Enterprise big data aggregator Splunk has taken exception to claims about its product, made by Oracle chief executive and chief technology officer Larry Ellison during a keynote at Oracle World this week.
In his speech, Ellison "contrasted Oracle Management Cloud with the security and management capabilities delivered by Splunk. The analysis highlighted that Splunk lacks the key data needed for operations and optimal security".
To this Splunk president and chief executive Doug Merritt fired back, "The thing that worries me the most about Oracle’s apparent new data offering isn’t their deep misunderstanding of how and why Splunk is able to so effectively deliver amazing value to our customers - it’s their fundamental lack of knowledge and understanding of the security market."
Ellison also said that while Oracle Management Cloud delivered "a complete data architecture through a unified entity model that spans topology, associations, telemetry and threats, Splunk has no real entity model and leaves data in many disparate vendor silos".
{loadposition sam08}To this Merritt riposted: "Like all database-oriented people, your solution to building an integrated view of a complex situation is to centralise all the data into a single store.
"The scale and speed of today’s universe of millions of data feeds make that approach a non-starter. We have customers indexing petabytes of data a day from hundreds to thousands of data sources and using that same data for multiple use cases."
Ellison's other claim about Splunk was that, "Oracle Management Cloud provides real-time insight through out-of-the-box applied machine learning that is easy to operate and use. In contrast, Splunk provides a machine learning toolkit that requires data scientists."
Merritt countered this by saying: "Just wrong. We make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone and we’re doing the same with machine learning."
Ellison's final claim about Splunk was that, "Oracle Management Cloud delivers integrated and automated remediation that helps eliminate human error. In contrast, Splunk has no remediation capability."
To this, Merritt shot back; "There is no such thing as a wall-to-wall Oracle customer. Companies live in a heterogeneous world. If you are focused on serving and adding value to customers, then any mission-critical solution must recognise this."
He wasn't finished, taking a dig at Oracle's recent failure in yacht racing. "There’s a free cloud trial of Splunk that could help you analyse the Oracle yacht data. We realise it’s a bit late for that this year. We’re happy to help you try and win the America’s Cup back next time you compete."