Splunk ramps up its Aussie presence

Splunk has launched its Asia-Pacific search solution, dubbed -Splunk 4 IT.

The search engine was born when Spunk's founders,  Erik Swan and Michael Baum, became frustrated with the menial work involved with running large IT infrastructures.

Even with the use state-of-the-art IT management tools, the pair found it nearly impossible to locate the root cause of problems, investigate security attacks and assemble all the data required for compliance audits.

Their conclusion was the silo approach to managing IT with separate tools for every technology and IT function was cumbersome, costly and didn't scale.

Robert Lau, vice president APAC at Splunk, told CRN, they founded Splunk to develop a different approach.

 "The concept was simple," he said.

"If Google can index and let users search billions of pages of Web content in seconds, why can't we do the same for the data center?

"Splunk indexes the data generated by any application, server or network device running across technical, functional and geographic IT silos and lets you instantly search, alert and report on it."

Lau said the software lets you search and analyse data IT infrastructures generate from a single location in real time.

"There's no need for databases, connectors, custom parsers or proprietary consoles," he said.

Splunk counts Monash University, Telstra, Optus, various government agencies and financial institutions, amongst its customers.

"We have a couple dozens of customers in Australia and NZ and close to 100 across the Asia Pacific," said Lau.

"Worldwide we have over 1100 plus enterprise customers."

"We also offer a free version of Splunk and during the last couple of quarters and around 2000 users from this region downloading the software."

Lau said the developer primarily sold through resellers and system integrator partners in this region.

The product is available here through distributor Digital Networks Australia. Integrators, Alphawest and Frontline are primary service providers for Splunk's larger customers.

"We look for partners with domain expertise in application management, operation management and security and compliance areas," said Lau. 

"Splunk can be used to solve many different use cases; however, our strong verticals are telcos, online services, datacenters, FSI, Public sectors.

"Customers tend to come back for more licenses as they find new uses for the technology."

Lau said Splunk currently has no direct competitors in the market.