The $120 million VictorOps acquisition, Splunk's third already in 2018 and fifth in the past year, opens the door to compete in the nascent fields of on-call scheduling, alerting and incident response. The combination of Splunk's AI and machine learning technologies with VictorOps' incident management offerings will create what company officials described as a "platform of engagement" for development teams, an analytics-driven platform to monitor issues, resolve incidents and continuously improve. "This will help us extend our vision of using data as the backbone of IT," said Doug Merritt, Splunk president and CEO.