Tell It to Me Straight Your online community can help fine-tune your products.

At least once a week, Splunk co-founder and CEO Michael Baum spends time reading and contributing to the wiki his team created for his company's search technology. He does this not just for his own edification, but also for product ideas.Wikis are web pages that can be edited by multiple contributors. Splunk's twist on the concept is SplunkBase, where the company encourages the techies who use its software to vent about various vendors' technologies in the data center and provide tips about how they use them. Members can also rate each others' feedback.

Baum, 45, and Splunk co-founders Erik Swan, 44, and Rob Das, 48, have a certain empathy for techies. They all felt their share of technical frustration while involved in internet development at companies like Infoseek and Yahoo!. Splunk's software taps their past experience to index the different tasks that computer servers, network routers, security devices and the like handle each day, keeping copious records about these activities. When a problem occurs, the technical teams managing these technologies use Splunk to search for anomalies and configuration problems.