Application development and deployment can bleed an organization’s resources. Besides the difficulty of snatching up scarce and pricey developers, there is the time and effort it takes to build and deploy apps. And those builders may be in for an unpleasant surprise when the feedback comes in and major tweaking is needed. Wouldn’t it save them a lot of grief if they could fast-forward into the future and see how an app would perform before they sank resources into it?

Allen Tucker, manager of HELPnet Central Systems at Indiana University, and Albert Ball, security analyst at Rice University, spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Splunk.conf 2016 event. And, according to Tucker, Splunk’s upcoming low-commitment test/dev license may be the next best thing to a crystal ball.

“The licensing changes are going to be pretty big for us,” Tucker said, explaining that Indiana University already uses Splunk, so the test/dev will make an interesting accessory.

“To be able to spin up test and dev environments in under 50 gig — that’s going to be pretty big. For us, that means we don’t have to go against our production license if someone just wants to try something out,” he said, adding that acquiring a license can be arduous for universities.

Vertically integrated development

Ball said the test/dev model allows Rice University to pull higher-ups into the fold before going live.

“We’ll be able to try out some things that we weren’t able to. Different apps possibly or pieces of the security offering, user analytics, we could probably throw that in there and then show management exactly what could be done there on that side of it,” he explained.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Splunk.conf 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE