The News: Splunk kicked off .Conf21 with several announcements in security, observability, platform, and partnerships to further their mission of turning data into doing. The new product innovations will help further digital transformation initiatives that are needed in today’s business climate. Read all the press releases here.
Splunk Turns Data into Doing with New Announcements at .Conf21
Analyst Take: The opening keynote at .Conf21 was jam packed with announcements that span security products, observability solutions, cloud platforms, and new partnerships. It’s clear that Splunk is ready to meet customers wherever they are in their digital transformation journeys providing them with the tools they need to continue to move forward. It’s no surprise that 92 of the Fortune 100 companies are Splunk customers. The last 18 months proved that the business world is full of unpredictability. And the best way to plan for it? Have a strong data foundation which Splunk can easily supply.
Cloud Platform Enhancements Make the Most Out of Data
Organizations in every industry are moving to the cloud, and while that may be easier for some areas of business, data management can get more challenging. Which is why these new features from Splunk will help organizations get more from their data at every stage and will meet the unique needs of each customer. Here are some of the announcements that caught my attention.
- End-to-end visibility with new solutions. The new capabilities will enable organizations to access cloud data, and work with data in motion, before it gets indexed within the Splunk platform. With ingest actions, customers have the ability to take action on data in motion. They can redact, filter, and route data where it needs to go.
- Eliminate silos with better search. Too often organizations have too many individual tools. And we know that individual tools don’t work well together. With the new Federated Search feature, customers get a unified search experience across all applications and can search across the entire Splunk ecosystem.
Observability Updates Drive Better Performance and Productivity
IT and DevOps teams are under pressure to keep businesses moving forward at a rapid pace while innovating new services, keeping existing services reliable, and delivering top=notch customer experiences. Add in more cloud-native technologies and the increasingly complicated tech stack is enough to give anyone a headache. But those issues are resolved with the Splunk observability portfolio. Customers are equipped with a service-centric, AI-powered observability and have complete control of their data from end-to-end, all in real-time and at scale. The new features that will improve the existing platform are:
- Splunk AlwaysOn Profiling. Customers can take existing full-fidelity tracing to have a continuous code-level visibility to identify service bottlenecks and resource optimization opportunities.
- Pre-built content packs turn data into insight. New prepackaged content, out-of-the-box searches, and dashboards for common infrastructure including Microsoft365 make it easy for organizations to set up and gain instant value from their applications.
Security Solutions Designed for our New Threat Environment
There were more security breaches last year than in the previous 15 years. This new environment requires updated security solutions that can keep an organization protected. Splunk is ready to deliver with enhancements to Splunk Security Cloud and Splunk SOAR.
- Risk-Based Alerting. It’s not about reducing the number of risk alerts but elevating the quality to drive better threat detection abilities and overall improved outcomes in the SOC.
- TruSTAR is now Splunk Intelligence Management. The acquisition of TruSTAR is finally paying off for Splunk as it’s now the Splunk Intelligence Management which will operationalize internal and external intelligence, improving overall insights into Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk SOAR.
Partnerverse Makes It All Possible
While this latest announcement won’t be available for a few more months, the Splunk Partnerverse Program will support thousands of distributors, global system integrators, service providers, original equipment manufacturers, technology alliance partners and value-added resellers.
Partners can improve their expertise with progressive learning pathways and certifications expanding the Splunk’s professional services practice development.
Overall Impressions: Splunk is Ready for the Future
Only one day in the books for .Conf21 and it’s clear that Splunk is ready for the future of business providing new solutions that will help customers build foundations that can withstand threats, unpredictability and more.
The landscape for competition in Splunk’s core business areas continue to grow as public cloud and large IT Infrastructure companies are all seeing the value of observability with the likes of IBM, Cisco, ServiceNow, Microsoft, and a litany of other companies increasing their presence in the space.
Overall, I feel encouraged about Splunk’s innovations in the space. It’s transition to ARR and Cloud continues to payoff and give the company greater agility to meet evolving customer expectations. A good event and encouraging progression for Splunk.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Other insights from Futurum Research:
Splunk Q2 Highlights Progress in its Cloud Transformation
Big ARR Growth Highlights Robust FY ’22 Q1 for Splunk
Splunk Deepens Its Security Bench With TruSTAR Acquisition
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
