Attending the Splunk Conference in Las Vegas, Dave Vellante, Chief Analyst with Wikibon, welcomed Sanjay Mehta & Manish Kalra to theCUBE, where they discussed the goals and objectives of the freshly released Splunk 6, and also provided a live demo (full video below).

Sanjay Mehta, VP of Product Marketing, starts by sharing Splunk’s primary goal: “making machine data very accessible, usable and valuable to everyone.”

It is an ongoing process, requiring a lot of work, as Mehta said: “We are constantly progressing on that mission, and Splunk is really all about ‘how you take data and put it in the hands of everyone’. We’ve basically delivered three breakthrough innovations that together represent a game changing factor,” claimed Mehta, who insisted it was not his choice of words, but their customers’. “Our customers genuinely believe these are game changing features.”

New in Splunk 6

Talking about the new features of Splunk 6, Mehta went into detail:

1. The Pivot Interface – provides the ability to analyze data without writing or learning a query language.
2. The Data Model – the concept, for those familiar with Splunk, it enables you to add meaning to underline raw machine data
3. High Performance Analytics Store – it improves the performance of an analytics kinds of operations by about 1000x.

“There’s a lot more, but these are the three things we’re leading with,” explained Mehta. Vellante picked up on that thought, noting that “the Holy Grail of Big Data seems to be putting analytics in the hands of not just the power users and the technology geeks, but in the hands of everyday line-of-business users.”

The three capabilities described (fast, easy and flexible), seem to deliver exactly that. As for the types of people who are going to be accessing this platform, Mehta mentioned the security teams of IT departments, but also the business users who recently found value in the analytics.

“We’ve seen this migration of people in IT taking this information and putting it on the desk of the C-level person or the business user,” clarified Mehta. “They are helping them getting a much richer sense out of their digital services, websites, infrastructure, their products; everything that they’re doing is part of their company and they get a richer sense of what’s happening, in real-time, using Splunk.”

Splunk 6 Demo

To exemplify, Manish Kalra, Director of Product Marketing, proceeded to demo Splunk 6, showing its use of columnar technology to dramatically increase the speed of data processing.

You can see the whole segment below. To quote Kalra, the entire process is greatly simplified in this version of Splunk: “All I needed to know was how to use a mouse.”