Product: Splunk

Developers: Michael Baum, Erik Swan, Rob Das, Rory Greene, Brian Murphy, David Carasso, Stephen Sorkin, Brad Hall, Andre Stechert, Amritpal Bath, Ivan Tam, Will Hayes, Kim Wallace, Jef Bekes, Nick Mealy, Johnvey Hwang, Ben Strawbridge and Ben Scharp

Many data center problems are easy to solve once you know what's going on. The hard part is finding them in the gigabytes of data dutifully logged on a millisecond basis by all the hardware, databases and applications. Manually combing through all the tiers of log data to track down a transaction or problem is slow and expensive. This is where Splunk comes in, a tool that uses search technology to speed problem resolution.

"Companies have had this fire hose of data thrown at them," says Dana Gardner, an analyst at Interarbor Solutions LLC in Gilford, N.H. "Splunk whittles down this stream so they can exploit the data."

San Francisco-based Splunk Inc.was founded in 2003 by three friends -- Michael Baum, Erik Swan and Rob Das -- who were running large-scale infrastructures dealing with search technology. CEO Michael Baum, for example, was running Yahoo Inc.'s e-commerce applications on more than 12,000 servers. As they discussed their jobs, they found that they were spending a lot of time and resources weeding through log file data with primitive tools. That kicked off a process that eventually led to Splunk.