'It's a great feather in the cap': Splunk celebrates 'fantastic' Computing Vendor Excellence Awards win

Head of marketing EMEA Matt Davies describes how winning the award represents 'a great moment' for Splunk and its customers

"It was fantastic, the entertainment was fantastic and it was a great afternoon."

That's what Matt Davies (pictured above), head of marketing for EMEA at Splunk, told Computing when describing the company's reaction to winning Big Data Innovation of the Year at Computing's Vendor Excellence Awards 2015 for its Splunk Enterprise platform.

Splunk beat competition from some of the biggest names in big data and analytics to win the award, which was presented during a packed event at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, where attendees were treated to a champagne reception and a delicious three-course meal.

Launched in 2006, Splunk Enterprise is used by most of the San Francisco firm's 9,000 customers and is, in the words of Davies, the company's "flagship product". He said the award-winning system enables organisations to crunch unstructured data created by just about anything.

"It's the platform for machine data. If you think of what machines are, they're everything from mobile phones, to data centres, to cloud, to cars and trains; all of those things have the same characteristics in that they generate unstructured machine data and there's a lot of it," he said.

"It's hard data as well; it's not neatly structured, you don't have rows and columns, it's very fast moving, horrible, messy data. Splunk is good at turning that into useful insight, allowing you to search that data, create alerts and reports and make that data usable to everyone."

Davies told Computing that Splunk is "used for many different things", including managing IT, security, analytics and Internet of Things, "so it's a platform for all that kind of machine data with different use cases".

Winning a Computing Vendor Excellence Award was "a great moment" for Splunk, he said, as it was a ringing endorsement of the product's capabilities. "It was nice to be recognised for that core ability of the platform to handle very large amounts of machine data."

Davies went on to describe how being awarded Big Data Innovation of the Year for Splunk Enterprise will benefit his organisation.

"I think it reinforces Splunk's tradition as one of the leading big data companies. It puts the spotlight on Splunk's enterprise platform as a leading platform for managing high volumes of big data," he explained.

"The award shows that being innovative and showing good time to value from big data is possible, and will shine a light on that," Davies said.

"Having the award from someone like Computing is great because it's a trusted brand and a leader in the UK space, and to be endorsed by Computing is a great feather in the cap of Splunk Enterprise and hopefully it'll let people know how easy it is to get value from big data," he said.

Splunk customers include big-name organisations such as games company Valve and mobile music app Shazam, and Davies said that being named Big Data Innovation of the Year at the Computing Vendor Excellence Awards reflected the ground-breaking ways these firms use the technology.

"If you look at the customers we have in the UK and across Europe who are doing some really interesting things with the data. You've got people like Shazam, Sophos, John Lewis and Tesco who are doing interesting things," he explained.

"They're all being very innovative with their data and they're using Splunk as a platform to do that. It's great to see companies like that disrupting their markets and using data to do things that have never been done before and using Splunk for it," Davies said.