It’s not every day that a well-established technology provider announces they are building their solutions on a new cloud technology stack, but that’s what Splunk announced at its .conf23.
“…[O]ne of the most exciting [announcements] is Splunk’s new strategic partnership with Microsoft to build Splunk’s cloud solutions natively on Microsoft Azure. Together, our approach will enable our joint customers to migrate, modernize and grow their environments with end-to-end cloud and hybrid visibility at scale,” Splunk President and CEO Gary Steele said in a Splunk blog post this morning.
Why such a bold move, might you ask? “Splunk’s strategic partnership with Microsoft to build Splunk natively on Azure demonstrates our commitment to advancing digital resilience and meeting our customers where they are…” Well, indeed, a big, big draw is the vast landscape of customers building and operating applications in Azure. While Gary didn’t share too many details about specific new capabilities or offerings yet, customers will get to use their Azure credits for Splunk offerings. I suspect two other important underlying factors made such a tech marriage happen: Open source and AI.
First, Microsoft is far removed from the days of being viewed as a pariah by the open source community and is now a leader and contributor to well-known open source projects (OpenTelemetry, to name one); it abandoned its proprietary service mesh tech and got behind Istio (a recently-graduated CNCF project) and now owns the largest open source repository ecosystem with GitHub.
While Splunk is by no means a noob when it comes to incorporating AI into products, the company continues to announce new AI capabilities, including a generative AI chat interface with a preview of Splunk AI Assistant, an improved version of the former SPL Copilot. Other AI-related announcements include Splunk App for Data Science and Deep Learning (DSDL) 5.1, which allows customers to leverage LLMs to build and train models with their domain-specific data for text summarization and text classification use cases. Stay tuned for more from .conf 2023!
