>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE we continue our coverage of .conf2017 here at the Splunk event with about seven thousand plus Splunkers. Along with Dave Vellante, John Walls. I like that Splunkers. >> You a Splunker? >> Not sure I'd be qualified. >> I'm learning how. >> I'm not qualified. >> to be come one. >> I don't think. >> I think we're kind of in the cheap seats of Splukism right now. Certainly there's a definitely vibe and I think that there's this whole feeling of positivity amongst our community right, that is to get a sense of that here. >> Dave: Hot company, data centers booming. >> It's all happenin', so we are in the Walter Washington Convention Center day two of the convention. We're joined now by of Stephen Hunt who is the CIO of an organization called Team Rubicon. Stephen thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Good to have you Sir. >> Thank you for having me. >> And CTO too correct? >> And CTO. >> So first off let's talk about Team Rubicon. Veterans based organization, you team up with disaster emergency responders, first responders, to come in a crisis management times of disasters I'm sure extremely busy right now. Gave birth to this organization back in 2010 after the Haiti earthquakes. So tell us a little bit more about your mission and what you're doing now I assume you're up to your ears and all kinds of work, unfortunately. >> Yeah so our, just speaking to our mission, our purpose is to leverage the skills a military vets and first responders in disaster. The capacity and skills that vets bring after active duty in the in the services, is remarkable resource that we've learned to tap to help people in need around the world. This is one of our or this is our busiest time right now. You know we're responding in the greater Houston area in Florida, the Florida Keys, British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Turks and Caicos. And it's just it's incredible what we're able to do and in aiding people from the point of search and rescue to recovery and resilience, there's a broad spectrum of activities that are our people engage in to make that all happen and across a diversity of locations. It's been truly remarkable and challenging in ways that we never imagined right now. >> And I should add that you're a veteran yourself. Paratrooper, 82nd Airborne, a reservist, but also have an engineering background MIT Lincoln Laboratories for 20 some plus years. So you've got this interesting combination of experiences that have brought you into a company that is also a beneficiary of the Splunk for Good Program part of the Splunk pledge Program. So are you bring a pretty interesting portfolio to the job here Stephen. >> It's a bit unusual I do understand how a lot of the world works, not because I'm the smartest person in the room, I have a bit of a head start there's a lot of experience there and so bringing my engineering skills to the field, as well as to the business office and how we operate. And working with companies like Splunk, you know I can see, pretty quickly, what's hard, what's easy. I understand that Splunk needs our requirements in order to deliver product that's meaningful to us and our mission. So tying that all together it is a bit unusual for an NGO to have someone like me around. I got involved simply to help people. When they told me at some point are that we're going to build a business to help people, I said I don't come here to build a business. And it took me a little while to get oriented around the fact that as we expand the brand as we bring it around the globe, it takes a strong business model and a strong technical model in how we project humanitarian aid in austere settings. >> In order to scale right. >> So Tell us more about the organization how large is the organization, you know, where do you get the resources, how is it funded. >> So we're almost a 100% privately funded. So corporations, foundations, individual donors from across the country and across the world. We have about sixty thousand members and these are volunteers in and globally, so how in the world do you do that? Well, it turns out we grew up at about the same time the cloud industry grew up, we've been around seven years. And I would like to say that I'm some kind of genius and I said well we should follow the cloud, it was a judgment call and it was what we could manage. Today we have about thirty five to forty cloud software products that drive everything from donor management, volunteer management, how we deal with our beneficiaries, as well as our employees. And and it's not just about product in mission it's about protection and seeing through what's happening at the company at scale. We have about anywhere from eight hundred to 15 hundred people sign up to join, to become a part of Team Rubicon every week. >> Dave: Every week? >> And we couldn't do that without scale, without cloud technology it's been truly remarkable. >> And the volunteers or or all veterans, is that right? >> About 80, 75 to 80% military vets, first responders and others. >> Okay, so they just they make time to take time off from work, or whatever it is and go volunteer. They'll get permission from whom ever. Their employers, their wives and husbands. >> The payment that we provide is a renewed sense of purpose. When you know you take off the uniform there is a certain part of your identity that goes on the hanger and people don't see in you that's missing and we get that back. Through service and being around like minded individuals it's just amazing when we bring all of our people together and they align to work to this common mission. >> So in the in the take a recent examples in Florida and Houston are they predominantly people that are proximate to those areas? Are you are you having to fly people in, how does that all work? We literally have people coming in from all over the world. Generally, with the way we run operations to keep them cost effective as we look first within 450 miles of an affected area, and and bring in people in close proximity. If there is need greater than that, then we expand the scope of the distance if you will. Logistically, where we bring folks in. we're all the way now to bring in people from Australia, Norway, Canada, as well as the UK and working alongside each other seamlessly and that's really due to our standards and training. You can imagine when we scale it's not just the technology but it's how you use it, in the field, and in the business environment in the office. >> Are they responsible for figuring out where they sleep, where they eat, I mean how does that all work. >> Yeah, we set that up, in the early days we kind of took care of it ourselves, you know we reach into our own pockets and the small groups run around the planet and help people. It was kind of a club, now it's a whole different story. When we're bringing in 500 people a day, we need to know how they're fed, is this safety, security and protection, not just physically, but also emotionally. You want to make sure that we're really looking after people before, during and after they deploy and help people. So we put them up, and typically it's not the Ritz, you know might be a cot in a warehouse somewhere. But I've stayed at hotels with Team Rubicon members and maybe sometimes eight in the room. My old job Wasn't like that, all these guys are fighting to see who's going to sleep on the floor. I mean it's it's a really interesting you know. >> You have very different dynamic I'm sure. So you talk about these global operations expanding what four or five countries you mentioned with thoughts of one larger. I know communications are huge part of that you have a partnership now with a a prominent satellite firm you know in Inmarsat and how is that coming to benefit your operations and does Splunk come in the play with that global communications opportunity? >> Inmarsat and Splunk have been truly remarkable impacting and working toward greater impact in how we deliver aid around the globe. And make a couple of very clear points and deliver a metric here. We're running maybe 15 simultaneous operations distributed across all those areas I just discussed earlier. And historically, in all the time that I've been with Team Rubicon we've always had outages when it comes to communicating with our staff in these austere settings. You know we have to life safety is everything. That's the most important thing on my list, is the welfare of the people I'm looking after, and our employees, volunteers and our beneficiaries. When we can't communicate if something goes wrong it's a problem Inmarsat has set us up with communications gear in such a way that even though running all these operations at our most challenging time, I haven't had one complaint. About not being able to communicate. And what's Splunk is doing, is integrating with the Inmarsat backend to provide us the status of all of that equipment and and so from a perspective where are they all located, what is the status of the you know the data usage to make sure that somebody doesn't get arbitrarily shut off, you know that strategic view of what's happening across the globe. And this was something that we've negotiated or Inmarsat asked us to do, and Splunk is stepping up to take care of that for us so that we can ensure life safety and coordination happen seamlessly. Just one more point about this, if you could communicate with everyone everyday you're planning team isn't sitting idle wondering what it needs to do next. So this tertiary effect, is really driven our planning team to perform in a way that guides material and resources that I didn't really think about, But it's quite remarkable. >> So, you please, I thought you finished, I apologize. >> No, it's OK. >> I'm excited. >> It's fantastic. >> So the tech let's get into the tech side of this. You got SaaS apps, you got logistics, you got comms, you got analytics stuff, you got planning, you got collaboration and probably a hundred other things that I haven't mentioned. Maybe talk about you put your CTO hat on. >> Oh no, absolutely, so one of the things I say to our people, you know the technology is important but people are more important. And and so how we work with technology, its adoption as a CIO is critical. I need to say that when we're provided quality top tier software technologies to support education and training, as I mentioned, volunteer management, information management and security. And they were adopted naturally and they take off like a fire on a dry day, it means Splunk and other companies produced a great product. And we've seen this time and again with our ecosystem. So it's a general statement about the cloud technologies. Many companies have just done an exceptional job at building products that our people can work with. So I don't really complain too much about adoption across the board or struggle with it, I should say. So Google, Microsoft, Splunk, Cornerstone OnDemand, Salamander, Everbridge, Palantir. >> Be careful it's like naming the kids you're going to leave somebody out. So many of these great benefactors. >> Yeah, they're used to it but we work with all and our new COO came in, I apologize, I was CIO/CTO of Team Rubicon USA for about three years and I just moved over to Team Rubicon global to help orchestrate our global footprint. And we've set up licensing and a model for where instances of software are located to meet the legal regulatory framework for doing business internationally. And but the the COO of USA, and I'm so proud of what USA is doing right now, it's just blowing up. I mean what they're accomplishing as the largest Team Rubicon entity. But he looked at me, he said, Steve we got to get rid of some of these software products, and I said well, tell me what you don't want to do and I'll delete it, happy to. And instead the numbers gone up by 10 you know since that conversation. So there's some great challenges with and great opportunities, but as you know when your capacity increases, working with data and information your risk also goes up. So we work hard it impacting the behaviors of all of our people, it doesn't happen in a month or two months it takes years. So that everyone is security minded and making good decisions about how we work with information and data, you know whether it's a collective view provided by a product like Splunk which gives us this global view of information. You know if we have people working in a in a dangerous area and all of a sudden we know where all of our people are we just don't post that up on the open internet right. That's a bad idea just to give you a simple example. Down to the PII of our members and employees. And we're becoming very good at that. And for an NGO that's unusual and we're going to be driving an independent security audit fairly soon, to push it even further with the Board of Directors and executives, and so the business team can make decisions about how what we do technically based on you know liability in business model, right for how we work, but for me, the highest priority's protection of everyone. >> Well, it is a wonderful organization and we sincerely Dave and I both thank you for your service, present and future tense, for your service absolutely. Team Rubicon they will accept contributions, both time and treasure so visit the website Team Rubicon and see what you might be able to do to lend help to the cause, great cause that it is. Thank you Stephen. Back with more from .conf2017 here in DC, right after this.