SiliconANGLE article by Jason English
Splunk Inc. returned this week to the online format of its blockbuster annual event, Splunk .conf21, with the broad theme of “Turning Data into Doing,” which seems appropriate given the massive security and observability data volumes the firm interprets into analytics and response actions for global companies.
What customers are doing with data
Sticking to the theme, Splunk positioned customer success stories from some of the world’s most innovative firms and institutions front and center, including Tesco PLC, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and McLaren Automotive, which brought out its Formula 1 champion Lando Norris to discuss how the racing team leverages track data insights to win. (*Disclosure below.)
Of particular note, Koby Avital, executive vice president of Walmart Inc.’s global tech platform, discussed how the company deploys Kubernetes clusters onto regional “Triplets” of Azure, Google Cloud and private cloud resources to fulfill millions of daily omnichannel orders. Splunk is part of Walmart’s core data plane, providing performance and security event monitoring and observability to anticipate customer experience issues and help it set a posture for disaster recovery contingencies.
Indeed, Splunk Chief Executive Doug Merritt (pictured) pointed out in an interview with SiliconANGLE’s video studio theCUBE at .conf that “one second of latency can have a 10% drop-off in fulfillment of a transaction. For Walmart, that’s a billion dollars a week if you can’t get their system to perform at the level it needs to.”
Data in Splunk also figures prominently in assuring security. “Security is largely a human problem, but it’s represented by data,” Stephen Schmidt, chief information security officer of Amazon Web Services Inc., said in a keynote testimonial. “We produce more than 50 petabytes of security-related log information a day, and we ingest more than 500 terabytes of logs about the behavior of our corporate infrastructure and our employees into Splunk. That allows us to immediately begin the process of understanding what’s happening in our infrastructure, and taking action to ensure we’re protected.”
Reinforcing the platform
Splunk seems to be constantly streamlining its product naming strategy, with logs, metrics and traces flowing through the Splunk Platform, which contains all of its data ingest, streaming, indexing, inferencing and search capabilities, as well as their Security Cloud and Observability Cloud solutions.
Read the entire article on SiliconANGLE here: https://siliconangle.com/2021/10/22/splunk-conf21-comprehensive-change-fueled-data/
Jason English (@bluefug) is a principal analyst at Intellyx, which advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. (* Disclosure: Splunk is a current Intellyx customer. None of the other vendors mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer.)
