Splunk announced its first full Internet of Things offering, with a bundle that combines Splunk Industrial Asset Intelligence, introduced earlier this year, with the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit, to provide a full IoT solution with both predictive analysis and customization capability.

ORLANDO — In April, Splunk announced the limited release of its first-ever packaged offering for the Internet of Things, with Splunk Industrial Asset Intelligence [IAI]. It was designed to enable capture and correlation of data from Industrial Control Systems, sensors, SCADA systems and applications, and thus facilitate easier monitoring and diagnosis of equipment and operational issues in real time. Using the lessons learned in the early release stage, Splunk has now bundled IAI into a broader offering, Splunk Industrial IoT, which they believe will give customers a fuller Internet of Things solution. The announcement was made at the at the Splunk .conf18 event here.

“Splunk Internet of Things is really a packaging exercise,” said Jon Rooney, Splunk’s VP of Product Marketing. “In April we announced the limited availability release of Splunk IAI. Following that, we got further information from our early adopter customers about precisely what they needed. They told us that IAI is great, but that it wasn’t the full set of ingredients they needed to be successful. A comparison would be like shipping an item without batteries, that needed them to work.”

Splunk Industrial IoT is a bundle which combines Splunk IAI with the newly announced version of the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit, on top of Splunk Enterprise.

“The primary benefit of Splunk Industrial IoT is the same as AIA — predictive analytics around industrial equipment,” Rooney said. “What the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit facilitates though is customization capabilities. With Splunk Industrial IoT, we have a package which offers both, giving customers the two things that they need, on top of Splunk Enterprise 7.2. This is now a complete solution.”

Splunk IAI will continue to be sold, and it does have a use case, although Rooney said that he expects most customers would buy it as a part of Splunk Industrial IoT.

“We would sell Splunk IAI if a customer was already using Splunk Enterprise and already have the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit,” he said. “That’s the scenario, where IAI is the missing ingredient and the customer already has everything else.”

Seema Haji, Director of IoT at Splunk, introduced Splunk Industrial IoT in the Wednesday keynote at .conf18.

“We listened to our customers and we listened to our partners,” Haji said. “With Splunk Industrial IoT, we are making data accessible, getting data to work the way you like to work, on the factory floor.

“You are familiar with Splunk’s ability to simplify data ingestion,” she said. “The challenges facing IoT are very similar to the challenges facing IT and security. Industrial users want to secure systems and predict issues with machine learning as well. So we are taking Splunk’s ability to make machine learning usable and accessible to an entire new set of organizations and an entire set of new users, to drive this transformation on the OT [operational technology] side of the house.”

Marvin Green, Principal Product Manager, IoT, at Splunk, presented a demo in the keynote which drilled into the operations side of manufacturing, and where he emphasized the Splunk Next focus on broadening the use cases and user base for Splunk products, and its’ applicability to Splunk Industrial IoT.

“This simplifies industrial operations without the need to write SPL,” he indicated. “Dashboarding with Splunk can now be leveraged by anyone. This is corelate and simplify events to create real-time Splunk alerts. All you have to do is drag and drop and click KPIs – no more SPL.”

Splunk for Industrial IoT will be generally available on October 30, 2018.