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Splunk: AWS's Kinesis can expand our market

Splunk CEO Godfrey Sullivan said 2014 will be an interesting year as usage of the company's big data analysis software expands beyond core IT and security.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Splunk CEO Godfrey Sullivan said that Amazon Web Services move into streaming data via a new Kinesis service could expand its market and use cases.

The company reported strong third quarter revenue growth and upped its outlook. Splunk is growing rapidly with the release of Splunk Enterprise, its data analysis software that recently received a user interface overhaul.

Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Kinesis, a service that can process volumes of streaming data in real-time. Customers will be able to store and process terabytes of data hourly. Initially, Kinesis was perceived as a potential rival to Splunk.

splunk 3q

 

Sullivan outlined how Kinesis could be a boon. He said:

Kinesis is good for everyone because it gives more companies exposure to their logs so just like Salesforce publishes its logs. Customers can get access to it and we do a pretty good job of analyzing those. It's really important that more and more writers begin to publish those log formats. We also released an improved version of the Splunk app for Amazon this past quarter and you can point that app at your Amazon instances and get better day-to-day reporting on workloads and which ones are chewing up cycles that you're paying for. There's a lot of interest in this whole Amazon to Splunk connectivity and we plan to capitalize on it.

Special Feature: M2M and The Internet of Things

Indeed, AWS and Splunk could broaden the big data use cases beyond core IT. Today, most of Splunk's revenue comes from IT monitoring and tracking of logs from technology assets. However, Splunk is increasingly being used for other enterprise uses.

Sullivan said that 2014 will be the year when Splunk starts garnering more usage beyond IT and security. "I think 2014 will be a fascinating year in terms of growth and the business analytics, web intelligence areas because Splunk 6 gives an easier interface," he said.

Splunk stopped short of predicting how much revenue new use cases such as Internet of things and operational analytics can bring in, but Sullivan said he expects them to be as large as the company's core IT monitoring business.

Among other key takeaways:

  • Analysts were upbeat about the prospects for Splunk Cloud, a version of Splunk Enterprise functionality as a service. Splunk can run as a service or on AWS and on premise.
  • Deals with Intuit and other large customers highlight how Splunk is landing broad enterprise adoption agreements. These arrangements basically mean companies are standardizing on Splunk. Intuit considers Splunk to be a cornerstone analytics technology.
  • 70 percent of Splunk's license bookings came from existing customers.
  • 207 orders were larger than $100,000 in the third quarter.

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