Practically all modern data management systems, including Splunk’s namesake platform for analyzing infrastructure logs and other information, use parallel computation techniques to speed up processing. Gamma, the early parallel database invented by DeWitt at the University of Wisconsin, introduced several methods that are used to this day in data projects.

Gamma contained parallel algorithms that allowed it to perform common database operations such as combining two pieces of information together faster than earlier systems. DeWitt also developed a method of more efficiently scheduling the order in which database operations are carried out. For his work on Gamma, DeWitt received the Association for Computing Machinery’s prestigious ACM Software Systems award and was later elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

“Organizations need a streamlined way to analyze and act on their data across multiple sources and cloud environments,” DeWitt said in a statement today. “Serving as a Splunk technical fellow is a wonderful opportunity to advance data analysis and query strategies as data volumes exponentially increase worldwide.”

The news that DeWitt is joining Splunk marks the company’s fourth executive appointment in less than a month. Previously, Splunk named company veteran Sendur Sellakumar to the role of senior vice president and chief cloud officer and appointed Claire Hockin senior vice president and chief marketing officer. Additionally, the company said former Amazon Web Services Inc. executive Garth Fort is joining as new chief product officer. 

Photo: Splunk