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Splunk Technology

Splunk Technology – A Company Which Built World’s First Data-To-Everything Platform.

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Born in 2003, Splunk Technology has received unicorn status and has become a very unique company of its own. The team of Splunk believes in the power of data and opportunities it creates for an organization when coupled with cutting-edge tech. The scenery of big enterprises is evolving too quickly to grasp all at once. So, learning in the way of making simultaneous transformations will keep any organization afloat. Splunk aims to help enterprises capture data on a real-time basis, study them, and take quick actions. The main goal here is to bridge the gap between data availability of any kind and the actions that are followed by studying it.

About Splunk Technology

Splunk is a technology company that primarily works with machine-generated data. The company is based in San Francisco, California, US. Seventeen years ago, Michael Baum, Rob Das, and Erik Swan founded the company. Doug Merritt is the present CEO and President of Splunk. Currently, Splunk has more than 7,500 employees who are spread across 27 different offices across the globe. The company is publicly traded as SPLK under NASDAQ.

There are several products of Splunk whose main task is to capture, study, and co-relate real-time data and draw conclusions from it using infographics. Splunk makes its products available to a wide range of clients who use the data and information Splunk learns from it in various operations of the company. There’s a lot to learn how Splunk is making changes and help companies accelerate growth in a variety of fields.

Splunk Technology
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Splunk in the Initial Days

Back in 2003, when the three co-founders established Splunk, they were supported by venture firms like August Capital, Ignition Partners, etc. The company was looking for significant funding in the early couple of years and raised $40 million by 2007. The growth of Splunk became noticeable around 2009 and the company eventually filed its first IPO in 2012. Since Splunk became a publicly-traded company, it started acquiring many businesses, launched multiple products, and made it to the Fortune 1000 list.

The company started acquisition in 2013 when it acquired a mobile-based data analytics business called BugSense. Acquiring this company was a smart move as BugSense provided mobile users to get access to data analytics using a “software developer kit.” Later that year, Splunk acquired Cloudmeter, a company that transformed network data. 2015 became a very important year for Splunk as it back-to-back acquired two companies, namely, Metafor and Caspida. Splunk when acquired Caspida entered into the cybersecurity field and thus after a few months partnered with Booz Allen Hamilton Inc (US government security contractor) for detecting cyber threats. In 2015, Splunk welcomed its new CEO, Doug Merritt.

Success of Splunk

With the growing business of Splunk, the company decided to donate a huge amount for providing training, support, education, etc to non-profit organizations and schools. Splunk took care of both its customers and employees equally. In 2017, it became the fourth largest company in the US in terms of highest pay. Splunk kept on adding more companies to its acquisition list especially in 2017 and 2018. Some of the companies that it bought in the two years span are Drastin, SignalSense, VictorOps, Krypton Cloud, etc. With acquiring companies specialized in different fields, Splunk now provides solutions from aerospace to healthcare. Till last year, 92 companies from the Fortune 100 list were clients of Splunk.

Splunk offers its products and solutions in many industries, but the three key initiatives of the company remain the same for its clients. First, unleashing the full potential of cloud transformation by overcoming cloud complexity. Second, Splunk provides a data analytics backbone to all its clients so that they keep responding to modern threats effectively and adapt to constantly evolving business scenarios. Third, to improve the quality of the digital experience by accelerating innovation, enhancing quality performance, and strengthening security.

About Dough Merritt

Doug Merritt joined Splunk with a very impressive business background. Merritt went to the University of Pacific Stockton, California, and graduated with a BS degree. He co-founded a cloud-based company called Icarian Inc and also served as its CEO from 1996 to 2001. Before joining Splunk, he worked at a few other companies like Cisco Systems and Baynote (served as the CEO). Merritt joined Splunk in 2014 and only after a year became both the CEO and President of the company. Under his leadership, Splunk went through some major shifts in its financial model which resulted in an increase in the company’s market capitalization.

box

Box : The Journey from A Class Project to Becoming a Unicorn

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File storage has become the biggest issue of the current time. With changing time, the need for storage capacity is also changing. In previous years, some KBs were sufficient, and now, even TBs are not able to fulfil the business requirements. But then, the introduction of the cloud has helped people to cop-up with their needs, such that they can buy as much online storage as they need to store their files on the cloud. This is a similar concept behind one of the successful startups, Box, which is a cloud content management and file sharing service. The founder of Box, Aaron Levie, started working on Box as a college project, which now is one of the Unicorn companies of the Silicon Valley.

Levie was born as Aaron Winsor Levie on 27 December 1985 in a Jewish family, settled in Mercer Island, Washington. He did his middle school from Islander Middle School in Mercer Island, Washington, where he met his best friend, and the future CFO of Box, Dylan Smith. Levie and Smith had always shown an interest in business as well as coding. In fact, when they were in high school, they had already built a few websites for people.

After completing his high school education, Levie joined the University of Southern California to pursue a degree in business and marketing, whereas Smith went to Duke University, and enrolled in a Bachelor’s course in economics.

Dylan Smith Aaron Levie Founders Box
Image Source: techrepublic.com

While at the University of Southern California, Levie constantly kept on working on new projects with his classmates. When he, with his other friends created code files, all of them created separate files on separate devices, so it was difficult for them to bring the code together and run. And this was the time when he realised that there has to be a single place to store files. It was the first pain point towards the development of Box.

At the same time, in one of their business studies class, a new project came up for their finals. Levie chose the same topic for his project that was a big issue for him and other businesses out there, centralised storage system. He wrote a paper for the project that represented the difficulties that the businesses were facing due to the lack of such systems.

While working on the project, Levie realised the scope of the project and decided to take the project more seriously. In 2004, he asked his friend Dylan to join him for help. Levie was working on the front end coding for the project, and then, brought his high school friends Sam Ghods and Jeff Queisser on board, too, to run the engineering work. Along with that, he hired some back-end developers on contract for the backend coding. The $20,000 seed funding for the project, and the company they founded, came from online poker earnings of Smith. They also invested the money that came from their previous projects in the company.

Levie knew the potential of his new project but was not sure what type of industry to target first. He, along with Smith, went to meet various business owners to clarify the same. Finally, they launched their company Box, and the service as Box.net in April 2005. At the end of 2005, the two went to Washington to work together on the project, and Levie took absence leave from his college. Soon, they moved their company to Berkeley, California.

Box received its first angel investment from Mark Cuban, a billionaire from Texas. During the beginning, the service was a consumer service, but the increased demand made Levie turn it into cloud storage and sell it to the businesses. In 2009, Box acquired Increo Solutions for its document collaboration and preview technology.

The company hosted a round of funding led by growth equity firm General Atlantic, where it raised a $125 million, in 2012. It also extended its operations to Europe and built its office in London, England. In 2013, the company in an F series round of funding raised a $100 million.

In 2014, 40% of Fortune 500 companies were using Box as their cloud storage and raised a $150 million in series G round of funding. Box also filed for an IPO at the New York Stock Exchange. The company became public in January 2015 and raised $175 million in the IPO. The IPO valued the company at around $1.6 billion, establishing it as a Unicorn company. In the same year, Box acquired another cloud management company named Airpost. The next year, the company built its headquarters in Redwood City, California. It even reached 44 million users around the world.

Box works in three types of offering, enterprise, business, and personal, IBM, Schneider Electric and Procter & Gamble, being its enterprise customers.

Dropbox Increases Storage for its Subscription Plans with Added New Features

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Dropbox, one of the most loved cloud storage provider, is going to increase the storage for its subscribers with a slight increase in the prices in the subscription plans. Now the subscribers will get better storage options for all its plans including Plus, Business, and Professional, and that too with newly added features.

dropbox
Image Source: gadgets.ndtv.com

The company has revised the prices of its Pus plan, increasing the storage capacity to 2TB of storage, up from 1TB. The price for the Plus plan will now be $12 per month from its previous $10. Dropbox has also added new features, like Dropbox Smart Sync and Dropbox Rewind to all its subscription plans. Dropbox Smart Sync feature will look for the items in the hard drive that have been idle for a long time and mark them as online-only. This way, it will move the out of date items from the hard drive and make space for the new stuff.

On the other hand, the Rewind feature will help the users to roll back some of its actions like deletion of some important data and the accidental edits done in the past 30 days. Along with those two features, Dropbox will be bringing the full-text search for the Plus users. The subscribers who will pay annually will get a $2 discount on the subscription fee.

For the Professional plan, the storage has been increased to 3TB from 2TB at the old price $19.99 per month. And like before, the price of the one-month subscription will remain $16.58 if paid annually. Both Smart Sync and the Rewind feature are enabled for this plan too, the latter being able to work for the past 180 days. The Professional plan subscribers will also get access to the watermarking tool, such that they can use the same to protect their work from being copied.

The price for the Business plan is also the same, but the storage has been increased from 3TB to 5TB. The plan will include the discussed features, and the 120-day version history has also been upgraded to 180-days version history for the subscribers.

The storage capacity for the Dropbox subscription plans has been increased for every subscriber. For the old subscribers, too, the storage has been increased immediately. For them, the plan price will remain the same until their subscription ends, and they subscribe for the new cycle. The new subscribers will need to pay the increased price for the Plus plan.

Drew Houston : The Co-founder & the CEO of Dropbox

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Drew Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur, who co-founded the multi-billion company Dropbox at the mere age of 24. Once just an idea, now has more than 500 worldwide users subscribed to it. Houston a computer enthusiast, gives the credit of his success to his partner and co-founder of Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi, and the education he received at MIT. In one of his speeches at MIT, he said that people should surround themselves with inspiring people. He said, “Surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard.”

Drew Houston
Image Source: nytimes.com

Early Life

Houston was born on 4 March 1983, in Acton, Massachusetts. His father was an electrical engineer. Houston was a student at the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School. Initially, he was influenced by video games and had decided that he would become a video game tester. But as soon his father introduced him with programming, his focus diverted towards the computers. At the age of 14, while playing a video game, on his father’s Pcjr computer, he found a bug in the game and reported to the video game company, upon which he was offered a job at the same company. In 1990, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from where he earned a graduate degree in Computer Science.

Career & Founding Dropbox

Along with an offer for a job at the early age of 14, he had also been a part of many startups including Bit9, Accolade and Hubspot. Houston was still in college when he thought of developing Dropbox. He wrote the first line of code for Dropbox, while he was travelling on a bus, as he had forgotten his USB drive. At the time he was frustrated with his habit of forgetting and losing those USB flash drives all the time. So he conceived the idea of creating a cloud-based system for keeping the files in it. At first, he started working on the project for his personal use, but then he realised that the product could benefit other people too.

Houston released a video regarding the idea, his college mate Arash Ferdowsi being one of the viewers of it. Ferdowsi was really impressed by the idea and contacted Houston for partnership. From here the two started working on the project together.

In May 2007, Houston founded the parent company to Dropbox, Evenflow, Inc. In the same year, the company was able to get a seed funding from venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Y Combinator. In 2008, the company launched Dropbox at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Within one year, Dropbox had more than 3 million registered users. By 2011, the number of users reached 50 million, and in March 2016, it had 500 million users.

During the evolution of the company, it also went through some successful acquisitions including TapEngage, Audiogalaxy, Snapjoy in 2012, Bubbli in 2014, CloudOn in 2015, etc. In 2011, the total revenue earned by the company was over $240 million. Dropbox is considered as one of the twenty best startups of Silicon Valley.

In February 2018, Dropbox filed an IPO to be listed on the Nasdaq.

Personal Life

Houston is a huge video game lover. He also likes to sing, and during the college, he was a part of ’90s cover band. Business Week named Houston as one of the most promising players aged 30 and under. He was also named among the top 30 under-30 entrepreneurs by inc.com.

IBM to Acquire Red Hat to Become World’s Number One Hybrid Cloud Provider

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IBM
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IBM, on Sunday, has announced that it is planning to acquire the American’s multinational open-source software development company, the Red Hat, to create the leading hybrid/multi-cloud provider. The Red Hat is the publicly traded company that has a market cap of $20.5 billion, with 176 million its shares are outstanding.

Noticeably, Red Hat is the software provider for the largest tech giants including Google, Amazon and Microsoft. That means after, IBM and Red Hat join their hands, IBM will automatically be delivering services to its rival companies.

The changing technology within the past few years has brought many changes the users used the technology. And, in no time the user’s data was moved from the hard disk of their desktops to the clouds. The Dropbox, Netflix, Flickr, Google Drive, Microsoft Office 365, Yahoo Mail are all cloud services and are the most used applications by the users. The only difficulty in using those cloud services is the moving of the data between those applications. But the deal between IBM and Red Hat will be a hybrid cloud arrangement, that will focus on solving the issue, as they together will provide the facility to move the data between various cloud services.

Ginni Rometty, IBM’s chairman, president and chief executive said, “The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer, It changes everything about the cloud market.” The companies have called the deal, but IBM has to get approval from the other shareholders too, for that it has scheduled a conference call with investors on Monday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.

The deal will be closed by paying Red Hat $190 a share in cash, with an enterprise value of about $34 billion. The deal will accelerate the IBM’s high business model and will make it world’s number one hybrid cloud provider. Red Hat will still retain its open-source legacy and operate as a distinct unit. The deal is expected to close by the end of the half of 2019.

Google One Launched : Replacing Google Drive?

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Google One
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In May 2018, Google had announced its new cloud storage product Google One and had been working on it for past few months. Finally, it has launched Google One, on the 15 August of this year. The ones, who have already used Google Drive, might know that Google provides you with 15 GB of free storage on Google Drive and after 15 GB, you have to pay for more storage.

Google One is similar to Google Drive and is a paid cloud storage provided for the users all over the world. No! It is not replacing Google Drive, but, Google Drive will be upgraded to Google One after its 15 GB free plan with some added perks for its Consumer.

1) Increased Data Storage: Google has been working on its newly launched Google One for a quite some time now and, has already been updating the Google Drive’s paid user’s subscriptions for the last few months. Google has come with many subscription plans, according to the user’s requirements and, that too at a good price.

The monthly plan of Google One starts with 100 GB of storage for $1.99, followed by 200 GB tier for $2.99, a 2 TB option for $9.99 and the plan ends at 30 TB of storage that will cost $299.99. Interestingly, Google has reduced the price of 2 TB storage by $10, i.e. $9.99 that was the previous price of 1 TB storage. The consumers can subscribe to any of the plans according to their need. Also, the subscription can be shared with five of the family members without paying any extra money and equal storage for all of them.

2) Customer Support: This time Google has also come with a one-tap help button, that is for the live-customer support. Meaning that the Google users can connect with the real experts, for their queries related to any Google product, instead of any AI chatbots. The customer-support will be available 24/7 and, you can contact them via a phone call or through an e-mail.

Right now, Google One is only available in the US. But, it will soon be rolling out for the consumers across other countries too. Also, the G-Suite users with the business account will get no additional benefits and their plans will remain as it is.

Google has come with some other perks for its subscribers and, will offer credits on their purchase on Google Play and Google Express. Also, if the user will search and book the Hotels through Google maps, they can earn good deals on the bookings.

So, now you can share more data like high-resolution pictures, 4K videos, documents with your family and friends with any of the above-mentioned subscription plans. And, if you are not a US citizen, you have to wait for sometime. Google is also working on launching an app for the users, to help them choose for their easy subscription to the different plans. So, hopefully, the app and Google One will be launched together in the other countries soon.