>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering .conf2018. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to .conf2018 everybody, this is theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, wrapping up day one and we're pleased to have Bina Khimani, who's the global head of Partner Ecosystem for the infrastructure segments at AWS. Bina, it's great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. >> Pleasure to be here. >> It's an awesome show, everybody's talking data, we love data. >> Yes. >> You guys, you know, you're the heart of data and transformation. Talk about your role, what does it mean to be the global head Partner Ecosystems infrastructure segments, a lot going on in your title. >> Yes. >> Dave: You're busy. (laughing) >> So, in the infrastructure segment, we cover dev apps, security, networking as well as cloud migration programs, different types of cloud migration programs, and we got segment leaders who really own the strategy and figure out where are the best opportunities for us to work with the partners as well as partner development managers and solution architects who drive adoption of the strategy. That's the team we have for this segment. >> So everybody wants to work with AWS, with maybe one or two exceptions. And so Splunk, obviously, you guys have gotten together and formed an alliance. I think AWS has blessed a lot of the Splunk technology, vice versa. What's the partnership like, how has it evolved? >> So Splunk has been an excellent partner. We are really joined hands together in many fronts. They are fantastic AWS marketplace partner. We have many integrations of Splunk and AWS services, whether it is Kinesis data, Firehose, or Macy, or WAF. So many services Splunk and AWS really are well integrated together. They work together. In addition, we have joined go to market programs. We have field engagement, we have remand generation campaigns. We join hands together to make sure that our customers, joint customers, are really getting the best value out of it. So speaking of partnership, we recently launched migration program for getting Splunk on prem, Splunk Enterprise customers to Splunk Cloud while, you know, they are on their journey to Cloud anyway. >> Yeah, Bina let's dig into that some, we know AWS loves talking about migrations, we dig into all the databases that are going and we talk at this conference, you know Splunk started out very much on premises but we've talked to lots of users that are using the Cloud and it's always that right. How much do they migrate, how much do they start there? Bring us instead, you know, what led to this and what are the workings of it. >> So what, you know if you look at the common problems people have customers have on prem, they are same problems that customers have with Splunk Enterprise on prem, which is, you know, they are looking for resiliency. Their administrator goes on vacation. They want to keep it up and running all the time. They help people making some changes that shouldn't have been made. They want the experts to run their infrastructure. So Splunk Cloud is run by Splunk which is, you know they are the best at running that. Also, you know I just heard a term called lottery proof. So Splunk Cloud is lottery proof, what that means the funny thing is, that you know, your administrator wins lottery, you're not out of business. (laughs) At the same time if you look at the the time to value. I was talking to a customer last night over dinner and they were saying that if they wanted to get on Splunk Enterprise, for their volume of data that they needed to be ingested in Splunk, it would take them six months to just get the hardware in place. With Splunk Cloud they were running in 15 minutes. So, just the time to value is very important. Other things, you know, you don't need to plan for your peak performance. You can stretch it, you can get all the advantages of scalability, flexibility, security, everything you need. As well as running Splunk Cloud you know you are truly cost optimized. Also Splunk Cloud is built for AWS so it's really cost optimized in terms of infrastructure costs, as well as the Splunk licensing cost. >> Yeah it's funny you mentioned the joke, you know you go to Splunk cloud you're not out of a job, I mean what we've heard, the Splunk admins are in such high demand. Kind of running their instances probably isn't, you know a major thing that they'd want to be worrying about. >> Yes, yes, so-- >> Dave: Oh please, go. >> So Splunk administrators are in such a high demand and because of that, you know, not only that customers are struggling with having the right administrators in place, also retaining them. And when they go to Cloud, you know, this is a SAS version, they don't need administrators, nor they need hardware. They can just trust the experts who are really good at doing that. >> So migrations are a tricky thing and I wonder if we can get some examples because it's like moving a house. You don't want to move, or you actually do want to move but it's, you have be planful, it's a bit of a pain, but the benefits, a new life, so. In your world, you got to be better, so the world that you just described of elastic, you don't have to plan for peaks, or performance, the cost, capex, the opex, all that stuff. It's 10 X better, no debate there. But still there's a barrier that you have to go through. So, how does AWS make it easier or maybe you could give us some examples of successful migrations and the business impact that you saw. >> Definitely. So like you said, right, migration is a journey. And it's not always easy one. So I'll talk about different kinds of migration but let me talk about Splunk migration first. So Splunk migration unlike many other migration is actually fairly easy because the Splunk data is transient data, so customers can just point all their data sources to Splunk Cloud instead of Splunk Enterprise and it will start pumping data into Splunk Cloud which is productive from day one. Now if some customers want to retain 60 to 90 days data, then they can run this Splunk Enterprise on prem for 60 more days. And then they can move on to Splunk Cloud. So in this case there was no actual data migration involved. And because this is the log data that people want to see only for 60 to 90 days and then it's not valuable anymore. They don't really need to do large migration in this case it's practically just configure your data sources and you are done. That's the simplest part of the migration which is Splunk migration to Splunk Cloud. Let's talk about different migrations. So... you have heard many customers, you know like Capital One or many other Dow-Jones, they are saying that we are going all in on AWS and they are shutting down their data centers, they are, you know, migrating hundreds of thousands of applications and servers, which is not as simple as Splunk Cloud, right? So, what AWS, you know, AWS does this day in and day out. So we have figured it out again and again and again. In all of our customer interactions and migrations we are acquiring ton of knowledge that we are building toward our migration programs. We want to make sure that our customers are not reinventing the wheel every time. So we have migration programs like migration acceleration program which is for custom large scale migrations for larger customers. We have partner migration programs which is entirely focused on working with SI partners, consulting partners to lead the migrations. As well as we're workload migration program where we are standardizing migrations of standard applications like Splunk or Atlassian, or many of their such standard applications, how we can provide kind of easy button to migrate. Now, when customers are going through this migration journey, you know, it's going to be 10 X better like you said, but initially there is a hump. They are probably needing to run two parallel environments, there is a cost element to that. They are also optimizing their business processes there is some delay there. They are doing some technical work, you know, discovery, prioritization, landing zone creations, security, and networking aspects. There are many elements to this. What we try to do is, if you look at the graph, their cost is right now where this and it's going to go down but before that it goes up and then goes down. So what we try to do is really provide all the resources to take that hump out in terms of technical support, technical enablement, you know, partner support, funding elements, marketing. There are all types of elements as well as lot of technical integrations and quick starts to take that hump out and make it really easy for our customers. >> And that was our experience, we're Amazon customer and we went through a migration about, I don't know five or six years ago. We had, you know, server axe and a cage and we were like, you know, moving wires over and you'd get an alert you'd have to go down and fix things. And so it took us some time to get there, but it is 10 X better now though. >> It is. >> The developers were so excited and I wanted to ask you about, sort of the dev-ops piece of it because that's really, it became, we just completely eliminated all the operational pieces of it and integrated it and let the developers take care of it. Became, truly became infrastructure as code. So the dev-ops culture has permeated our small organization, can't imagine the impact on a larger company. Wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. >> Definitely. So... As customers are going through this cloud migration journey they are looking at their entire landscape of application and they're discovering things that they never did. When they discover they are trying to figure out should I go ahead and migrate everything to AWS right now, or should I a refactor and optimize some of my applications. And there I'm seeing both types of decisions where some customers are taking most of their applications shifting it to cloud and then pausing and thinking now it is phase two where I am on cloud, I want to take advantage of the best of the breed whatever technology is there. And I want to transform my applications and I want to really be more agile. At the same time there are customers who are saying that I'm going to discover all my workload and applications and I'm going to prioritize a small set of applications which we are going to take through transformation right now. And for the rest of it we will lift and shift and then we will transform. But as they go through this transformation they are changing the way they do business. They are changing the way they are utilizing different technology. Their core focus is on how do I really compete with my competition in the industry and for that how can IT provide me that agility that I need to roll out changes in my business day in day out. And for that, you know, Lambda, entire code portfolio, code build, code commit, code deploy, as well as cloud trail, and you know all the things that, all the services we have as well as our partners have, they provide them truly that edge on their industry and market. >> Bina, how has the security discussion changed? When Stu and I were at the AWS public sector summit in June, the CIO of the CIA stood up on stage in front of 10,000 people and said, "The cloud on my worst day from a security perspective "is better than my client server infrastructure "on a best day." That's quite an endorsement from the CIA, who's got some chops in security. How has that discussion changed? Obviously it's still fundamental, critical, it's something that you guys emphasize. But how has the perception and reality changed over the last five years? >> Cloud is, you know, security in cloud is a shared responsibility. So, Amazon is really, really good at providing all the very, very secure infrastructure. At the same time we are also really good at providing customers and business partners all of the tools and hand-holding them so that they can make their application secure. Like you said, you know, AWS, many of the analysts are saying that AWS is far more secure than anything they can have within their own data center. And as you can see that in this journey also customers are not now thinking about is it secure or not. We are seeing the conversation that, how in fact, speaking of Splunk right, one customer that I talked to he was saying that I was asking them why did you choose Splunk cloud on AWS and his take was that, "I wanted near instantaneous SOA compliant "and by moving to Splunk cloud on AWS "I got that right away." Even I'm talking to public sector customers they are saying, you know, I want fair DRAM I want in healthcare industry, I want HIPPA Compliance. Everywhere we are seeing that we are able to keep up with security and compliance requirements much faster than what customers can do on their own. >> So they, so you take care of, certainly from the infrastructure standpoint, those certifications and that piece of the compliance so the customer can worry about maybe some of the things that you don't cover, maybe some of their business processes and other documentation, ITIL stuff that they have to do, whatever. But now they have more time to do that presumably 'cause that's check box, AWS has that covered for me, right? Is that the right thinking? >> Yes, plus we provide them all the tools and support and knowledge and everything so that they, and even partner support who are really good at it so that not only they understand that the application and infrastructure will come together as entire secure environment but also they have everything they need to be able to make applications secure. And Splunk is another great example, right? Splunk helps customer get application level security and AWS is providing them infrastructure and together we are working together to make sure our customers' application and infrastructure together are secure. >> So speaking about migrations database, hot topic at a high level anyway, I wonder if you could talk about database migrations. Andy Jassy obviously talks a lot about, well let's see we saw RDS on Prim at VMworld, big announcement. Certainly Aurora, DynamoDB is one of the databases we use. Redshift obviously. How are database migrations going, what are you doing to make those easier? >> So what we do in a nutshell, right for everything we try to build a programatic reputable, scalable approach. That's what Amazon does. And what we do is that for each of these standard migrations for databases, we try to figure out, that let's take few examples, and let's figure out Play Books, let's figure out runbooks, let's make sure technical integrations are in place. We have quick starts in place. We have consulting partners who are really good at doing this again and again and again. And we have all the knowledge built into tools and services and support so that whenever customers want to do it they don't run into hiccups and they have really pleasant experience. >> Excellent. Well I know you're super busy thanks for making some time to come on theCUBE I always love to have AWS on. So thanks for your time Bina. >> Thank you very nice to meet you both. >> Alright you're very welcome. Alright so that's a wrap for day one here at Splunk .conf 2018, Stu and I will be back tomorrow. Day two more customers, we got senior executives coming on tomorrow, course Doug Merritt, always excited to see Doug. Go to siliconangle.com you'll see all the news theCUBE.net is where all these videos live and wikibon.com for all the research. We're out day one Splunk you're watching theCUBE we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. >> Bina: Thank you. (electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering .conf2018! Brought to you by Splunk. (techno music) >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. We're here with theCUBE covering Splunk.conf2018. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Chris Crocco is here, he's the Lead Solutions Engineer at ViaSat. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Let's start with ViaSat. Tell us what you guys do and what your role is all about. >> So ViaSat is a global communications and technology company primarily focused on satellite-based technologies, anything from government services to commercial aviation and residential service. >> And what does a Lead Solutions Engineer do? >> My primary role is to help us kind of transition from a traditional operations state into more of a DevOps environment including monitoring, alerting, orchestration and remediation. >> Oh, we love this conversation, don't we? Okay. The basic question is, and I know it's hard, but it's subjective, it's kind of if you think about the majority of your organization in the context of DevOps, on a scale of one to five, five being nirvana, so let's assume you're not at five 'cause it never ends, right? You're constantly evolving. Where would you say you are? Are you just getting started? Are you more like a four, 4 1/2, what do you think? >> That's a good question. I would say we're probably three on our way to four. We've had a lot of growing pains, we've had a lot of learning opportunities. The processes of DevOps are getting pretty well-entrenched and right now, we're working on making sure that the culture sticks with the DevOps. >> That's critical, right? >> I mean, that's really where the rubber meets the road is that organizational and political. Without getting into the dirt of it, give us what it looked like before and where you are today. >> Sure. Prior to our shift to DevOps, which was mainly motivated by our latest spacecraft, ViaSat-2, we had a very traditional operational model where we had everything funneled through a Network Operations Center, we had a Technical Operations Team, and if they weren't able to triage and remediate issues, they kicked it over the fence to engineers and developers who would then throw something back. There wasn't a lot of communication between the two organizations, so when we did find recurring problems, recurring issues in our network and in our environment, it took a long time to get those resolved and we had to have a large volume of staff there just to kind of put out the fires. With the transition of DevOps, one of the things that we've been focusing on is making sure that our development teams, our engineering teams understand the customer experience and how it's impacted by what they do, and de-centralizing that operation structure so all of the triage work goes to the people who actually work on those services. So it's a pretty big paradigm shift but it's also helping us solve customer problems faster and get better education about what the customer experience is to the people who actually make it better. >> And roughly, what was the timeframe that it took to go from that really waterfall model to the structure that you have today? >> We've been going for about two or three years now in this transition. Like I said, the first year or so was kind of bumpy and we've really kind of ramped up over the past year in terms of the amount of teams that are practicing DevOps, the amount of teams that are in an agile and scrum model. So overall, two to three years to get to where we are today. >> So the problem with the traditional model is you have time to deployment is slower, that means time, the value is slower, a lot of re-work. Here, you take it. No, you take it. Hey, it worked when I gave it to you, a lot of back and forth, and not a lot of communication creates frustration, not a lot of collaboration and teamwork, then you're working through that now. How large is the team? >> My team is five people. We have 4,500 people roughly at ViaSat as a whole. I believe roughly 2,000 of them are in an engineering or technical role. >> Okay, but in the previous model, you had developers and you had operations folks, is that right? And your five are sort of split over those or was it a much, much larger corpus of folks? >> It was a very large distribution of people. It was very engineering and developer-centric. We still had a Core Operations Team of 60 to 100 people based in our Denver office. We're keeping our headcount relatively the same with respect to our operations and we're growing a lot in terms of those DevOps teams. So as those teams continue to grow, we're adding more operational resources to them and kind of inserting a lot of that knowledge into other parts of the organization. >> You're doing a lot more with the same. Are you coming from the ops side or the dev side? >> I come from the ops side. I actually started my career with ViaSat in our knock in Denver. From there, I transitioned into a ops analyst role and then we created the Solutions Engineering Team and I took the lead on that. >> Chris, can you tell us how Splunk plays into your DevOps? Did you start using it in the knock and kind of go from there? >> We did, actually. Splunk started out as just a tool for us to see how many modems were offline in the knock. It was up on the video wall and we would see spikes and know that there was a problem. And as we've made this transition at DevOps, a lot of teams that were using other solutions, other open-source and home-grown solutions were kind of organically pivoting to Splunk because it was a lot easier for them to use for alerting dashboards, deep-data analysis, a lot of the things they needed to do their job effectively. So as we've grown as a company, as we've grown in this organizational model, Splunk has kind of grown along with that in terms of use case. >> That growth is predominately in IT operations and security, correct? >> Well, it's actually pretty interesting. It's kind of all over the board in our organization. It started in IT operations and security, but we have people in our marketing department using it to make sales and campaign decisions. We have executive leadership looking at it to see the performance of our spacecraft, we have exploratory research being done with it in terms of what's effective and what's not for our new spacecraft that will be coming out, the ViaSat-3 Constellation. So it's really all over the board in our organization. >> That's interesting, Stu, you're not the first customer who's told us that no, it's not just confined to IT, it's actually seeping through the organization. Despite the fact that we heard a bunch of announcements today, I don't know if you saw the keynotes, making it simpler for lines of business folks to actually utilize Splunk, so given that a lot of your teams in the business are actually using it already, what do you think these announcements will do for them? Maybe you haven't had time to evaluate it, but essentially, it's making it easier for business people, you know, simplifying it. >> Yeah, you know, all of the announcements in the keynotes over the past two days have been really, really exciting. Everything that I was hoping for got checked off the list. So I think one of the big things that it's going to allow us to do is get our customer-facing teams and our customer care organizations more involved with the tool. And getting them the information that they need to better serve customers that are calling in, and potentially even prevent the situations that customers have to call in for in the first place. So giving them a lot of account information quickly, giving them the ability to access information that is PCI and PII-compliant but still allowing them to get the data they need to service an individual customer, all of those things I think are really going to be impacted by the announcements in this conf. >> So you were the keynote yesterday. >> I was! >> Were you shaking the phone? >> I was, yeah. >> Which group were you, were you orange? >> We were orange group, yeah. >> We were orange, too! But we were sitting in the media section and all the media guys were sitting on their hands but we had a lot of devs and ops guys shaking with us. It's like when you do the wave at Fenway Park when it gets behind home plate, everybody just kind of sits down, but we were plugging hard. Alright, Chris, what else has excited you about .conf2018? School stuff that you've seen, some innovations, things you've learned. >> Well, I'm really excited about the app for infrastructure. That's something that we've been trying to get for ITSI for a long time now in terms of NED-level monitoring and NED-level thresholding. I think that's going to complement our business really, really well. The advancements that they're doing with the metrics store, specifically with things like Syslog are really, really exciting. I think that that's going to allow us to accelerate our data and make it more performant. The S3 compliant storage is absolutely fantastic and it comes in black now and that's really, really fantastic. >> Oh right! The dark mode! >> Dark mode, yup. >> You mentioned the ITSI. Have you used the VictorOps pieces before or is that something you're looking to do? >> We haven't looked at VictorOps as of yet. We're an xMatters customer right now so we've been using their integration that they built out and it's on Splunk base. But VictorOps, it'll be interesting to see how that organization changes now that it's part of the Splunk. >> So dark mode actually, it's one of those things that it really got such a loud ovation. It was funny, I was actually talking to a couple Splunkers that are like, "We want that dark mode t-shirt." Which I think you have to be a user and you need to sign up for some research thing that they're doing, and they're giving out the black shirt that has like gray text on it. >> Awesome! >> Why does that resonate with you, the dark mode? >> Well, it was actually what they talked about in the keynote. If you have it up on a video wall, which we have in various parts of our company, or if you're sitting in a dark office, something like that, looking at a really white screen for a long period of time, it's not easy on your eyes, it's hard to look at for a long period of time. And generally speaking, a lot of our presentation layers go towards that visual format. So I think this is going to allow us to make it much more appealing to the people who are putting this up on screens in front of people. >> Your responsibility extends out into the field, I presume. The data that's in the field, is that true? >> It does. >> Okay, so I'm interested in your reaction to the industrial IoT announcements, how you see or if you see your organization taking advantage of that. >> Well, we're a very vertically integrated company so we actually manufacture a lot of the devices that we use and that we provide to our customers. I think a lot of our manufacturing capabilities would really benefit from that. Anything from building antennas for ground segment that actually talked to the spacecraft. It's the modems that we put in people's houses, that entire fabrication process I think would benefit a lot. I really loved the AR presentation that they did where they were actually showing the overlay of metrics on a manufacturing line. I think that's something that would be fantastic for us, particularly for sending somebody to an antenna or a ground station to replace a piece of equipment. We can overlay those metrics, we can overlay all of that, we can use the industrial analytics piece of that to actually show which piece of hardware is most affected and how best to replace that. So a lot of opportunities there for our company. >> So I wonder if you could help us understand what's, from your perspective, on Splunk's to-do list. We're going to have Doug Merritt on a little later. If you had Doug right here and he said, Chris, what can we do to make your life better? What would you tell him? >> You know, I think a couple of the things that would make it better, and it looks like they're heading this direction, is streaming in and streaming out. You know, streaming in is of course important, that's where a lot of your data lives, but you also have to be able to send that out to Kafka, to Kinesis, to other places, so other people can consume the output of what Splunk is doing. So I think that would be a really, really important thing for us to socialize the benefit of Splunk. And then vertically integrating the incident management chain, it looks like something that's on their roadmap and I'd be interested to see what their roadmap looks like in terms of pulling in Phantom, pulling in VictorOps, pulling in some of these other technologies that are now in the Splunk umbrella to really make that end-to-end process of detecting, directing and remediating issues a lot more efficient. >> Okay, and do you see at some point that the machine will actually do, the machine intelligence will do a lot of that remediation? >> I think so. >> Do you see the human still heavily involved? >> Well, I think one of the important things is for a lot of these remediation things, we shouldn't have a human involved, right? Particularly things that are well-known issues. Human beings are expensive and human beings are important, and there are a lot more important things that they can be doing with their time than putting out fires. So if we can have machines doing that for them, it frees them up to do a lot more cool stuff. >> You're right. Alright, Chris, well listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Yeah! Appreciate it very much. >> Thanks for your insights. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Orlando Splunk.conf2018. Be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2018 brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to Splunk's .conf2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're here in Orlando. Day one of two days of wall to wall coverage, this is our seventh year doing Splunk .conf, Stu amazing show, a lot of action, partnership is growing, ecosystem is growing. And we're going to to talk to one ecosystem partner, Gemini Data. J.R. Murray's here as the vice president of technical services. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Happy to be here. >> Yeah so when we first started this, Splunk ecosystem was really tiny and it's just sort of growing and growing and now is exploding. But tell us about Gemini Data what are you guys all about. What's your role? >> Sure, so my role is VP of technical services. I manage our sales engineers and professional services consultants as well as our managers services practice, based in the United States. So what I do is I go through and help make sure all the operations go pretty smoothly. And in terms of the company and what we do we've got a couple different things that we work on. Primarily our focus is around big data platforms and making them easier to deploy and manage. We offer a hardware appliances as part of that package and we also have an investigate software platform that we feed data into and it helps analysts jobs be a little bit more easier and quicker to do investigations. >> And you guys started the company three and a half, four years ago, is that right? >> That's right, that's right. >> Back when big data was and kind of still is a mess. >> That's right. >> Doug even said that in his conversations today. He said that we live in a world filled with change. The messiest landscape is the data. >> That's right. >> The bigger, the faster, the more complex the data, the messier it is. So you guys kind of started to solve a problem. Why did you start the company? What was the problem you were trying to solve? >> So really where we started is we focused on there's a problem with deploying big data platforms, customers have poor experiences in terms of it's too complicated, there are a lot of very technical details you have to worry about. And if you're a little bit lower on the maturity curve of technology solution implementation you might need some help along the way or if you are a little bit further along in the technical maturity curve you may actually need some help in getting something that's more turn-key in order to alleviate a lot of the challenges that go along with IT bureaucracy. You've got maybe something that you need that's purpose built because you've got something that's very central to your security strategy. You need to make sure that it's up and running, and reliable, and dependable. So that's where we come in. We have a platform that we allow you to implement. It's a turn-key solution, multiple systems get your Splunk deployment up and running. >> And when you do that on your website looking at, you support various technologies, I see Splunk on there, FireEye, Cloud Era, Service Now, Amazon, Azure, so those are sort of systems, RSA. I mean they've got a lot of products and a lot of cases it's cloud or, they've got a platform like Splunk. Will you actually do like bottoms up stuff with Hadoop and pig and hive or are you really focused on sort of that higher level helping customers integrate those platforms that they brought in. >> Right. >> Kind of helping them be a platform of platforms if you will, is it the former or the latter? >> Yeah so that's kind of the idea right? We come in and we go through and we say what are your actual goals here do you just want to go through and install Splunk or do you actually have a big data strategy that we can help you execute on. So it's kind of a cohesive holistic approach in terms of, what you need to deploy and how we help you get there. So if you need to deploy Splunk we help you install Splunk. If you want to do Splunk and have a Hadoop data role for example you can have hadub just alongside your Splunk all on the same platform. You can go through and manage that centrally and make it a little bit easier to manage via policy push out jobs centrally all the automation and orchestration is there and the under pendings for all those solutions. >> Yeah J.R. who who are you typically selling to? One of the things we look at data is pervasive in the company in companies but who owns it, I've talked to a number of people at this company that are like well I've got Splunk and everybody comes and asks me questions right now. So where do you fit in in the organization? >> So we've got a few different things going on. So in terms of who we sell to and where we focus, its kind of across the board we've got very large enterprises who are pushing tens of terabytes into the deployment, and we help them out with getting a solution that's going to be something that's a little bit more manageable. You've got a limited staff, the knowledge of Splunk is hard to hard to actually cultivate and then actually keep and retain folks that know Splunk. They are generally very well paid. So its easy for them to find opportunities elsewhere. You've invested a lot in these people, your success is very critical and they're a critical part of it. And it's important to keep those people around. So we've got a manage service to help with customers like that. We call it Gemini Care. We come in and we are actually able to have an automated monitoring and break fix type of resolution service that factors into those types of deployments. And as part of that we go through and offer some services and touch points throughout the month to make sure they're getting what they need from a value standpoint. I mean its one thing to have the platform and the deployment, and the data but in fact if you're not getting any value out of that what good is it? So if you don't have the talent the skills you're able to go through it and use us to implement some of those used cases and things like that. >> Yeah yeah one of the other things that changed a lot in the last 3, 4 years is the on the premises of course is where a lot of the customers are and a lot of data is but partner with the cloud, you partner with the Ager's and Amazon's in the world even if you start talking about edge that diversity of where my data lives. How how is that playing into your solution? >> So it's funny you mention that we came to arka we led with and applied base solution and we said customers that are having problems either getting hardware common thing is you want to put a box in or 10 or 20 boxes but you've got the storage team saying hey we need to hook up to our our sand we spent millions of dollars on this, we're going to get some use out of it and guess what Splunk you're going to be our biggest consumer of all of our storage internally on this brand new sand we got. A lot of times its not attractive to a lot of interim customers. You've got IOPS requirements, you've got all these other requirements. Folks don't understand you've got hard requirements for CPU's and and the band width there. So if you're using virtual solutions which a lot of customers are forced into doing you actually have a very difficult time getting reserved resources on those virtual hosts. So you get a bare metal box in there, you get a platform on it you have none of those issues. So in terms of where we pivoted from there the industry is obviously going towards cloud. So what we're trying to do is actually, we have a solution in the market today. Customers are really interested in us helping them on that journey so we've got plenty of customers who are on premise today they have a cloud strategy they want to get out of the data center business and they need to get into cloud. So what we're doing is we're helping them we've got equipment who in a code located data center and what we're doing is migrating customers over to that infrastructure as more of a subscription basis. So it's the same platform but now it's in the cloud. There are benefits to that. >> So I want to I want to actually let me follow up now, so the subscription basis >> Right. How does that work? So it used to be what sort of an upfront perpetual license and then here you go and then we'll you when there's another upgrade. >> Right >> And now how's it work I know 75% last quarter of Splunk's bookings or revenue I'm not sure which one. Were subscription based irratible and there was a big long discussion about whatever it was 606 and all the Wall Street guys trying to part through it. What does it mean for the customer? What does that transition like? >> Okay >> Is it like hey good news. >> Right >> We're not going to go through the spike cycles we're going to smooth things out for you. But what's that conversation like? >> We've got a lot of flexibility with customers. We've got the ability to do OPX or CAPX, we've got the ability to ship as an appliance kind of as an all in one solution. However what we've really migrated to as what the market has demanded is customer feedback. Is, "hey we can buy this box anywhere" and we're like, "you know what you're right. If you want to go right ahead here's the software subscription. So now we have the option to sell the appliance and the software subscription together as one package that's also partially subscription but what happens when you migrate that into the cloud, is now you've got a cloud based subscription infrastructure and that software license is sort of included in that. >> I want to ask you about use cases. You were talking a little bit before but if you pre go back before the term big data came to fruition, you kind of had the EDW was the so called data big data used case and you had maybe a couple of analysts that knew the decision support systems and could build a cube and they were like the data gods. So big data comes in and you had used cases like a cheaper EDW that was kind of a really popular one. Certainly fraud detection was one, precision marketing, ad serving, obviously Splunk and the security and IT operations base although Splunk never really used the term big data so its only sort of more recent and line of business analytics. So you see all these sort of new uses for data very complex as you pointed out. You guys started the company to sort of help squint through some of that complexity and actually build solutions. So the brief history of big data by Dave Vellante. So given all that how has your customers use of data changed over the last since you guys have started and where do you see it going? >> So we originally started, originally we had some customers that came over into this new business venture existing relationships and what not they were using a different sim platform. You one of our primary objectives were to was to get them all in to Splunk and that's something that we were able to do successfully. So they were doing security analysis, log retention, those were their primary goals and that's it. Maybe compliance, okay. So their really focusing on that. Now today we're doing entirely different things. We're focusing on as you mentioned anti-fraud. Huge opportunity in the space there with Splunk the tools in that space today are prohibitively expensive, very complex and we come in with Splunk we're able to take in data from all sorts of places and technologies really know really know understanding of the data at that point required yet and then we convert that into business value for the customer by means of services. Because there's very little in the way of precan used cases for that and frankly when it comes to the fraud space a lot of customers their requirements are all different. There aren't really many shops that are very much alike at all. So you've got to sort of manage around that. Now that's one way but we're also seeing folks who want to do executive reporting out of their Splunk data. You're talking about being able to go through and do year to year reporting how are we doing from a risk management standpoint. These are the things you are starting to see trickle up to the Csuite in terms of what does that mean for us and the way we need to make these business decisions. >> So I understand that. So really started out kind of hard core IT and certainly security used cases. What I'm hearing is Splunk is expanding into lines of business actually using data in in ways that perhaps others were trying to do in the past but not really succeeding. >> That's right >> What is it about Splunk that allows you to do that. We heard a lot about 7dot2 today, performance improvements, some efficiency in your granular storage and compute. I'm sure that Csuite doesn't know or care about that but being able to analyze more data is something that they probably would care about, mobile is probably something that they care about. >> Absolutely. So what is that Splunk's doing that maybe others aren't doing or can't do, architecturally or technology wise? >> Now a couple things stand out right off the top. So you've got the ability to scale, you've got horizontal distribution of data which means you can spread that load across many many nodes. We're able to go through and distribute that load and it makes things actually perform. So we get an acceptable user experience and that means everything to a customer, right? So that's one thing. The second thing with Splunk you've skemead read you're able to pull in as much data as you want for as long as you want without having to understand that data. You can actually come back through later and and parse, interpret, report on, and get value out of that data historically without having to necessarily having to understand it upfront. That's in my personal experience been a huge impediment right up front to onboarding data with other we'll call them legacy solutions. But there still some in the market today that require and depend on that is knowing the data upfront. We can't pull in this data unless we know exactly what its supposed to look like and can sanitize it and parse it into fields. >> So Stu I want to follow up if I may. So a lot of people in the big data world talk about no scheme on write or scheme on read >> Sure >> And what they do is they toss everything into a data lake. The big joke is the lake becomes a swamp, they got to go and clean it up. Why is that not the case with Splunk? What's different about Splunk and that they're able to, I forget exactly how Doug said it but essentially structure the data when you need it. >> That's right >> In the moment >> So the difference with Splunk is that you're able to you're able to foster and really pull together the community resources more or less crowdsourcing how to parse all these data sources. You no longer have individuals at every given company with a very specific data source say Windows event logs that might be universal to many other applications and organizations, needing to roll their own. So you're able to socialize and share those things on a place like Splunk base and then suddenly everyone's able to really capitalize on the data, so I see that as more like a force multiplier. You've got the entire community behind you helping you parse your data because they have the same data and that's really what I think makes the difference. >> Whereas the so called data lake would be like the big data metaphor for a god box where only a few people know how to get to the data, right? >> Basically yeah, thats right? And the amount of skill required, okay, that's another big piece when you're in Splunk everything is very well documented so if you need to write a search and its there are plenty of resources you've got the Splunk community, you've also got all of the documentation, you've got the quick reference sheets. Its not hard to get into its hard to become an expert but if you just need to do something very quickly it's not that difficult. >> Well if we look at where Splunk is going next you talk a lot about the AI and the ML and one of the tensions you hear out there is, "how much am I willing to let the system just take that action?" So I'm curious on your product line and working with Splunk what you hear how real people are, the advances that we're getting with AI, ML and deep learning and are users ready to embrace that yet? >> Yeah so that's a technology that's truly made leaps and bounds even over the past five years. Right. So what we're seeing is customers are able to use machine learning to go through and do predictive analytics and to be able to have the machines to sort of speculate as to and you can say predict but its really I think speculation more like what a given categorical value might be. Is it yes or no, maybe for the answer to a question based on what those events say, or is it is there an outage coming up that potentially you could predict based on different values. And there all sorts of applications for that and all sorts of platforms that are trying to do that. Now what Splunk's done is sort of bring that to the masses with machine learning toolkit and made that a little bit easier to really digest for the common person. What they haven't done at least until very recently from what my understanding is that they're doing is that they're actually taking more of that function out and making it more intuitive helping customers understand the most common challenges I'll say. So you're really lowering the bar in terms of the amount of information or knowledge rather and skills to be able to leverage some of these more advanced algorithms and computing resources to go through and get the types of results you expect out of machine learning. >> Well J.R. Murray thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Pleasure. Thank you >> Great to meet you. Alright everybody keep it right there Stu and I will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Splunk .Conf18 in Orlando. We'll be right back.