How Splunk Aims to Tame Flood of Internet of Things Data

By Chris Preimesberger

Splunk Chairman and CEO Godfrey Sullivan brought humor and a positive stage presence to his opening keynote as he introduced key Splunk customers Coca-Cola, GE Capital and Red Hat. Each of them explained why they chose Splunk, what it does for them and why it’s so important to the long-term strategy of each company. Splunk, which has an open platform but is not an open-source product, is the only non-open source software Red Hat uses.

Coca-Cola Co. is a rather significant Splunk customer. Michael Connor, senior platform architect at the world’s largest soft drink maker, had a couple of memorable lines during his Splunk testimony. “Welcome, all, to Las Vegas. I suppose the sight of 3,000 data scientists coming into a casino would be frightening to the gambling supervisors.” And another gem: “Always remember: Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”

Splunk is already among the IT front-runners in indexing, monitoring and generally taking stock of machine data in the Internet of things, which is substantial now but only stands to become more and more difficult to manage with the extreme proliferation of unstructured data that is on the way into the world’s IT systems.

Besides the front-line Splunk Enterprise, which is now GA in version 6.2, the company also has three other versions for specific purposes: Splunk Cloud, which is everything Enterprise is but delivered via a subscription service; Hunk, which is a specialized version for use atop other types of analytics, such as Hadoop; and Spunk Mint, its platform for managing mobile data.

Red Hat, the world’s largest open-source products company, isn’t timid about telling people what it wants to do. The data points in the slide describe a forthcoming 24/7 Splunk dashboard to assess continuously the business value of its own Website, collect product download logs for analysis, do predictive anaylses on those logs and continue to grow its partnership with Splunk.

Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon explained in his presentation that Splunk provides a true integrated view of all security-related events in all the company’s systems; that is very important in day-to-day work. Splunk captures and manages system status, both inside and outside all of its data centers; it also shows performance of RedHat.com in real time. RedHat.com is far and away the company’s chief access point for users.

That’s pretty much the mantra at Splunk. Most companies have piles of data stored up in siloes located across the company and/or different geographies, and it costs money to store it, secure it and yet make it accessible. Splunk has found a way to tap into all those siloes, bring them into a data lake for analysis and then classify everything so as to remain accessible for years to come.

That sounds easy, and to most users, it is because Splunk’s interface is intuitive to use. But it is really hard to make a breakdown of siloes of data easily accessible, yet Splunk—which has a freemium model with a free-of-charge community edition—has accomplished this.

More than 3,500 users and partners of Splunk attended dozens of seminars, chalk talks, keynotes and informal around-the-table discussions about charting data flows, storage and the IoT—among many other topics.

Good control and understanding of a company’s data can take an enterprise more directly toward increased profits because this kind of control offers insight and advice based on facts, not intuition or guessing. Company thought leaders then can use this insight to make better-informed decisions about stock, personnel, partnerships, spikes in sales and so on.