Splunk Inc. is a software company based in San Francisco, California that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a Web-style interface. Splunk's mission is to make machine data accessible across an organization by identifying data patterns, providing metrics, diagnosing problems, and providing intelligence for business operations. The company was founded in 2003 by Erik Swan, Rob Das, and Michael Baum. Splunk went public in 2012 and is traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol SPLK.