It’s always interesting when a tech company becomes publicly listed. All of a sudden it focuses pretty closely in on building its revenue – through both selling more stuff to existing customers and expanding the breadth of its franchise. No wonder, Wall Street is notoriously touchy about quarterly revenue announcements and no public company CEO has the luxury of ignoring short-term growth.

And so it is with Splunk who is looking to continually grow – both vertically and horizontally. A good example of an initiative that is aimed at delivering that growth comes today with its new offerings that aim to make machine learning a class of technology that has more mainstream adoption. The company is increasing both the breadth and the depth of its platform.

More horizontal functionality

Splunk’s history was in creating a board platform for data ingestion. over time, however, they’ve actively strived to move on from being simply a data repository to being the place where analysis occurs. This continues today with the announcement from the company of new machine learning solutions including:

  • Splunk ITSI 3.0: The latest version of Splunk ITSI combines service context with machine learning to help identify existing and potential issues, prioritize restoration of business-critical services and deliver analytics-driven IT operations.
  • Splunk UBA 4.0: The new version of Splunk UBA enables data scientists to write and load their own machine learning algorithms to generate custom anomalies and custom threats via Splunk’s new software developers kit (SDK). This capability opens up UBA, giving users the power to detect insider attacks and unknown threats.
  • Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit: Free to any Splunk customer, the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit is a data science application that anyone can use to predict future IT, security and business outcomes. Recent updates include a visual interface for creating and managing models, as well as public APIs for custom algorithms.

And not forgetting the specific vertical solutions

Splunk is also painfully aware that by re-packaging existing solutions and tailoring them for specific verticals, it has the ability to enter peripheral markets readily. To this end, the company is announcing new and updated solutions to tackle specific industries:

  • Splunk ES Content Update: Splunk ES Content Update is delivered via a new Splunk app that offers pre-packaged security content to Splunk ES customers, giving them the ability to analyze breaking security threats from multiple threat intelligence feeds and with their own data. Available for free to all Splunk ES customers, Splunk ES Content Update regularly delivers new content to security practitioners, giving them additional context that helps deliver answers to timely threats faster.
  • Splunk Essentials for Anti-Fraud: Splunk Essentials for Anti-Fraud is a free Splunk App that leverages machine learning to identify and investigate the anomalies that may signal different types of fraud, including fraud in healthcare, payment cards, transactional data, and user behavior and risk analysis. Splunk Essentials for Anti-Fraud spots fraud faster with advanced search commands, risk scoring, and anomaly detection.
  • Splunk Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring: Available in the Amazon Marketplace as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), Splunk Insights for AWS Cloud Monitoring provides organizations with an analytics-based approach to cloud monitoring. This solution offers awareness of performance, security, operational and cost management insights from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
  • Splunk Insights for Ransomware: Splunk Insights for Ransomware is an offering priced per user that provides organizations with insights for proactive assessment and rapid investigation of potential ransomware threats.

And a move into more specific IT monitoring areas

Splunk will also be previewing two new future technologies at its .conf2017 being held this week. These two offerings more clearly detail Splunk’s moves to compete with former partners:

  • Splunk Project Waitomo: Preview of a new infrastructure monitoring solution that unifies logs and metrics, delivering integrated machine learning for alerts, trends, and investigation.
  • Splunk Project Nova: Preview of an API-based logging as a service offering, targeting developers and DevOps practitioners.

MyPOV

I always worried about Splunk’s perceived role as a mere plumbing and data repository provider. As such it has been fascinating to watch in recent years as the company has extended and expanded the very definition of what it is. Today’s announcements are a continuation of this strategy and will see the company broaden its franchise – both within existing customers and in new verticals.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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