>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering .conf18. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to Splunk .conf18, #splunkconf18. You're here watching theCUBE, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my cohost, Stu Miniman, and we're going to take a cruise with the data. Curt Persaud is here. He's the director of IT for Guest Technology at Carnival Cruise Lines. So, he's the ship. And Ariel Molina is here. He's the Senior Director of web development and enterprise architecture at Carnival Cruise Line. He's the shore. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Happy to be here. Very, very. >> Thanks for having us guys. >> Dave, I sea what you did there. (laughs) >> Yeah, Stu, it's pretty good, huh. Well, this is kind of, you know, Splunk is known for a little tongue in cheek. >> Alright, let's keep this interview on course. >> (laughs) Alright, you got it. So Arnold Donald, your CEO, was on stage today with Doug Merritt, a very inspirational individual. You guys have an amazing company. You see those ads and just go "wow." Just makes you want to go. But Ariel, let's start with you, your role, what you guys are doing here. Just kick it off for us. >> So, no, it's fantastic, great to be here. Great energy in the conference today. The keynote was fantastic. It was great to see our CEO up there and really represent our company, really talk about, sort of, where we're heading and how Splunk helps us along that journey when it comes to data. Things are changing, they're moving faster every day, right? We're pressured into delivering more value, delivering innovation at a faster pace, and Splunk is a key enabler of that, for us. >> And Curt, at any one point in time, you guys said you have like 250,000 guests on the seas around the world. Wow! And everybody wants to be connected these days. So that's kind of your purview, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Five, 10 years ago, what sold cruises was the ability to be disconnected. Right now, people want to be connected more than ever. So what we try to do, beyond just the connectivity, and giving them better bandwidth, and stuff like that, was to try to develop products onboard that helps them be connected, be social, but not miss out on the product that we're actually selling, which is the ship, the people, the crew, and the actual entertainment and the staff onboard. So we're trying to make people social, but not anti-social with some of the technologies that we're bringing onboard, as well. >> Doug Merritt said today, "we're all data emitters." And I think the number was you guys will service 13 million guests in any given year? So a huge, huge number of data emitters. And of course, Ariel, you obviously are analyzing a lot of data, as well. So, how has the use of data changed over the years at Carnival? Maybe you could kind of take us through that. >> Well, ultimately I think it's about personalizing the experience. So, how do we use the data to better understand what folks are looking for in that guest journey? We call the guest journey everything from planning a voyage, purchasing a voyage, purchasing all the auxiliary items that are up for sale, and then ultimately making it into the ship. So, what we're doing these days, is looking at mining this data, and looking for opportunities. On the dot-com side of things, obviously it's about resiliency and personalization. How do we deliver innovation through multiple releases, and then do so in a resilient way? And a lot of those innovations, typically, are around personalization. And we see that move the needle. We're incentivized to have more folks book online. That's ultimately good for the bottom line. So, data's a big part of that. Personalization, resiliency. >> Yeah, it's one of those interesting things we look at. Most people probably think of cruise ships as you're vacation or transportation, everything like that. You're a technology company now. You're tied in, you've got multiple mobile apps, before and during. Maybe bring us a little bit inside what that's like. >> Over the past three years, we've seen a great transformation in terms of the technologies that we're bringing on board. You name it, whether it's very high end tools, like Splunk and other APM tools that we use, to cutting-edge technology like AI, chatbots, facial recognition. We're using the full breadth of all these innovations, in terms of technology, to try to enhance guest experience. And to Ariel's point, the focus is really on trying to be very personal, trying to personalize this information, trying to personalize the guest experience, and using all those data points that we're capturing to really target what a custom experience looks for you. It's really interesting, because one of the things that we try to do in that personalization is try to manage those micro-moments. We're trying to get you what you want, we're trying to get you the feedback that you need in that micro-moment, so that you can do your transaction and move on to enjoying your cruise. >> There's something that you mentioned. You want a balance. You want people to take advantage of what's there. You used to think of a vacation like this, you'd disconnect yourself. Help understand that balance. >> You'd be surprised. We were just recently on a cruise, my family and I, and we don't cruise as often as you would imagine. >> Because you work for the company. >> Even though, when you do, it feels good to be a customer, right? There's so much activity going on on a ship on a given day. It's very hard to understand where to be at a certain point in time, and some people find that overwhelming. What things like the app does is really allow you to curate your day. To say hey, you like music? Let's focus on events that are music-oriented and that's going to be in Location XYZ on the ship. And they're going to be sequenced. So, that's personalizing the experience. But it's also ensuring that folks are really taking advantage of the full product. >> From our perspective, the technology should be in the background. It's more complementary. The real product is really the ship, the crew members, the activities, the entertainment on board. That's the product we really want people to really connect to. The stuff that we do is auxiliary in terms of, let me help you maximize those experiences on board. And that's what we're really trying to do. If we can get that done and accomplished, than we have done our jobs. >> So the app is the digital conduit to the physical experience >> Exactly. >> If you have a good app, it makes all the difference in the world. If you're at Disney, and you're trying to figure out what's next, what do the lines look like? You get a lot of people on a ship, and you want to prioritize. You all call that curating your experience. It's all about the app, as they say. What's the state of the app? The 1.0 probably needed a little work. Where are you know in the evolution? >> We're in a 2.0 release version of it. The original version, we started with what we called the meat and potatoes. The very basic stuff, that hey, where can I get food? What is the entertainment lineup for the day? We started off with some innovation in terms of being able to generate, we did a chat, kind of like, communication, so people could chat with their families onboard without having to purchase a plan or have any bandwidth needs. And then, as we evolved that, then we started to go into things that are more transactional. So, you're able to purchase your photos digitally through the app. We leveraged facial recognition software, so that if a photographer on a ship takes a picture of you, it recognizes that as you and puts your photo in your photo stream and your photo album. So, very, very convenient. We do things like sell shore excursions in terms of transactional stuff. You can sit at the pool and say "oh, tomorrow's a port day, "I'm going to be in the Bahamas. "Let me see what shore excursion I want to do. And you can do it directly from the app without even moving. So now, as we evolve that now, as Ariel said, now we're trying to leverage all that data now, to go beyond the transactions, and make things even more personalized. So, I know that you favor the casino, maybe you're a spa person, you want a facial. We'll target you and say hey, on your previous cruise you did this. Let's target you because we might have something special waiting for you onboard. >> And then carry that across the journey, right. So now they leave our ships. And how do we get them to come back to our ships? How do you create that conversation that's ongoing, notifications about what's going on on our ships. People follow their favorite cruise director. People follow a lot of the unique experiences there. How do you bring that to the online, to the dot-com experience? So that when they're thinking about that next cruise, they can remember what that last cruise was about, and they can know what's happening on each one of our ships in real-time. It's a journey. And technology definitely is a huge enabler for us and the experience. >> So what's the data architecture look like on there? We always talk on theCUBE about the innovation sandwich of the future. It used to be Moore's Law, doubling every two years. Okay, great. Now, it's data, plus machine intelligence, and you scale with the cloud. What's your data architecture look like? >> Well, I think it's early days. I think it's, I mean, they're all over the place, right? I think there's silos within the enterprise that are really maximizing data. I think that that trend continues to happen. But I think there's got to be, and the enterprise architecture world is sort of about wrangling that, and figuring out how data from different dispersed touch points affect that. So, it's early days. I do think that you're starting to see that machine learning algorithms do play a part. I'm seeing it personally, more in the operations side of the world. So all these systems, at the end of the day, they need to be resilient and they need to have high service levels. So, what I'm seeing now is tools, and at Splunk, you saw that today, being able to be really predictive about where the anomalies are. Traditionally, you were having to log errors and then interpret errors, and then that would be the way you action some of these things. The predictive nature of some of these tools are such that you're being proactive. So when you talk about data there's so many different places you can go. If you think about our technology stack, and that guest experience point of view, it's all about really maintaining that SLA's, resolving issues as quickly as possible. And there's a ton of data in that space, right? I mean, it's everywhere, there's a ton of signals. >> Well you guys know, we tend not to throw stuff away in technology. You sort of have to figure out how to integrate. >> A signal via the customer is probably one of those, as well. So at the end of the day, what more information are we collecting about our guest to ultimately personalize that experience? It's centered around that. >> And that's challenging, I mean, look at the airlines. And your app, which you love the airline apps. I mean, you're not, like, tethered to them. But the phone experience, and even the laptop experience, are a little bit different. Because of the data, it's very, very challenging. Have you figured that out? Or are you sort of figuring that out? >> That's API's, right? It's that experienced API layer. Being able to activate that data which is sitting in distinct silos and then do so across those experience apps, the experience channels, which is dot-com, the app, the chatbot, there's so many interfaces out there. But, yeah, it's a solid, mature API strategy that's going to get us there. >> And I think one of the things that our challenge is, as technology partners, is the ability to build those platforms so that the next wave of conversions, as you mentioned, there's some disjointed experience across the desktop view versus the mobile view, is to try to bring those conversions together. And in order to that, like Ariel said, maybe making some API extraction layers figuring out how to mine the data better, figuring out how to leverage insights from different tools or machines and sensors, we have a ton of sensors on these ships as well. And bringing all those things together to be able to put us in a position that when we do finally get a seamless conversion, we're ready for it from a technology and a platform perspective. >> It's obvious why data is important for your business. You actually did a press release with Splunk. Maybe explain a little about how Splunk Cloud fits into this discussion that we've been having? >> Well, Cloud really removes the barriers of experimentation. How do you right-size a problem you don't understand very well? I think Cloud really helps with that. We're looking forward to being able to be flexible. Flexibility in architecture, flexibility in infrastructure. So that's absolutely the use-case I think security's got a number of use-cases. You see it every day in the news. So yeah, more opportunities, I would say, it scales that flexibility that's taken us the cloud route. >> When you think Splunk, you think security. You got guys in the Knock. That's not where you guys are. You're kind of closer to the business. And so you're seeing Splunk, as I said before, permeate into other parts of the organization. You kind of expected somebody else to do that. I don't know, the Hadoop guys. And it's interesting, Splunk never used to talk about big data. Now that the big data era is, sort of, behind us, Splunk talks a lot about big data. It's kind of an interesting flip. >> I would say it's democratizing the data. That's the stuff I liked, that I heard today. How do you get these tools away from the IT operators that are writing these complex queries to get insights? And how do you elevate that up to the analysts, and the product managers? And how do they get access to those interfaces? You know, drag-and-drop, whatever you want to call it. But I think that where I see this happening more so than, machine learning, that's great and predictive. But just empowering others to really leverage that data. I would say Splunk is leading there and it's good to see some of that stuff today. >> Absolutely. It's putting the power where it really needs to be, where it's the end users, the guys making decisions, it's the product owners, the product managers, that are making those slight tweaks to that interface, or to that design, or to that experience, that makes a difference. And that's what we're trying to do, and leverage with tools like Splunk, as well. >> Even the simple visualization, right, the stuff that's out of the box is really important for the business user, right? >> The out of the box part's another thing that I saw today, which is more, sort of, curating for particular use-case, and saying hey, we're going to build that end-to-end and really turn it on and activate it a little sooner. So that infrastructure product we saw today, I think that's a big step forward. Where you're a platform, but at some point you're going to have to start being a little more vertical in the way that you bring to market, the way that they did with security. >> And Doug talked about, you know, Doug Merritt, that is, talked about data is messy, and the messiest landscape is the data. And then he talked about being able to organize that data in the moment. So, I think about, okay, just put it in the, we like to call data ocean, right, and just capture it. But then having the tools to be able to actually look at it in whatever schema you want, when you want it, is a challenge that people have. My question is, did he describe it accurately? I think yes. But then, can you actually do that with this messy data? >> I think it's a great concept. I'm interested to see how that plays out going forward. But I think in our world, we have several use-cases where that makes sense. We have a very captive audience for seven to 10 days. So we really have a very limited amount of time to make a really good impression. So, it's not only about attracting first-time cruisers; it's trying to get a repeat cruiser. So that limited time frame that we have to leave a really lasting impression is very limited. So things like recovery, in terms of getting metrics or data real-time, and being able to act on it immediately. Say you had a bad experience at the sushi bar. If we're able to grab that information, whatever data points that allow us to understand what happened, and then do a quick recovery, we may have a guest for a repeat cruise. Those are the things that we're trying to do. And, if what Doug is saying is something that they've kind of solved, or are able to try to solve in a good way, that is very powerful for us as well, and we definitely see leverage in that. >> Last question, Ariel, you're saying off-camera it's kind of early days. What's the future hold? I mean, that's going to blow our minds. Blow our minds! >> Oh, it's the predictive thing, right? It's bringing you your favorite drink before you're ready to have it, or something. I don't know. The cruise line business, the travel and hospitality space is a very fun space to work in. We get to really see our guests enjoy the product. And us, as technologists, we get to see how technology moves the needle. Continued innovation, right? If you're in the development side of the world, challenging yourself to deploy more often, to deliver more value more often. And if you're on the data side, how to get aggregated, compile all this this data, for ultimately what we're looking for, which is to enhance the guest experience. >> I mean, that real-time notion that you were talking about Curt, you can see that coming together and completely transforming the guest experience. So guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Congratulations on all your success and good luck. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back at Splunk .conf18. You're watching theCUBE. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. we'll be right back! (upbeat music)