With more than 9,500 customers worldwide, the big data and security intelligence provider Splunk is turning heads.

The San Francisco-based company recently reported revenue growth of 46 percent year-over-year to $125.7 million for first quarter of its 2016 fiscal year and signed more than 450 new enterprise customers during the quarter, which now include 80 Fortune 100 companies.

Splunk made another key investment last month by hiring former GE Capital chief information officer Snehal Antani, as its new chief technology officer. Antani will direct the long-term vision of Splunk's technology across cloud, mobile, on-premises and hybrid offerings. He reports directly to CEO Godfrey Sullivan.

Antani recently spoke with CRN about his vision for the company, how he will capitalize on the emerging Internet of Things market and why Splunk is clearly the "leader in the marketplace." What follows is an edited excerpt of that conversation.

What does your technology roadmap look like right now?

There are several key drivers of our roadmap. We're working with large enterprise customers who are fast approaching petabyte data volumes per day, a hybrid world with multiple clouds and on-premise deployments, new requirements from our premium solutions and the ecosystem, and significant changes in the data center like containerization.

We're focused on seamlessly evolving our customers from security operational intelligence and IT operational intelligence to commercial operational intelligence, enabling them to derive actionable insights from proprietary, partner and machine data. Our technology must continue to seamlessly facilitate this evolution.

Coming from GE Capital, who do you see are Splunk's biggest competitors?

We're the clear leader in the marketplace. We have more than 9,500 customers, including many of the world’s largest businesses and government agencies. We are still by far the biggest player in analytics for IT operations. In cybersecurity, Gartner consistently positions us as a leader in their Magic Quadrant for SIEM.

What is your vision for Splunk?

There are two verticals that Splunk is well positioned for -- business analytics and the Internet of Things.  Many of our customers have already leveraged Splunk to solve challenging problems in these areas and our success in enterprise security serves as a great commercialization model for us to follow.

Though we started off as log analytics tool for IT operations, our customers recognized the versatility, scale and power of the platform, and have used Splunk in innovative ways. We partnered with our customers, studying their use cases, and delivered vertical solutions like Splunk Enterprise Security.  We also recognized that enterprises were going to have hybrid IT environments – a mix of private cloud, SaaS and public cloud services, so we expanded ways to leverage the technology, becoming the premier hybrid cloud solution within our space.