In their ongoing coverage of Splunk Conference 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante spoke with Clint Sharp, Director of Product Management, Big Data and Operational Intelligence at Splunk business analytics, in theCUBE. The three discuss the secret to Splunk’s success despite increased competition, benefits of search and the future of analytics offerings.

Vellante has observed more companies entering the market and asks Sharp, “What gives you the confidence [that] you can stay ahead of the competition?” Sharp says the secret to Splunk’s success lies in the way the company looks at data. Unlike other companies, he suggests Splunk is “Not just schema lists and NoSql. Splunk is reading [at] search time… We go and search for the data and we structure it then, [while] many people are doing schema on read.” Sharp says the customers appreciate the “search bar experience” Splunk provides.

Splunk is certainly changing the traditional analytics scenario for customers. According to Sharp, typically 60 to 70 percent of time invested in business intelligent projects goes into processes like building rows and columns, ETL, and designing data. Splunk’s approach is different, allowing users to input unstructured or structured data as is and receive structured analytics. In turn, customers save money from not having to build the infrastructure necessary for analysis. While some companies aim to simply help customer successfully input data, many customers need to search and explore data. Splunk helps customers easily search and iterate upon data.

Furrier asks Sharp’s opinion on mobile. Sharp acknowledges that “mobile is everywhere [and] generating a ton of data.” Splunk helps customers gather data on mobile applications on the server-side so that they can coordinate what’s happening on the actual client with the actual server.

Watch the full-interview below:

Vellante asks about how far the industry has company has come in business intelligence. Essentially he asks: “Can analytics help customers anticipate what the next step is going to be? Are we at that point?” Sharp responds, “We’re not there yet, but we want to go there. We do a lot of that today, it’s just a little more esoteric than we’d like it to be.” Splunk provides some sophisticated analytics capabilities in its search language today, but “we just have to work and find them,” says Sharp. He adds, “We should be able to do that because heuristically, we know what the norms are.” He believes what customers need is anomaly detection, better clustering, and, in general, “things that are going to make their lives easier.”

Asking about the corporate culture, Furrier inquires, “What is one of the guiding principles that you guys put forth through your teams?” Sharp jokingly responds, “In it to win it.” He goes on to describe that the company truly believes in working and playing hard. He says, “I leave the office at about 6:30pm. If you come back at midnight, there are people still there coding.” Furrier quips, certainly the company is doing something right when he hears end users say, “Splunk allows me to dream.”