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Splunk Technology

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

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
Image Source: wikimedia.org

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.

Bluetooth

How Jaap Haartsen Changed the World Sends and Receives Files With Bluetooth

The world around us has changed so much due to advancements in science and technology. Almost every sphere of our lives has been touched by technology in some way or the other. It has made it possible for us to do things that were impossible or unimaginable in the past. One of the major fields in which technology has had a massive impact is in communication and data transfer. We have all used Bluetooth at some point of time to share and transfer files. It has been our savior whenever we had to share a song or an image and didn’t have cellular data to help us. But how many know about how Bluetooth came to be. Since being invented, Bluetooth has come a long way, from being something primarily used by businesspeople to share things on their mobile phones to a universally loved and adopted platform to share and transfer data. So, here’s a look at the story behind Bluetooth and how the technology became what it is.

About the Inventor

Jaap Haartsen led the development team that designed and created the Bluetooth in 1994. At the time, he was working at Ericsson, while now he serves as an expert at wireless communication at Plantronics. Jacobus Cornelis Haartsen, generally called Jaap by his colleagues was born in 1963 in Hague, Netherlands. The Dutchman got his electrical engineering degree from Delft University in 1986.

After graduation, he worked for short stints in both Siemens and Philips before eventually going back to pursue his higher studies. He got his Ph.D. from Delft with honors in 1990, after publishing a thesis on acoustic wave detection. He joined Ericsson a year later, and worked in the US for two years, before shifting to their base in Sweden in 1993. It was while he was at the Mobile division in Lund that he developed the idea for the Bluetooth. After 1997, he worked for Ericsson in their Emmen plant, eventually quitting and taking up a part-time teaching job at the University of Twente.

He later became the Chief Technology Officer at Tonalite BV, which was a small company specializing in wireless wearables. In 2012, Plantronics acquired Tonalite, prompting Haartsen to become a part of their team. In 2015, he became a part of the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his contribution to the field of radio and wireless communication.

Jaap and Wireless Communication

Jaap always had an interest in the field of wireless communication, and now has been active in this field for over three decades. In 1994, he began developing a system that would later grow and evolve to become the Bluetooth technology we now enjoy. He began by taking up a project related to indoor wireless systems and tried to find ways to enable short-range radio connections.

After developing Bluetooth, he was also instrumental in setting up the Bluetooth Special Interest group, better known as the BSIG in 1998. He then, went on to serve as their Chairman till 2000, helping with standardizing the Bluetooth interface. He also played an important part in helping to obtain all the required approvals regarding the world-wide usage of Bluetooth technology.

Concept of Bluetooth

The idea for a short-range radio tech began in 1989, as per the suggestion of Ericsson’s CTO Nils Rydbeck. Haartsen’s goal was to create a device that could support both digital and visual data while being digital and wireless.

The team went with a chip that could integrate all these types of technologies and not pull to much space or battery power. Also, “Bluetooth comes from an anglicized version of the name of the Danish King Harald Blåtand, who played an important role in uniting Denmark and Norway. The logo too consists of a Viking inscription, called the bind rune, that brings together the king’s initials.

After developing the Bluetooth technology, IBM’s Adalio Sanchez approached Rybeck to talk about integrating the new technology with their existing technology in 1997. This resulted in the Bluetooth becoming a part of the ThinkPad notebook and Ericsson phone. However, since neither of these players was market leaders in their respective segments, they decided that it would do the technology well to make it open-source, so as to maximize the access to the market. Hence, with that aim in mind, in 1998, SIG came out with IBM, Ericsson, Nokia, Intel and Toshiba on board.

A year later, the first consumer device with Bluetooth integrated into came out, and even won an award at COMDEX. Ericsson then launched the first Bluetooth phone through the T36 and the T39 came out in 2001. Similarly, IBM launched the ThinkPad A30 in 2001, making it the world’s first notebook that came with Bluetooth.

Since then, Bluetooth has grown to become a gold standard in wireless data transfer, finding its way into almost every phone manufactured nowadays. With Apple recently stating that it was going to do away with the traditional headphone jack, the future of Bluetooth looks more interesting than ever before!