Splunk, a Cave Diver for Data, Lures $28 Billion Cisco Bid

If the deluge of data in the modern world is increasingly overwhelming, Splunk claims to have been ready for it for 20 years.

The company’s name reflects the act of burrowing deep down into the Earth to explore caves — the adventure of data spelunking.

Splunk was started by three friends in 2003, with co-founder and ex-Chief Executive Officer Michael Baum drawing on his past building search engines at Yahoo. The conundrum was to figure out how to make sense of mass collection of real-time data. Splunk aimed to search it in an instant, surpassing cumbersome old ways of ...