Splunk Technology

Built a log analytics company out of my PhD from the University of Illinois.

And it became apparent to me when I was at Splunk and managing a very large engineering team that the biggest pain at scale is actually how do you run and debug these production systems.

And despite, let's say, unlimited access to our own tools, because we were an observability vendor, it was still very painful.

We had a period of time where Our entire SRE team resigned because of burnout, because of how hard it was to keep the systems reliable.

But I could see it becoming even useful for a single application, simple application.

Speaking of single application, I feel like why that didn't exist yet is because of like the GTM and then like the revenue perspective, right? One of the things about GTM I want to chat about is like you guys serve some of these like biggest organizations from like Coinbase to like, you know, Snail Flag to like all these kind of like big companies.

What's a kind of like GDM motion? It's like, do you travel with a CTO? And then obviously you have like an amazing track record and you are a founder of your multiple, like your previous company sold to like Splunk and like you have like done these like, you know, amazing, You have amazing track record.

And you said this on a different podcast.

You know, you don't always have everything up front.

And on the other side of the spectrum, you have engineering teams being forced to pull handpicked fields from their production databases and sending them over to your Tableaus, your Splunks, whatever have you.

And then the data isn't there anyway.

But at least they're responsible for doing it.

That's from an endpoint protection perspective, the server endpoint, as well as the end user endpoint.

But when we start talking about when the SOC comes into picture, we are Splunk.

Splunk is our SIEM, which is the security incident and event management system.

That's where all of our logs go.

But all of the institutions that are part of the SOC program under Lani SOC are in Splunk as our SIM solution.

And then our public private partnership with TechStream, they leverage the Splunk SOAR platform to coordinate the incident management and the event management platform from that perspective.

And that's where the student SOC analysts would also work in the same platform.

From other security tools that LSU A&M uses, we've got a plethora of things, right? So from a network perspective, we have firewalls, we have threat intelligence built into our firewalls to prevent threats.

Data centers turtle up in Maryland, an NSA reorg is in progress, OpenAI goes glass, Cornelis Networks is building bigger, better networks, Salesforce launches some new agents, and Splunk is looking to control AI.

Speaking of which, AI might not be slowing down after all, in this week's episode of the Tech Field Day Rundown.

Hello, everyone.

So far, I haven't seen a big sort of build a moat around your Salesforce here.

Salesforce has historically tended to like integrating with things that just charge you a fortune for everything that you get from them.

Splunk is adding new AI tools while giving IT teams more control of the cost of managing data.

The company announced Splunk AI Assistant tools for building AI agents, new pricing options, and expanded monitoring for AI workloads.

Splunk is also strengthening its integration with Cisco, that incidentally owns Splunk, to help IT security and operations teams manage data and AI systems from a more connected platform.

Welcome to Fresh AI, Workforce Wednesday.

Today we're covering a major infrastructure announcement from Cisco and Splunk at .conf26 in Denver, where the two companies just shipped the Cisco AI pod for Splunk.

a turnkey on-premises stack purpose-built to host agentic AI workloads inside enterprise data centers, marking Splunk's first extension of accelerated computing to on-prem hardware.

Right.

And the stack itself is comprehensive.

Cisco UCS compute paired with NVIDIA GPUs, Red Hat OpenShift, and Splunk's AI runtime.

It's designed to run the Splunk AI Assistant and the Agent Launchpad locally.

Agent Launchpad has been available on Splunk Cloud since July 15, 2026, so this marks a notable shift toward giving customers the option to keep everything in-house.

When it was originally designed, there was no such thing as like Otel or some of these other things.

So now we're just kind of, making the best of modern metrics and logging systems and even sending like things off platform to your Splunks and your whatever, your enterprise third party observability tools, you can start adopting that methodology as well and save a bunch of resources too.

So keep a lookout for that across the board.

And I think that's a big savings, especially now that we all may be seeing, maybe before last year, like, oh, yeah, we saved some compute.