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Translating Technology to Success
ThingWorx, a PTC Business Case Study
Splunk Partnership Ties Together Big Data
and Internet of Things Services
"Integration Turns 'IoT Experiments' into Smart Connected Services"
Splunk was founded in 2004 on the premise that making sense of machine data and deriving
critical business analytics from it would prove to be highly-sought-after software and cloud
services. From the first version of its technology in 2006, it has been Splunk's goal to create a
technology platform that would easily convert such data into "Operational Intelligence."
Splunk is now a business with over 1,300 employees and is successfully operating in
numerous vertical markets with highly complex and typically real-time data analysis
requirements, creating critical operational insights for its customers. The company operates
in over 100 countries, has over 8,400 customers, and its Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud
platform is offered as both an on-premise and SaaS solution.
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AT A GLANCE
Business Challenges
Splunk was faced with the need
to meet emerging customer
demands for interfacing IoT
projects to its suite of services.
The company required an IoT
partner that would be able to
easily and quickly integrate
with its Splunk Enterprise
platform, rather than allocating
development resources and
time to building out an IoT
interface and application
platform.
A key value proposition Splunk offers its many customers is the ability to easily monitor,
collect, index, and provide deep, yet flexible, analysis of massive quantities of primarily
Solutions
unstructured and real-time machine data from a nearly limitless set of big data sources. In the
ThingWorx quickly built a
plugin for its own platform that
allows users to directly access
all of Splunk's big data analysis
capabilities directly.
case of the Internet of Things (IoT), sources will include extensive sensor data.
The resulting operational insights, in turn, are put to use in many forms depending on the
customer. Examples include creating improvements to both internal and customer-facing
services, creating better workforce collaboration, ensuring compliance where required,
reducing operational costs, or managing and mitigating security risks.
Key IoT Business Drivers and Challenges
Over the last few years, there has been nothing less than a deluge of new machine-to-machine
(M2M), connected device, and IoT-driven data streams that many of Splunk's customers now
need to add to the mix of big data streams Splunk Enterprise handles for them. These new
data streams also present new challenges for customers in terms of how they use the data
being captured from these sources to derive even greater business intelligence.
Brian Gilmore, Splunk's Solution Expert for the Internet of Things and Industrial Data, notes
that Splunk found itself with the need to quickly develop partnerships with vendors at the
forefront of both real-time connected device-based and IoT data-based application
development and management technology.
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Benefits and Results
• Rapid time to market
through partnership
• IoT services development
allows Splunk to quickly
meet its customers' IoT
demands
• No expensive internal
development resources were
required
• Opportunity for expanding
Splunk's IoT ecosystem and
customer base through the
ThingWorx App store
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Translating Technology to Success
According to Gilmore, "The key need our customers have in this particular market is a means
to easily expose the data streams from these emerging connected M2M and IoT devices to
Splunk products. Many of our existing customers, as well as potential new customers have
immediate connected device and IoT needs for their businesses, and it became clear to us that
"Our partnership with
partnering with third-party IoT vendors would be necessary to meet customer demand on a
ThingWorx has resulted in a
timely basis."
solid and tight technology
integration. Between the two
ThingWorx Steps Up to the Splunk Partner Ecosystem
Gilmore's job was to locate key technology solutions to add to the Splunk partner ecosystem
to deliver on the IoT capabilities. He began having discussions with ThingWorx early in 2014.
Gilmore says that “it was clear from the ensuing discussions that the ThingWorx platform
would be able to deliver the data integration capabilities that Splunk customers were in need
of, and in turn give them direct access to Splunk's platforms and capabilities.”
Typically Splunk partners build applications that plug into their framework, but ThingWorx
took a different approach and built an application, now available in ThingWorx's own app
store, that Splunk's customers can plug into the ThingWorx platform itself. This method
immediately makes the entire suite of Splunk software available for data collection and data
platforms we are able to
provide our customers with
rapid time to market
deployments to meet their IoT
data-driven needs."
Brian Gilmore
Solution Expert for the Internet
of Things and Industrial Data,
Splunk
storage, and enables analytics services from ThingWorx's Mashup Builder, allowing customers
to utilize ThingWorx's powerful real-time search capabilities. The following image shows the
Splunk-ThingWorx Plugin Architecture.
Source: Splunk, February 2015
The end result of the integration between the two platforms and of the approach that was
taken serves the needs of both companies. Gilmore points out that "when either a ThingWorx
or Splunk customer creates a ThingWorx application or object within the ThingWorx Mashup
Builder or ThingWorx Composer, and the Splunk plugin is in place, that application or object
Blue Hill Research
24 School Street, Mezzanine
Boston, MA 02108
http://www.bluehillresearch.com
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Translating Technology to Success
gains immediate access to the entire Splunk Enterprise platform, and will be able to simply
send its data across to Splunk."
The integration with ThingWorx solves a key technology and business issue for Splunk by
directly helping the company meet new and specific IoT-driven customer demands. By
leveraging the ThingWorx technology, Splunk eliminated the need to create its own
application platform, and avoided having to dedicate expensive developer resources to build
one in-house.
Driving New Connected Products and Services
"We're really only getting
started with significant IoT
Many of Splunk's early IoT projects began as customer experiments, where customers looked
projects but overall we also feel
to apply Splunk Enterprise to certain IoT projects. As these projects have become more real
we have a solid running start
and significant, Gilmore has sought to codify the common underlying processes, and to
with ThingWorx - which has
establish a repeatable methodology. As Gilmore puts it, "Creating that repeatable methodology
developed a reputation for
takes the lab experiment out of the process. Working and partnering with ThingWorx has
easy installation and rapid app
helped us come very close to achieving this IoT goal."
development."
Many of these customer IoT projects have begun to scale beyond the big data collection,
monitoring and analytics that Splunk provides as they begin to develop large-scale end-to-end
Brian Gilmore
projects that require applications, which in turn may require real-time end point sensor and
Solution Expert for the Internet
device management and bi-directional device/sensor communications.
of Things and Industrial Data,
The partnership with ThingWorx enables Splunk's customers to execute their IoT projects and
Splunk
to efficiently build out their emerging IoT ecosystems as they grow and expand their efforts.
Similarly, ThingWorx is now able to offer its own customers easy access to the Splunk
Enterprise platform, where it is Splunk that helps ThingWorx close the loop for its customers.
It is a mutually beneficial relationship in which non-competing technologies are brought
together to enhance the possibilities that the Internet of Things opens up.
Visit our website to learn more about ThingWorx,
a PTC Business, or contact us:
350 Eagleview Blvd, Suite 200, Exton, PA 19341
(610) 968-1500
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permission from Blue Hill Research.
Blue Hill Research
24 School Street, Mezzanine
Boston, MA 02108
http://www.bluehillresearch.com
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