Blogs: Rahul Deshmukh

You hear this quite often.  We all love to share the excitement of a new purchase – be a new car or a new gadget.  Feelings from purchasing a new software are no different.   Organizations tout on their investment in a new tool or technology, soon to realize that they have not achieved the full value or benefit from their investment.  There is a perception that investment in tools/technology is the answer to all the problems.  Well that is just the beginning for solving the problems.  There are two important questions that I tend to ask:

1) Was your selection the best for solving the problem you were aiming to solve?

2) Have you invested the right resources or…

Every now and then, you get so busy at work/home that you put off few things you like to do.  I know everyone goes through this.  For the last few weeks, I have been both busy and lazy.  Busy at work and lazy about writing a blog post.  My good friend and desk neighbor is kind enough to remind me that it’s always good to write…thanks Erin!

I wanted to focus this short post on two key elements of successful analysis and analytical teams.  On any given week, I interact with number of customers and organizations.  A clear distinction of successful analytical function is the focus on the two elements – intent and outcomes.  Many have talked about…

It happens to me quite a bit that I hear a song and then it keeps playing in my head.  My 4 year old is notorious for singing the same song over and over and then I find myself humming during my long train ride to work.

Sometimes, it happens at work – you hear a thing and you keep hearing about the same thing in almost every conversation.  I am sure you have had those times too.  A number of you will have had days or weeks when you have had some discussion on “big data”.

For the last three weeks, I have had number of conversations on the topic of big data.  Strata,

I have been an avid follower of eMarketer research articles for many years.  eMarketer does a great job at bringing research and marketing trends for the evolving area of digital marketing.  The recent research about cross channel data integration brings some of the pervasive challenges for cross-channel integration.  Many of us talk about the challenges with multi-channel  or cross-channel – need for effective analysis, improving targeting,  difficulty in bringing data from various sources together.  Well how hard it is depends on who you ask.  Thanks to Axciom and Digidays Nov 2011 survey and analysis by eMarketer.  The insights from the survey and analysis provide a better visibility of how successful organization are with cross-channel data integration…

On February 10, Forrester Research published research titled “Welcome to the Era of Digital Intelligence”.  Joe Stanhope and the crew at Forrester have done a fantastic job at laying out the current challenges in the web analytics space and laying out a framework for Digital Intelligence.  I couldn’t agree more.

Forrester is redefining web analytics as “Digital Intelligence”.  According to Forrester, Digital Intelligence is:

“The capture, management, and analysis of data to provide a holistic view of the digital customer experience that drives the measurement, optimization, and execution of marketing tactics and business strategies.”

What this means to the analytics industry is quite interesting.  Web Analytics solutions that have provided clickstream reports and some level of segmentation are…

Last week Google announced that Urchin will be closed as of March 2012.  We were sorry to hear of this announcement but understand that sometimes business decisions have to be made. We also recognize the huge commitment that Google has made in this area and the role Urchin and Google Analytics have played in helping bring Web Analytics mainstream. I know some members of the original Urchin team and want to thank them for the work on Urchin which helped shape Google Analytics. Without the initial success of these tools, Web Analytics would have not made the progress we have seen over the past ten years.  Today, smart organizations are starting and building products based on this data and Urchin…

Many of you have read about the exciting launch of Splunk version 4.3.  This release has a number of enhancements which will help users.  Spunk is used by many users for web analytics and probably wondering how these features affect you.  Well, I am very excited to share that these features are available in the Web Intelligence App and also available for web analytics using core Splunk.  I am going to focus on couple of the features in this blog post – sparklines and data preview.

Context is King for any insightful analysis.  The context can be based on time (time series reporting) or comparing trends for various dimensions.  Visualization of these trends can make analysis faster and…

At Splunk, we are committed to providing the best product and customer service.  During my last three months at Splunk, I have heard number of success stories as well as feedback from our customers on areas that we could do better.  I firmly believe in measuring the feedback.   Feedback from our customers helps us identify areas that we are doing good and areas of opportunity.

Starting this week, we have initiated our first Customer Satisfaction survey.  The survey is a very short survey – 6 questions that will help us gauge how we are doing. The survey should take less than 5 minutes.  The response is anonymous and will remain confidential.

A randomly selected set of customers should have received…

We are always amazed by how passionate and innovative Splunk users are about using and extending the capabilities of Splunk.  I have observed number of examples where users are driving tremendous value in Web Analytics using Splunk.  I recently read a post from datalicious about their use of Splunk.  Datalicious is a Splunk partner that came up with an innovative way to augment their implementation of Google Analytics. Splunk is being used for a comprehensive look at the customer and drive advanced segmentation  and real-time analytics.

According to Datalicious “we realised that we could use its powerful, expressive search language and its intuitive charting & visualisation features to do analytics work that’s more difficult, more expensive, or simply not possible,…

Braving a 20 degree drop in temperature and change of weather from bright/sunny to rain, more than 150 people attended SplunkLive Seattle.  SplunkLive Seattle took place on Oct 11^th.  Steve Sommer opened the event with a brief introduction of Splunk followed by three awesome presentations from Zulily.com, InfoSpace and Expedia.  Attendees were excited to see the Microsoft Exchange App and Citrix Zen Desktop demos.  The attendees were not shy about asking questions, which made the event very interactive.

The first customer presentation was from Zulily.  Zulily is a member only site for moms looking to buy kids clothes and accessories.  Zulily is experiencing tremendous growth and with the double-digit monthly growth came its fair share of challenges.  Site uptime was…