Splunk .conf19 Conference Focuses On Turning Data Into Doing

Source:-forbes.com

Splunk and 11,000 or so of their closest friends—including more than 2,200 partners—hung out in Las Vegas last week for the .conf19 conference. Splunk executives unveiled a number of innovations and initiatives and presented a roadmap and vision for Splunk that focused on using its Data-to-Everything platform to turn data into doing.

They packed a lot into .conf19. The keynote session on Tuesday morning was filled with significant announcements related to innovations within Splunk and Splunk’s investment and participation in the communities around them. Here is a quick sampling of the major announcements:

Zonehaven Investment

Splunk announced that the first investment from its newly launched Splunk Ventures Social Impact Fund—a $50 million fund that invests in early stage organizations that are using innovative, data-driven approaches to drive meaningful social impact—is in Zonehaven. This investment seems particularly relevant as thousands are being forced to evacuate wildfires raging across the state of California. Zonehaven gives fire departments and emergency response agencies unprecedented situational awareness and decision support by utilizing intelligent evacuation zones, advanced fire modeling, real-time weather data and always-on fire sensing capabilities.

FedRAMP Authorization

The company revealed that Splunk Cloud has received FedRAMP authorization. Achieving FedRAMP authorization from the General Services Administration (GSA) FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO) brings the power of Splunk Cloud to federal agencies. Agencies and their partners will now be able to leverage the assurance of the FedRAMP program to solve IT, security and IoT challenges with Splunk’s Data-to-Everything Platform.Today In: Innovation

Enhanced Portfolio for IT Operations

New enhancements to IT operations were announced, including new versions of Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), Splunk App for Infrastructure (SAI), and integrations with Splunk VictorOps and Splunk Phantom. Expanding AIOps allows Splunk to deliver an observability portfolio for organizations at every stage of the cloud journey.

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Splunk Mission Control

Splunk Mission Control launched as part of the Splunk Security Operations Suite. Splunk Mission Control is a new, cloud solution that connects Splunk SIEM (Splunk Enterprise Security), SOAR (Splunk Phantom) and UEBA (Splunk UBA) products into a single unified analyst experience. The Splunk Security Operations Suite promises to make it easier for security analysts to manage security across the entire threat lifecycle.

Increased Scale and Speed

Splunk announced general availability of Splunk Enterprise 8.0, Splunk Data Fabric Search (DFS) and Splunk Data Stream Processor (DSP) to increase the scale and speed at which customers can search and analyze data. Splunk DFS accelerates and streamlines data analytics by weaving together insights from massive datasets, living across diverse data stores, into a single view. Splunk DSP is a real-time stream processing solution that continuously collects high-velocity, high-volume data from diverse sources, turns data into valuable information or insights, and then distributes results to Splunk or other destinations.

The Vision of Splunk

I watched the opening keynote on the livestream, but I was unable to attend .conf19 in person. I did, however, have an opportunity just a few weeks ago to chat with Tim Tully, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Splunk. We had spoken earlier in the year about some of the innovative ways Splunk was trying to make data more accessible for customers, but this conversation was focused more on where Splunk is headed and its vision for the future of data.

Tully told me that organizations have a ton of data coming from different devices and platforms. Gathering data isn’t the problem. The challenge is that correlating and aggregating the data is difficult. The effort involved trying to stitch it all together causes them to focus on where the data is coming from. They’re always looking backward to understand the source of the data instead of focusing on analyzing the data and taking action on it.

The theme of Tully’s presentation at the .conf19 keynote revolved around the accessibility of data. Splunk bills itself as the Data-to-Everything platform. At .conf19 they spent a lot of time talking about taking that to the next level and turning data into doing.

To democratize data analytics and evolve to a future where customers can more easily turn data into doing will rely on unbounded learning—the ability to apply machine learning against unsupervised and unstructured streaming data without building models ahead of time. Tully stressed that many companies go out of their way to use machine learning as a marketing or promotion tool. He believes that the real value of machine learning comes from delivering better results faster. Customers don’t want to buy machine learning—they want the output of effective machine learning. That’s what Splunk strives to deliver.