Wall Street Loves Big Data: Huge IPO Pop for Splunk

Data analytics specialist Splunk had a blockbuster IPO Thursday, with its shares jumping 109 percent on their first day of trading on the NASDAQ market. Shares of Splunk (ticker symbol SPLK) were boosted by investor interest in "Big Data" as a business opportunity. Splunk makes software that helps companies analyze large volumes of machine data generated by web sites, applications and devices.

Shares of Splunk opened at $17 a share and immediately spiked as high as $38 a share. They closed at $35.48, up $18.48 a share for a one-day gain of 108.7 percent.

More than 3,700 customers in 75 countries use Splunk to harness the power of their machine-generated big data for application management, IT operations, cyber security, compliance, web intelligence and business analytics. Splunk is used by many companies to analyze data about data center operations, collecting and indexes all the data generated by your IT infrastructure - your networks, server and guest OS, hypervisors, database audit trails, message queues. It works with any machine-generated data, including logs, file configurations, performance metrics, SNMP traps and custom application logs.