Splunk fires a shot across the bows of 'Ludicrous Larry'

Doug Merritt says there is "no such thing as a wall-to-wall Oracle customer"

Comparisons to Splunk made by Oracle CTO Larry Ellison in his keynote introduction to the new Management and Security Cloud were ‘baseless [and] factually inaccurate,' the company has said.

In an inflammatory blog post, Splunk president and CEO Doug Merritt referred to the Oracle founder as ‘Ludicrous Larry'. Claims that Splunk is ‘simply an analytics tool that delivers a search tool with a large ecosystem of third-party vendors creating silos and a big data problem' demonstrate "a fundamental lack of knowledge and understanding of the security market," he said.

In his second keynote of OpenWorld, Ellison hit out at Splunk and similar companies for keeping data in silos; requiring human input to interpret its machine learning toolkit; and lacking remediation capability.

Merritt delivered a one-two retaliatory punch. Oracle's solution to silos ("centralising all the data into a single store") is "a non-starter", highlighting Ellison's background in databases and nothing else. The security market, he insisted, doesn't work that way:

"Splunk turns data into answers, applying schema on read to give structure to the data when you ask the question and not force entities when you write it (presumably to an Oracle database which is... again… convenient).

"Virtual integration is the new path, dynamically integrating data on a just-in-time basis as opposed to collecting it on a ‘just-in-case basis.' The data will stay in those disparate silos - the knowledge won't."

Merritt also called Oracle's interpretation of Splunk's machine learning toolkit "just wrong," and in response to the remediation claim said that there is no such thing as "a wall-to-wall Oracle customer." While Splunk might not do auto-remediation, it will work with the existing heterogeneous IT landscape to take the right action.

Before signing off, the Splunk CEO took one last parting shot across Ellison's bows - literally. Splunk has been collecting data from planes, trains and automobiles for years, and could bring in boat data as well - which could help to analyse why Oracle's yacht tipped over during training for the America's Cup this year. Savage.