Vendor lineage
Splunk
Named after caving, because that is what searching your own logs felt like.
Michael Baum, Rob Das and Erik Swan founded Splunk in San Francisco in October 2003, having each spent years on infrastructure software and arrived at the same complaint: finding anything in machine-generated logs meant crawling through them by hand. They named the company after spelunking.
The technical decision that made it work was schema-on-read. A relational database demands you decide the shape of your data before you store it, which is impossible when the data is whatever a hundred different systems happen to emit. Splunk indexed the text as it arrived and let structure be applied at search time instead. That inversion is why it could ingest anything, and it is the idea the whole product rests on.
The go-to-market was equally deliberate: a free tier of 500MB a day, adopted by engineers who then brought it into their employers. Bottom-up rather than top-down, years before that was a recognised strategy.
It raised about $40M in total - modest for what it became - was profitable by 2009, and went public in 2012 at roughly $1.6B. Baum had stepped down as chief executive in 2009; he moved to Burgundy in 2014 and bought a winery, which is a more graceful exit than most of this timeline offers.
Cisco announced the acquisition on 21 September 2023 and completed it on 18 March 2024 for approximately $28B, one of the largest software deals ever made. Cisco is a chapter in this site's own career record, so the two ends of that transaction both appear on this page.
2013 BugSense and Cloudmeter
Mobile analytics and network data capture, bought within months of each other.
Mobile intelligence and wire-data ingestion.
2018 VictorOps $120M
On-call incident management.
Splunk On-Call.
2019 SignalFx $1.05B
Real-time cloud monitoring, and the largest purchase Splunk made.
Splunk Observability Cloud - the second half of a story that had been only about logs.
- Wikipedia: Splunk - founded October 2003, the three founders, IPO 2012, Cisco parent
- Grokipedia: Splunk - wholly-owned Cisco subsidiary from 18 March 2024, ~$28B
- CNBC: the $28B sale, Baum's tenure to 2009 and his move to Burgundy