Splunk .conf18: New Product Offerings Emphasize Improved Accessibility and Usability
Carnival, which boasts nine cruise brands and more than 100 ships, attracts nearly 12 million guests annually, a figure President and CEO Arnold Donald anticipates will rise to 13 million guests by the end of 2018.
“We generate a lot of data,” said Arnold, who spoke Tuesday during the opening keynote at Splunk .conf18 in Orlando, Fla. Carnival deploys both Splunk Cloud and Splunk Enterprise Security to provide secure mobile access to its guests and wants to continue to enhance their experiences with the help of all of that data.
“We want our innovations to make every guest interaction more impactful, meaningful and personalized,” Arnold said.
Along with updates to its cloud and security solutions, revised iterations of several other offerings, as well as brand-new tools, were unveiled by Splunk during the keynote. CEO Doug Merritt stressed the company never stops advancing in its quest to empower users from all backgrounds.
“People who know business but don’t know data can act like data scientists today,” Merritt said during a question-and-answer session with reporters after the keynote about Splunk’s evolving usability. “We are always on a relentless push for simplification because the environment continues to become more complex around us.”
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Splunk Enterprise 7.2 Enables Easier Data Management for Users
Notably, the company announced the launch of Splunk Enterprise 7.2, which boasts a new feature called SmartStore that separates compute and storage, making it much easier for administrators to manage clusters and potentially improving the total cost of ownership for users.
CTO Tim Tully also unveiled Splunk Next, an evolving series of technologies that aim to boost accessibility even further. One of those solutions uses augmented reality to enable users to interact with and take action from various data sources, including QR codes, dashboards, UPC scanning and near-field communications.
“We all know the data landscape is incredibly complex,” Merritt said. “There are so many different types of data. It’s constantly in motion.”
In addition, Splunk announced a new version of its IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) platform, powered by machine learning. The solution will enable users to better detect looming problems, while helping them to automate processes such as incident investigation.
“We’ve been at [machine learning] for a while now, so we’re all getting better; Splunk is getting better, our customers are getting better, and the community is getting better at understanding how to do that,” Merritt said.
Above all else, though, Merritt and Susan St. Ledger, president of worldwide field operations for Splunk, said it’s imperative that their technology is flexible and can live wherever data lives. St. Ledger noted that one of the things she hears over and over from customers is that people want to “Splunk” their data where it lives, whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises.
“You need to bring compute to data as much as you need to bring data to compute,” Merritt said.
Keep this page bookmarked for articles from the event. Follow us on Twitter @BizTechMagazine, or the official Splunk Twitter account, @splunk, and join the conversation using the hashtag #splunkconf18.
