A few years ago we came up with a completely different way to address the management of IT by applying search to millions of data center artifacts. Traditionally these artifacts were summarized, filtered, reduced and then forgotten - leaving us humans in a pickle when we needed to figure out what’s really going on. More than 250,000 people have downloaded Splunk to troubleshoot operations problems, investigate security incidents, report on compliance controls and mine IT data for business intelligence. For us Splunk is also about a different way to do business using an approach of utter transparency. Our public product road maps, freely downloadable software and straightforward marketing had even our early stage venture capital investors thinking we were crazy. I enjoy thinking about the intersection of humans and complex IT infrastructures. I’m also into new ways of doing business and business transparency. If you find any of my ramblings thought provoking let me know. My email is thebaum at splunk dot com.