When Big Data started to really take flight a couple of years ago, many inside the industry anticipated that major application development would follow. After all, what use is it to have access to so much unstructured data if you have no means to analyze and utilize it? While some Big Data companies have started creating applications for Hadoop and other Big Data platforms, none have taken a dominant role in this market space. Splunk aims to change that, and so far the company is off to a very good start.

According to Wikibon lead Big Data analyst Jeff Kelly, Big Data’s return on investment in Hadoop has not been as great as companies had hoped (about 51 cents for every dollar invested in 2012). What Wikibon found is that organizations simply do not have the tools to extract value from their data. Splunk’s Big Data application development platform provides them with an avenue to make that happen. The market is begging for a system that can log data and apply it to a large Big Data ecosystem, allowing developers to build across application sources.

Splunk’s Big Data products include Hunk, analytics software that simplifies and accelerates Big Data analysis and interaction, Splunk Hadoop Connect, Hadoop Management, and Splunk DB Connect. In order to foster even more application development, Splunk offers SDK (software developer kits) for C#, PHP, Ruby, Java, Javascript, and Python that give developers the ability to create Splunk apps with custom dashboards, data visualizations, and user interfaces.

Proof that Splunk’s products have been well received in the Big Data market is evident in the company’s revenue. For Q2 2013, Splunk reported $66.9 million in revenue, an increase of 50% from the same quarter last year. In doing so, Splunk has poised itself to dominate the Big Data application arena the way Google came to dominate the search industry. Splunk will have to compete with big companies like IBM to do this, but so far, it is off to a strong start.