How does a company nab and hold down one of the snazziest spots in the data-analytics market? It’s actually pretty simple: Give customers the ways and means to extract real insights from their data — stuff like better-designed products, more cash in the bank and higher customer counts.

Lowering the bar to practical data use is how Splunk Inc. is charging forward on the momentum it built up as an on-premises machine-data analytics platform. The company has since spread out to cloud and other technologies to help customers simply get stuff done with data.

“The people that can get that done increasingly are going to become the most valuable players on the field,” said the company’s chief executive officer, Doug Merritt (pictured).

Merritt spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf18 event in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. They discussed Splunk’s slate of new announcements and its work to put big data into more people’s hands. (* Disclosure below.)

Speeding ahead toward practical data innovation

Splunk’s business was fine and dandy while initially focused on information technology and security services. But increasingly, HR, finance, marketing, sales, manufacturing, etc., will not be successful without a really competent group of folks that can make things happen with data, according to Merritt.

“Our job is to lower that bar, so you don’t have to go to Carnegie Mellon for four years and get a master’s in computer science and data science to be able to be that most valuable person on the field,” Merritt said.

Splunk’s partnership with the public cloud powerhouse, Amazon Web Services Inc., is pushing it to speed up its own innovation cycle. “Our job is run faster than Amazon, and I think that this show and our announcements help illustrate that. Our invention cycle is in high-tilt gear,” Merritt said.

Splunk made 20 announcements at this week’s event, some of which see it sallying into line-of-business and others geared toward developers. For example, its Developer Cloud has an enhanced application program interface layer that interacts with the different services in the Splunk portfolio.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Splunk .conf18 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk .conf18. Neither Splunk Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE