Data-to-Everything rules for Splunk

Splunk recently announced a host of new programs, such as the launch of Splunk Service Intelligence for SAP solutions, a new version of Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring Add-On and Splunk IT Essentials.

Here, Jyoti Prakash, Regional Director Sales, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How are you delivering the world’s first Data-to-Everything platform?

Jyoti Prakash: Companies worldwide are moving from traditional processes towards digitization and being responsive real-time. However, without gathering, analysing and deriving insights from these processes, and coming to effective decision-making, companies are losing out on the advantage of going digital.

All businesses globally should be making more use of operational data to better understand what is happening both within and outside a company. This is what we call ‘Data-to-Everything’.

Splunk, with its flexible platform and purpose-built solutions makes data accessible and useful to organisations. With a thriving ecosystem of partners and services, Splunk has completely invested to create data-driven outcomes across organisations. Splunk is used and trusted by 92 out of the Fortune 100 companies.

As the world’s first Data-to Everything Platform, Splunk offers an investigative approach to solving data problems that supports a wide variety of data sources and formats, and that too in real time. We support our customers in their data journey that includes both technology and expertise to guide them through data investigation, monitoring, analysis, and action. Splunk also provides investments in future technology to expand data access to new people, new data types and embedding functionality like AI/ML to make faster, better decisions.

With our Data-to-Everything platform more powerful than ever before, we have been able to push beyond our scalable index to provide real-time streaming, machine learning, federated search and analytics orchestration and automation. Splunk is designed to help companies put data at the center of their competitive strategies and deliver business outcomes at highest possible operating efficiency.

DQ: How is Splunk going to be a world-class cloud provider?

Jyoti Prakash: Splunk is designed to unlock trapped value by bringing data to every question, decision, and action. We helpover 20,000+ customers worldwide to remove the barriers between data and action, enabling them to know what is happening within their organisation and turn data into doing.  We also provide our customers the ability to build for a future requiring extensive data access, faster decisions and visibility across more types of data.

Splunk has a strong 16-year old history of empowering users to find new insights by analysing their data. What started as a challenge for a small subset of the IT community--making sense of a disparate set of machine data-- has grown to become one of the leading challenges across all companies as they further embrace digital transformation.

Splunk helps its customers accelerate their digitization, ensures business resilience and meet the data opportunities of present and future. Being a strategic partner throughout the digital and cloud transformation, Splunk enables the organisations to get insights from all their data wherever the data resides - in the cloud, on-premises or both. Splunk has a robust ecosystem of partners such focused on helping the customers get visibility into their business-critical data, also continues to expand strategic partnerships with cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud.

DQ: Elaborate on the Splunk Service Intelligence for SAP solutions, a new version of Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring Add-On and Splunk IT Essentials. Also, what are the new features of the Splunk Mission Control Plug-In framework?

Jyoti Prakash: We recently concluded its 2-day annual global conference .conf20.  We hosted the event in a virtual environment across the different regions and it was a huge success, where Splunk announced a range of updates that allows their global customer base to embrace cloud-driven transformation in their business journey.

The virtual experience brought forward the latest trends on IT, Security, Observability and the Splunk Data-to-Everything Platform. At the event, we announced the launch of Splunk Service Intelligence for SAP solutions and the Splunk Mission Control Plug-In Framework, which includes inaugural technology partners such as Accenture iDefense, C3M, Crowdstrike, Netskope, RiskIQ and Tenable to host product integrations.

DQ: What are the top trends that you see for 2021?

Jyoti Prakash: Data is the new oil. In a rapidly digitizing world, data is at the root of every opportunity, and essential to solving every problem, from basic business logistics to global crises. However, apart from data, there's a lot to look forward to in 2021 as follows:

Machine learning can bridge the gap between data and human-facing business processes, helping to detect and predict outcomes that matter most to organizations and prevent threats. Organizations can use it to help detect IT or security incidents, predict and prevent IT outages, forecast product inventories, and much more.  This data may be more specific to lines of business too - for instance customer profile, order and product/service catalog information. Other data types include structured data sets like address, IP lookup and customer transaction information.

Unlike human analysis, Splunk’s machine learning is always on – an important addition to normal monitoring, operations and business analysis

Edge Computing; Cloud computing and the cloud are now an omnipotent part of everyday life. But now that cloud computing is no longer an emerging technology, we can look to edge computing for the next big leap forward. Edge computing is a concept that has quickly spread from the mobile and telecom sector to almost all industries. Edge computing is much more advanced than the Cloud and involves bypassing the latency that exists with cloud computing. According to reports, the global edge computing market is set to be worth $6.72 billion by 2022.

Artificial intelligence is already well known, but is yet to become omnipresent in every single part of our everyday lives. In 2021, we expect AI technologies to grow exponentially and feature within nearly all tech products and services. According to AI investor and philanthropist Tej Kohli, AI has at least four times as many applications as the Internet, and so the AI economy could eventually be worth $150 trillion. With potential applications in every single industry, 2021 could be the year that AI finally comes of age.

Cybersecurity- With increasing awareness among businesses, 2021 will see an increase in their spending on cybersecurity. Cybersecurity now dominates the priorities of every organization as they adapt to a post-COVID world. The demand will far exceed the supply of qualified experts, leading to a widening skill gap, which will be filled with automation, SaaS vendors and technological solutions to meet this challenge. According to the reports the global cybersecurity market is currently worth $173B in 2020, and will be worth $270B by 2026.