As an established company with plenty of data processing street cred, Splunk has been making life easier for their 12,000 clients by analyzing machine data and delivering actionable insights for the IT, security and business sectors since 2004. But Splunk was finding that their customers needed something more, they wanted real-time analytics and monitoring.
And they wanted the capabilities to do that while processing millions of signals a day. They knew they needed to broaden out their analytics offerings but weren’t sure if they should build in-house or buy an outside company. Data processing isn’t the kind of business that allows for grass to grow underfoot so the San Francisco-based tech firm had to move quick.
“This trend is moving pretty fast,” said Roy Fitz, SVP and general manager of Global Markets, in a 2019 interview. “It became very clear to us that we need to move very fast to capitalize on this shift.”
Seek and ye shall find, however, and Splunk’s hunt for their own data-analytics Holy Grail did not go in vain. The company recently announced they would be acquiring SignalFx, a real-time cloud-monitoring service, for a hefty $1.05 billion price tag. It’s not a financial move for the faint of heart but for Fitz, it represents a win since they offer the services their customers want right now – no waiting around for a time-consuming build. The deal is likely to close in the second half of 2020.
The companies have a history of collaboration and joining forces is a natural next step. SignalFx’s products will augment Splunk’s own services and make them a strong contender for cloud market dominance. Splunk will have new capabilities to help their customers tame the big data beast and many of the tools will already integrate well with data-analytics company’s existing solutions.
“We built SignalFlow streaming analytics technology to process huge volumes and output results [very quickly]. We have customers processing tens of billions of signals a day,” Karthik Rau, SignalFx’s CEO from 2015, said in an interview. “When that is added to Splunk’s ability to makes sense of all the raw, unstructured data being produced every day, it’s a winning combination.
“Data fuels the modern business, and the acquisition of SignalFx squarely puts Splunk in position as a leader in monitoring and observability at massive scale,” said Doug Merritt, president and CEO of Splunk, in a prepared statement. “SignalFx will support our continued commitment to giving customers one platform that can monitor the entire enterprise application lifecycle. We are also incredibly impressed by the SignalFx team and leadership, whose expertise and professionalism are a strong addition to the Splunk family.
