Splunk's Activity-Based Pricing Shifts the AI Data Management Landscape

Splunk has rolled out activity-based pricing for its Machine Data Lake (MDL), which is part of the Cisco Data Fabric (CDF) framework for AI data management. This new pricing model balances between ingest-based pricing and workload-based pricing, and no longer requires users to index all data upon ingestion.

According to Mike Leone, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, the departure from universal indexing will have a major effect on how CIOs view Splunk. He believes that the cost savings will be enough for some customers to completely reevaluate their current indexing practices.

Kamal Hathi, Splunk's senior vice president and general manager, stated that the goal of activity-based pricing is to let customers store orders of magnitude more data in MDL for the same price they paid previously. This means that users can 'add a zero' to their data volumes without seeing an increase in costs.

Federated Search has also been expanded to support Amazon CloudWatch and Databricks on AWS, allowing users to avoid indexing data until it's searched. A new Value Insights feature is also available to help users assess which pricing options provide the most cost savings.