Splunk Breakthrough Recognized with Grant of U.S. Patent for Organizing and Understanding Massive Machine Data

SAN FRANCISCO, June 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Splunk, a leading provider of Operational Intelligence software, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company a new patent for organizing and understanding machine data through use of a  "machine data web." A Splunk-created machine data web can be searched, browsed, navigated, analyzed and visualized enabling IT professionals and businesses to solve a wide range of mission-critical problems, all without the inherent limitations of traditional approaches.

"Eight years ago, we began thinking about the challenges that result from information systems generating vast amounts and disparate types of machine data across physical and virtual environments both within data centers and in the cloud," said Erik Swan, co-founder and CTO, Splunk. "This information is extremely valuable to IT and business users. However, there was no unified way to organize and extract actionable insights from the massive machine data generated across diverse sources such as web servers, application servers, databases, and networks.  That is what we set out to create with Splunk."

Splunk's Machine Data Web patent includes turning machine data into a machine data web.  A machine data web is created by organizing machine data into events representing discrete activities, and dynamically linking events together representing larger, more complex activities. Much like the World Wide Web is a hyperlinked information space of documents and web sites, a machine data web is an interconnected information space of information system events and activities. The machine data web can be searched, browsed and navigated, and analyzed as a proxy for the information-processing environment itself. Splunk's technology has been granted U.S. Patent No. 7,937,344.

The volume and business-critical nature of machine data has exploded with the growth of mobile devices, location based data, the web, online commerce, social media, IP-connected devices and sensors, RFID, and other sources that extend far beyond traditional IT systems.  "The volume and speed with which machine data is generated makes it difficult to collect and organize for analysis often requiring sophisticated parallel processing frameworks," said David Menninger, VP & Research Director, Ventana Research. "Splunk has been tackling this problem with a unique solution that is generating a significant amount of commercial success."

"Our CIO is driving a real-time dashboarding initiative across the organization," said Noah Gift, Associate Director AT&T Interactive. "Splunk's ability to ingest and correlate large amounts of machine data generated by our infrastructure and rapidly build dashboards gives us the real-time insights we need to deliver early on our CIO's decree."

Over 2,600 customers in 78 countries use Splunk to make their machine data accessible, useful and valuable to IT and throughout their organizations. Unlike other approaches to big data, Splunk uniquely offers a free version that users can download and start seeing results in minutes or hours, rather than months. Additionally, the free version enables users to scale their usage of Splunk as their needs expand. To download Splunk for free visit: http://www.splunk.com/download.

Additional Resources:

• Definition of Machine Data on Splunk.com
• Download the Guide to Splunk and Operational Intelligence
• Download the Whitepaper, Why You Need Operational Intelligence from CITO Research

About Splunk

Splunk is the leading provider of operational intelligence software used to monitor, report and analyze real-time machine data as well as terabytes of historical data – located on-premise or in the cloud. Almost half of the Fortune 100 and more than 2,600 enterprises, service providers and government organizations in 78 countries use Splunk to improve service levels, reduce IT operations costs, mitigate security risks, and drive new insights for IT and the business.

For more information please visit www.splunk.com.

SOURCE Splunk