The Gately Report: Future Splunk Innovation Will Focus on ML for Threat Detection

In the coming months, new Splunk innovation will focus on adding more machine learning (ML) to its tools for advanced threat detection.

That’s according to Jane Wong, Splunk’s vice president of security products. She spoke during this week’s Splunk .Conf22. The conference brought 12,500 attendees and more than 1,800 partners to Las Vegas.

This was also the first .Conf for Gary Steele, Splunk’s new president and CEO. He joined Splunk after serving as Proofpoint’s CEO for nearly 20 years. Doug Merritt stepped down as Spunk’s CEO last November.

Momentum Is Back

Splunk’s Jane Wong

Wong said Steele has “brought a momentum back to Splunk.”

“You can feel it, very positive,” she said. “He’s very personal. He’s very transparent. We have weekly town halls to feel very real and authentic. He’s going to dive in and be hands on, and really help us get to the next level.”

During his .Conf keynote, Steele said he’s looking forward to driving revenue growth well beyond $3 billion.

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Wong talked about Splunk’s innovations in observability and security and more from .Conf22.

Channel Futures: From your perspective, was there an overall message from this conference, whether you’re a partner
or a customer?

Jane Wong: I’ve been talking to customers over the past couple of days, and they’re really resonating well with what they want to see Splunk do. So one is that we’re not going to be addicted to ingest any longer. We’re really changing the way we think about data and whether that data is ingested into Splunk or not, or whether we can add value through analytics, whether the data is in a cloud service provider, on-premises or a private data lake. I think that’s really resonating well with analysts, too. I’ve had so many meetings where they are saying good to see you on this path finally. Machine learning is a message that we had last year as well, and everybody thinks that Splunk has access correctly to so much data that we can have a ton of value using ML for security to find more advanced threats. So that’s exciting. I think those are the two big ones. Also, security and observability coming together. I had lots of conversations with customers about that because they’re looking at both and they want to know can you dig down a little, tell us what you’re doing, where these things come together and how that works.

Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Wong about Splunk security innovation and more cybersecurity news.