IT search company Splunk has launched a new version of its technology for managing, securing and auditing IT infrastructure, featuring dramatic improvements in speed, scale and manageability, according to the firm.

Splunk 4 has been re-architected to give the firm's largest customers up to 10 times faster search and two times faster indexing, enhancing IT issue resolution times and incident investigations, the company said.

Splunk has also improved manageability with a new web-based user interface, enabling business users as well as IT administrators to get the most out of the product, according to the firm's founder, Michael Baum.

"Before, a lot of the functions were under the hood but you'd need an engineer to get to them. Now you can do that through a web-based user interface, " he said.

Splunk 4 features a new framework allowing users to develop and deploy their own custom applications and dashboards running on top of the Splunk engine.

The company also launched three premium offerings - Enterprise Security, PCI Compliance, and Change Management - and promised more for use with technology partners such as F5 and VMware.