San Francisco, California-based Splunk, a fast growing provider of software that helps organizations gather and make use of machine data from a diverse set of sources, filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, and is set to soon to go public.
With Morgan Stanley serving as the lead underwriters, the company plans to raise approximately $125 million through the initial public offering and hopes to trade under the symbol “SPLK”.
Splunk is operational intelligence software used to monitor, report and analyze live streaming IT data. It provides the ability to manage event data from a wide array of network security devices, including firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS) systems, servers, web gateways, and other network and security devices. With Splunk, system administrators and security professionals can navigate and search through log files, alerts, and other “meta data” describing the network event.
For the curious, the somewhat funny name “Splunk” is derived from “Spelunking”, the hobby or practice of exploring caves. “Our customers told us that finding their IT problems was like digging through caves with headlamps and helmets, crawling through the muck trying to find problems,” explained Rob Das, co-founder of the company.
Splunk’s revenue in the nine months ended Oct. 31, 2011 totaled almost $78 million, a 79 percent increase over the previous year. The $78 million total was comprised of approximately $55 million in license revenue and $22 million in maintenance and services revenue.
In July, the company lured CFO David Conte away from IronKey to serve as Splunk’s first Chief Financial Officer. Prior to IronKey, Conte was at Opsware, where he held a series of positions over eight years including CFO, VP of Finance, Director of Finance and Corporate Controller. Conte played a key part in the evolution of the business as a public company until its acquisition for $1.6 billion by HP.
Splunk has more than 400 employees worldwide, and 8 offices around the world and claims more than 3,300 organizations as customers. Just this week, the company launched Splunk Enterprise 4.3, the latest version of its flagship product.
Splunk was founded by Erik Swan and Rob Das in 2002 with the mission to make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone. Swan and Das share more about the company’s history and how they got things started in the video below.