TheCube – Splunk .conf2012: Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick give their end of day one thoughts.

Splunk’s .conf2012 event kicked off earlier this week on September 10 and will run until tomorrow, September 13 at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Splunk provides software that makes bid data analysis fun and easy for users, even if they aren’t data scientists or data analysts.  What makes Splunk standout is the culture behind the company.  They’re not just telling you how fun and easy big data analysis is, they show you, especially this week at the .conf2012 event.

The highlights of the first day of the conference were tackled by Wikibon Analyst Jeff Kelly and SiliconANGLE’s Executive in Residence Jeff Frick, who are covering the event at TheCube – SiliconANGLE’s premier video production program.

Kelly noted that one of the highlights of the conference was when Splunk’s CEO Godfrey Sullivan talked about how their tools are going to help customers analyze big data especially with the emergence of new technologies.  A few years ago, CIOs of companies were doubtful about big data, but now they’re more open to its potential, especially for tools that help them manage huge amounts of data.

Frick notes that Splunk is an “atypical startup company,” as they went into the game looking for a problem to solve and not providing answers to possible problems.  Splunk, in his view, is a company whose culture was built with the essence of helping people find the best solution.  They spent years finding an area where they would excel and when they did, they just kept getting better and better.

As mentioned earlier, the company’s culture and their attitude towards customers are the factors that made Splunk such a success, drawing some high profile clients to their yard.

Take for example Target, the widely recognized retailer.  Eric Heigeson, Senior Technical Architect at Target, relates that when they launched their first external API in November of 2011, there was only one person with access to the logs of large amounts of data that began to flow in.  This is way too much for one person to handle so Target used Splunk to help organize the data and make it readily available.

Splunk was brought in to log and monitor product data, location data, and other business related data within Target at an enterprise service support angle.  But as time went on, they noticed that large amounts of data coming in from an API started showing the value of the data from a business angle.

Another thing to note here is Splunk’s core technology, which Kelly says is a big draw for customers looking for “enough flexibility in the platform to allow their customers to do other kinds of things to explore on their own.”  This is very important for customers to survive in the big data world where organizations aren’t fond of rigid data structures.  Splunk has made an effort to create a product that’s “easy to integrate to data sources and easy to build your applications into.”

You can watch the whole first day recap on TheCube here.