Splunk continues to address cost concerns – adds IT Service Intelligence to mix
- Summary:
- Splunk is growing and its maturing. It's customers love it. But it now recognises that it needs to address challengers in the market and pricing concerns. We report from .conf 2015.
Splunk has made quite a name for itself in the much hyped area of 'big data'. And that's because it came up with practical solutions to problems that some of the largest enterprises out there were having to deal with. Not only that, but it came up with solutions that could help companies optimise their existing assets – which drives down costs and helps to deliver an ROI.
In particular Splunk has made a name for itself in analysing machine data to enhance security, optimise application delivery and better IT operations.
However, there is one criticism that is often thrown Splunk's way. That it is expensive. I remember attending my first Splunk .conf (it's annual user conference) and sitting at a table of high profile customers over lunch, where they all openly admitted that whilst Splunk was pricey, it was pretty much the only thing on the market that did the job they required.
But things are changing. There are a number of open source tools out there now that are growing in popularity. Splunk is beginning to recognise that being 'one of the best' may not be enough to protect it from tools that run at a significantly lower cost.
Which is why, it could be argued, that Splunk spent a significant chunk of time during its opening keynote at this week's .conf explaining how it is not only boosting the performance of its Enterprise product, but it is also reducing the total cost of ownership.
Combined with an announcement earlier this year that Splunk is introducing a new licensing model for enterprises that ensures that costs don't increase based on how much data you consume, it is obvious that Splunk recognises that it needs to change the 'expensive' perception. Up until now, Splunk has charged based on the amount of data you index.
This will no doubt be good news to customers that are wanting to standardise on Splunk. I still have concerns elsewhere, but it's good to see that they're responding to the market changes and responding to customer needs. More on that later.
We are on Mile 8 now
During the opening remarks of the keynote session at .conf this week, Splunk CEO Godfrey Sullivan gave customers and attendees a clear idea about the future direction of the company. He described Splunk's growth as a marathon and he said he is now focused on catering to the enterprise customer's needs. He said:
When I joined Splunk in 2008 we had about 200 customers. One of the things we are most proud of is that we have now passed the 10,000 customer mark. So where are we headed? Where is Splunk going? The devices and the machines of the world, the systems of the world, are driving this enormous amount of data. This new generation of data. But how do we make the machine generated data easier to access, more accessible, easier to use and get value out of? That's our mission. Make the data easy and easy to get value.
If you go to any Splunk office in the world you'll see a sign on the office wall that says 'Mile 8'. Back in the day when we were pre-IPO we had a Mile 3 sign up. We are on the Mile 8 now. It's still early in the marathon, but we are making good progress. So what does Mike 8 mean to Splunk? These are the four areas of investment that we are building on your behalf.
He described the four areas as follows:
- Enterprise scale - enterprise grade products and services for enterprise customers.
- Partners – which includes developers, who deliver more complete solutions and who work with Splunk to deliver customer success.
- Solutions – transitioning as a company just from raw indexing, to building more complete solutions. Splunk has reorganised the company around these solutions (business analytics, industrial data and IoT, security, application delivery and IT operations).
- Cloud – Sullivan said that cloud is now “mainstream” and is a big business for Splunk.
Splunk Enterprise 6.3
Nate McKervey, Splunk's director of technical market, was next up on the stage to announce the availability of Splunk Enterprise 6.3, which addresses the cost and performance concerns highlighted above. He said that part of the 'Mile 8 journey' is to focus on enterprise, but not just enterprise scale or capabilities, but also new use cases that can be applied across the enterprise. And new use cases means...more Splunking. He said:
Whether you are a Fortune 100 company indexing hundreds of terabytes a day or a small organisation on a focused mission, you are analysing more data for more use cases than ever before. For you and your customers performance matters, total cost of ownership matters, and ease of management matters. This is why I'm incredibly pleased to announce the availability of Splunk 6.3, which truly delivers here.
The technical details of how Splunk Enterprise 6.3 works can be found here, but what it essentially means is that for a typical two terabyte a day deployment, a company can run half the hardware it was previously running for Splunk Enterprise 6.0.
Not only this, but Splunk is introducing some new management tools that allow customers to gain better insight into how they are indexing data. The assumption being that if you have a better idea about what your data sources are and how you are using them, then you can be more efficient with your Splunk tools. McKervey added:
But reducing hardware costs isn't the only way to reduce the total cost of ownership, making distributed deployments easier to manage frees up a more valuable resource – that's your time. This is why we have invested in a distributed management console, which now includes a high level overview of your deployment, a unified view of the state of all your instances, insight into your index and storage utilisation, as well as performance status. You're going to gain more visibility.
Introducing IT Service intelligence
IT service management has had a bit of a resurgence in the past few years, with cloud companies like
ServiceNow and ServiceMax proving popular and experiencing decent growth. As such, it makes sense that Splunk too is wanting to tap into this area. Today it announced the availability of Splunk IT Service Intelligence, which it says “provides breakthrough visibility into the health and key performance indicators of IT services”.Splunk said that it has several customers now running IT Service Intelligence in production, which has resulted in less downtime and improved service levels. At a top level the product includes the following:
- A central, unified view of critical IT services for data-driven monitoring.
- Maps critical services with KPIs to pinpoint areas of interest.
- Utilizes advanced analytics powered by machine learning to highlight anomalies, detect root cause and pinpoint areas of impact.
- Supports drill down into the data for rapid issue investigation and resolution.
Solution owner of operational analytics at Vodafone, one of the customers using the new product, said the following:
Splunk IT Service Intelligence gives Vodafone a real-time understanding of how our services are performing overall and at the more granular level.
We have KPIs mapped to critical service components and can provide relevant insights to stakeholders across the business, including management, service owners and the security team. The glass table visualizations in Splunk ITSI make it quick and easy to identify and resolve any issues, preventing any impact on our users. Now we can be much more proactive about our services.
My take
An interesting first morning with Splunk. The emphasise on cost was needed and will be welcomed by customers. It's important to remember that enterprises using Splunk are almost evangelical about its benefits, but cost will ultimately always play a role. Especially when new, cheaper challengers are growing in the market.
It's evident that Splunk is maturing across a number of areas and that it is consistently filling out the gaps across its product line, whilst simplifying how it approaches the market.
However, if I were to have one word of warning for the company – something that I'm sure I've said before – it is that it still is not a product that is targeted at the top level, casual business user. Which has been an aim of the company in the past. It is simplifying, but there is still little emphasis on top level business outcomes. Not that it matters too much at the moment, given the results it is delivering for customers. But its something worth considering in the future, as it continues to grow.