Splunk CTO: we will ‘open the aperture’ for data analytics

Machine data intelligence and analytics specialist Splunk has detailed a number of product updates at its annual .conf user and customer conference this month.

The self-styled real time operational intelligence company highlighted new versions of its core Splunk Enterprise (now at version 7.2) and Splunk Cloud products – technologies designed to allow users (developers… and, increasingly, less technical users) to search and ‘ask questions’ of machine data, log files and other core system information.

Splunk president & CEO Doug Merritt asserts that today there are two types of company: those who only record events with data — and those who make things happen with data.

Also new this year is Splunk>Next, a means of applying Splunk to a wider variety of data sources — and by that, the company means more real time data, or you could say data that is ‘in motion’.

Opening the aperture

The Splunk Data Stream Processor is designed to help evaluate, transform and perform analytics on data in motion. The focus now is [data] search at massive-scale – and in this case that means trillions of events at millisecond speeds with ‘federated search’ across multiple Splunk deployments through Splunk Data Fabric Search.

“Splunk is building on our strong heritage to evolve the platform for the future,” said Splunk CTO Tim Tully.

Tully has called this an ‘opening of the aperture’ so that Splunk can be used in more places.

“[We will] help our customers pattern match everything with artificial intelligence and machine learning infused across the entire product portfolio. We’re doing this with streaming data, data at rest, data from any source and on whatever kind of device you want to use to take action,” said Tully.

To detail some more of the functions here, users can interact with Splunk products from a mobile device via Splunk Mobile and Splunk Cloud Gateway.

Users can also employ Augmented Reality (AR) to interact with (and take action from) data through features such as QR codes, scanning for dashboards, UPC scanning and near-field communications New Data sources.

Also noted here, users can ask questions of Splunk using voice and text and receive responses with natural language.

Splunk says that customers can now move any data to and from the Splunk Platform regardless of its format, state or location. New capabilities in this regard include Guided Data Onboarding, a new graphical user interface to help move data into Splunk Cloud or Splunk Enterprise and guiding through the best onboarding methodology based on a specific architecture.

Wider aperture, all round

The look and feel from Splunk .conf overall can be described in one word: bigger.

To clarify, that means bigger in terms of attendees — the Orlando convention centre used for this annual event strained in terms of its air conditioning power and ability to serve what is now some 8,000 attendees.

Splunk is also bigger in terms of employees, product sets, partners and (the whole point of many of the news announcements made and underlined by the CTO’s comments in this story) Splunk is also bigger in terms of its scope and breadth for data as it now works with more data sources from Industrial IoT feeds to core machine data and bring all that together with new mobile functionality.

Splunk .conf 2019 is logically moving to Vegas, you can bet on that.

< class="wp-caption-text">Splunk CTO Tim Tully heralds an ‘opening of the aperture’ so that Splunk can be used in more places.

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