Splunk Inc.
Splunk is the cybersecurity and observability leader helping organizations build digital resilience. The company provides a unified platform to search, monitor, analyze, and act on data from any source, enabling organizations to detect threats, investigate incidents, ensure application performance, and gain operational intelligence across hybrid and multicloud environments.
At a Glance
- Aerospace and defense
- Communications and media
- Energy and utilities
- Financial services and insurance
- +11 more
AI Tools by Splunk Inc.
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Splunk AI Assistant for SPL
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Latest News
Splunk's Impact in Cybersecurity Gains Repeated Analyst Recognition
Splunk Report Shows Observability is a Business Catalyst for AI Adoption, Customer Experience, and Product Innovation
Cisco launches Splunk Observability Cloud on AWS in Singapore
Cisco Announces Splunk and Australian Signals Directorate Joining Forces to Strengthen Australia's Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing
Products & Services
Platform for search, analysis, and visualization to gain actionable insights from all data
Cloud-powered insights for petabyte-scale data analytics across the hybrid cloud
Ensures service performance through visibility, AIOps, and incident intelligence
Delivers high-performing applications and customer experiences through unified metrics, traces, and logs
Market Position
Splunk is positioned as a leader in both security (SIEM) and observability markets, being the only vendor named a consecutive leader in both categories by major analyst firms (Gartner, Forrester). The company competes with specialized players like Datadog, New Relic, and Elastic in observability, and with Microsoft Sentinel, IBM QRadar, and others in SIEM. Splunk differentiates through its unified platform approach combining security and observability, extensive integrations (over 1,100 patents), AI/ML capabilities, and now Cisco's enterprise reach and networking integration. Key competitive advantages include schema-on-read flexibility, ability to handle petabyte-scale data, proven track record with 15,000+ customers in 110+ countries, and deep domain expertise in both IT operations and cybersecurity. Post-acquisition, Cisco+Splunk positioning emphasizes AI-powered digital resilience and integrated security/observability solutions.
Leadership
Founders
Michael Baum
Silicon Valley engineer and entrepreneur who spent the decade prior to founding Splunk working with scale-out web and search technologies during the first dot-com wave. Previously guided several venture-backed startups. Served as initial CEO. Inspired by Steve Jobs, he co-founded Splunk in 2003 and later founded four other technology ventures.
Rob Das
Silicon Valley engineer recognized for his distributed-systems expertise. Spent the decade prior to founding Splunk working with scale-out web and search technologies during the first dot-com wave.
Erik Swan
Silicon Valley engineer known for his ability to turn rough ideas into functional code. Spent the decade prior to founding Splunk working with scale-out web and search technologies during the first dot-com wave. Served as Chief Technology Officer from November 2003.
Executive Team
Gary Steele
General Manager and CEO
Appointed Splunk CEO in April 2022. Previously served as CEO of Proofpoint from 2002 to 2022. Former CEO of Portera Systems and held leadership roles at Sybase, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard. Currently a director at Upwork.
Ammar Maraqa
Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer
Previously held roles at Cisco, Dell, and Bain and Company. MBA from Stanford University and dual degrees in Engineering and Business from University of Pennsylvania.
Board of Directors
Founding Story
In the summer of 2003, three Silicon Valley engineers—Michael Baum, Rob Das, and Erik Swan—were frustrated that log files containing answers to server failures and customer glitches were scattered across machines and nearly impossible to search. They realized that traditional schema-on-write databases could not keep up with the torrential growth of machine data. They envisioned a 'Google for machine data' that would allow administrators to dive into raw logs and find specific information in seconds, based on a schema-on-read insight where structure is applied only at the time of search. The name Splunk was derived from the term 'spelunking,' as the founders compared debugging to crawling through dark caves with a headlamp to find nuggets of insight.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Splunk generates revenue through subscription-based cloud services and license-based on-premises deployments. The company offers multiple pricing models: (1) Ingest-based pricing charged on data volume ingested, (2) Workload-based pricing aligned with computing resources and types of workloads, (3) Entity-based pricing for observability products based on number of hosts, and (4) Activity-based pricing tied to specific metrics like metric time series, traces analyzed per minute, sessions, or uptime requests. Revenue streams include annual recurring revenue (ARR) from cloud subscriptions, perpetual and term licenses for on-premises deployments, professional services, and support contracts.
Pricing Tiers
Charges based on the volume of data brought into the Splunk Platform, allowing for additional searches and expanded use cases
Charges aligned with the types of workloads running on the Splunk Platform, making it economical to ingest large amounts of data searched less frequently
Predictable pricing based on the number of hosts using Splunk observability products
Costs connected to activities monitored such as metric time series (MTS), traces analyzed per minute, sessions, or uptime requests
Free trial available for evaluation purposes
Target Markets
- Aerospace and defense
- Communications and media
- Energy and utilities
- Financial services and insurance
- Healthcare and life sciences
- Higher education
- Security information and event management (SIEM)
- IT operations and monitoring
- DevOps and continuous delivery
- Application performance monitoring (APM)
- Observability and full-stack monitoring
- Fraud detection and prevention
- Singapore Airlines
- Papa John's
- Heineken
- McLaren Racing