Image Gallery: Splunk’s .conf 2016 Features Verizon, Cisco, Chewbacca?

Splunk’s Worldwide Users’ Conference, dubbed “.conf 2016,” wrapped up Wednesday after two-and-a-half busy days in Orlando.

The software provider invited attendees – 4,000 customers, practitioners, partners and media – to see the “whole new world of opportunity” that exists in data, which can help improve IT performance, offer real-time business insight, and understanding of user behavior and the ability to reach new levels of security.

.conf2016 served up operational-intelligence trends in cloud computing, business analytics, the Internet of Things, machine learning and more.

Highlights:

• Splunk’s chief technology advocate, Andi Mann, encouraging attendees to embrace unified services as the route to digital transformation. “You can evolve,” Mann said. “We’ve got you.
• The expansion of Splunk’s Adaptive Response Initiative, an alliance featuring big-name security providers.
• Products: New versions of Splunk Enterprise, IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), Enterprise Security and User Behavior Analytics.

Channel Partners was there. Click through our image gallery for more from the event.

Follow editor in chief Lorna Garey on Twitter.

Splunk president and CEO Doug Merritt insists that digital transformation can happen only when underpinned by machine data. While some analysts kvetched about Splunk’s definition of that data, attendees say machine learning has absolutely helped their organizations get deeper insights and improve security and operations. See coverage of his keynote here.

Steve Rivera (right), director of security services for Verizon Enterprise, showed off the carrier’s flagship Managed Security Services platform, which incorporates analytics from Splunk Enterprise Security.

The platform, announced in February, uses Splunk analytics to process the more than 1 million security events that Verizon sees every day. Verizon also uses Splunk software to power its Advanced Security Operations Center.

Syncsort wants to unlock the data trapped on mainframes, which are still in use by top banking and retail customers. In an interview, David Hodgson, general manager, mainframe, told Channel Partners that its Ironstream on Splunk technology represents an opportunity for its partners. More on that interview to come.

Cisco’s kiosk was busy in advance of the expansion of its Adaptive Response Initiative partnership with Splunk. Specifically, Adaptive Response now integrates with Cisco’s Identity Services Engine and Cisco Umbrella.

Booz Allen’s booth had an industrial quality, with a collection of control systems and plenty of blinking lights.

The Splunk app for the popular ServiceNow CMDB provides insight into incident, change and event-management processes and includes a prebuilt knowledge base of dashboards and reports, preconfigured data inputs for 20 ServiceNow database tables as well as support for creating custom data inputs. There’s also a selection of commands, alert actions and scripts.

Andi Mann, chief technology advocate, called out the Syncsort module and dug into Splunk’s strategic AWS partnership. The companies are working closely together on integrations, uptime, cost control and helping customers achieve end-to-end visibility within the cloud and on premises.

Mann also called out new partnerships with Ansible, Puppet, Docker and other next-gen infrastructure providers.

Where better to hold a party for a bunch of techies than Disney’s Star Wars exhibit? Chewbacca selfies were a popular takeaway.