Splunk .conf 2012 – CEO Godfrey Sullivan, Splunk, with Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick

The Cube’s Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick sat down with Splunk CEO and Chairman Godfrey Sullivan at the company’s annual user conference, .conf 2012. The conference, now in its third year, has moved to Las Vegas to accommodate its increasing size. Over 1,000 attendees have turned out for this year’s event. More than Splunk’s conference attendee list is growing.

The Case for Splunk and Big Data

The company spent a decade building its platform to monitor and analyze machine data. The hard work paid off. In April, Splunk had a wild successful IPO, and many people are taking note. According to Sullivan, Splunk added almost 400 new customers in its last quarter. He believes the platform’s pricing model and simplicity are major contributors to its success. Companies can download Splunk free, install it within minutes, later convert it to a paid subscription and scale it as their needs grow.

Splunk is hot now, but things have not always been so great. Kelly asked Sullivan to elaborate on a point from the keynote – the challenges the vendor faced having to sell companies on the product and the value of machine. Sullivan admitted, it was a very difficult endeavor. A few years ago, most companies viewed machine data like configuration details, event queues and log files as little more than digital debris that was only useful if some catastrophic problem occurred.

These businesses are missing opportunities to gain better insight and control over everything from databases to virtualization infrastructure. Sullivan explained how Splunk could be used to as part of a big data solution to analyze data stored within Hadoop.

Splunk has made a significant effort to educate technology executives. Sullivan explained Splunk’s founding team used a foundational business problem, “If a transaction went into one side of the IT blender and never came out…Why not?” to drive the development and evangelism efforts. The number of businesses that understand machine data can be a source of valuable insight is growing each day.

Splunk Beyond IT

Splunk It’s time for Splunk to move on to its next challenge – expanding its reach beyond IT.  Items from airplanes to cable boxes produce data that can be monitored, collected and analyzed. Splunk could be used to tie into building security systems or with road sensors to understand traffic patterns. Sullivan says there is almost and endless list of possibilities, but many companies aren’t capitalizing on the value of Splunk outside of the technology. That’s something he plans to change.

Sullivan told Kelly, and perhaps warned investors, “We are investing everything we make in growing the business.” Some might see the move as risky, but Splunk has a dominant market position, and if it plans on retaining it, it will have to aggressively continue to improve its capabilities.