A year ago investors were piling into shares of Splunk Inc, even as many other technology stocks swooned as the pandemic began to spread in the United States. These days, it appears they cannot get out of the stock fast enough while sending prices of others like Amazon racing ahead.

And yet business appears to have never been better for this 18-year-old San Francisco firm whose offerings rest on a tripod of security, information technology infrastructure, and observability. At the core of its flagship product, Splunk Enterprise, used by companies as diverse as Porsche, Domino’s Pizza and Intel, is a proprietary machine-data engine that brings together collection, indexing, search, reporting analysis and data management capabilities.