What’s so great about agile software development? Sure engineers think its great. I think it helps them feel empowered. Product managers think its great too, but secretly I think they’re still trying to figure it out. Apparently Oracle thinks it’s great. The company just paid $495 million for Agile Software Corporation (Nasdaq: AGIL), representing a 14% premium.

As a user I just want to know, what’s in it for me?

We just shipped Splunk 3.0. During the past seven months I’ve heard agile, scrum, sprints — all the cool concepts that are part of this revolutionary framework to spur innovation, more efficient product development cycles and a tighter loop with customers. So why then did it take us half a year to release something? I mean we’re still a start-up after all.

Don’t get me wrong, Splunk 3.0 is fantastic. All kinds of amazing, ground breaking stuff. I’m running it on my OS X laptops and desktops to monitor ps, top, iostat, vmstat and it comes in very handy for figuring out why things crash by indexing everything in /var/log. It also now generates cool interactive reports and Flash graphs of who’s getting the most SPAM on my FC5 mail server running Sendmail and Dovecot IMAP front ended by my Ironport box. Look out mom I’m gonna charge you extra. Check out all the new Splunk 3.0 features and download your own free copy.