Splunk's Sullivan: Value, Complexity Important Trends in IT

Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Splunk's President and CEO Godfrey Sullivan, who characterized his company as "Google (News - Alert) for the data center."

It's a search engine that looks through all the IT infrastructure for a client, and as Sullivan noted, this is the third year they were chosen as the trouble-shooting standard for work at Interop: "We searched half a billion events over the past three days," he said, "looking at network traffic, Web site destination, attacks" and other events.

Business is good, Sullivan said, noting that the company grew 120 percent last year. Indeed, any company growing 120 percent in 2009 is doing well.

When asked about trends he'd seen changing in the industry over the past couple years, Sullivan said that the infrastructures are getting more and more complex, so "having a tool like Splunk (News - Alert), where you can aggregate all the data in your infrastructure and look at it in one common view, that's a real benefit as IT infrastructures continue to grow more complex."

Another trend Sullivan remarked upon is that with tight(er) budgets these days, "IT organizations want to see value before they spend the money. That's been a real plus for us - we have paying customers in 68 countries." Sullivan said that's because people download the free version of the product, use that, test it out, and "come back to buy a license. Pretty good evidence of the power of viral, and the power of proving your value before you get paid for it."

View the full video interview below (Apple (News - Alert) users click here):