The problem here is that splunk was configured with boot start enabled. On AIX, this will put a line in the /etc/inittab file which will then be run by startsrc. This seems fine except startsrc is run by root and if your Splunk install is configured to run as a different user, you can get a "permission denied" error.
To fix this, remove the line in /etc/inittab that references Splunk and restart.
If you do want Splunk to start at boot time, you could configure it with the "enable boot start" but just make sure to set the user Splunk will run as correctly. This doc page is a good reference.
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.1.3/admin/ConfigureSplunktostartatboottime
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