Image Gallery: Splunk .conf 2019 Featuring Cisco, Intel
(Pictured above: A local Vegas rock band gets the Splunk .conf crowd warmed up before the event’s first keynote.)
A record-setting 11,000-plus attendees, including more than 2,200 partners, descended on Las Vegas for last week’s Splunk .conf 2019 user conference.
The 10th annual user conference saw the unveiling of an evolved Partner+ Technology Alliance Program, a new partner portal, new innovations across its Security Operations Suite and more. The theme of the conference was “Turn Data into Doing.”
Doug Merritt, Splunk’s president and CEO, said his company’s expanded vision is “we are the data-to-everything platform.”
“We are bringing data to every question, decision and action,” he said. “The capabilities we’ve been building … help you act on your data. To do that, you need a system that integrates monitoring, acting, investigating and analysis. It must handle any structure of data, and it must be able to deal with any data source and unlock previously unavailable value.”
The Partner+ Technology Alliance Program now offers enhancements to increase value for partners that build connectors, apps and add-ons to Splunk. This includes a new structure for partner engagement and solution development across the Splunk product portfolio addressing a broader set of customer challenges, the company said.
Aziz Benmalek, Splunk’s vice president of worldwide partners, said his company is innovating through building, buying, and investing in new players and partnerships.
“The richer the portfolio of products and offerings, the better the opportunity for our partner ecosystem because that expands the use case scenarios and offers more breadth of solutions that they can build solutions on top of, and service and provide added value to our joint customers,” he said. “The partner ecosystem is strategic and critical in the way we are going to make the data to everything platform a reality for our joint customers.”
Scroll through our gallery for highlights from the conference.
Merritt kicked off Splunk’s .conf 2019 by telling attendees that data is the answer to everything. The coming divide will be between companies that seize and make things happen with data, and those that don’t and no longer exist, he said.
"There is no way any parts of our lives can be separated from data going forward," he said. "Are you prepared for this new data age?"
Tony Pavlovich, Splunk's vice president of customer success and professional services (left), and Stefan Arnold, Porsche's head of technology, acceleration and management, talked about how Splunk's data-to-everything platform powers Porsche's Taycan, it's new electric car.
Josh Klahr, Splunk's vice president of product management, announced the general availability of Splunk Enterprise 8.0 with added support for analytics functions. He also announced the general availability of Splunk Data Fabric Search (DFS) and Splunk Data Stream Processor (DSP). All are available to Splunk's partners.
Zonehaven, which uses data to help communities get ahead of wildfires, is Splunk's first social impact fund investment. The $50 million fund invests in startup companies doing social good and solving problems. Jonathan Cox, San Mateo County, California, Fire Department division chief (right); Charlie Crocker, Zonehaven's CEO (center; and Susan St. Leger, Splunk's president of worldwide field operations (left), talked about the company's work.
In a Q&A with press and analysts, (left to right) Carrie Palin, Splunk's CMO; Merritt; and Tim Tully, senior vice president and CTO, talked about their company's strategy and the significance of recent acquisitions. Its latest acquisition is Streamlio, a platform for fast data, allowing organizations to build data-driven applications to react to data as it arrives.
Tully also said Splunk has increased its investment in experimentation.
"You'd better be innovative," he said. "This market is moving so quickly, if we're not experimenting, rolling out something per month, we'll be one of those companies that was interesting."
In the source= Pavilion, Splunk provided demos of its apps addressing security, compliance and fraud. Splunk is integrating more than 1,900 APIs with about 300 customers, and announced it will be open-sourcing all those integration apps. Each app solves specific issues for specific users.
Splunk Investigate, unveiled at .conf, is a cloud-based service that allows a team to ingest, search and analyze data collaboratively and in real time. It can be used for root-cause analysis, incident management, troubleshooting production issues and more. Some 435 patents have been issued to Splunk as of this month.
This month, Splunk completed its $1 billion acquisition of SignalFx, a provider of real-time monitoring and metrics for cloud infrastructure, microservices and applications. Splunk said the combination will give IT departments a data platform that allows them to monitor and observe data in real-time, and to cut costs, boost revenue and improve the customer experience.
"Our acquisitions really give us a foothold in the open-source community," Tully said. "We know that great innovations are being built right now … and we want to be part of that investment."
Splunk is known for its .conf shirts that include a wide variety of catchy lines, such as "Looking for Trouble" and "You Bet Your Sweet SaaS." A display featured shirts from the company's 10 conferences.
Intel is a longtime partner and customer of Splunk's security products. Brent Conran, Intel's chief information security officer, said his company sees many use cases where Splunk's new MIssion Control "can really help us."
With Mission Control, customers gain a unified security operations center (SOC) experience that supports investigation and search across multiple on-premises and cloud-based Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security instances, ChatOps collaboration, case management and automated response.
The Cisco-Splunk partnership has matured with thousands of joint customers, and built on top of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Network Assurance Engine (NAE), Nexus 9000, UCS, Tetration, security, software and services. A new addition to the Cisco-Splunk solution portfolio features Cisco ACI with SignalFx.
Benmalek said Splunk and Cisco are "just in the first phase of our strategic partnership that we are pursuing together on how we are bringing endpoint security for Cisco and [virtual machine] endpoint security enabled by Splunk."
The guest keynote was actor Matthew McConaughey, who admitted he knew nothing about Splunk, but entertained attendees by answering questions like who's his favorite president living or dead (Bill Clinton), what would be his last meal on death row (a cheeseburger) and how he got his first film role in "Dazed and Confused."
