Splunk provides innovative software solutions that enable organizations to
gain real-time operational intelligence by harnessing the value of their data.
Our offerings enable users to collect, index, search, explore, monitor, correlate
and analyze data regardless of format or source. Our offerings address large
and diverse data sets commonly referred to as big data and are specifically
tailored for machine data. Machine data is produced by nearly every software
application and electronic device across an organization and contains a definitive,
time-stamped record of various activities, such as transactions, customer and
user behavior, and security threats. Beyond an organizations traditional information
technology (“IT”) and security infrastructure, data from the Industrial
Internet, including industrial control systems, sensors, SCADA systems, networks,
manufacturing systems, smart meters and the Internet of Things (“IoT”)
which includes consumer-oriented systems, such as electronic wearables, mobile
devices, automobiles and medical devices are also continuously generating machine
data. Our offerings help organizations gain the value contained in machine data
by delivering real-time information to enable operational decision making.
Our mission is to make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone
in an organization. Our customers leverage our offerings for various use cases,
including infrastructure and operations management, security and compliance,
applications management and business analytics, and to provide insights into
data generated by the IoT and industrial data, among many others. Our offerings
are intended to help users in various roles, including IT, security and business
professionals, quickly analyze their machine data and achieve real-time visibility
into and intelligence about their organization’s operations. We believe
this operational intelligence enables organizations to improve service levels,
reduce operational costs, mitigate security risks, demonstrate and maintain
compliance, and drive better business decisions. The result is an improved level
of operational visibility enabling more informed business decisions that can
provide greater efficiency, security and competitive advantage for our customers.
Our flagship product is Splunk Enterprise, a machine data platform, comprised
of collection, indexing, search, reporting, analysis, alerting, monitoring and
data management capabilities. Splunk Enterprise can collect and index petabytes
of machine data daily, irrespective of format or source. Our machine data platform
uses our patented data processing architecture that performs dynamic schema
creation at read time, rather than write time, enabling users to run queries
on data without having to define or understand the structure of the data prior
to collection and indexing. This is in contrast to traditional IT systems that
require users to establish the format of their data prior to collection in order
to answer a pre-set list of questions. Splunk Enterprise also enables customers
to interactively explore, analyze and visualize data stored in data sources
such as Hadoop and Amazon S3. Our technology delivers speed, scalability and
advanced analytics including machine learning when processing massive amounts
of machine data for anomaly detection, event grouping, prediction and other
methods. Our software leverages improvements in the cost and performance of
commodity computing and can be deployed in a wide variety of computing environments,
from a single laptop to large globally distributed data centers as well as public,
private and hybrid cloud environments.
Splunk Cloud delivers the benefits of Splunk Enterprise deployed and managed
reliably and scalably as a service. Splunk Cloud is available internationally
and eliminates the need to purchase, deploy, and manage infrastructure. Splunk
Cloud can be used to collect, analyze and store data in a public cloud environment
or via a hybrid approach that spans cloud and on-premises environments. A single
Splunk interface can search data stored in both on-premises Splunk Enterprise
instances as well as Splunk Cloud instances, providing a single point of visibility
and analysis across the customer’s entire enterprise.
Splunk Light provides log search and analysis that is designed, priced and
packaged for small IT environments, where a single-server log analytics solution
is sufficient, and can be purchased through our online store or via our channel
partners.
Our premium solutions are purpose-built to address key customer needs. Splunk
premium solutions are sold separately and include:
Splunk Enterprise Security - Addresses emerging security threats and security
information and event management (“SIEM”) use cases through monitoring,
alerting, reporting, investigation and forensic analysis.
Splunk IT Service Intelligence - Monitors the health and key performance indicators
of critical IT and business services with machine learning.
Splunk User Behavior Analytics - Detects cyber-attacks and insider threats using
data science, machine learning and advanced correlation.
We also complement the capabilities of Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud and our
premium solutions with additional content (“apps” and “add-ons”).
These apps and add-ons, which are generally available for download from within
our offerings, via our Splunkbase website or in our Splunk Cloud environment,
provide functionality in the form of pre-built data inputs, workflows, searches,
reports, alerts and dashboards that make it easier and faster for our customers
to address specific use cases. Splunk, along with a number of third-party developers
and customers, have developed hundreds of apps and add-ons for common data sources
and valuable use cases in our core and adjacent markets. Many of these apps
and add-ons are available as free downloads. Examples of apps that we and our
partners have developed include:
Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit (“MLTK”) - A free app that enables
customers to apply machine learning techniques and algorithms to data stored
in Splunk. The MLTK includes public machine learning application programming
interfaces (“APIs”) for open source and proprietary algorithms and
a data prep module to help customers prepare and clean their data before initiating
machine learning modeling.
Splunk App for AWS - Collects and analyzes data from AWS data sources to deliver
security, operational and cost management insights via pre-built dashboards,
reports and alerts.
Splunk DB Connect - Enables customers to get business and enterprise context
such as customer, product and HR data from traditional relational databases
using real-time integration
Splunk Apps enable us to deliver greater customer value, target new markets,
accelerate user adoption and address markets traditionally served by point solutions.
Often, customers start with one app before expanding into other apps and use
cases, driving incremental usage, licensing and revenues for Splunk Enterprise
and Splunk Cloud.
As part of our strategy to offer an open platform, we provide APIs, software
development kits (“SDKs”) in major programming languages, and extensions
for popular integrated development environments (“IDEs”) like Eclipse
and Microsoft Visual Studio. These enable developers to build software that
leverages Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud as well as integrate with other
parts of an organizations’ IT infrastructure.
Our online user community websites, Splunkbase and Splunk Answers, provide our
customers with an environment to share apps, collaborate on the use of our software
and provide community-based support and education. Additionally, our Splunk
Dev portal allows developers to download SDKs, access API documentation and
see sample code for building applications using our developer environment and
tools. We believe this user-driven ecosystem results in greater use of our offerings
and provides cost-effective marketing, increased brand awareness and affinity,
as well as viral adoption of our offerings.
Our offerings are designed to deliver rapid return-on-investment for our customers.
They generally do not require customization, long deployment cycles or extensive
professional services commonly associated with traditional enterprise software
applications. Prospective users can get started with our free online sandboxes
that enable our customers to immediately try and experience Splunk offerings.
Users that prefer to deploy the software on-premises can take advantage of our
free 60-day trial of Splunk Enterprise, which converts into a limited free perpetual
license of up to 500 megabytes of data per day. Paying users can sign up for
Splunk Cloud and avoid the need to provision, deploy and manage internal infrastructure.
Alternatively, they can simply download and install the software, typically
in a matter of hours, to connect to their relevant machine data sources. Customers
can also provision a compute instance on AWS via a pre-built Amazon Machine
Image, which delivers a pre-configured virtual machine instance with our Splunk
Enterprise software. In fiscal 2017, we introduced free development-test licenses
for certain commercial customers, allowing customers to explore new data and
use cases in a non-production environment without incurring additional fees.
We also offer support, training and professional services to our customers to
assist in the deployment of our software.