(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

250 Brannan Street

San Francisco, California 94107

(Address of principal executive offices)

(Zip Code)

(415) 848-8400

(Registrant's telephone number, including area code)

Securities Registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities

Act:    Yes   x   No  

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the

Act:    Yes       No   x

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.    Yes   x     No  

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically and posted on its corporate Web site, if any, every Interactive Data File required to be submitted and posted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit and post such files).    Yes   x    No    

Indicate by check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of Registrant's knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K, or any amendment to this Form 10-K.    ¨

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer or a smaller reporting company. See the definitions of "large accelerated filer," "accelerated filer" and "smaller reporting company" in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act).    Yes    No   x

As of July 31, 2014, the aggregate market value of shares of common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant was $5,498,673,543 based on the number of shares held by non-affiliates as of July 31, 2014 and based on the last reported sale price of the registrant's common stock on July 31, 2014.

The number of shares outstanding of the Registrant's Common Stock as of March 23, 2015 was 125,017,093 shares.

Documents Incorporated by Reference

Portions of the registrant's definitive Proxy Statement for the 2015 Annual Stockholders' Meeting are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

PART I

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K, including the sections entitled "Business," "Risk Factors," and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations," contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they never materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Statements that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act"). Forward-looking statements are often identified by the use of words such as, but not limited to, "anticipate," "believe," "can," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "seek," "should," "target," "will," "would" and similar expressions or variations intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning the following:

These statements represent the beliefs and assumptions of our management based on information currently available to us. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other important factors that could cause actual results and the timing of certain events to differ materially from future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those identified below, and those discussed in the section titled "Risk Factors" included under Part I, Item 1A. Furthermore, such forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this report. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after the date of this report.

Item 1. Business

Overview

Splunk provides innovative software products that enable organizations to gain real-time operational intelligence by harnessing the value of their data. Our products enable users to collect, index, search, explore, monitor and analyze data regardless of format or source. Our products address large and diverse data sets commonly referred to as big data and are specifically tailored for machine-generated data. Machine data is produced by nearly every software application and electronic device in an organization and contains a definitive, time-stamped record of various activities, such as transactions, customer and user activities and security threats. Beyond an organization's traditional IT and security infrastructure, every processor-based system, including HVAC controllers, smart electrical meters, GPS devices and radio-frequency identification tags, and many consumer-oriented systems, such as electronic wearables, many manufacturing systems, mobile devices, automobiles and medical devices that contain embedded electronic devices, are also continuously generating machine data. Our products help organizations gain value from all of these different sources and forms of machine data.

Our products are intended to help users in various roles, including IT, security and business professionals, quickly analyze their machine data and achieve real-time visibility into and intelligence about their organization's operations. We believe this operational intelligence enables organizations to improve service levels, reduce costs, mitigate security risks, demonstrate and maintain compliance and gain new customer and business insights that enable them to make better decisions.

Our flagship product is Splunk Enterprise, which at its core is a proprietary machine data engine, comprised of collection, indexing, search, reporting, analysis, alerting, monitoring and data management capabilities. Splunk Enterprise can collect and index hundreds of terabytes of machine data daily, irrespective of format or source. Our machine data engine uses our patented data processing architecture that enables dynamic schema creation on the fly, enabling users to run queries on data without having to understand the structure of the data prior to collection and indexing. This is in contrast to traditional IT systems that require users to establish the format of their data prior to collection in order to answer a pre-set list of questions. Our technology delivers speed and scalability when processing massive amounts of machine data. Our software leverages improvements in the cost and performance of commodity computing and can be deployed in a wide variety of computing environments, from a single laptop to large globally distributed data centers as well as public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

Our Splunk Cloud service delivers the core functionalities of Splunk Enterprise as a scalable, reliable cloud service. These capabilities include monitoring and alerting, role-based access controls, data modeling, pivot, knowledge mapping, report acceleration and visibility across on-premises and cloud deployments. Splunk Cloud runs in Amazon Web Services ("AWS"). Our Splunk Cloud service can be delivered solely as a cloud service or via a hybrid cloud approach, in which a single Splunk interface can search both on-premise Splunk Enterprise instances as well as Splunk Cloud instances.

We complement the capabilities of Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud with additional content ("apps" and "add-ons") that can be deployed directly on top of the core platform. These apps and add-ons, which are generally available for download via our Splunk Apps website, provide functionality in the form of pre-built data inputs, searches, reports, alerts and dashboards that make it easier and faster for our customers to address specific use cases. Splunk, along with a number of third-party developers and customers, have developed hundreds of apps and add-ons for the most common data sources and valuable use cases in our core and adjacent markets. While many of these apps and add-ons are available as free downloads, we also develop and sell premium apps such as the Splunk App for Enterprise Security, Splunk App for Microsoft Exchange, Splunk App for PCI Compliance and Splunk App for VMware. Examples of apps that we have developed and currently offer at no additional cost include Splunk App for AWS, the Splunk App for Microsoft Active Directory, Splunk DB Connect, Splunk Hadoop Connect, the Splunk App for Hadoop Operations and Splunk Open Database Connectivity ( ODBC) Driver. In addition, the Splunk App for Stream enables our customers to capture real-time network data, increasing the breadth of machine data consumed by the core platform. We are also developing cloud-specific Splunk apps, such as our Splunk App for Salesforce, which enables users of our Splunk Cloud service to leverage their Salesforce data along with other machine data within Splunk Cloud. Splunk apps have also enabled Splunk to target new markets and disrupt markets traditionally served by point solutions. Often, as customers use additional apps, this generates expanded usage, licensing and revenues for Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud. 

As part of our strategy to offer an open platform, we provide application programming interfaces ("APIs") and software development kits ("SDKs") in major programming languages. These enable developers to build enterprise-grade apps that run on top of Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud and to integrate their Splunk apps and data with other parts of an organizations' IT infrastructure.

Our Splunk MINT product is a cloud service that provides mobile data collection, enabling mobile device and application analytics as well as mobile app performance and crash reporting. Splunk MINT enables Splunk Enterprise customers to analyze, establish alerts and searches and correlate mobile data with other machine data.

Our Splunk Light product provides log search and analysis for small IT environments, where a single-server log analytics solution is sufficient, and accordingly the daily indexing volume is limited as compared to Splunk Enterprise. Splunk Light collects, indexes, monitors, reports and alerts on a customer's log data in real time, and can be purchased through an online store, either directly from our website or via our channel partners.

Our product, Hunk: Splunk Analytics for Hadoop and NoSQL Data Stores ("Hunk"), is full-featured software for interactively exploring, analyzing and visualizing data stored in Hadoop and other NoSQL data stores such as MongoDB and Cassandra. Hunk includes a full-featured analytics stack and leverages our schema-on-the-fly and machine data fabric technologies to reduce the typical integration and deployment effort required for Hadoop and other NoSQL projects. Hunk works on Apache Hadoop and most major Hadoop distributions, including Amazon's Elastic MapReduce, Cloudera CDH, Hortonworks Data Platform, IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, MapR and Pivotal. Hunk is also available directly from the Amazon Elastic MapReduce console, enabling AWS customers to purchase Hunk on an hourly basis and be automatically provisioned from the Amazon Elastic MapReduce console for data in Amazon Elastic MapReduce and S3.

Our online user communities, Splunk Apps and Splunk Answers websites, provide our customers with an environment to share apps, collaborate on the use of our software and provide community-based support. Additionally, our Splunk Dev portal allows developers the ability to download SDKs, access API documentation and see sample code for building

applications using our developer environment and tools. We believe this user-driven ecosystem results in greater use of our products and provides cost-effective marketing, increased brand awareness and viral adoption of our products.

Our products are designed to accelerate return-on-investment for our customers. They generally do not require customization, long deployment cycles or extensive professional services commonly associated with traditional enterprise software applications. Users can simply download and install the software, typically in a matter of hours, to connect to their relevant machine data sources. Alternatively, they can sign up for the Splunk Cloud service and avoid the need to provision, deploy and manage internal infrastructure. Customers can also provision a compute instance on AWS via a pre-built Amazon Machine Image, which delivers a pre-configured virtual machine instance with our Splunk Enterprise software. We also offer support, training and professional services to our customers to assist in the deployment of our software.

Our mission is to make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone in an organization. Our customers leverage our products for various use cases, including infrastructure and operations management, applications management, security and compliance, business and web analytics, and to provide insights into data generated by the "Internet of Things" and industrial data, among many others. Our products help users derive new insights from machine data that can be used to, among other things, improve service levels, reduce operational costs, mitigate security risks, demonstrate and maintain compliance, and drive better business decisions. The result is a higher level of operational visibility enabling more informed business decisions that can provide a competitive advantage for our customers.

As of January 31, 2015, we had over 9,000 customers, including 79 of the Fortune 100 companies. Our Splunk Enterprise customers pay license fees generally based on their estimated peak daily indexing capacity needs. From time to time, our Splunk Enterprise customers enter into transactions that are designed to enable broad adoption of our software across their entire company, referred to as enterprise adoption agreements ("EAAs"), to provide these customers with a licensing option that is independent of data volumes and use cases and does not impose license limits on the amount of data indexed. Our Splunk Cloud customers pay an annual subscription fee based on the combination of the volume of data indexed per day and the length of the data retention period. For fiscal 2015, 2014 and 2013, our revenues were $450.9 million, $302.6 million and $198.9 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 49% for fiscal 2015 and 52% for fiscal 2014. Our net losses for fiscal 2015, 2014 and 2013 were $217.1 million, $79.0 million and $36.7 million, respectively.

Our Growth Strategy

Our goal is to make Splunk the standard platform for delivering operational intelligence and real-time business insights from machine data. The key elements of our strategy are to:

Extend our technological capabilities.     We intend to continue to invest heavily in our product development efforts to deliver additional features, address customer needs and enable solutions that can address new end markets. We will continue to expand into adjacent product and technology areas that enable organizations to further realize the value of their machine data. Our investments may involve organic hiring and associated development, acquisitions and licensing of third party technology.

Continue to expand our direct and indirect sales organization, including our channel relationships, to increase our sales capacity and enable greater market presence.     We will continue to increase investments in our sales and marketing organizations to enable the acquisition of new customers as well as expansion within our current customer base. Our investments will be spread across geographies, customer tiers and specific industries. We will continue to invest in and foster the growth of our channel relationships, both inside and outside the United States, to enable greater leverage in our go-to-market investments.

Further penetrate our existing customer base and drive enterprise-wide adoption.     We will continue to drive customer satisfaction and renewals by offering community, standard, enterprise and global support to ensure our customers' success with our products. We will continue to cultivate incremental sales from our existing customers through increased use of our products within organizations as well as consultative services that broaden the customer's awareness of our product capabilities . In particular, we continue to seek to upsell increased license capacity to our existing customers for additional deployments and new use cases. We believe our existing customer base serves as a strong source of incremental revenues given the horizontal applicability of our products and the growing machine data volumes our customers experience. We recently expanded our structure of enterprise adoption arrangements to provide prospects with a licensing option that is independent of data volumes and does not impose license limits on the amount of data indexed. Our sales teams are responsible for securing new customers, obtaining renewals of existing contracts as well as increased adoption of our software by existing customers.

Enhance our value proposition through a focus on solutions which address core and expanded use cases.     We will increasingly organize our go-to-market and product strategy around our customer use cases. This approach includes offering capabilities, either in the form of platform features or premium apps, which target both our core use cases as well as new use cases, as driven by our corporate strategy and customer demand. We believe premium apps in particular will enable us to increase our market penetration, expand our addressable market opportunity and make our products a more targeted solution for

specific challenges that our customers face across their organization. For example, our Splunk App for Enterprise Security helps our customers effectively address enterprise IT security use cases. We will also build teams of domain experts who provide thought leadership in product development, product management, marketing, business development, sales and field technical services. For example, we have invested in domain experts in the IT security, IT operations and Cloud areas, and intend to grow our domain experts in business analytics and "Internet of Things", among others.

Grow our user communities and partner ecosystem to increase awareness of our brand, target new use cases, drive operational leverage and deliver more targeted, higher value solutions.     We believe our user community has the potential to provide significant operating leverage by delivering apps that extend the Splunk platform into new use cases. We will continue to invest in business development initiatives in order to add additional OEM and strategic relationships to enable new sales channels for our products as well as extend our product integrations with third-party products. In addition, once these relationships have been established, we expect that OEM vendors and managed service providers will continue to invest in and create customized application functionality based on our core machine data engine.

Continue to deliver a rich developer environment to enable rapid development of enterprise applications that leverage machine data and the Splunk platform.     We intend to continue our investments in SDKs and APIs that help software developers leverage the Splunk platform and Hunk software. Our SDKs enable developers to build solutions that deeply integrate the analytics functionality of these products as well as access the data stored in the data indexes. Through our investments in SDKs and APIs, we intend to promote and extend the capabilities of our products to customers who wish to build sophisticated applications and interfaces that leverage our software and services.

Splunk Technology

Key Technologies

We believe our investments in our products and key technologies provide significant competitive differentiation. Our key technologies are architected to support large volumes of machine data at a massive scale with minimal overhead. Our platform is highly flexible and is able to collect and index large amounts of heterogeneous data formats, from physical, virtual and/or cloud environments.

Schema-on-the-fly.     Our products collect and index data irrespective of source and format. Rather than requiring that data be input in a pre-defined structure, our schema-on-the-fly technology creates structure as data is being searched, allowing users to ask new and different questions at any time without having to re-architect a schema as would be required in a relational database. Our technology builds a schema at read time, rather than write time, and does not require any pre-defined knowledge about the data it is processing. Using our technology, different users can run a variety of queries, regardless of changes in format to the data being input into the system.

Machine data fabric.     Our products enable users to process machine data no matter the infrastructure topology, from a single machine to a globally distributed, virtualized IT infrastructure. This machine data fabric allows customers to address the complexities of handling massive amounts of real-time, dynamic, heterogeneous machine data. Our APIs enable users to forward data from our software to other parts of their IT network, creating a machine data fabric across the organization irrespective of whether the data is used by our products for analysis and reporting or as a conduit to other systems.

Search processing language.     Our proprietary search processing language is specifically designed for working with machine data. Our search language supports arithmetic operations to refine searches and conduct calculations with the results of a query in real time. Statistical and reporting commands native to our search language let users perform more robust calculations and analytics. Our software can also learn about the structure of the machine data through the searches users conduct, allowing users to utilize the machine data structure and knowledge garnered by previous Splunk searches. Our software includes acceleration technology that delivers high performance for analytical operations across terabytes or petabytes of data, such as identifying rare terms and performing aggregation operations.

Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud

Features and Functionality

Our Splunk Enterprise platform contains the following features and functionality, while Splunk Cloud provides the same core functionalities of Splunk Enterprise as a cloud service.

Splunk Light provides a subset of the features contained in Splunk Enterprise, including gathering log data from different and distributed systems in real time and providing dynamic alerts, reports and dashboards. We believe this focused feature set enables customers to specifically target log search and analysis for small IT environments.

Technology Architecture

For our Splunk platform, the technology architecture contains a number of important components:

Collection.     Our Splunk platform collects machine data from many disparate sources across a distributed environment deployed on-premises, or in public and private clouds. This includes servers, network devices, desktop and laptop computers, mobile devices and various other systems that organizations have deployed to support their operations. Our products act as a recording mechanism, collecting, storing and making available all of the machine data that they index and store. Splunk offers a Universal Forwarder that can be deployed on various data sources to facilitate the reliable collection of machine data.

Indexing.     Our proprietary universal indexing technology enables real-time indexing of any data collected regardless of its source or format and without the use of any specific parsers or data connectors. Our Splunk platform indexes the data and stores the data in a scalable storage format, which can reside on commodity servers and storage devices. In the case of Splunk Cloud, data is stored securely in our cloud service, which we host on Amazon Web Services.

Search.     Our Splunk platform enables users to search massive amounts of machine data that have been indexed and stored. At its most basic level, the search engine at the core of our Splunk platform allows users to type and search for keywords or data fields that are of interest. This foundational capability forms the basis for deriving business insights from our dashboards and customized views. Users can leverage our search language and functionality to filter through indexed data and refine search results to obtain more precise information. Splunk also provides event pattern detection to allow users to detect meaningful patterns in their machine data, regardless of data source or type.

Core functions.     Our Splunk platform's core functionality includes alerts, access control, statistics, correlation and predictive capabilities. With our software's granular, role-based access control, an administrator can manage various aspects of a given user's search including the data to which the user has access, as well as what portions of the data may be visible in results. Search results and reports can be defined according to a particular user's business function and level of access. Different users can see completely different views on the same data, depending on what is important to them.

SDKs and APIs.     Our SDKs allow third-party software developers to build enterprise applications on top of our software using popular programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, C#, Python, PHP and Ruby. Our APIs allow users to access the machine data stored within the Splunk platform instance as well as access our machine data engine functionality from third-party software.

App Development Environment.     We provide the ability for users and third party developers to create apps with custom dashboards, flexible UI components and custom data visualizations using freely available components and templates, as well as common development languages and frameworks, such as JavaScript and Python.

Hunk: Splunk Analytics for Hadoop and NoSQL Data Stores

Features and Functionality

Hunk contains the following features and functionality:

Technology Architecture

For our product Hunk, the technology architecture contains a number of important components:

Search.     Hunk enables users to search through the massive amounts of data stored in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores. Search is a core capability of Hunk and allows users to explore, understand and analyze data in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores. Users can interactively filter through data in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores and refine search results to obtain more precise information.

Virtual Indexing.     Hunk provides patented technology that decouples the storage tier from the data access and analytics tiers, allowing Hunk to transparently route requests to different data stores. By decoupling tiers, Hunk is able to allow users to analyze and visualize data with Data Models, the Pivot interface and by creating custom dashboards, and also provides role-based access controls to secure the data.

Core Capabilities.     The Hunk software also includes core functions that let users explore, analyze and visualize data in Hadoop and provide granular role-based access to protect data. Hunk also provides SDKs and APIs that allow third-party software developers to build applications using common development languages and frameworks such as JavaScript and Python. We also provide the ability for developers to build their own apps with custom dashboards, custom data visualizations and flexible UI components.

Archive from Splunk Enterprise.     Hunk provides support for archiving historical data in Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud to commodity storage in Hadoop and Amazon S3. Customers can gain new insights with distributed search queries that correlate real-time data from Splunk Enterprise with historical data in Hunk.

Splunk Product Deployments

Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Light and Hunk can be deployed on-premises and in public or private clouds. Splunk Cloud offers the core functionalities of Splunk Enterprise as a cloud service. Taking Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud together, customers utilizing a hybrid deployment model can have a centralized view and location-independent use across cloud and on-premise environments.

For Splunk Enterprise deployments, our software can be deployed in a variety of environments ranging from a single server to globally distributed enterprise IT environments handling hundreds of terabytes of data per day. Our customers can deploy Splunk Enterprise on-premises, in the cloud, in virtualized server and storage environments or in hybrid IT environments. Our customers can use Splunk forwarders, indexers, and search heads to create a machine data fabric that allows for the efficient, secure and real-time collection and indexing of machine data regardless of network, data center or IT infrastructure topology.

This distributed machine data processing architecture provides near-linear scalability, resulting in the ability to index and search across massive data volumes. Our Splunk platform can operate in a single data center or across multiple data centers both inside and outside an organization, and all from a single user interface. This architecture also allows for flexible deployment of hardware, as commodity hardware can be added as needed.

Splunk Light provides log search and analysis for small IT environments and as such, is limited to deployment on a single server. It does not contain the enterprise deployment features, such as high availability or clustering found in our Splunk Enterprise product. This simplifies deployment for the customer while providing fast time to value for the targeted log search and analysis use case within small IT environments.

Customers can deploy Hunk wherever their Hadoop environment is located. Hunk works with Apache Hadoop and most major distributions, including those from Amazon, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR and Pivotal, supports both first-generation MapReduce and YARN, and can scale to support multi-thousand node Hadoop clusters. Hunk is also available directly from the Amazon Elastic MapReduce console, enabling AWS customers to purchase Hunk on an hourly basis and can be automatically provisioned from the Amazon Elastic MapReduce console for processing data in Amazon Elastic MapReduce and S3.

Services

While users can easily download, install and deploy Splunk software on their own, certain enterprise customers that have large, highly complex IT environments or deployment requirements may choose to leverage our customer support and professional services organization. Many users leverage the community-based support of Splunk Apps and Splunk Answers before engaging with our customer support or services organizations. Some of our certified partners also provide limited, first level support and professional services before a customer reaches out to our internal Splunk customer support and professional services teams.

Maintenance and Customer Support

Our customers typically purchase one year of software maintenance and support as part of their initial purchase of our products, with an option to renew their maintenance agreements. These maintenance agreements provide customers the right to receive unspecified software updates, maintenance releases and patches and access to our technical support services during the term of the agreement.

We maintain a customer support organization that offers multiple service levels for our customers based on their needs. These customers receive guaranteed response times, direct telephonic support and access to online support portals. Our highest levels of support provide 24x7x365 support for critical issues, a designated resource to manage the account and quarterly reviews of the customer's deployments. Our customer support organization has global capabilities, delivering support in multiple languages with deep expertise in both our software as well as complex IT environments and associated third party infrastructure.

Training Services

We offer training services to our customers and channel partners through our education and training organization. We have also implemented a comprehensive training certification program to ensure an understanding of our products.

Professional Services

We provide consulting and implementation services to customers through our professional services team. They are typically utilized by large enterprises looking to deploy our software across their large, disparate and complex IT infrastructure.

We generally provide these services at the time of initial installation to help the customer with configuration and implementation. Given our software's ease-of-use, our professional services engagements are typically short in duration and last from a few days to up to several weeks.

Partner and Developer Ecosystem

We have OEM relationships with a select group of third parties who integrate our software into their product offerings to provide additional reporting, monitoring and analytic capabilities within their own products. With respect to our OEM relationships, we provide a limited use license to expose certain data and analytics functionalities in their products, for which they generally pay us a royalty based on units shipped.

We engage with managed service providers, who offer services based on our software, such as for security, PCI compliance and log management. These services are typically offered on a subscription basis, for which we are paid license fees typically based on daily indexing volume.

We have also established relationships with several leading technology companies to build Splunk apps that allow users to capture data and gain insights into those parties' respective products. Several technology providers offer apps for free via the Splunk Apps website. These apps typically consist of collections of reports, dashboards and data extractions which put our software in context for users of those specific technologies and allow them to easily and quickly understand the performance of their IT systems or correlate this data with other data sources.

We offer a developer license that allows third-party developers to build software using our existing developer framework and we have published information about our APIs to enable developers to build new user interfaces on top of our core engine. We are creating additional SDKs based on various programming languages to make our software more extensible and allow developers to build applications and services that extend its functionality.

Splunk Community

Our online communities provide us with a rapidly growing network of active users who promote the usage of our software and provide technical support to each other.

Our online communities include Splunk Apps, our apps repository, Splunk Answers, our community collaboration site, and Splunk Dev, where developers can download SDKs, access API documentation and see sample code for building applications using our developer environment and tools. We also maintain active communities on leading social internet platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Splunk Apps.     Users and partners contribute and share custom apps and add-ons that run on our software. Generally, these apps provide pre-built functionality that addresses specific use cases. Currently, we have hundreds of apps available for download on the Splunk Apps website. We do not receive any revenues from the sale of apps by third-party application providers, and most apps posted to Splunk Apps are free. Partner apps listed on Splunk Apps that are not free are licensed directly by the third party to the end user.

Splunk Answers.     Users ask questions in an online community forum and share best practices about how to build searches, create data visualizations and configure and deploy our software. While our product, support, engineering and professional services teams participate in the Splunk Answers forum, during fiscal 2015, approximately three-quarters of questions appearing on Splunk Answers were answered by non-Splunk personnel, largely the result of a growing, active user community.

Splunk Dev.     In addition to documentation about the Splunk APIs and SDKs, our developer portal contains documentation about best practices for building machine data output into third-party software.

We also promote and support offline meetings for our community, including regional user group meetings and an annual user conference.

Sales and Marketing

Our sales and marketing organizations work together closely to drive market awareness, build a strong sales pipeline, and cultivate customer relationships to drive revenue growth.

Sales

We sell our products through direct field sales, direct inside sales and indirect channel sales. We gather prospects through a broad range of marketing programs and events and through users who either download our trial software from our website or sign up for our online sandboxes or cloud services. Our inside sales team handles lead qualifications as well as

smaller transactions, while larger or more complex transactions are handled by our globally distributed direct field sales teams. Our sales engineers help define customer use cases and pre-sales qualification and evaluation.

We maintain a distributor and reseller network, or channel, which often co-sells with our field sales organization. Our channel assists us by sourcing new prospects, providing technical support to existing customers, upselling for additional use cases and daily indexing capacities and maintenance renewals. This channel expands our geographic sales reach worldwide, particularly in key international markets such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and China. As of January 31, 2015, we had over 500 channel relationships worldwide. Historically, the majority of EMEA and APAC sales have been fulfilled through channel partners and we expect this trend to continue.

In addition to acquiring new customers, our sales teams are responsible for securing renewals of existing contracts as well as increased adoption of our software and cloud services by existing customers. To accomplish this, our field and inside sales teams work closely with our customers to drive expanded licenses through higher capacity or upgrades and additional use cases within existing customers. Our field sales teams are organized geographically across the Americas, EMEA and APAC. We intend to invest in our sales organization to drive greater market penetration in the Americas, EMEA and APAC. We also have a dedicated sales team focused on government customers, which includes United States federal, state and local government entities. Our Splunk Light product is designed to broaden our market reach by providing log search and analysis for small IT environments. We are initially relying on select channel partners, as well as an online store, to reach the Splunk Light target markets. For fiscal 2015, 2014 and 2013, our revenues from our international operations represented 24%, 23% and 22% of total revenues, respectively. For additional information regarding our sales and long-lived assets by geographic location, see Note 9 to our consolidated financial statements in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Marketing

We focus our marketing efforts on increasing Splunk's brand and awareness, driving viral adoption, communicating product advantages and business benefits, and generating leads for our sales force and channel. We market our software and cloud services as a targeted solution for specific use cases and as an enterprise solution for machine data. We engage with existing customers to provide community-based education and awareness and to promote expanded use of our software within these customers. We host SplunkLive! events across our sales regions to engage with both existing customers and new prospects as well as deliver product training. We host an annual worldwide user conference (.conf) and multiple partner conferences as another way to support the Splunk community to foster collaboration and help our customers drive further business results from our software.

Research and Development

We invest substantial resources in research and development to enhance our products, develop new end market specific solutions and apps, conduct software and quality assurance testing and improve our core technology. Our technical staff monitors and tests our software on a regular basis, and we maintain a regular release process to refine, update, and enhance our existing products.

Research and development expense totaled $150.8 million, $75.9 million and $41.9 million for fiscal 2015, 2014 and 2013, respectively.

Intellectual Property

We rely on patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret laws, confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions to protect our technology and intellectual property rights. The nature and extent of legal protection of our intellectual property rights depends on, among other things, its type and the jurisdiction in which it arises. We believe that our intellectual property rights are valuable and important to our business.

We retain ownership of software we develop. All software is licensed to users and primarily provided in object code or as a cloud-based service pursuant to either shrink-wrap, embedded or on-line licenses, or signed license agreements. These agreements generally contain restrictions on duplication, disclosure and transfer. We are currently unable to measure the full extent of unauthorized use of our software. We believe, however, that such unauthorized use is and can be expected to be a persistent problem that negatively impacts our revenue and financial results.

Despite our efforts to protect our intellectual property rights, they may not be successfully asserted in the future or may be invalidated, circumvented or challenged. In addition, the laws of various foreign countries where our products are distributed may not protect our intellectual property rights to the same extent as laws in the United States. See Item 1A, "Risk Factors," for further discussion of risks related to intellectual property.

Customers

Our customer base has grown from approximately 450 customers at the end of fiscal 2008 to over 9,000 customers in more than 100 countries, including 79 of the Fortune 100 companies, as of January 31, 2015. Our customer count consists of organizations that have purchased our Splunk platform; we exclude users of our trial software from our customer count. We provide products and services to customers of varying sizes, including enterprises, educational institutions and government agencies. No individual customer represented greater than 10% of our total revenues in fiscal 2015, 2014 or 2013. One channel partner represented 12% of our total revenues in fiscal 2015. Our current customer base spans numerous industry verticals, including cloud and online services; education; financial services; government; healthcare/pharmaceuticals; industrials/manufacturing; media/entertainment; retail/ecommerce; technology and telecommunications.

Backlog and Seasonality

See Item 7, "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations - Seasonality, Cyclicality and Quarterly Trends" for information regarding our backlog and the seasonality in the sale of our products and services.

Competition

We compete against a variety of large software vendors and smaller specialized companies, open source projects and custom development efforts, which provide solutions in the specific markets we address. Our principal competitors include:

The principal competitive factors in our markets are product features, performance and support, product scalability and flexibility, ease of deployment and use, total cost of ownership and time to value. We believe that we generally compete favorably on the basis of these factors. For example, Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud, Splunk Light, Hunk, Splunk MINT and our premium apps all contain rich feature sets that reduce costly deployment cycles typically associated with enterprise software. Additionally, we offer a broad range of support options, and our customers consistently provide us with high ratings for our support.

Some of our actual and potential competitors have advantages over us, such as longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing or other resources, stronger brand and business user recognition, larger intellectual property portfolios, broader global distribution and presence, and competitive pricing. In addition, our industry is evolving rapidly and is becoming increasingly competitive. Larger and more established companies may focus on operational intelligence and could directly compete with us. Companies may develop open source based alternatives that, customers may conclude, offer equivalent functionality to our Splunk products. Smaller companies could also launch new products and services that we do not offer and that could gain market acceptance quickly.

Employees

As of January 31, 2015, we had over 1,400 employees. None of our United States employees is represented by a labor union with respect to his or her employment with us. Employees in certain European countries have the benefits of collective bargaining arrangements at the national level. We have not experienced any work stoppages.

Corporate Information

Our principal executive offices are located at 250 Brannan Street, San Francisco, California 94107, and our telephone number is (415) 848-8400. We were incorporated in California in October 2003 and were reincorporated in Delaware in May 2006.

Our web site is located at www.splunk.com and our investor relations web site is located at http://investors.splunk.com. The information posted on our website is not incorporated into this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our

Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available free of charge on our investor relations web site as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. You may also access all of our public filings through the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Further, a copy of this Annual Report on Form 10-K is located at the SEC's Public Reference Room at 100 F Street, NE, Washington, D.C. 20549. Information on the operation of the Public Reference Room can be obtained by calling the SEC at 1-800-SEC-0330.

We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations web site. Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, as part of our investor relations web site. The contents of these web sites are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this report or in any other report or document we file.

Item 1A. Risk Factors

Our operations and financial results are subject to various risks and uncertainties including those described below. The risks and uncertainties described below are not the only ones we face. Additional risks and uncertainties that we are unaware of, or that we currently believe are not material, also may become important factors that affect us. If any of the following risks or others not specified below materialize, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially adversely affected. In that case, the trading price of our common stock could decline.

The market for our products is new and unproven and may not grow.

We believe our future success will depend in large part on the growth, if any, in the market for products that provide operational intelligence, particularly from machine data. We market our products as targeted solutions for specific use cases and as an enterprise solution for machine data. In order to grow our business, we intend to expand the functionality of our products to increase their acceptance and use by the broader market as well as develop new products. It is difficult to predict customer adoption and renewal rates, customer demand for our products, the size and growth rate of this market, the entry of competitive products or the success of existing competitive products. Any expansion in our market depends on a number of factors, including the cost, performance and perceived value associated with our products. If our products do not achieve widespread adoption or there is a reduction in demand for products in our market caused by a lack of customer acceptance or expansion, technological challenges, decreases in accessible machine data, competing technologies and products, pricing pressure, decreases in corporate or information technology spending, weakening economic conditions, or otherwise, it could result in reduced customer orders, early terminations, reduced renewal rates or decreased revenues, any of which would adversely affect our business operations and financial results. We believe that these are inherent risks and difficulties in this new and unproven market.

Our future operating results may fluctuate significantly, and our recent operating results may not be a good indication of our future performance.

Our revenues and operating results could vary significantly from period to period as a result of various factors, many of which are outside of our control. For example, we have historically generated a majority of our license revenues from perpetual license agreements, whereby we generally recognize the license fee portion of the arrangement upfront, assuming all revenue recognition criteria are satisfied. Our customers also have the choice of entering into term licenses for our software, whereby the license fee is recognized ratably over the license term, and, in combination with our introduction of enterprise adoption agreements, or transactions that are designed to enable broad adoption of our software within an enterprise, we have seen the proportion of our customer orders where revenue will be recognized ratably increase steadily as a percentage of total orders. At the beginning of each quarter, we do not know the ratio between perpetual licenses and term licenses that we will enter into during the quarter. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 and fiscal year 2015, the percentage of license orders that will be recognized ratably was 45% and 38%, respectively. As a result, our operating results could be significantly impacted by unexpected shifts in the ratio between perpetual licenses and term licenses. In addition, the size of our licenses varies greatly, and a single, large perpetual license in a given period could distort our operating results. The timing and size of large transactions are often hard to predict in any particular period. Further, since we recognize a portion of our revenue ratably over the life of the term license agreements and maintenance agreements, a portion of the revenue we report in each quarter is the result of agreements entered into during previous quarters.  Consequently, a decline in business from term license agreements or maintenance agreements in any quarter may not be reflected in our revenue results for that quarter. Any such decline, however, will negatively affect our revenue in future quarters.  Accordingly, the effect of downturns in sales and market acceptance of our products and services may not be fully reflected in our results of operations until future periods. Comparing our revenues and operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful, and you should not rely on our past results as an indication of our future performance.

We may not be able to accurately predict our future revenues or results of operations. In particular, approximately half of the revenues we currently recognize each quarter has been attributable to sales made in that same quarter with the balance of the revenues being attributable to sales made in prior quarters in which the related revenues were not recognized upfront. As a result, our ability to forecast revenues on a quarterly or longer-term basis is extremely limited. We base our current and future expense levels on our operating plans and sales forecasts, and our operating costs are expected to be relatively fixed in the short-term. As a result, we may not be able to reduce our costs sufficiently to compensate for an unexpected shortfall in revenues, and even a small shortfall in revenues could disproportionately and adversely affect our financial results for that quarter.

In addition to other risk factors described elsewhere in this "Risk Factors" section, factors that may cause our financial results to fluctuate from quarter to quarter include:

Many of these factors are outside our control, and the variability and unpredictability of such factors could result in our failing to meet or exceed our financial expectations for a given period. We believe that quarter-to-quarter comparisons of our revenues, operating results and cash flows may not necessarily be indicative of our future performance.

We have a short operating history, which makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and may increase the risk that we will not be successful.

We have a short operating history, which limits our ability to forecast our future operating results and subjects us to a number of uncertainties, including our ability to plan for and model future growth. We have encountered and will continue to encounter risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies in developing industries. If our assumptions regarding these uncertainties, which we use to plan our business, are incorrect or change in reaction to changes in our markets, or if we do not address these risks successfully, our operating and financial results could differ materially from our expectations and our business could suffer. Moreover, although we have experienced rapid growth historically, we may not continue to grow as rapidly in the future. Any success that we may experience in the future will depend in large part on our ability to, among other things:

• respond timely and effectively to competitor offerings and pricing models;

• appropriately price our products and services;

If we fail to address the risks and difficulties we face, including those described elsewhere in this "Risk Factors" section, our business will be adversely affected and our business operations and financial results will suffer.

If we fail to effectively manage our growth, our business and operating results could be adversely affected.

Although our business has experienced significant growth, we cannot provide any assurance that our business will continue to grow at the same rate or at all. We have experienced and may continue to experience rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which has placed and will continue to place significant demands on our management and our operational and financial infrastructure. As of January 31, 2015, approximately 35% of our employees had been with us for less than one year. As we continue to grow, we must effectively integrate, develop and motivate a large number of new employees, while maintaining the effectiveness of our business execution and the beneficial aspects of our corporate culture. In particular, we intend to continue to make directed and substantial investments to expand our research and development, sales and marketing, and general and administrative organizations, as well as our international operations.

To effectively manage growth, we must continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls, and our reporting systems and procedures by, among other things:

These systems enhancements and improvements will require significant capital expenditures and allocation of valuable management and employee resources. If we fail to implement these improvements effectively, our ability to manage our expected growth, ensure uninterrupted operation of key business systems and comply with the rules and regulations that are applicable to public reporting companies will be impaired. Additionally, if we do not effectively manage the growth of our business and operations, the quality of our products could suffer, which could negatively affect our brand, financial results and overall business.

We face intense competition in our markets, and we may be unable to compete effectively for sales opportunities.

Although our products target the new and emerging market for software and cloud services that provide operational intelligence, we compete against a variety of large software vendors and smaller specialized companies, open source projects and custom development efforts, which provide solutions in the specific markets we address. Our principal competitors include:

The principal competitive factors in our markets include features, performance and support, scalability and flexibility, ease of deployment and use, total cost of ownership and time to value. Some of our actual and potential competitors have advantages over us, such as longer operating histories, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing or other resources, stronger brand and business user recognition, larger intellectual property portfolios and broader global distribution and presence. Further, competitors may be able to offer products or functionality similar to ours at a more attractive price than we can, such as by integrating or bundling their software products with their other product offerings. In addition, our industry is evolving rapidly and is becoming increasingly competitive. Larger and more established companies may focus on operational intelligence and could directly compete with us. For example, companies may commercialize open source software, such as Hadoop, in a manner that competes with our products or causes potential customers to believe that such product and our products perform the same function. If companies move a greater proportion of their data and computational needs to the cloud, new competitors may emerge that offer services comparable to ours or that are better suited for cloud-based data, and the demand for our products may decrease. Smaller companies could also launch new products and services that we do not offer and that could gain market acceptance quickly.

In recent years, there have been significant acquisitions and consolidation by and among our actual and potential competitors. We anticipate this trend of consolidation will continue, which will present heightened competitive challenges to our business. In particular, consolidation in our industry increases the likelihood of our competitors offering bundled or integrated products, and we believe that it may increase the competitive pressures we face with respect to our products. If we are unable to differentiate our products from the integrated or bundled products of our competitors, such as by offering enhanced functionality, performance or value, we may see decreased demand for those products, which would adversely affect our business operations, financial results and growth prospects. Further, it is possible that continued industry consolidation may impact customers' perceptions of the viability of smaller or even medium-sized software firms and consequently their willingness to use software solutions from such firms. Similarly, if customers seek to concentrate their software license purchases in the product portfolios of a few large providers, we may be at a competitive disadvantage regardless of the performance and features of our products. We believe that in order to remain competitive at the large enterprise level, we will need to develop and expand relationships with resellers and large system integrators that provide a broad range of products and

services. If we are unable to compete effectively, our business operations and financial results could be materially and adversely affected.

Because we derive substantially all of our revenues and cash flows from sales of licenses of one software product, failure of this product to satisfy customer demands or to achieve increased market acceptance would adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition and growth prospects.

Although we have recently introduced several new product offerings, we derive and expect to continue to derive substantially all of our license revenues and cash flows from sales of licenses and maintenance of Splunk Enterprise. As such, the market acceptance of Splunk Enterprise is critical to our continued success. Demand for licenses to Splunk Enterprise is affected by a number of factors beyond our control, including continued market acceptance of Splunk Enterprise by referenceable accounts for existing and new use cases, the timing of development and release of new products by our competitors, technological change, and growth or contraction in our market. In addition, users of software that provides operational intelligence may seek a cloud-based service, and only recently we began to offer a cloud service with the features and functionality of Splunk Enterprise. Our cloud-based services currently represent a de minimis percentage of our overall revenues. We expect the proliferation of machine data to lead to an increase in the data analysis demands of our customers, and our products may not be able to scale and perform to meet those demands or may not be chosen by users for those needs. If we are unable to continue to meet customer demands or to achieve more widespread market acceptance of Splunk Enterprise, our business operations, financial results and growth prospects will be materially and adversely affected.

We have a history of losses, and we may not be profitable in the future.

We have incurred net losses in each year since our inception. As a result, we had an accumulated deficit of $386.8 million at January 31, 2015. Because the market for our products is rapidly evolving and has not yet reached widespread adoption, it is difficult for us to predict our future operating results. We expect our operating expenses to increase over the next several years as we hire additional personnel, expand and improve the effectiveness of our distribution channels, and continue to develop features and functionality for our products. In addition, as we grow as a public company, we have incurred and will continue to incur significant legal, accounting and other operating expenses, including compliance with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. If our revenues do not increase to offset these increases in our operating expenses, we may not be profitable in future periods. Our historical revenue growth has been inconsistent and should not be considered indicative of our future performance. Further, in future periods, our revenue growth could slow or our revenues could decline for a number of reasons, including slowing demand for our products, increasing competition, a decrease in the growth of our overall market, or our failure, for any reason, to continue to capitalize on growth opportunities. Any failure by us to achieve, sustain or increase profitability on a consistent basis could cause the value of our common stock to decline.

If customers do not expand their use of our products beyond the current predominant use cases, our ability to grow our business and operating results may be adversely affected.

Most of our customers currently use our products to support application management, IT operations, security and compliance functions. Our ability to grow our business depends in part on our ability to persuade current and future customers to expand their use of our products to additional use cases, such as facilities management, supply chain management, business analytics and customer analytics. If we fail to achieve market acceptance of our products for these applications, or if a competitor establishes a more widely adopted solution for these applications, our ability to grow our business and financial results will be adversely affected.

We employ multiple, unique and evolving pricing models, which subject us to various pricing and licensing challenges that could make it difficult for us to derive value from our customers and may adversely affect our operating results.

We employ multiple, unique and evolving pricing models for our products and services. For example, we generally charge our customers for their use of Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Light based on their estimated peak daily indexing capacity. In addition, Splunk Cloud is generally priced based on peak daily indexing capacity and data storage and Hunk licenses are priced based on the number of Hadoop data nodes. We offer both perpetual and term licensing options, which have different payment schedules, and depending on the mix of such licenses, our revenue or deferred revenue could be adversely affected. Our pricing models may ultimately result in a higher total cost to our customers generally as data volumes increase over time, or may cause our customers to limit data volumes in order to stay within the limits of their existing licenses, making it more difficult for us to compete in our markets. As the amount of machine data within our customers' organizations grows, we face downward pressure from our customers regarding our pricing, which could adversely affect our revenues and operating margins. In addition, our unique pricing models may allow competitors with different pricing models to attract customers unfamiliar or uncomfortable with our pricing models, which would cause us to lose business or modify our pricing models,

both of which could adversely affect our revenues and operating margins. While we recently introduced unlimited enterprise-wide licenses of Splunk Enterprise to provide pricing predictability to our customers, we have limited experience selling this type of license, and our customers may not find this type of license attractive.

Furthermore, while our products can measure and limit customer usage, such limitations may be improperly circumvented or otherwise bypassed by certain users. Similarly, we provide our customers with an encrypted key for enabling their use of our products. There is no guarantee that users of our products will abide by the terms of these encrypted keys, and if they do not, we may not be able to capture the full value for the use of our products. For example, our enterprise license is generally meant for our customers' internal use only. If our internal use customers improperly make our products available to their customers, for example, through a cloud or managed service offering, it may displace our end user sales. Additionally, if an internal use customer that has received a volume discount from us improperly makes available our products to its end customers, we may experience price erosion and be unable to capture the appropriate value from those end customers.

During fiscal 2015, we increased the license capacity of our entry-level licenses for Splunk Enterprise and decreased the price of our Splunk Cloud service. Although we believe that this price reduction will enable our customers to more rapidly increase their ability to adopt our product and services, there is no guarantee this will occur. It is possible that such price reduction will not be offset by an increase in order volume, which would have the effect of lowering our revenues and negatively impacting our financial results.

Our license agreements generally provide that we can audit our customers' use of our products or require them to certify their actual usage to ensure compliance with the terms of our license agreement. However, a customer may resist or refuse to allow us to audit their usage, in which case we may have to pursue legal recourse to enforce our rights under the license agreement, which would require us to spend money, distract management and potentially adversely affect our relationship with our customers and users.

If we do not effectively expand and train our sales force, we may be unable to add new customers or increase sales to our existing customers and our business will be adversely affected.

We continue to be substantially dependent on our sales force to obtain new customers and to drive additional use cases and adoption among our existing customers. We believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth. New hires require significant training and may take significant time before they achieve full productivity. Our recent hires and planned hires may not become productive as quickly as we expect, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the markets where we do business or plan to do business. In addition, as we continue to grow rapidly, a large percentage of our sales force is new to the company and our products. Our growth creates additional challenges and risks with respect to attracting, integrating and retaining qualified employees, particularly sales personnel. If we are unable to hire and train sufficient numbers of effective sales personnel, or the sales personnel are not successful in obtaining new customers or increasing sales to our existing customer base, our business will be adversely affected.

Our sales cycle is long and unpredictable, particularly with respect to large customers, and our sales efforts require considerable time and expense.

Our operating results may fluctuate, in part, because of the resource intensive nature of our sales efforts, the length and variability of the sales cycle of our software licensing offerings and the short-term difficulty in adjusting our operating expenses. Our operating results depend in part on sales to large customers and conversions of users of the trial versions of our products into paying customers. The length of our sales cycle, from initial evaluation to delivery of and payment for the software license, varies substantially from customer to customer. In addition, the introduction of our cloud-based service Splunk Cloud has generated interest from our customers who are also considering purchasing and deploying Splunk Enterprise, our on-premises solution. In some cases, our customers may wish to consider a combination of these products, potentially further slowing our sales cycle. Our sales cycle can extend to more than a year for certain customers, particularly large customers. It is difficult to predict exactly when, or even if, we will make a sale with a potential customer or if a user of a trial version of one of our products will upgrade to the paid version of that product. As a result, large individual sales have, in some cases, occurred in quarters subsequent to those we anticipated, or have not occurred at all. The loss or delay of one or more large transactions in a quarter could impact our operating results for that quarter and any future quarters for which revenue from that transaction is delayed. As a result of these factors, it is difficult for us to forecast our revenues accurately in any quarter. Because a substantial portion of our expenses are relatively fixed in the short-term, our operating results will suffer if revenues fall below our expectations in a particular quarter, which could cause the price of our common stock to decline.

Our business and growth depend substantially on customers renewing their term licenses and maintenance agreements with us. Any decline in our customer renewals could adversely affect our future operating results.

While much of our software is sold under perpetual license agreements, all of our maintenance and support agreements are sold on a term basis. In addition, we also enter into term license agreements for our software and cloud services. In order for us to improve our operating results, it is important that our existing customers renew their term licenses, if applicable, and maintenance and support agreements when the initial contract term expires. Our customers have no obligation to renew their term licenses or maintenance and support contracts with us after the initial terms have expired. Our customers' renewal rates may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with our software, our cloud services, our pricing, the effects of economic conditions, competitive offerings or alterations or reductions in our customers' spending levels. If our customers do not renew their agreements with us or renew on terms less favorable to us, our revenues may decline.

Our international sales and operations subject us to additional risks that can adversely affect our business operations and financial results.

During the fiscal year ended January 31, 2015, we derived approximately 24% of our total revenues from customers outside the United States, and we are continuing to expand our international operations as part of our growth strategy. We currently have sales personnel and sales and support operations in the United States and certain countries around the world. However, our sales organization outside the United States is substantially smaller than our sales organization in the United States, and we rely heavily on our sales channel for non-U.S. sales. Our ability to convince customers to expand their use of our products or renew their maintenance agreements with us is directly correlated to our direct engagement with the customer. To the extent we are unable to engage with non-U.S. customers effectively with our limited sales force capacity or our indirect sales model, we may be unable to grow sales to existing customers to the same degree we have experienced in the United States.

Our international operations subject us to a variety of risks and challenges, including:

Any of these risks could adversely affect our international operations, reduce our international revenues or increase our operating costs, adversely affecting our business operations, financial results and growth prospects.

In addition, compliance with laws and regulations applicable to our international operations increases our cost of doing business in foreign jurisdictions. We may be unable to keep current with changes in foreign government requirements and laws as they change from time to time. Failure to comply with these regulations could have adverse effects on our business. In many foreign countries it is common for others to engage in business practices that are prohibited by our internal policies and procedures or United States regulations applicable to us. In addition, although we have implemented policies and procedures designed to ensure compliance with these laws and policies, there can be no assurance that all of our employees, contractors, channel partners and agents will comply with these laws and policies. Violations of laws or key control policies by our employees, contractors, channel partners or agents could result in delays in revenue recognition, financial reporting misstatements, fines, penalties, or the prohibition of the importation or exportation of our products and cloud services and could have a material adverse effect on our business operations and financial results.

If we are unable to maintain successful relationships with our channel partners, our business operations, financial results and growth prospects could be adversely affected.

In addition to our direct sales force, we use indirect channel partners, such as distributors and resellers, to license and support our products. We derive a portion of our revenues from sales of our products through our channel partners, particularly in the Europe, Middle East and Africa, or EMEA, and Asia Pacific, or APAC, regions and for sales to government agencies. We expect that sales through channel partners in all regions will continue to grow as a portion of our revenues for the foreseeable future.

Our agreements with our channel partners are generally non-exclusive, meaning our channel partners may offer customers the products of several different companies, including products that compete with ours. If our channel partners do not effectively market and sell our products, choose to use greater efforts to market and sell their own products or those of our competitors, or fail to meet the needs of our customers, our ability to grow our business and sell our products may be adversely affected. Our channel partners may cease marketing our products with limited or no notice and with little or no penalty. The loss of a substantial number of our channel partners, our possible inability to replace them, or the failure to recruit additional channel partners could materially and adversely affect our results of operations. In addition, sales by channel partners are more likely than direct sales to involve collectability concerns, in particular sales by our channel partners in developing markets, and accordingly, variations in the mix between revenues attributable to sales by channel partners and revenues attributable to direct sales may result in fluctuations in our operating results.

Our ability to achieve revenue growth in the future will depend in part on our success in maintaining successful relationships with our channel partners, and to help our channel partners enhance their ability to independently sell and deploy our products. If we are unable to maintain our relationships with these channel partners, or otherwise develop and expand our indirect distribution channel, our business, results of operations, financial condition or cash flows could be adversely affected.

Incorrect or improper implementation or use of our software could result in customer dissatisfaction or customer data loss and negatively affect our business, operations, financial results and growth prospects.

Our software is deployed in a wide variety of technology environments. Increasingly, our software has been deployed in large scale, complex technology environments, and we believe our future success will depend on our ability to increase sales of our software licenses for use in such deployments. We often must assist our customers in achieving successful implementations for large, complex deployments. If we or our customers are unable to implement our software successfully, are unable to do so in a timely manner or if an improper implementation or change in system configuration results in errors or loss of data, customer perceptions of our company may be impaired, our reputation and brand may suffer, and customers may choose not to increase their use of our products. In addition, our software imposes server load and index storage requirements for implementation. If our customers do not have the server load capacity or the storage capacity required, they may not be able to effectively implement and use our software and, therefore, may not choose to increase their use of our products.

Our customers and third-party partners may need training in the proper use of and the variety of benefits that can be derived from our software to maximize its potential. If our software is not implemented or used correctly or as intended, inadequate performance, errors or data loss may result. Because our customers rely on our software and maintenance and support services to manage a wide range of operations, the incorrect or improper implementation or use of our software, our failure to train customers on how to efficiently and effectively use our software, or our failure to provide maintenance services to our customers, may result in negative publicity or legal claims against us. Also, as we continue to expand our customer base, any failure by us to properly provide these services will likely result in lost opportunities for follow-on sales of our software and services.

Interruptions or performance problems associated with our technology and infrastructure, and our reliance on Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, technologies from third parties, may adversely affect our business operations and financial results.

Our continued growth depends in part on the ability of our existing and potential customers to use and access our cloud services or our website in order to download our on-premises software or encrypted access keys for our software within an acceptable amount of time. We have experienced, and may in the future experience, website and service disruptions, outages and other performance problems due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, human or software errors, capacity constraints due to an overwhelming number of users accessing our website and services simultaneously and denial of service or fraud or security attacks. In some instances, we may not be able to identify the cause or causes of these website and service performance problems within an acceptable period of time. It may become increasingly difficult to maintain and improve our website and service performance, especially during peak usage times and as our products become more complex and our user traffic increases. If our website or cloud services are unavailable or if our users are unable to download our software or encrypted access keys within a reasonable amount of time or at all, our business would be negatively affected. We expect to continue to make significant investments to maintain and improve website and service performance and to enable rapid releases of new features and apps for our software and cloud services. To the extent that we do not effectively address capacity constraints, upgrade our systems as needed and continually develop our technology and network architecture to accommodate actual and anticipated changes in technology, our business and operating results may be adversely affected.

In addition, we rely heavily on hosted SaaS technologies from third parties in order to operate critical functions of our business, including enterprise resource planning services and customer relationship management services.  Further, our cloud-based services, such as Splunk Cloud, are hosted exclusively by third parties. We recently introduced a 100% uptime service level agreement ("SLA") for Splunk Cloud. If any of these services fail or become unavailable due to extended outages, interruptions or because they are no longer available on commercially reasonable terms or prices, or if we are unable to deliver 100% uptime under our SLAs, our revenue could be reduced, our reputation could be damaged, we could be exposed to legal liability, expenses could increase, our ability to manage our finances could be interrupted and our processes for managing sales of our products and supporting our customers could be impaired until equivalent services, if available, are identified, obtained and implemented, all of which could adversely affect our business.

Our systems and third-party systems upon which we rely are also vulnerable to damage or interruption from catastrophic occurrences such as earthquakes, floods, fires, power loss, telecommunication failures, terrorist attacks, geopolitical events and similar events. Our United States corporate offices and certain of the facilities we lease to house our computer and telecommunications equipment are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region known for seismic activity. Despite any precautions we may take, the occurrence of a natural disaster or other unanticipated problems at our and third parties' hosting facilities could result in interruptions, performance problems or failure of our infrastructure.

We are subject to governmental export and import controls that could impair our ability to compete in international markets or subject us to liability if we violate the controls.

Our products are subject to United States export controls, and we incorporate encryption technology into certain of our products. These encryption products and the underlying technology may be exported outside of the United States only with the required export authorizations, including by license.

Furthermore, our activities are subject to the U.S. economic sanctions laws and regulations that prohibit the shipment of certain products and services without the required export authorizations or export to countries, governments, and persons targeted by U.S. sanctions. While we take precautions to prevent our products and services from being exported in violation of these laws, including obtaining authorizations for our encryption products, implementing IP address blocking and screenings against U.S. Government and international lists of restricted and prohibited persons, we cannot guarantee that the precautions we take will prevent violations of export control and sanctions laws.

We also note that if our channel partners fail to obtain appropriate import, export or re-export licenses or permits, we may also be adversely affected, through reputational harm as well as other negative consequences including government investigations and penalties. We presently incorporate export control compliance requirements in our channel partner agreements. Complying with export control and sanctions regulations for a particular sale may be time-consuming and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities.

While we have extensive procedures in place, we recently determined that a small number of persons in or associated with Iran may have downloaded free software from us in potential violation of the export control and economic sanctions laws. We filed Initial Voluntary Self Disclosures in October 2014 with the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security ("BIS") and the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") and we are currently in the process of preparing the Final Voluntary Disclosures for submission to BIS and OFAC.

Violations of U.S. sanctions or export control laws can result in fines or penalties, including civil penalties of up to $250,000 or twice the value of the transaction, whichever is greater, per violation. In the event of criminal knowing and willful violations of these laws, fines of up to $1 million and possible incarceration for responsible employees and managers could be imposed.

Also, various countries, in addition to the United States, regulate the import and export of certain encryption and other technology, including import and export permitting and licensing requirements, and have enacted laws that could limit our ability to distribute our products or could limit our customers' ability to implement our products in those countries. Changes in our products or future changes in export and import regulations may create delays in the introduction of our products in international markets, prevent our customers with international operations from deploying our products globally or, in some cases, prevent the export or import of our products to certain countries, governments, or persons altogether. Any change in export or import regulations, economic sanctions or related legislation, or change in the countries, governments, persons or technologies targeted by such regulations, could result in decreased use of our products by, or in our decreased ability to export or sell our products to, existing or potential customers with international operations. Any decreased use of our products or limitation on our ability to export or sell our products would likely adversely affect our business operations and financial results.

If our new products, including cloud services, and product enhancements do not achieve sufficient market acceptance, our financial results and competitive position will suffer.

We spend substantial amounts of time and money to research and develop new product offerings, including cloud services, and enhanced versions of our existing products to incorporate additional features, improve functionality or other enhancements in order to meet our customers' rapidly evolving demands. In addition, we continue to invest in solutions that can be deployed on top of our core platform to target specific use cases and to cultivate our community of application developers and users. When we develop a new or enhanced version of an existing product, we typically incur expenses and expend resources upfront to market, promote and sell the new offering. Therefore, when we develop and introduce new or enhanced products, they must achieve high levels of market acceptance in order to justify the amount of our investment in developing and bringing them to market. For example, if our cloud-based services such as Splunk Cloud do not garner widespread market adoption and implementation, our financial results and competitive position could suffer.

Further, we may make changes to our products that our customers do not like, find useful or agree with. We may also discontinue certain features, begin to charge for certain features that are currently free or increase fees for any of our features or usage of our products.

Our new products or product enhancements and changes to our existing products could fail to attain sufficient market acceptance for many reasons, including:

If our new products, including cloud services, or enhancements and changes do not achieve adequate acceptance in the market, our competitive position will be impaired, and our revenues will be diminished. The adverse effect on our financial results may be particularly acute because of the significant research, development, marketing, sales and other expenses we will have incurred in connection with the new products or enhancements.

Our business depends, in part, on sales to the public sector, and significant changes in the contracting or fiscal policies of the public sector could have a material adverse effect on our business.

We derive a portion of our revenues from contracts with federal, state, local and foreign governments, and we believe that the success and growth of our business will continue to depend on our successful procurement of government contracts. Factors that could impede our ability to maintain or increase the amount of revenues derived from government contracts, include:

The occurrence of any of the foregoing could cause governments and governmental agencies to delay or refrain from purchasing licenses of our products in the future or otherwise have an adverse effect on our business operations and financial results.

Failure to comply with laws or regulations applicable to our business could cause us to lose customers in the public sector, subject us to fines and penalties or negatively impact our ability to contract with the public sector.

We must comply with laws and regulations relating to the formation, administration and performance of contracts with the public sector, including United States federal, state and local governmental bodies, which affect how our channel partners and we do business with governmental agencies. These laws and regulations may impose added costs on our business, and failure to comply with these or other applicable regulations and requirements, including non-compliance in the past, could lead to claims for damages from our channel partners, penalties, termination of contracts, loss of exclusive rights in our intellectual property, and temporary suspension or permanent debarment from government contracting. Any such damages, penalties, disruptions or limitations in our ability to do business with the public sector could have a material adverse effect on our business operations and financial results.

The cloud services version of our Splunk Enterprise product, Splunk Cloud, is a relatively new product offering, and market adoption of this cloud service offering could adversely affect our business.

SaaS is a model of software deployment in which a software provider typically licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand through web browser technologies. Delivering under these SaaS models typically results in higher costs and expenses when compared to sales of perpetual licenses for similar functionality. In October 2013, we released Splunk Cloud, our cloud-based service that provides a fully functional version of Splunk Enterprise. In recent years, companies have begun to expect that key software, such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems, be provided through a SaaS model. In order to provide Splunk Cloud via a SaaS deployment, we have made and will continue to make capital investments and incur substantial costs to implement and maintain this alternative business model, which could negatively affect our financial results.  Even with these investments and costs, the SaaS business model for Splunk Cloud may not be successful. Moreover, sales of Splunk Cloud could displace sales of our Splunk Enterprise software licenses. Alternatively, subscriptions to Splunk Cloud that exceed our expectations may unexpectedly increase our costs, lower our

margins, lower our profits or increase our losses and otherwise negatively affect our projected financial results. In addition, the change to a SaaS model results in changes in the manner in which we recognize revenues. Changes in revenue recognition would affect our operating results and could have an adverse effect on our business operations and financial results.

Real or perceived errors, failures or bugs in our products could adversely affect our financial results and growth prospects.

Because our products are complex, undetected errors, failures or bugs may occur, especially when new products, versions or updates are released. Our on-premises software is often installed and used in large-scale computing environments with different operating systems, system management software, and equipment and networking configurations, which may cause errors or failures of our software or other aspects of the computing environment into which it is deployed. In addition, deployment of our software into complicated, large-scale computing environments may expose undetected errors, failures or bugs in our software. Despite testing by us, errors, failures or bugs may not be found in our products until they are released to our customers. In the past, we have discovered errors, failures and bugs in some of our offerings after their introduction. Real or perceived errors, failures or bugs in our products could result in negative publicity, loss of or delay in market acceptance of our products, loss of competitive position or claims by customers for losses sustained by them. In such an event, we may be required, or may choose, for customer relations or other reasons, to expend additional resources in order to help correct the problem.

In addition, if an actual or perceived failure of our on-premises software occurs in a customer's deployment, regardless of whether the failure is attributable to our software, the market perception of the effectiveness of our products could be adversely affected. Alleviating any of these problems could require significant expenditures of our capital and other resources and could cause interruptions, delays or cessation of our licensing, which could cause us to lose existing or potential customers and could adversely affect our financial results and growth prospects.

Failure to protect our intellectual property rights could adversely affect our business.

Our success depends, in part, on our ability to protect proprietary methods and technologies that we develop under patent and other intellectual property laws of the United States and other jurisdictions outside of the United States so that we can prevent others from using our inventions and proprietary information. If we fail to protect our intellectual property rights adequately, our competitors might gain access to our technology, and our business might be adversely affected. However, defending our intellectual property rights might entail significant expenses. Any of our patent rights, copyrights, trademarks or other intellectual property rights may be challenged by others or invalidated through administrative process or litigation. Our issued patents and any patents issued in the future may not provide us with any competitive advantages, and our patent applications may never be granted. Additionally, the process of obtaining patent protection is expensive and time-consuming, and we may not be able to file and prosecute all necessary or desirable patent applications, or we may not be able to do so at a reasonable cost or in a timely manner. Even if issued, there can be no assurance that these patents will adequately protect our intellectual property, as the legal standards relating to the infringement, validity, enforceability and scope of protection of patent and other intellectual property rights are complex and often uncertain.

Any patents that are issued may subsequently be invalidated or otherwise limited, allowing other companies to develop offerings that compete with ours, which could adversely affect our competitive business position, business prospects and financial condition. In addition, issuance of a patent does not guarantee that we have a right to practice the patented invention. Patent applications in the United States are typically not published until 18 months after filing or, in some cases, not at all, and publications of discoveries in industry-related literature lag behind actual discoveries. We cannot be certain that we were the first to use the inventions claimed in our issued patents or pending patent applications or otherwise used in our products, that we were the first to file patent applications, or that third parties do not have blocking patents that could be used to prevent us from marketing or practicing our products or technology. Effective patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret protection may not be available to us in every country in which our products are available. The laws of some foreign countries may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States (in particular, some foreign jurisdictions do not permit patent protection for software), and mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights may be inadequate. Additional uncertainty may result from recent and future changes to intellectual property legislation in the United States (including the "America Invents Act") and other countries and from interpretations of the intellectual property laws of the United States and other countries by applicable courts and agencies. Accordingly, despite our efforts, we may be unable to prevent third parties from infringing upon or misappropriating our intellectual property.

We rely in part on trade secrets, proprietary know-how and other confidential information to maintain our competitive position. We generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our employees, consultants, vendors and customers, and generally limit access to and distribution of our proprietary information. Although we endeavor to enter into non-disclosure agreements with our employees, licensees and others who may have access to this information, we cannot assure you that these

agreements or other steps we have taken will prevent unauthorized use, disclosure or reverse engineering of our technology. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries do not protect our proprietary rights to as great an extent as the laws of the United States, and many foreign countries do not enforce these laws as diligently as government agencies and private parties in the United States. Moreover, third parties may independently develop technologies or products that compete with ours, and we may be unable to prevent this competition.

We might be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect our intellectual property rights. We may initiate claims or litigation against third parties for infringement of our proprietary rights or to establish the validity of our proprietary rights. Litigation also puts our patents at risk of being invalidated or interpreted narrowly. Additionally, we may provoke third parties to assert counterclaims against us. We may not prevail in any lawsuits that we initiate, and the damages or other remedies awarded, if any, may not be adequate to compensate us for the harm suffered. Any litigation, whether or not it is resolved in our favor, could result in significant expense to us and divert the efforts of our technical and management personnel, which may adversely affect our business operations or financial results.

We have been, and may in the future be, subject to intellectual property rights claims by third parties, which are extremely costly to defend, could require us to pay significant damages and could limit our ability to use certain technologies.

Companies in the software and technology industries, including some of our current and potential competitors, own large numbers of patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets and frequently enter into litigation based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. In addition, many of these companies have the capability to dedicate substantially greater resources to enforce their intellectual property rights and to defend claims that may be brought against them. The litigation may involve patent holding companies or other adverse patent owners that have no relevant product revenues and against which our patents may therefore provide little or no deterrence. From time-to-time, third parties, including certain of these leading companies, have asserted and may assert patent, copyright, trademark or other intellectual property rights against us, our channel partners, our technology partners or our customers. We have received, and may in the future receive, notices that claim we have misappropriated, misused, or infringed other parties' intellectual property rights, and, to the extent we gain greater market visibility, we face a higher risk of being the subject of intellectual property infringement claims, which is not uncommon with respect to the enterprise software market.

There may be third-party intellectual property rights, including issued or pending patents, that cover significant aspects of our technologies or business methods.   We may be exposed to increased risk of being the subject of intellectual property infringement claims as a result of acquisitions, as, among other things, we have a lower level of visibility into the development process with respect to such technology or the care taken to safeguard against infringement risks. Any intellectual property claims, with or without merit, could be very time-consuming, could be expensive to settle or litigate and could divert our management's attention and other resources. These claims could also subject us to significant liability for damages, potentially including treble damages if we are found to have willfully infringed patents or copyrights. These claims could also result in our having to stop using technology found to be in violation of a third party's rights. We might be required to seek a license for the intellectual property, which may not be available on reasonable terms or at all. Even if a license were available, we could be required to pay significant royalties, which would increase our operating expenses. As a result, we may be required to develop alternative non-infringing technology, which could require significant effort and expense. If we cannot license or develop technology for any infringing aspect of our business, we would be forced to limit or stop sales of our products and may be unable to compete effectively. Any of these results would adversely affect our business operations and financial results.

One of our marketing strategies is to offer trial versions of our products, and we may not be able to realize the benefits of this strategy.

We offer trial version licenses of certain of our products to users free of charge as part of our overall strategy of developing the market for products that provides operational intelligence and promoting additional penetration of our products in the markets in which we compete. Some users never convert from the trial version license to the paid version license. To the extent that these users do not become paying customers, we will not realize the intended benefits of this marketing strategy and our ability to grow our revenues will be adversely affected.

If we are not able to maintain and enhance our brand, our business and operating results may be adversely affected.

We believe that maintaining and enhancing the "Splunk" brand identity is critical to our relationships with our customers and channel partners and to our ability to attract new customers and channel partners. The successful promotion of our brand will depend largely upon our marketing efforts, our ability to continue to offer high-quality products and our ability to successfully differentiate our products from those of our competitors. Our brand promotion activities may not be successful or yield increased revenues. In addition, independent industry analysts often provide reviews of our products, as well as those

of our competitors, and perception of our products in the marketplace may be significantly influenced by these reviews. If these reviews are negative, or less positive as compared to those of our competitors' products and services, our brand may be adversely affected.

Moreover, it may be difficult to maintain and enhance our brand in connection with sales through channel or strategic partners. The promotion of our brand requires us to make substantial expenditures, and we anticipate that the expenditures will increase as our market becomes more competitive, as we expand into new markets and as more sales are generated through our channel partners. To the extent that these activities yield increased revenues, these revenues may not offset the increased expenses we incur. If we do not successfully maintain and enhance our brand, our business may not grow, we may have reduced pricing power relative to competitors with stronger brands, and we could lose customers and channel partners, all of which would adversely affect our business operations and financial results.

Our future performance depends in part on proper use of our community website, Splunk Apps, and support from third-party software developers.

Our products enable third-party software developers to build apps on top of our platform. We operate a community website, Splunk Apps, for sharing these third-party apps, including add-ons and extensions. While we expect Splunk Apps to support our sales and marketing efforts, it also presents certain risks to our business, including:

Many of these risks are not within our control to prevent, and our brand may be damaged if these apps, add-ons and extensions do not perform to our customers' satisfaction and that dissatisfaction is attributed to us.

If poor advice or misinformation is spread through our community site, Splunk Answers, users of our products may experience unsatisfactory results from using our products, which could adversely affect our reputation and our ability to grow our business.

We host Splunk Answers for sharing knowledge about how to perform certain functions with our products. Our users are increasingly turning to Splunk Answers for support in connection with their use of our products. We do not review or test the information that non-Splunk employees post on Splunk Answers to ensure its accuracy or efficacy in resolving technical issues. Therefore, we cannot ensure that all the information listed on Splunk Answers is accurate or that it will not adversely affect the performance of our products. Furthermore, users who post such information on Splunk Answers may not have adequate rights to the information to share it publicly, and we could be the subject of intellectual property claims based on our hosting of such information. If poor advice or misinformation is spread among users of Splunk Answers, our customers or other users of our products may experience unsatisfactory results from using our products, which could adversely affect our reputation and our ability to grow our business.

Our use of "open source" software could negatively affect our ability to sell our products and subject us to possible litigation.

We use open source software in our products and expect to continue to use open source software in the future. We may face claims from others claiming ownership of, or seeking to enforce the terms of, an open source license, including by demanding release of the open source software, derivative works or our proprietary source code that was developed using such software. These claims could also result in litigation, require us to purchase a costly license or require us to devote additional

research and development resources to change our products, any of which would have a negative effect on our business and operating results. In addition, if the license terms for the open source code change, we may be forced to re-engineer our products or incur additional costs. Finally, we cannot assure that we have not incorporated additional open source software in our products in a manner that is inconsistent with our current policies and procedures.

If our security measures are breached or unauthorized access to customer data is otherwise obtained, our products may be perceived as not being secure, customers may reduce the use of or stop using our products, and we may incur significant liabilities.

Our software and cloud services involve the storage and transmission of data, and security breaches could result in the loss of this information, litigation, indemnity obligations and other liability. While we have taken steps to protect the confidential information that we have access to, including confidential information we may obtain through our customer support services or customer usage of our cloud-based services, our security measures could be breached.  In addition, we do not have the ability to monitor or review the content that customers of Splunk Enterprise store, and therefore, we have no direct control over the substance of that content. Therefore, if customers use our products for the transmission or storage of personally identifiable information and our security measures are breached as a result of third-party action, employee error, malfeasance or otherwise, our reputation could be damaged, our business may suffer, and we could incur significant liability. Because techniques used to obtain unauthorized access or sabotage systems change frequently and generally are not identified until they are launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures. Any or all of these issues could negatively impact our ability to attract new customers and increase engagement by existing customers, cause existing customers to elect to not renew their subscriptions, or subject us to third-party lawsuits, regulatory fines or other action or liability, thereby adversely affecting our financial results.

We use third-party technology and systems for a variety of reasons, including, without limitation, encryption and authentication technology, employee email, content delivery to customers, back-office support, credit card processing and other functions. Although we have developed systems and processes that are designed to protect customer information and prevent data loss and other security breaches, including systems and processes designed to reduce the impact of a security breach at a third-party vendor, such measures cannot provide absolute security.

Because our products could be used to collect and store personal information, domestic and international privacy, data transfer and data security concerns could result in additional costs and liabilities to us or inhibit sales of our products.

Privacy and data information security have become a significant issue in the United States and in many other countries where we offer licenses of our software and subscriptions of our cloud services. The regulatory framework for privacy and personal information security issues worldwide is rapidly evolving and is likely to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future. Many federal, state and foreign government bodies and agencies have adopted or are considering adopting laws and regulations regarding the collection, use and disclosure of personal information. In the United States, these include rules and regulations promulgated under the authority of the Federal Trade Commission, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 and state breach notification laws. Internationally, virtually every jurisdiction in which we operate has established its own data security and privacy legal framework with which we or our customers must comply, including the Data Protection Directive established in the European Union and the Federal Data Protection Act implemented in Germany.

In addition to government regulation, privacy advocates and industry groups may propose new and different self-regulatory standards that either legally or contractually apply to us. Because the interpretation and application of privacy and data protection laws are still uncertain, it is possible that these laws may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with our existing data management practices or the features of our software and cloud services. If so, in addition to the possibility of fines, lawsuits and other claims, we could be required to fundamentally change our business activities and practices or modify our products, which could have an adverse effect on our business. Any inability to adequately address privacy concerns, even if unfounded, or comply with applicable privacy or data protection laws, regulations and policies, could result in additional cost and liability to us, damage our reputation, inhibit sales and adversely affect our business.

Furthermore, the costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by, the laws, regulations, and policies that are applicable to the businesses of our customers may limit the use and adoption of, and reduce the overall demand for, our products. Privacy and personal information security concerns, whether valid or not valid, may inhibit market adoption of our products particularly in certain industries and foreign countries.

Federal, state and industry regulations as well as self-regulation related to privacy and data security concerns pose the threat of lawsuits and other liability.

We may collect and utilize demographic and other information, including personally identifiable information, from and about users (such as customers, potential customers, and others) as they interact with Splunk over the internet and otherwise provide us with information whether via our website, through email, or through other means. Users may provide personal information to us in many contexts such as when signing up for certain services, purchasing our products, registering for seminars, participating in a survey, when answering questions on our Splunk Answers community site, when posting reviews or otherwise commenting on Splunk apps, when using other community or social networking features, when participating in polls or when signing up to receive e-mail newsletters.

Within the United States, various federal and state laws and regulations govern the collection, use, retention, sharing and security of the data we receive from and about users. Outside of the United States, various jurisdictions actively regulate and enforce laws regarding the collection, retention, transfer, and use (including loss and unauthorized access) of personal information. Privacy advocates and government bodies have increasingly scrutinized the ways in which companies link personal identities and data associated with particular users or devices with data collected through the internet, and we expect such scrutiny to continue to increase. Loss, retention or misuse of certain information and alleged violations of laws and regulations relating to privacy and data security, and any relevant claims, may expose us to potential liability and may require us to expend significant resources on data security and in responding to and defending such allegations and claims.

If we are unable to attract and retain key personnel, our business could be adversely affected.

We depend on the continued contributions of our senior management and other key personnel, the loss of whom could adversely affect our business. All of our executive officers and key employees are at-will employees, which means they may terminate their employment relationship with us at any time. We do not maintain a key-person life insurance policy on any of our officers or other employees.

Our future success also depends on our ability to identify, attract and retain highly skilled technical, managerial, finance and other personnel, particularly in our sales and marketing, research and development, general and administrative, and professional service departments. We face intense competition for qualified individuals from numerous software and other technology companies.

In addition, competition for qualified personnel, particularly software engineers, is particularly intense in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters are located. We may incur significant costs to attract and retain them, and we may lose new employees to our competitors or other technology companies before we realize the benefit of our investment in recruiting and training them. As we move into new geographies, we will need to attract and recruit skilled personnel in those areas. If we are unable to attract and retain suitably qualified individuals who are capable of meeting our growing technical, operational and managerial requirements, on a timely basis or at all, our business will be adversely affected.

Volatility or lack of performance in our stock price may also affect our ability to attract and retain our key employees. Many of our senior management personnel and other key employees have become, or will soon become, vested in a substantial amount of stock, restricted stock units or stock options. Employees may be more likely to leave us if the shares they own or the shares underlying their vested restricted stock units or options have significantly appreciated in value relative to the original purchase prices of the shares or the exercise prices of the options, or, conversely, if the exercise prices of the options that they hold are significantly above the market price of our common stock. If we are unable to retain our employees, or if we need to increase our compensation expenses to retain our employees, our business, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows would be adversely affected.

Prolonged economic uncertainties or downturns could materially adversely affect our business.

Current or future economic downturns or uncertainty could adversely affect our business operations or financial results. Negative conditions in the general economy both in the United States and abroad, including conditions resulting from financial and credit market fluctuations and terrorist attacks on the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific or elsewhere, could cause a decrease in corporate spending on enterprise software in general and negatively affect the rate of growth of our business.

General worldwide economic conditions have experienced a significant downturn and continue to remain unstable. These conditions make it extremely difficult for our customers and us to forecast and plan future business activities accurately, and they could cause our customers to reevaluate their decision to purchase our products, which could delay and lengthen our sales cycles or result in cancellations of planned purchases. Furthermore, during challenging economic times our customers may face issues in gaining timely access to sufficient credit, which could result in an impairment of their ability to make timely

payments to us. If that were to occur, we may be required to increase our allowance for doubtful accounts, which would adversely affect our financial results.

We have a significant number of customers in the business services, energy, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, technology, manufacturing, media and entertainment, online services, retail, telecommunications and travel and transportation industries. A substantial downturn in any of these industries may cause firms to react to worsening conditions by reducing their capital expenditures in general or by specifically reducing their spending on information technology. Customers in these industries may delay or cancel information technology projects or seek to lower their costs by renegotiating vendor contracts. To the extent purchases of our products are perceived by customers and potential customers to be discretionary, our revenues may be disproportionately affected by delays or reductions in general information technology spending. Also, customers may choose to develop in-house software as an alternative to using our products. Moreover, competitors may respond to market conditions by lowering prices and attempting to lure away our customers. In addition, the increased pace of consolidation in certain industries may result in reduced overall spending on our products.

We cannot predict the timing, strength or duration of any economic slowdown, instability or recovery, generally or within any particular industry or geography. If the economic conditions of the general economy or industries in which we operate worsen from present levels, our business operations and financial results could be adversely affected.

We may require additional capital to support business growth, and this capital might not be available on acceptable terms, if at all.

We intend to continue to make investments to support our business growth and may require additional funds to respond to business challenges, including the need to develop new features or enhance our products, improve our operating infrastructure or acquire complementary businesses and technologies. Accordingly, we may need to engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds. If we raise additional funds through future issuances of equity or convertible debt securities, our existing stockholders could suffer significant dilution, and any new equity securities we issue could have rights, preferences and privileges superior to those of holders of our common stock. Any debt financing that we may secure in the future could involve restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, which may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities, including potential acquisitions. We may not be able to obtain additional financing on terms favorable to us, if at all. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to support our business growth and to respond to business challenges could be significantly impaired, and our business may be adversely affected.

We have in the past made and may in the future make acquisitions that could prove difficult to integrate and/or adversely affect our business operations and financial results.

From time to time, we may choose to expand by making acquisitions that could be material to our business, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows. Our ability as an organization to successfully acquire and integrate technologies or businesses is unproven. Acquisitions involve many risks, including the following:

The occurrence of any of these risks could have a material adverse effect on our business operations and financial results.

If currency exchange rates fluctuate substantially in the future, our financial results, which are reported in U.S. dollars, could be adversely affected.

As we continue to expand our international operations, we become more exposed to the effects of fluctuations in currency exchange rates. Although most of our sales contracts are denominated in U.S. dollars, and therefore substantially all of our revenues are not subject to foreign currency risk, a strengthening of the U.S. dollar could increase the real cost of our products to our customers outside of the United States, adversely affecting our business operations and financial results. We incur expenses for employee compensation and other operating expenses at our non-U.S. locations in the local currency. Fluctuations in the exchange rates between the U.S. dollar and other currencies could result in the dollar equivalent of such expenses being higher. This could have a negative impact on our reported operating results. To date, we have not engaged in any hedging strategies, and any such strategies, such as forward contracts, options and foreign exchange swaps related to transaction exposures that we may implement to mitigate this risk may not eliminate our exposure to foreign exchange fluctuations.

The enactment of legislation implementing changes in the United States of taxation of international business activities or the adoption of other tax reform policies could materially impact our financial position and results of operations.

Recent changes to United States tax laws, including limitations on the ability of taxpayers to claim and utilize foreign tax credits and the deferral of certain tax deductions until earnings outside of the United States are repatriated to the United States, as well as changes to United States tax laws that may be enacted in the future, could impact the tax treatment of our foreign earnings. Due to expansion of our international business activities, any changes in the United States taxation of such activities may increase our worldwide effective tax rate and adversely affect our financial position and results of operations.

Our ability to use our net operating losses to offset future taxable income may be subject to certain limitations.

In general, under Section 382 of the United States Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or the Code, a corporation that undergoes an "ownership change" is subject to limitations on its ability to utilize its pre-change net operating losses, or NOLs, to offset future taxable income. If our existing NOLs are subject to limitations arising from previous ownership changes, our ability to utilize NOLs could be limited by Section 382 of the Code. Future changes in our stock ownership, some of which are outside of our control, could result in an ownership change under Section 382 of the Code.

Furthermore, our ability to utilize NOLs of companies that we may acquire in the future may be subject to limitations. There is also a risk that due to regulatory changes, such as suspensions on the use of NOLs, or other unforeseen reasons, our existing NOLs could expire or otherwise be unavailable to offset future income tax liabilities. For these reasons, we may not be able to utilize a portion of the NOLs reflected on our balance sheet, even if we attain profitability.

Taxing authorities may successfully assert that we should have collected or in the future should collect sales and use, value added or similar taxes, and we could be subject to liability with respect to past or future sales, which could adversely affect our financial results.

We do not collect sales and use, value added and similar taxes in all jurisdictions in which we have sales, based on our belief that such taxes are not applicable. Sales and use, value added and similar tax laws and rates vary greatly by jurisdiction. Certain jurisdictions in which we do not collect such taxes may assert that such taxes are applicable, which could result in tax assessments, penalties and interest, and we may be required to collect such taxes in the future. Such tax assessments, penalties and interest or future requirements may adversely affect our financial results.

Our international operations subject us to potentially adverse tax consequences.

We generally conduct our international operations through wholly owned subsidiaries, branches and representative offices and report our taxable income in various jurisdictions worldwide based upon our business operations in those jurisdictions. We are in the process of organizing our corporate structure to more closely align with the international nature of our business activities. Our intercompany relationships are subject to complex transfer pricing regulations administered by taxing authorities in various jurisdictions. The relevant taxing authorities may disagree with our determinations as to the income and expenses attributable to specific jurisdictions. If such a disagreement were to occur, and our position were not sustained, we could be required to pay additional taxes, interest and penalties, which could result in one-time tax charges, higher effective tax rates, reduced cash flows and lower overall profitability of our operations. We believe that our financial statements reflect adequate reserves to cover such a contingency, but there can be no assurances in that regard.

We could be subject to additional tax liabilities.

We are subject to federal, state and local taxes in the United States and numerous foreign jurisdictions. Significant judgment is required in evaluating our tax positions and our worldwide provision for taxes. During the ordinary course of business, there are many activities and transactions for which the ultimate tax determination is uncertain. We previously discovered that we have not complied with various tax rules and regulations in certain foreign jurisdictions. We are working to resolve these matters. In addition, our tax obligations and effective tax rates could be adversely affected by changes in the relevant tax, accounting and other laws, regulations, principles and interpretations, including those relating to income tax nexus, by our earnings being lower than anticipated in jurisdictions where we have lower statutory rates and higher than anticipated in jurisdictions where we have higher statutory rates, by changes in foreign currency exchange rates, or by changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities. We may be audited in various jurisdictions, and such jurisdictions may assess additional taxes against us. Although we believe our tax estimates are reasonable, the final determination of any tax audits or litigation could be materially different from our historical tax provisions and accruals, which could have a material adverse effect on our operating results or cash flows in the period or periods for which a determination is made.

Our stock price has been volatile, may continue to be volatile and may decline regardless of our financial performance.

The trading prices of the securities of technology companies have been highly volatile. The market price of our common stock has fluctuated significantly and may continue to fluctuate significantly in response to numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control, including:

In addition, the stock markets, and in particular the market on which our common stock is listed, have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations that have affected and continue to affect the market prices of equity securities of many technology companies. Stock prices of many technology companies have fluctuated in a manner unrelated or disproportionate to the financial performance of those companies. In the past, stockholders have instituted securities class action litigation following periods of market volatility. If we were to become involved in securities litigation, it could subject us to substantial costs, divert resources and the attention of management from our business and adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows.

If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or reports about our business, or publish negative reports about our business, our share price and trading volume could decline.

The trading market for our common stock depends in part on the research and reports that securities or industry analysts publish about us or our business, our market and our competitors. We do not have any control over these analysts. If one or more of the analysts who cover us downgrade our shares or change their opinion of our shares, our share price would likely decline. If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of our company or fail to regularly publish reports on us, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which could cause our share price or trading volume to decline.

Substantial future sales of shares of our common stock could cause the market price of our common stock to decline.

The market price of shares of our common stock could decline as a result of substantial sales of our common stock, particularly sales by our directors, executive officers, employees and significant stockholders, a large number of shares of our common stock becoming available for sale, or the perception in the market that holders of a large number of shares intend to sell their shares. As of January 31, 2015, we had outstanding approximately 123.5 million shares of our common stock. We have also registered shares of common stock that we may issue under our employee equity incentive plans. These shares will be able to be sold freely in the public market upon issuance.

The requirements of being a public company may strain our resources, divert management's attention and affect our ability to attract and retain executive management and qualified board members.

As a public company, we are subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, or the Exchange Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, the listing requirements of The NASDAQ Stock Market and other applicable securities rules and regulations. Compliance with these rules and regulations has increased our legal and financial compliance costs, made some activities more difficult, time-consuming or costly and increased and will continue to increase demand on our systems and resources. The Exchange Act requires, among other things, that we file annual, quarterly and current reports with respect to our business and operating results. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we maintain effective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting. In order to maintain and, if required, improve our disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting to meet this standard, significant resources and management oversight may be required. As a result, management's attention may be diverted from other business concerns, which could adversely affect our business and operating results. Although we have already hired additional employees to comply with these requirements, we may need to hire more employees in the future or engage outside consultants, which will increase our costs and expenses.

In addition, changing laws, regulations, standards and practices relating to corporate governance and public disclosure are creating uncertainty for public companies, increasing legal and financial compliance costs and making some activities more

time consuming. These laws, regulations, standards and practices are subject to varying interpretations, in many cases due to their lack of specificity, and, as a result, their application in practice may evolve over time as regulatory and governing bodies provide new guidance or as market practices develop. This could result in continuing uncertainty regarding compliance matters and higher costs necessitated by ongoing revisions to disclosure and governance practices. We will continue to invest resources to comply with evolving laws, regulations and standards and keeping abreast of current practices, and this investment may result in increased general and administrative expenses and a diversion of management's time and attention from revenue-generating activities to compliance and corporate governance activities. If our efforts to comply with new laws, regulations and standards differ from the activities intended by regulatory or governing bodies due to ambiguities related to their application and practice, regulatory authorities may initiate legal proceedings against us and our business may be adversely affected.

As a result of disclosure of information as a public company, our business and financial condition have become more visible, which we believe may result in threatened or actual litigation, including by competitors and other third parties. If such claims are successful, our business operations and financial results could be adversely affected, and even if the claims do not result in litigation or are resolved in our favor, these claims, and the time and resources necessary to resolve them, could divert the resources of our management and adversely affect our business operations and financial results. These factors could also make it more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified employees, executive officers and members of our board of directors.

We are obligated to develop and maintain proper and effective internal control over financial reporting. These internal controls may not be determined to be effective, which may adversely affect investor confidence in our company and, as a result, the value of our common stock.

We are required, pursuant to Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to furnish a report by management on, among other things, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. This assessment includes disclosure of any material weaknesses identified by our management in our internal control over financial reporting. We are also required to have our independent registered public accounting firm issue an opinion on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting on an annual basis. During the evaluation and testing process, if we identify one or more material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, we will be unable to assert that our internal controls are effective.

If we are unable to assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, or if our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to express an opinion on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting, we could lose investor confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, which would cause the price of our common stock to decline, and we may be subject to investigation or sanctions by the SEC.

We do not intend to pay dividends for the foreseeable future.

We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our common stock and do not intend to pay any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. We anticipate that we will retain all of our future earnings for use in the development of our business and for general corporate purposes. Any determination to pay dividends in the future will be at the discretion of our board of directors. Accordingly, price appreciation of our common stock, which may never occur, may be the only way our stockholders realize any future gains on their investments.

Anti-takeover provisions in our charter documents and under Delaware law could make an acquisition of our company more difficult, limit attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management and limit the market price of our common stock.

Provisions in our certificate of incorporation and bylaws may have the effect of delaying or preventing a change of control or changes in our management. Our certificate of incorporation and bylaws include provisions that:

These provisions may frustrate or prevent any attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management by making it more difficult for stockholders to replace members of our board of directors, which is responsible for appointing the members of our management. In addition, because we are incorporated in Delaware, we are governed by the provisions of Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, which generally prohibits a Delaware corporation from engaging in any of a broad range of business combinations with any "interested" stockholder for a period of three years following the date on which the stockholder became an "interested" stockholder.

Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments

None.

Item 2. Properties

Our corporate headquarters occupy approximately 95,000 square feet in San Francisco, California under operating leases that expire in February 2019. As of January 31, 2015, we also lease approximately 22,000 square feet of office space in Cupertino, California to support our expanding business operations and hiring needs. We also lease smaller regional offices for sales, support and some product development in various locations throughout the United States. Our foreign subsidiaries also lease office space for their operations including local sales, support and some product development. While we believe our facilities are sufficient and suitable for the operations of our business today, we are in the process of adding new facilities and expanding our existing facilities as we add employees and expand into additional markets. During the fiscal year ended January 31, 2015, we entered into an office lease for approximately 182,000 square feet located at 270 Brannan Street, San Francisco, California. We expect to occupy a portion of the premises at 270 Brannan Street starting in January 2016.

Item 3. Legal Proceedings

The information set forth under Legal Proceedings in Note 3 contained in the "Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements" is incorporated herein by reference.

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures

Not applicable.

PART II

Item 5. Market for Registrant's Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Stock Price and Dividends

Our common stock, $0.001 par value, began trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market on April 19, 2012, where its prices are quoted under the symbol "SPLK." As of January 31, 2015 there were 23 holders of record of our common stock. Because many of our shares of common stock are held by brokers and other institutions on behalf of stockholders, we are unable to estimate the total number of beneficial holders represented by these record holders.

The following table sets forth the reported high and low sales prices of our common stock for the periods indicated, as regularly quoted on the NASDAQ Global Select Market:

We have never declared or paid, and do not anticipate declaring or paying in the foreseeable future, any cash dividends on our capital stock. Any future determination as to the declaration and payment of dividends, if any, will be at the discretion of our board of directors, subject to applicable laws and will depend on then existing conditions, including our financial condition, operating results, contractual restrictions, capital requirements, business prospects, and other factors our board of directors may deem relevant.

Securities Authorized for Issuance Under Equity Compensation Plans

See Item 12, "Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters" for information regarding securities authorized for issuance.

Stock Performance Graph

This chart compares the cumulative total return on our common stock with that of the NASDAQ Composite index and the NASDAQ Computer index. The chart assumes $100 was invested on April 19, 2012, the date our stock began trading, in our common stock, the NASDAQ Composite index and the NASDAQ Computer index. The peer group indices utilize the same methods of presentation and assumptions for the total return calculation as does Splunk and the NASDAQ Composite index. All companies in the peer group index are weighted in accordance with their market capitalizations.

Item 6. Selected Financial Data

        The following selected consolidated financial data should be read in conjunction with our audited consolidated financial statements and related notes thereto and with Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, which are included elsewhere in this Form 10-K. The consolidated statement of operations data for fiscal 2015, 2014, and 2013 and the selected consolidated balance sheet data as of January 31, 2015 and 2014 are derived from, and are qualified by reference to, the audited consolidated financial statements and are included in this Form 10-K. The consolidated statement of operations data for fiscal 2012 and 2011 and the consolidated balance sheet data as of January 31, 2013, 2012, and 2011 are derived from audited consolidated financial statements, which are not included in this Form 10-K.

Item 7. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements and related notes appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. This discussion contains forward-looking statements based upon current expectations that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those set forth under "Risk Factors" included in Part I, Item 1A or in other parts of this report.

Overview

Splunk provides innovative software products that enable organizations to gain real-time operational intelligence by harnessing the value of their data. Our products enable users to collect, index, search, explore, monitor and analyze data regardless of format or source. Our products address large and diverse data sets, commonly referred to as big data, and are specifically tailored for machine-generated data. Machine data is produced by nearly every software application and electronic device and contains a definitive, time-stamped record of various activities, such as transactions, customer and user activities and security threats. Beyond an organization's traditional IT and security infrastructure, every processor-based system, including HVAC controllers, smart electrical meters, GPS devices and radio-frequency identification tags, and many consumer-oriented systems, such as electronic wearables, many manufacturing systems, mobile devices, automobiles and medical devices that contain embedded electronic devices, are also continuously generating machine data. Our products help organizations gain value from all of these different sources and forms of machine data.

We believe the market for products that provide operational intelligence presents a substantial opportunity as data grows in volume and diversity, creating new risks, opportunities and challenges for organizations. Since our inception, we have invested a substantial amount of resources developing our products and technology to address this market, specifically with respect to machine data.

Our products are designed to accelerate return-on-investment for our customers. They generally do not require customization, long deployment cycles or extensive professional services commonly associated with traditional enterprise software applications. Users can simply download and install the software, typically in a matter of hours, to connect to their relevant machine data sources. Alternatively, they can sign up for our Splunk Cloud service and avoid the need to provision, deploy and manage internal infrastructure. They can also provision a compute instance on Amazon Web Services via a pre-built

Amazon Machine Image, which delivers a pre-configured virtual machine instance with our Splunk Enterprise software. We also offer support, training and professional services to our customers to assist in the deployment of our software.

For Splunk Enterprise, we base our license fees on the estimated daily data indexing capacity our customers require. Prospective customers can download a trial version of our software that provides a full set of features but limited data indexing capacity. Following the 60-day trial period, prospective customers can purchase a license for our product or continue using our product with reduced features and limited data indexing capacity. A majority of our license revenues consist of revenues from perpetual licenses, whereby we generally recognize the license fee portion of these arrangements upfront. As a result, the timing of when we enter into large perpetual licenses may lead to fluctuations in our revenues and operating results because our expenses are largely fixed in the short-term. Additionally, we license our software under term licenses which are generally recognized ratably over the contract term. From time to time, we also enter into transactions that are designed to enable broad adoption of our software within an enterprise, referred to as enterprise adoption agreements. These agreements often include provisions that require revenue deferral and recognition over time.

Our Splunk Cloud service delivers the core functionalities of Splunk Enterprise as a scalable, reliable cloud service. Our Splunk Cloud customers pay an annual subscription fee based on the combination of the volume of data indexed per day and the length of the data retention period. Our product, Hunk: Splunk Analytics for Hadoop and NoSQL Data Stores, is a software product that enables exploration, analysis and visualization of data in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores. Our Splunk MINT product enables customers to gain greater operational intelligence from mobile apps and enables Splunk Enterprise customers to analyze their mobile data, establish alerts and searches based on mobile data, and correlate mobile data with other machine data.

We intend to continue investing for long-term growth. We have invested and expect to continue to invest heavily in our product development efforts to deliver additional compelling features, address customer needs and enable solutions that can address new end markets. For example, in March 2015, we introduced Splunk Light, a product designed for smaller IT environments. In addition, we expect to continue to aggressively expand our sales and marketing organizations to market and sell our software both in the United States and internationally.

Our goal is to make our software the platform for delivering operational intelligence and real-time business insights from machine data. The key elements of our growth strategy are to:

We believe the factors that will influence our ability to achieve our goals include, among other things, our ability to deliver new products as well as additional product functionality; acquire new customers across geographies and industries; cultivate incremental sales from our existing customers by driving increased use of our software within organizations; provide additional solutions that leverage our core machine data engine to help organizations understand and realize the value of their machine data in specific end markets and use cases; add additional OEM and strategic relationships to enable new sales channels for our software as well as extend our integration with third party products; and help software developers leverage the functionality of our machine data engine through SDKs and APIs.

For the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013, our total revenues were $450.9 million, $302.6 million and $198.9 million, respectively. For the fiscal year ended January 31, 2015, approximately 24% of our total revenues were derived from customers located outside the United States. Our customers and end-users represent the public sector and a wide variety of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, retail and technology, among others. As of January 31, 2015, we had over 9,000 customers, including 79 of the Fortune 100 companies.

For the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013, our GAAP operating loss was $215.8 million, $78.3 million and $22.0 million, respectively. Our non-GAAP operating income was $12.3 million for fiscal year ended January 31, 2015 and our non-GAAP operating loss was $1.2 million and $1.4 million for fiscal years ended January 31, 2014 and 2013, respectively.

For the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013, our GAAP net loss was $217.1 million, $79.0 million and $36.7 million, respectively. Our non-GAAP net income was $11.0 million for fiscal year ended January 31, 2015, and our non-GAAP net loss was $3.1 million and $2.0 million for fiscal years ended January 31, 2014 and 2013, respectively.

Our quarterly results reflect seasonality in the sale of our products and services. Historically, a pattern of increased license sales in the fourth fiscal quarter as a result of industry buying patterns has positively impacted sales activity in that period, which can result in lower sequential revenues in the following first fiscal quarter. Our gross margins and operating losses have been affected by these historical trends because the majority of our expenses are relatively fixed in the short-term. The majority of our expenses are personnel-related and include salaries, stock-based compensation, benefits and incentive-based compensation plan expenses. As a result, we have not experienced significant seasonal fluctuations in the timing of expenses from period to period.

Non-GAAP Financial Results

To supplement our consolidated financial statements, which are prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP, we provide investors with certain non-GAAP financial measures, including non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP operating income (loss), non-GAAP operating margin, non-GAAP net income (loss) and non-GAAP net income (loss) per share (collectively the "non-GAAP financial measures"). These non-GAAP financial measures exclude all or a combination of the following (as reflected in the following reconciliation tables): stock-based compensation expense, employer payroll tax expense related to employee stock plans, amortization of acquired intangible assets, ground lease expense related to a build-to-suit lease obligation, impairment of a long-lived asset, acquisition-related costs and the partial release of the valuation allowance due to acquisition. In addition, non-GAAP financial measures include free cash flow, which represents cash from operations less purchases of property and equipment. The presentation of the non-GAAP financial measures is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for, or superior to, the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making purposes and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information about our operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by our management in its financial and operational decision making. In addition, these non-GAAP financial measures facilitate comparisons to competitors' operating results.

We exclude stock-based compensation expense because it is non-cash in nature and excluding this expense provides meaningful supplemental information regarding our operational performance. In particular, because of varying available valuation methodologies, subjective assumptions and the variety of award types that companies can use under Financial Accounting Standards Board ("FASB") Accounting Standards Codification ("ASC") Topic 718, we believe that providing non-GAAP financial measures that exclude this expense allows investors the ability to make more meaningful comparisons between our operating results and those of other companies. We exclude employer payroll tax expense related to employee stock plans in order for investors to see the full effect that excluding that stock-based compensation expense had on our operating results. These expenses are tied to the exercise or vesting of underlying equity awards and the price of our common stock at the time of vesting or exercise, which may vary from period to period independent of the operating performance of our business. We also exclude the non-cash charge for previously capitalized research and development expense for our Splunk Storm product (reflected as an impairment of a long-lived asset) as a result of our strategic decision to start making Splunk Storm available at no cost to customers, a decision that we expect to be infrequent in nature. We also exclude acquisition-related costs, amortization of acquired intangible assets and ground lease expense related to a build-to-suit lease obligation from our non-GAAP financial measures because these are considered by management to be outside of our core operating results. We further exclude the partial release of the valuation allowance due to acquisition from non-GAAP net income (loss) and non-GAAP net income (loss) per share because it is also considered by management to be outside our core operating results. Accordingly, we believe that excluding these expenses provides investors and management with greater visibility to the underlying performance of our business operations, facilitates comparison of our results with other periods and may also facilitate comparison with the results of other companies in our industry. We consider free cash flow to be a liquidity measure that provides useful information to management and investors about the amount of cash generated by the business that can be used for strategic opportunities, including investing in our business, making strategic acquisitions and strengthening our balance sheet.

There are limitations in using non-GAAP financial measures because the non-GAAP financial measures are not prepared in accordance with GAAP, may be different from non-GAAP financial measures used by our competitors and exclude expenses that may have a material impact upon our reported financial results. Further, stock-based compensation expense has been and will continue to be for the foreseeable future a significant recurring expense in our business and an important part of the compensation provided to our employees. The non-GAAP financial measures are meant to supplement and be viewed in conjunction with GAAP financial measures.

The following table reconciles our net cash provided by operating activities to free cash flow for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013 (in thousands):

The following table reconciles GAAP gross margin to non-GAAP gross margin for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013:

The following table reconciles GAAP operating loss to non-GAAP operating income (loss) for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013 (in thousands):

The following table reconciles GAAP operating margin to non-GAAP operating margin for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013:

The following table reconciles GAAP net loss to non-GAAP net income (loss) for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013 (in thousands):

The following table reconciles the shares used in computing basic and diluted GAAP and non-GAAP net income (loss) per share for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2015, 2014 and 2013 (in thousands, except per share amounts):

Components of Operating Results

Revenues

License revenues.   License revenues reflect the revenues recognized from sales of licenses to new customers and additional licenses to existing customers. We are focused on acquiring new customers and increasing revenues from our existing customers as they realize the value of our software by indexing higher volumes of machine data and expanding the use of our software through additional use cases and broader deployment within their organizations. A majority of our license revenues consists of revenues from perpetual licenses, under which we generally recognize the license fee portion of the arrangement upfront, assuming all revenue recognition criteria are satisfied. Customers can also purchase term license agreements, under which we recognize the license fee ratably, on a straight-line basis, over the term of the license. Due to the differing revenue recognition policies applicable to perpetual and term licenses, shifts in the mix between perpetual and term licenses from quarter to quarter could produce substantial variation in revenues recognized even if our sales remain consistent.

In addition, seasonal trends that contribute to increased sales activity in the fourth fiscal quarter often result in lower sequential revenues in the first fiscal quarter, and we expect this trend to continue. Comparing our revenues on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful, and you should not rely on our past results as an indication of our future performance.

Maintenance and services revenues.   Maintenance and services revenues consist of revenues from maintenance agreements and, to a lesser extent, professional services and training. Typically, when purchasing a perpetual license, a customer also purchases one year of maintenance service for which we charge a percentage of the license fee. When a term license is purchased, maintenance service is typically bundled with the license for the term of the license period. Customers with maintenance agreements are entitled to receive support and unspecified upgrades and enhancements when and if they become available during the maintenance period. We recognize the revenues associated with maintenance agreements ratably, on a straight-line basis, over the associated maintenance period. In arrangements involving a term license, we recognize both the license and maintenance revenues over the contract period. We have a professional services organization focused on helping some of our largest customers deploy our software in highly complex operational environments and train their personnel. We recognize the revenues associated with these professional services on a time and materials basis as we deliver the services or provide the training. We expect maintenance and services revenues to become a larger percentage of our total revenues as our installed customer base grows.

Professional services and training revenues as a percentage of total revenues were 7% for fiscal 2015. We have experienced continued growth in our professional services revenues primarily due to the deployment of our software with some customers that have large, highly complex IT environments.

Cost of Revenues

Cost of license revenues.   Cost of license revenues includes all direct costs to deliver our product, including salaries, benefits, stock-based compensation and related expenses such as employer taxes, allocated overhead for facilities and IT and amortization of acquired intangible assets. We recognize these expenses as they are incurred.

Cost of maintenance and services revenues.   Cost of maintenance and services revenues includes salaries, benefits, stock-based compensation and related expenses such as employer taxes for our maintenance and services organization, allocated overhead for depreciation of equipment, facilities and IT and amortization. We recognize expenses related to our maintenance and services organization as they are incurred.

Operating Expenses

Our operating expenses are classified into three categories: research and development, sales and marketing and general and administrative. For each category, the largest component is personnel costs, which include salaries, employee benefit costs, bonuses, commissions as applicable, stock-based compensation and related expenses such as employer taxes. Operating expenses also include allocated overhead costs for depreciation of equipment, facilities and IT. Allocated costs for facilities consist of leasehold improvements and rent. Our allocated costs for IT include costs for compensation of our IT personnel and costs associated with our IT infrastructure. Operating expenses are generally recognized as incurred.

Research and development.   Research and development expenses primarily consist of personnel and facility-related costs attributable to our research and development personnel. We have devoted our product development efforts primarily to enhancing the functionality and expanding the capabilities of our software and services. We expect that our research and development expenses will continue to increase, in absolute dollars, as we increase our research and development headcount to further strengthen and enhance our software and services and invest in the development of our solutions and apps.

Sales and marketing.   Sales and marketing expenses primarily consist of personnel and facility-related costs for our sales, marketing and business development personnel, commissions earned by our sales personnel, and the cost of marketing and business development programs. We expect that sales and marketing expenses will continue to increase, in absolute dollars, as we continue to hire additional personnel and invest in marketing programs.

General and administrative.   General and administrative expenses primarily consist of personnel and facility-related costs for our executive, finance, legal, human resources and administrative personnel; our legal, accounting and other professional services fees; and other corporate expenses. We anticipate continuing to incur additional expenses due to growing our operations and being a publicly traded company, including higher legal, corporate insurance and accounting expenses and costs related to maintaining compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and related regulations.

Interest and other income (expense), net

Interest and other income (expense), net consists primarily of foreign exchange gains and losses and interest income on our investments and cash and cash equivalents balances.

Provision for income taxes

The provision for income taxes consists of federal, state and foreign income taxes. We recognize deferred tax assets and liabilities for the expected tax consequences of temporary differences between the tax basis of assets and liabilities and their reported amounts using enacted tax rates in effect for the year in which we expect the differences to reverse.  We record a valuation allowance to reduce the deferred tax assets to the amount that we are more-likely-than-not to realize.  Because of our history of U.S. net operating losses, we have established, in prior years, a full valuation allowance against potential future benefits for U.S. deferred tax assets including loss carry-forwards and research and development and other tax credits.  We regularly assess the likelihood that our deferred income tax assets will be realized based on the realization guidance available. To the extent that we believe any amounts are not more-likely-than-not to be realized, we record a valuation allowance to reduce the deferred income tax assets. We regularly assess the need for the valuation allowance on our deferred tax assets, and to the extent that we determine that an adjustment is needed, such adjustment will be recorded in the period that the determination is made.

Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates

We prepare our consolidated financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States. The preparation of consolidated financial statements also requires us to make estimates and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenues, costs and expenses and related disclosures. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances. Actual results could differ significantly from the estimates made by our management. To the extent that there are differences between our estimates and actual results, our future financial statement presentation, financial condition, results of operations and cash flows will be affected.

We believe that the assumptions and estimates associated with revenue recognition, share-based compensation and income taxes have the greatest potential impact on our consolidated financial statements. Therefore, we consider these to be our critical accounting policies and estimates. Accordingly, we believe these are the most critical to fully understand and evaluate our financial condition and results of operations. For further information on all of our significant accounting policies, see Note 1 of our accompanying Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included in Part II, Item 8, "Financial Statements and Supplementary Data" of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Results of Operations

The following tables set forth our results of operations for the periods presented and as a percentage of our total revenues for those periods. The period-to-period comparison of financial results is not necessarily indicative of financial results to be achieved in future periods.

______________________________

Fiscal 2015, 2014 and 2013

Revenues

Fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014.    The increase in license revenues of $84.2 million was primarily driven by increases in our total number of customers, sales to existing customers and an increase in the number of larger orders. For example, we had 1,112 and 791 orders greater than $100,000 for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2015 and 2014, respectively. Our total number of Splunk customers increased from approximately 7,000 at January 31, 2014 to approximately 9,000 at January 31, 2015. The increase in maintenance and services revenues of $64.1 million was due to increases in sales of maintenance agreements resulting from the growth of our installed customer base as well as sales of our professional services.

Fiscal 2014 compared to fiscal 2013.     Total revenues increased $103.7 million primarily due to growth in license revenues. The increase in license revenues was primarily driven by increases in our total number of customers, sales to existing customers and an increase in the number of larger orders. For example, we had 791 and 467 orders greater than $100,000 for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2014 and 2013, respectively. Our total number of Splunk customers increased from approximately 5,200 at January 31, 2013 to approximately 7,000 at January 31, 2014. The increase in maintenance and services revenues was due to increases in sales of maintenance agreements resulting from the growth of our installed customer base as well as sales of our professional services.

Cost of Revenues and Gross Margin