The big BI vendors such as SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos and Oracle Hyperion all telling the end-to-end story as well, while at the same time they are trying to make their products easier to use.

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Splunk is run by Godfrey Sullivan, who was the top man at Hyperion Solutions Corp. until that company was acquired by Oracle Corp.

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As CEO of Hyperion, one of the pioneering business intelligence companies that is now part of Oracle, Sullivan lived through the journey that relational databases systems, reporting, and other analytics technology made as they propagated through the enterprise.

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