Former Microsoft tech fellow Brad Lovering to open R&D office for Splunk

Brad Lovering, a former Microsoft Technical Fellow who left the company in October 2010, has a new gig. Lovering is opening the Seattle office for San Francisco-based Splunk, a company that indexes real-time and historical IT data.

Lovering was a 24-plus-year Microsoft veteran -- and most recently head of the disintegrating Microsoft Oslo modeling effort -- when he left Microsoft last year. Lovering gave himself three months to investigate the Seattle market, something he needed to do, given Microsoft was the only place he had worked since college.

"I was at Microsoft so long. It was a universe" in and of itself, Lovering told me. Not being much of "a real networking kind of guy," his first order of business was to meet with anyone and everyone who sounded even remotely interesting, he said.

He met with venture capitalists, startups, bigger companies. He considered doing something on his own, he said. Then he met with Ignition Partners, a venture firm full of former Softies.

Splunk, a company doing "operational intelligence," was part of Ignition's portfolio. Splunk is looking to build a developer ecosystem around its technology, which enables users to search data from weblogs and a variety of other systems storing real-time information. Splunk allows users to search for events in specific time windows. Splunk is in the "big data" arena -- and is working on a cloud-computing platform/extension -- making the company a good fit for Lovering, who had been doing work at Microsoft involving databases, systems management and the cloud.

"There's a complete revolution in data management happening, and it is great to have found a place I can work on all that," he said.