Splunk Inc 's

We compete against a variety of large software vendors and smaller specialized companies, open source projects and custom development efforts, which provide solutions in the specific markets we address. Our principal competitors include:

IT departments of potential customers which have undertaken custom software development efforts to analyze and manage their machine data;

companies targeting the big data market by commercializing open source software, such as the various Hadoop distributions and NoSQL data stores, including Elastic;

security, systems management and other IT vendors, including BMC Software, CA Technologies, Micro Focus, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and VMware;

business intelligence vendors, analytics and visualization vendors, including IBM and Oracle; and

cloud service providers, as well as small, specialized vendors that provide complementary or competitive solutions in enterprise data analytics, log aggregation and management, data warehousing and big data technologies that may compete with our offerings.

The principal competitive factors in our markets are product features, performance and support, product scalability and flexibility, ease of deployment and use, total cost of ownership and time to value. We believe that we generally compete favorably on the basis of these factors. For example, Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud, and our premium solutions all contain rich feature sets that reduce costly deployment cycles typically associated with enterprise software.

Some of our actual and potential competitors have advantages over us, such as longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing or other resources, stronger brand and business user recognition, larger intellectual property portfolios, broader global distribution and presence, and competitive pricing. In addition, our industry is evolving rapidly and is becoming increasingly competitive. Larger and more established companies may focus on operational intelligence and could directly compete with us. Companies may develop open source based alternatives that, customers may conclude, offer equivalent or superior functionality to our Splunk offerings. Smaller companies could also launch new offerings that we do not offer and that could gain market acceptance quickly.