Hadoop has been a buzzword in technology circles for more than five years now. As unstructured and multi-structured data continues to explode, enterprises have increasingly resorted to storing this data in a distributed fashion using Hadoop clusters, with the expectation that this stored data might in the future have value for operations, competitive intelligence, compliance and so on. Except that, so far, Hadoop has mostly been a storage paradigm rather than a source of business insights. In this context, how would we like it if the folks from Splunk (one of the most successful stories around multi-structured data analytics) offered a solution that could help enterprises easily obtain insights from their stored Hadoop data? Well, introducing Hunk, a product that promises to do exactly that.

A number of features on top of Hadoop have emerged recently, such as SQL querying (Hive, Impala), BI visualization (via connectors into Tableau and others), streaming insights (YARN being the most prominent) and analytics appliances (e.g Teradata Aster). In this evolving landscape, what might make Hunk unique? For starters, Splunk’s 5,600 customers are excellent targets for cross-selling Hunk. The open question today is whether there is a strong positive ROI around insights from Hadoop, and with Splunk’s large customer base, Hunk has an excellent shot at a land-and-expand strategy (more so than the multiple Hadoop distribution companies that are now moving upstream into insights). Splunk’s credibility around actually helping enterprises improve their bottom-lines should spur customers to give Hunk a shot, and Hunk’s perceived ease of use and future enhancements in data visualization can only help further. So, as Hadoop becomes the de-facto storage option, and as real-time / streaming insights become commonplace, Hunk should gain market share over the next few years. Along the way, we should also expect some cannibalization of Splunk’s other product revenues, which in the big picture should still work out well for Splunk.

If the money follows big insights and not just big data, then with Hunk, Splunk is showing how to play the money game right.