Another big name in the tech industry that we had the chance to interview at O’Reilly Fluent Conference was Paul Sanford, GM for Products, Developer Platform & Windows at Splunk.

In his keynote speech, Sanford talked about how a company should be doing big data development or any kind of development that can be hooked in to technologies that they are already using. Splunk even demonstrated “Splunking” Minecraft where they were able to draw out some real-life value in the data they gathered because they managed to see where people are going in the world. They also talked about how the data can be presented in interesting 3D visualizations and hook it with FAA data and external APIs, all within the Splunk environment.

“In our office in Seattle, we are Splunking Minecraft .. I just had a directed energy in the demo ware which has been a lot of fun. Splunk, historically, as you know, has been very strong with log data. I like to say Splunk was big data before big data became big data because log data demonstrates all the characteristics of big data… What they did is they took the Minecraft activity, put it in the Splunk, hooked it in with a Minecraft visualization technology and built some very interesting views of the world where you can view, real time, where people are going in the world and see what’s happening.”

When asked how is big data now part of the development environment as a raw material, Sanford explained:

“All apps need data so it just depends on what kind of data you’re working with. What we’re developing with our development platforms is to make this as easy as possible for Splunk developers or any developer who has knowledge of standard technologies –whether that’s languages, frameworks, or querying capabilities for them to hook in and build applications on top of our data store.”

John Furrier even jokingly asked if they are Splunking Bitcoin data next and Sanford bragged that “Splunk can take any kind of data so if it has an API, it throws off any kind of data, we can Splunk it. Splunk is a verb.”

Splunk can also save lives! A healthcare company used one of their SDKs to Splunk pacemakers. “They were taking the data on the health of the device and putting that into the Splunk Java SDK so they can get better insight into how that device is performing so can build better device, ultimately saving lives. That one I thought was great. Splunk saving lives!