Eighteen years after its founding, Splunk Inc. has become a central part of the big data conversation. The company has grown to over 7,500 employees and counts 91 of the Fortune 100 companies as customers.

Over that time, Splunk’s role has evolved from being just one of many tech tools within an organization to empowering information technology, DevOps and security teams in driving overall business growth. Behind a quirky and irreverent culture fueled by a fondness for black Splunk T-shirts and barbecues on the company patio during all-night projects is a firm that helps power much of the digital economy today.

“We are a serious company; what we do in the data plane of tens of thousands of organizations globally literally makes a difference on whether they are successful or not,” said Doug Merritt (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Splunk. “One second of latency can have a 10% drop-off in fulfillment of a transaction. For Walmart, that’s a billion dollars a week if you can’t get their system to perform at the level it needs to.”

Merritt spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf21 Virtual event. They discussed Splunk’s revenue, go-to-market strategy and future enhancements for its data platform. (* Disclosure below.)

Targeting a $90-billion market

Merritt has been along for seven years of Splunk’s journey. He joined the company in 2014 when the business was generating $300 million in annual revenue.

“We’ll be well over $3 billion in ARR this year,” Merritt said. “We have tried to stay very focused on a go-to-market basis for serving the technical triumvirate of the cyber teams, the ITOps teams and the App Dev/DevOps teams. That’s $90 billion of total addressable market.”

As Splunk has grown since 2003, so has the enterprise database market. By Merritt’s estimation, there are at least 16 basic categories of database tools today, ranging from graph and relational to data warehouse and ledger.

“That’s not because we are all stupid in tech,” Merritt said. “A graph database is different than a relational database, which is different than what we do with our schemaless index. Within the swim lane that you are in, which for us is this nonstructured, high-volume difficult data to manage, now the problem is how to create that nonbroken, end-to-end view so you can handle your use cases effectively. We will stay on top of enriching that data platform and ensure that we provide better APIs and better interfaces.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during the Splunk .conf21 Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk’s .conf21 Virtual conference. Neither Splunk, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE