Splunk for Business Analytics

Business Insights Beyond Structured Data

The world of business analytics is changing. In today's data-driven world, companies that rely only on structured data for business analytics are bound to find themselves at a distinct competitive disadvantage.

Data architects, business analysts, developers and IT leaders are expanding the scope of business analytics to incorporate new data sources such as machine data. Every organization generates machine data in huge volumes, at high velocity and from a variety of sources—it is big data that powers the enterprise.

Organizations already rely extensively on machine data to support their IT and operational needs. Leading companies also mine machine data to deliver new business insights, in real time, to their executives, sales, products, marketing, operations and customer service teams.

Splunk Delivers Business Insights from Machine Data

Splunk Enterprise is the platform for machine data. It is the easy, fast and resilient way to collect, analyze and secure the massive streams of machine data generated by your technology infrastructure. Splunk software enables organizations to gather and index all types of machine-generated data, in real time, from any source, in any format or at any location.

Splunk software transforms machine data into operational intelligence to deliver real-time business insights.

New Class of Data for Business Analytics

With Splunk Enterprise, you can expand beyond the data warehouse to include machine data as a critical new source of business insights. Splunk Enterprise lets you:

• Analyze and correlate machine data to identify patterns, outliers and trends
• Quickly create custom dashboards for different roles or users within your organization
• Visualize your data on your desktop, tablet or mobile device

There are numerous examples of what can be achieved using business insights from machine data. For example, telecom service providers can now monitor real-time activation of new devices and services across regions, retailers can understand how customers are interacting with mobile and web sites, product managers can view how customer consume various online services, and financial services companies can get a complete view of the customer across various channels of communication.

Enrich Machine Data with Business Context

While machine data by itself is a source of critical value for the business, enriching machine data with structured data provides additional business context and makes it even more valuable to the business. Splunk DB Connect enables real-time integration between Splunk Enterprise and other relational databases.

For example, you have the ability to combine real-time service activation data with profile data from customer master to understand what types of customers are purchasing what types of plans—enabling in-depth real-time sales and customer analytics not possible before. Examples of business analytics by combining machine data with structured data are shown in the table below:

Real-time Business Insights Delivered Quickly

Splunk is architected to collect and index terabytes of machine data in real time. Splunk does not require time consuming processes to extract, transform and load (ETL) data.

Most data management projects are designed to answer a pre-set list of questions, fitting into brittle schema and data models. Indexed data in Splunk doesn't have these limitations because the schema is applied at the time of search—so users can immediately ask new questions while they explore data and add new data sources as they come up.

These capabilities along with the ability to rapidly create role-based dashboards empower you to deliver business insights to your users immediately and in real time.

Complements Existing BI Tools and Other Big Data Technologies

Most organizations already have existing business intelligence tools along with data warehouses. Splunk complements these technologies by providing your users new business insights from machine data.

Data architects can use Splunk to expand the scope of data they use to create analytics and dashboards. Developers can use Splunk software development kits (SDKs) and APIs to directly access indexed machine data in Splunk and make it available in existing visualization solutions. Business analysts can take advantage of Splunk's easy-to-use interface to create searches, dashboards and perform in-depth analytics.

Deploying Hadoop? Use Splunk Enterprise for real-time collection, indexing, analysis and visualizations and use Splunk Hadoop Connect to reliably forward events to Hadoop for cheap storage and additional batch analytics. Further leverage Splunk software by importing and indexing data already stored in Hadoop.

Getting Started

Splunk is a powerful, easy-to-use solution that should be a part of your business analytics technology portfolio. With a rapidly growing customer base, it is likely that Splunk is already being used by IT, Operations or Security teams in your organization. Talk to them and learn how you can use Splunk to deliver value to the business.

Download Splunk for free today and unleash the power of machine data for your business users. Contact us and let us know how we can help you.