Gary Mikuna, FIRNA, at Splunk.conf 2014 with John Furrier and Jeff Kelly @theCUBE @Splunk #theCUBE #Splunk #splunkconf #SiliconANGLE Dave remarks that Splunk’s recently unveiled cloud offering and Hunk, its Hadoop-based querying and visualization tool, are highly strategic products that “bump into a lot of adjacent markets.” He predicts that these solutions and the channel will continue to drive value for the company as it expands into new segments. Adding his own take on the vendor’s rapid growth, Jeff notes that “the ability to land and expand if you will, and apply the platform to any number of areas, is certainly so far a winning strategy for Splunk against something similar we see happening at Tableau. But as you said Dave, as they spread their wings they are going to start bumping into more competitors, even Tableau for instance, there’s a little overlap there with the type of data visualizations you can create.” Dave highlights that in addition to Tableau, Splunk also competes with VMware and traditional business intelligence vendors such as SAP. The firm is taking a federated approach to analytics that includes not only Hadoop but also Cassandra, MongoDB and other increasingly popular Big Data platforms. John believes that Splunk is well positioned to secure a dominant position in the market. He notes that the company is a “different animal” with “a lot of trends behind their back,” including the consumerization of IT and search, which has become a fundamental component of enterprise applications in recent years. See the video below for the full discussion, including John’s analysis of Splunk’s role in the Big Data application ecosystem.