Splunk with funding

Filed in archive Technology on December 17, 2004

Splunk has announced its first round of funding with USD 5 million from August Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds.

"The company's technology allows users to "splunk" IT systems, meaning it allows them to find and follow paths through the infrastructure by locating and analyzing large amounts of operational IT data."

The company also runs a blog as company homepage (incl. a "What we read section"!) that has more detail on what the founders try to achieve:

"IT systems used to be laid out like well-planned cities. What
got connected to what and who talked to who was all tightly controlled.
But today's infrastructure is distributed, loosely coupled and the
potential connections and paths through the infrastructure are endless.
As a result, the amount of operational data has grown rapidly and the
structure and location of the data can change regularly.

A typical server today can log more than a gigabyte a day and a
small data center can generate over a terabyte of operational data a
week. In addition to the problems of scaling traditional solutions to
data of this magnitude, variety and frequency of change, making meaning
out of the data is still a difficult task for even the most experienced
technical staff. Welcome to the cost of the new IT reality.

Somewhere along the way things got confusing. IT people tried to
apply their network management systems to the new IT reality. We did it
... at places like Bank of America, eBay, Infoseek, Yahoo!, Sun and
Wells fargo. These colossal management systems loom over IT with
acronyms like SOA, BSM or BTO trying to maximize control by minimizing
change. But IT is supposed to be a flexible, adaptive medium supporting
the ever-changing way applications and businesses work. The new IT
reality is born of a more decentralized, DIY approach fueled by
componentization and open standards. The new IT hero is the one
getting things done with fewer dollars and resources by putting
together and managing pieces of technology from all over the
place."