New baked-in machine learning tools take Splunk Inc.’s platform to the next level of big data management, but how can the company maintain the simplicity of its on-premises solutions in an increasingly popular multicloud world?

Where many trade show keynote speeches garner obligatory “golf course claps,” the crowd at this week’s Splunk.conf event reacted to Splunk’s ML upgrades with “genuine applause,” according to one analyst attending the show. That’s because the data analytics company has stayed true to its community of software developers and information technology administrators with the singular goal of taking the “SH out of IT,” as conference schwag T-shirts proudly boast.

Launched in 2003, Splunk has a history of analyzing machine data to boost security and simplify data management at the enterprise level. Now a billion-dollar company with strong second-quarter revenues, Splunk’s dedication to simplifying operational complexities in data management puts it “at the heart of big data,” said Dave Vellante (pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the kickoff segment of Splunk.conf in Washington, D.C.

Sitting with fellow Wikibon analyst George Gilbert (pictured, left), the two experts discussed the evolution of Splunk and its current challenges as it faces an increasingly complex and competitive big data market. (* Disclosure below.)

Keep it simple in a complex world

As big data becomes a central interest for modern businesses, Splunk evolves its strategy to meet growing demands for cloud-ready analytics tools. The trick is to maintain dedication to simplified processes as Splunk shifts away from self-contained, on-prem solutions to the hodgepodge environments characterizing the cloud.

“Splunk had this wonderful thing on-prem where they were really the only one who was unifying big data. In the cloud, it hasn’t happened yet,” Gilbert said.

With rising competition from Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, two cloud service providers ramping up application cycles to offer specialized analytics tools, Splunk looks to its loyal community as it builds up an ecosystem for cloud-ready environments.

Claiming 50 percent of its clients use cloud or hybrid cloud environments, Splunk is finding its footing in the public cloud trend. “When you’re working with Splunk on-prem, you’re really in a very different ecosystem than when you’re using it in the cloud,” Gilbert said. “In the cloud, you might want to take advantage of special-purpose machine learning tools or special purpose analytics databases,” such as those offered by AWS, he furthered.

Part of Splunk’s evolution is to offer more apps that dig deeper into analytics services and work horizontally across its platform, and to allow the ecosystem to develop apps on top of the platform. According to the analysts, this is a significant step in the right direction.

“What they’re starting to do, which is really significant, is build the apps on top, which go deep. The apps like Splunk User Behavior Analytics and Splunk Enterprise Security … those apps come pre-trained to know how to read the customer’s landscape, put a map together and then also how to figure out when services are not acting quite right, what to investigate,” Gilbert explained. “They come with administrator knowledge baked in.”

ML apps breed coopetition

Machine learning plays a key role in Splunk’s cloud strategy, with expanded platform offerings unveiled this morning. Baking in ML capabilities, Splunk broadens its appeal beyond data scientists. Splunk can look into a customer’s business and determine what’s normal so it can boost performance monitoring and security by better detecting anomalies.

Yet even Splunk and its algorithmically intelligent platform can’t escape the paradoxical matter of increasing complexities as it tries to resolve them. To this end, Splunk rallies strategic partners like AWS for deeply integrated offerings, even if such partnerships appear counterintuitive in such a fiercely competitive industry.

“To stay in that self-contained and compatible sort of platform, sphere, this little biosphere, wherever it may be, you lose out on the platform-specific, specialized services that might be on any particular platform,” Gilbert said. The coopetition between Splunk and larger cloud providers will present tradeoffs for Splunk’s customers, but according to Gilbert, “The fact that you have that tradeoff is good — it’s choice.”  

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk .conf2017. (* Disclosure: Splunk sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Splunk nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE