U.S.-based Splunk, a big data solution provider, is enhancing its presence across Latin America, especially in Brazil. Splunk started in Brazil through a partnership with Silverlink Technologies and is now opening its own local operations. The move follows Splunk’s IPO on April 18 when its stock soared 109% on the Nasdaq, sending the company’s market value above $3 billion. For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2012, Splunk had U.S.$121 million in revenue.
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“Latin America, but especially Brazil, is an obvious market for us to increase our investment,” said Steve Sommer, chief marketing officer at Splunk. “We know what strategies are working in other major markets, but we rely on partners such as Silverlink to tell us about the specific market needs and market opportunities in Brazil.”
Sommer recently visited Brazil, where he explained that the idea is to open a local operation to monitor the growth of the Brazilian market closely and support Splunk’s local partners and users.
The system developed by Splunk aims to be a type of “Google,” focused on searching data among network environments, which have become more complex due to the big data trend. According to Sommer, difficult challenges are handling velocity (massive streams of machine data); the variety of data that needs to be analyzed; and variability—the constantly changing and unpredictable formats of machine data sources.
Although Splunk does not report revenue from individual regions, the company has high expectations for Brazil, given the size and strength of the country’s economy and its innovative IT people as well as Splunk’s growing partnerships with Silverlink and others.
Silverlink’s director for new business, Breno Niero, noted that sales grew 51% in the first quarter of 2012 compared to the same period in 2011. The company closed 2011 with U.S.$133 million in revenue.
The partnership between Silverlink and Splunk began in 2009, and since then, Niero said business volume has increased, pointing to the BM&FBOVESPA—Brazil’s securities, commodities and futures exchange—as a main customer. “The vertical sectors we see most often using Splunk to take advantage of big data are typically telecoms, financial services, online services and government,” Sommer said.
In addition to BM&FBOVESPA, Niero said there are two big groups among the company’s prospects. He noted that telecom groups and online service firms are more likely to buy the product once they begin to work with a huge amount of data.
