(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Splunk .Conf19. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome to theCUBE everybody, we're here in Las Vegas for Splunk's .Conf, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with Lisa Martin for the next three days. Lisa will be here tomorrow and the next day. I'm going to be carrying it solo, this is our seventh year .Conf, Splunk's conference celebrating their 10th year. Our first guest is Melissa Zicopula, vice president of managed services of Herjavec Group. Robert's been on before, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> I always get that, Herjavec? >> Herjavec Group. >> Herjavec Group. >> Happy to be here. >> Well known for the Shark Tank, but what's really interesting about Robert and your company is that we had multiple conversations and the Shark Tanks is what he's known for in the celebrity world. >> Melissa: Yes. >> But he's a nerd, he's a geek, he's one of us! (laughing) >> He's absolutely a cyber-security expert in the field, yes. >> So tell us what's going on this year at .Conf obviously security continues to be focus you guys have a booth here, what's the message you guys are sharing, what's the story from your standpoint? >> Yeah, so we do, Herjavec we're focusing on managed security services, where information security is all we do, focusing on 24/7 threat detection, security operations and also threat management. So, we want to be able to demo a lot of our capabilities, we're powered by Splunk, our HG analytics platform uses, heavily uses Splunk on the back end. So we want to be able to showcase for our customers, our clients, our prospects different types of use cases, different types of ways to detect malicious activity, while leveraging the tool itself. >> And data we're been covering since 2013, Splunk's .Conf, it's always been a data problem, but the data problem gets bigger and bigger, there's more volume than ever before which shifts the terms to the adversaries because ransomware is at an all time high. >> Melissa: Sure. >> Data is where the value is, but that's also where the attack vectors are coming from. This isn't going away. >> Absolutely, yeah, we want to focus on not just what type of data you're ingesting into your instance but to also understand what types of log sources you're feeding into your sim today. So we have experts actually focus on evaluating the type of log sources we're bringing in. Everything from IPS, to AV, to firewall you know, solutions into the sim so that way we can build use cases those, to be able to detect different types of activity. We leverage different types of methodologies, one of them is Mitre framework, CIS top 20. And being able to couple those two together it's able to give you a better detection mechanism in place. >> I want to some kind of, clarification questions because we talked to a lot of CSOs and CIOs and and CXOs in general. >> Melissa: Sure. >> The roles are changing, but the acronyms of the providers out in the market place are specializing, some have unique focuses, some have breadth, some have depth, you guys are an MSSPP. So, MSSPP, not to be confused with an MSP. Or ISV, there's different acronyms, what is the difference between an MSSPP versus an MSP? >> Melissa: Correct, so it's, we are a MSSP, which is a Managed Security Service Provider. And what we do is just, we're focused on we're very security-centric. So information, security is all we do everything from threat detection, we even have a consulting advisory role where we're actually doing penetration exams. We're PCI compliant, obviously SOC operations are the bread and butter of our service. Whereas, other MSPs, Managed Services Providers, they can do anything from architecture, network operations in that purview. So, we're focused on more of SIM solutions, endpoint, being able to manage any of your security technologies. And also, monitor them to take a fact into the SOC. >> So you guys are very focused? >> Melissa: Very focused on security. >> Then what's the key decision point for a customer to go with you guys, and what's the supplier relationship to the buyer because they're buying everything these days! >> Melissa: Sure. >> But they want to try and get it narrowed down so the right people are in the right place. >> Melissa: Yeah, so one of the great things about Herjavec Group is we are, you know, we're vendor agnostic, we have tons of experts in, you know, expertise resources that monitor, manage different types of technologies. Whether it's Splunk and other technologies out there, we have a team of people, that are very, very, you know, centric to actually monitor and manage them. >> How big is Splunk, in relative with your services? How involved are they with the scope? >> Melissa: Over 60% of our managed clients today, utilize Splunk, they're heavy Splunk users, they also utilize Splunk ES, Splunk Core, and from a management side, they're implementing them into their service. All of the CSOs and CROs or CIOs are leveraging and using it, not just for monitoring and security but they're also using it in development environments, as well as their network operations. >> So, one of the things I've been, I won't say preaching, because I do tend to preach a lot, but I've been saying and amplifying, is that tools that have come a long in the business and there's platforms and Splunk has always kind of been that, a platform provider, but also a good tool for folks. But, they've been enabling value, you guys have built an app on Splunk, the proprietary solutions. >> Absolutely. >> Could you tell me about that because this is really where the value starts to shift, where domain expertise focused practices and services, like you guys are doing, are building on someone else's platform with data, talk about your proprietary app. >> Absolutely, so we discovered, a few years ago, was that customers needed help getting to the data faster. So we were able to build in built-in queries, you know literally one click, say if you wanted to get to a statistical side of how many data sources are logging your SIM, is the data, you know, modeling complete, you know, is there anything missing in the environment or are there any gaps that we need to fill? You're able to do it by just clicking on a couple of different, you know, buttons within the tool itself. It gives you a holistic view of not just the alerts that are firing in your environment but all the data log sources that are coming into your SIM instance. It's a one stop shop. And also, what's great about it, is that it also powers Splunk ES, so Splunk ES also has similar tools and they are, literally, I mean that tool is so great you can go in, you can look at all the alerts, you can do an audit trail, you can actually do drill-down analysis, you can actually see the type of data like PCAP analysis, to get to the, you know, the type of activity you want to get to on a granular level. So, both tools do it really well. >> So you have hooks into ES, Splunk ES? >> Yes, we can actually see, depending on the instance that it's deployed on, 'cause our app is deployed on top of Splunk for every customer's instance. They're ale to leverage and correlate the two together. >> What are some of the trends in the marketplace that you're seeing with your customers? Obviously, again, volumes are increasing, the surface area of attacks is coming in it's more than log files now, it's, you got traces, you got other metrics >> Melissa: Sure. >> Other things to measure, it's almost It's almost too many alerts, what do you-- >> Yeah, a lot of KPI's. The most important thing that any company, any entity wants to measure is the MTTD, the Mean Time To Detection, and also mean time to resolve, right? You want to be able to ensure that your teams are have everything at their fingertips to get to the answer fast. And even if there's an attack or some type of breach in their environment, to at least detect it and understand where it is so they can quarantine it from spreading. >> What's the biggest surprise that you've seen in the past two years? I mean, 'cause I look back at our interviews with you guys in 2013, no 2015. I mean, the narrative really hasn't changed global security, I mean, all the core, top line stories are there, but it just seems to be bigger. What's the big surprise for you in terms of the marketplace? >> The big surprise for me is that companies are now focusing more on cyber-hygiene. Really ensuring that their infrastructure is you know, up to par, right? Because you can apply the best tools in-house but if you're not cleaning up you know, your backyard (laughing) it's going to get tough. So now we have a lot of entities really focusing and using tools like Splunk you know, to actually analyze what's happening in their environment, to clean up their back of house, I would say and to put those tools in place so they could be effective. >> You know, that's a classic story clean up your own house before you can go clean up others, right? >> Right. >> And what a trend we've been seeing in the marketplace on theCUBE and talking to a lot of practitioners is, and channel partners and suppliers is that, they tend to serve their customers, but they don't clean up their own house and data's moving around so now with the diversity of data, they've got the fabric search, they got all kind of new tools within Splunk's portfolio. >> It's a challenge, and it could be you know, lack of resources, it just means that we have you know, they don't have the right expertise in-house so they used managed security providers to help them get there. For example, if a network, if we identify the network being flat, we can identify you know, how to help them how to be able to kind of, look at the actual security landscape and what we need to do to have good visibility in their environment from places they didn't know existed. >> What's the one, one or two things that you see customers that need to do that, they aren't doing yet? You mentioned hygiene is a trend, what are some other things that that need to be addressed, that are almost, well that could be critical and bad, but are super important and valuable? >> I think now a lot of, actually to be quite honest a lot of our clients today or anyone who's building programs, security programs are getting you know, very mature. They're adopting methodologies, like Mitre Framework, CIS Top 20, and they're actually deploying and they're actually using specific use cases to identify the attacks happening in their environment. Not just from a security-centric standpoint but also from an operations side you know, you could identify misconfigurations in your environment, you can identify things that are you know, just cleaning up the environment as well. >> So, Splunk has this thing called SOAR, Security-- >> Automation. >> Orchestration Automation Recovery, resilience whatever R, I think R stands for that. How does that fit in to your market, your app and what you guys are doing? >> So it definitely fits in basically, being able to automate the redundant, mundane types of tasks that anyone can do, right? So if you think about it, if you have a security operations center with five or 10 analysts, it might take one analyst to do a task, it might take them two or three hours, where you can leverage a tool like Phantom, any type of SOAR platform to actually create a playbook to do that task within 30 seconds. So, not only are you minimizing the amount of you know, head count to do that, you're also you know, using your consistent tool to make that function make that function you know, more, I want to say enhanced. So you can build play books around it, you can basically use that on a daily basis whether it's for security monitoring or network operations, reporting, all that becomes more streamlined. >> And the impact to the organization is those mundane tasks can be demotivating. Or, there's a lot more problems to solve so for productivity, creativity, can you give some examples of where you've seen that shift into the personnel, HR side the human resource side of it? >> Yeah, absolutely so you know, you want to be able to have something consistent in your environment, right? So you don't want others to get kind of, get bored or you know, when you're looking at a platform day in and day out and you're doing the same task everyday, you might miss something. Whereas, if you build an automation tool that takes care of the low hanging fruit, so to speak, you're able to use a human component to put your muscles somewhere else, to find some you know, the human element to actually look for any types of malicious anomalies in the environment. >> How much has teamwork become a big part of how successful companies manage a security threat landscape? >> Very, very important. I mean, you're talking about leveraging different teams on the engineering side, on the operations side, even you know, coupling that with business stakeholders. You absolutely need to get the business involved so they have an understanding of what's critical to their environment, what's critical to their business, and making sure that we're taking security, obviously seriously, which a lot of companies know already, but not impeding on the operation. So doing it safely without having to minimize impact. >> Well let's just, I got to ask you this question around kind of, doing the cutting edge but not getting bled out, bleeding edge, bleeding out and failing. Companies are trying to balance you know, being cutting edge and balancing hardcore security Signal FX is a company that Splunk bought, we've been following them from the beginning. Strong tracing, great in that cloud native environment. So cloud native with micro services is super hot in areas you know, people see with Kubernetes and so on happening, kind of cutting edge though! >> Melissa: Right. >> You don't want to be bleeding edge 'cause there's some risks there too so, how do you guys advise your clients to think about cloud native with Splunk and some of the things that they're there but as the expression goes "there's a pony in there somewhere" but it's risky still, but certainly it's got a lot of promise. >> Yeah, you know, it's all about you know, everyone's different, every environment's different. It's really about explaining those options to them what they have available, whether they go on the cloud, whether they stay on-prem, explaining them from a cost perspective, how they can implement that solution, and what the risks are involved if they had and how long that will take for them to implement it in their environment. >> Do you see a lot of clients kicking the tires in cloud native? >> A lot of customers are migrating to cloud. One, because they don't have to keep it in a data warehouse, they don't have to have somebody manage it, they don't have to worry about hardware or licenses, renewals, all that. So, it's really easy to spin up a you know, a cloud instance where they can just keep a copy of it somewhere and then configure it and manage it and monitor it. >> Melissa, great insight, and love to have you on theCUBE, I got to ask you one final question >> Melissa: Sure. >> As a, on a personal note well, personal being you're in the industry you know, I hear a lot of patterns out there, see a lot of conversations on theCUBE. One consistent theme is the word scale. Cloud brings scale to the table, data scaling, so data at scale, cloud at scale, is becoming a reality for customers, and they got to deal with it. And this also impacts the security piece of it. What are some of the things that you guys and customers are doing to kind of one, take advantage of that wave but not get buried into it? >> Absolutely, so you just want to incorporate into the management life cycle, you know you don't want to just configure then it's one and done, it's over. You want to be able to continually monitor what's happening quarter over quarter you know, making sure that you're doing some asset inventory, you're managing your log sources, you have a full team that's monitoring, keeping up with the processes and procedures, and making sure that you know, you're also partnering with a company that can can follow you you know, year over year and build that road map to actually see what you're building your program, you know. >> So here's the personal question now, so, you're on this wave, security wave. >> Melissa: Sure. >> It's pretty exciting, can be intoxicating but at the same time, it's pretty dynamic. What are you excited about these days in the industry? What's really cool that you're getting jazzed about? What's exciting you in the industry these days? >> Automation, absolutely. Automation, being able to build as many playbooks and coupling that with different types of technologies, and you know, like Splunk, right? You can ingest and you can actually, automate your tier one and maybe even a half of a tier two, right, a level two. And that to me is exciting because a lot of what we're seeing in the industry now is automating as much as possible. >> And compare that to like, five years ago in terms of-- >> Oh absolutely, you know, SOAR wasn't a big thing five years ago, right? So, you had to literally sit there and train individuals to do a certain task, their certain function. And then you had to rely on them to be consistent across the board where now, automation is just taken that to the next level. >> Yeah it's super exciting, I agree with you. I think automation, I think machine learning and AI data feeds, machine learning. >> Michelle: Right. >> Machine learning is AI, AI is business value. >> Being able to get to the data faster, right? >> Awesome, speed, productivity, creativity, scale. This is the new formula inside the security practice I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. More live coverage here for the 10th anniversary of Splunk .Conf, our seventh year covering Splunk from a start-up, to going public, to now. One of the leaders in the industry. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE continuing our coverage of .conf2017 sponsored by Get Together in your nations capitol, we are live here at the Walter Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. Along with Dave Vellante I'm John Walls Joined now by a couple CUBE alums, actually, you guys were here about a year ago. Yeah, Robert Herjavec, with the Herjavec Group of course you all know him from Shark Tank fame answer Atif Ghauri who is the VP of Customer Service Success at the Herjavec Group. I love that title, Atif we're going to get into that in just a little bit. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you all. >> We're more like CUBE groupies We're more like CUBE groupies. >> Alums. >> Alums, okay, yeah. >> If we had a promo reel. >> Yeah, we love it here. We get free mugs with the beautiful Splunk. >> That doesn't happen all the time does it. >> Where did you get those? >> They're everywhere. >> Dave, I'll share. >> So again for folks who don't, what brings you here what, what's the focus here for the Herjavec Group in in terms of what you're seeing in the Splunk community and I assume it's very security driven. >> Yeah, well we've been part of the Splunk community for many years going on gosh, eight, nine years. We're Splunkers and we use Splunk as our core technology to provide our managed service and we manage a lot of customer environments with Splunk and we've been really forefront of Splunk as a SIM technology for a long time. >> Atif, excuse me, David, just the title, VP of Customer Service Success, what's under that umbrella? >> Yeah, it's actually pretty simple and straightforward given especially that Splunk's aligned the same way. Christmas success is King, right. If our customers aren't successful then how are we successful? So what we're trying to do there is putting the customer first and help in growing accounts and growing our services starting with our customers that we have today. >> It was actually Doug Maris, I have to give him full credit him and I were on a flight, and I said to him what's really critical to you growing revenue, efficiency, innovation and he said, number one for us is customer success. So we're very happy to steal other people's ideas if they're better. >> So security's changing so fast. You mentioned SIM, Splunk's narrative is that things are shifting from a traditional SIM world to one of an analytic driven remediation world. I wonder if you could talk about what you're seeing in the customer base, are people actually shifting their spending and how fast and where do you see it all going? >> Yeah, so the days of chasing IOC's is a dead end. Because that's just a nonstop effort. What's really happening now is technique detection. Defining, looking at how hackers are doing their trade craft and then parroting that. So Splunk has ideas and other vendors have ideas on how to go about trying to detect pattern recognition of attacker trade craft. And so what definitely was driving what's next when it comes to security automation, security detection, for our customers today. >> You know, we always tell people and it's just dead on but the challenge is people want to buy the, sexy, exciting thing and why I always try to say to customers is you're a dad and you have three kids, and you have a minivan. You don't really want to own a minivan, you want a really nice Ferrari or Corvette but at the end of the day, you have three kids and you got to get to the store. And in the security world it's a little bit like that. People talk about artificial intelligence and better threat metrics and analytics but the core, foundational basis still is logs. You have to manage your log infrastructure. And the beauty of Splunk is, it does it better than anyone and gives you an upstream in fact to be able to do the analytics and all those other things. But you still got to do the foundation. You still got to get three kids into the minivan and bring back groceries. >> So there's been a lot of focus, obviously security's become a Board level topic. You hear that all the time, you used to not hear it all the time, used to be IT problem. >> Absolutely, the only way I could get a meeting with the CEO or CIO was because I was on Shark Tank. But as a security guy, I would never meet any executives. Oh yeah I spend 80% of my time meeting with CEO, not just CIO's, but CEO's and Boards and that kind of stuff, absolutely. >> How should the CIO be communicating the Board about security, how often, what should be the narrative you know, transparency, I wonder if you could give us your thoughts. >> It's a great question. There's a new financial regulation that's coming out where CISO's and CIO's actually have to sign off on financial statements related to cyber security. And there's a clause in there that says if they knowingly are negligent, it carries criminal charges. So the regulations coming into cyber security are very similar to what we're seeing and Sarbanes Oxley like if a CEO signs an audit statement that he suspects might have some level of negligence to it I'm not talking about outright criminal fraud but just some level of negligence, it carries a criminal offense. If you look at the latest Equifax breach, a lot of the media around it was that there should be criminal charges around it. And so as soon as as you use words like criminal, compliance, audit, CEO's, executives really care. So the message from the CIO has to be we're doing everything in our power, based on industry standards, to be as secure as we can number one. And number two we have the systems in place that if we are breached, we can detect it as quickly as possible. >> So I was watching CNBC the other day and what you don't want to see as a Board member, every Board members picture from Equifax up there, with the term breach. >> Is that true? >> Yeah, yeah. >> See, but, isn't that different. Like you never, like if we think back on all the big breaches, Target and Sony they were all seminal in their own way. Target was seminal because the CEO got fired. And that was the first time it happened. I think we're going to remember Equifax, I didn't know that about the Board. >> For 50 seconds it was up there. I the sound off. >> You don't want to be a Board member. >> I mean, I hate to say it, but it's got to be great for your business, first of all it's another reason not to be a public company is one more hurdle. But if you are they need help. >> They absolutely need help. And on point I don't want to lose is that what we're seeing with CISO's, Chief Information Security Officers, Is that that role's transcending, that role is actually reporting directly to in to CEO's now. Directly into CFO's now, away from the CIO, because there's some organizational dynamics that keep the CISO from telling, what's really going on. >> Fox in henhouse. >> Exactly. >> You want to separate those roles. You're you're seeing that more often. What percent of the CISO's and CIO's are separate in your experience? >> Organizations that have a mature security program. That have evolved to where it's really a risk-based decision, and then the security function becomes more like risk management, right. Just what you they've been doing for decades. But now you have a choice security person leading that charge. >> So what we really always saying theCUBE, it's not a matter of if, it's when you're going to get infiltrated. Do you feel as though that the Boards and CIO's are transparent about that? Do Boards understand that that it's really the remediation and the response that's most important now, or there's still some education that has to go on there? >> You know, Robert speaks to Boards are the time he can comment on that, but they really want to know two things, how bad is it and how much money do you need. And those are the key questions that's driving from a Board perspective what's going to happen next. >> What's worse that Equifax got breached or that Equifax was breached for months and didn't know about it. I mean, as a Board member the latter is much worse. There's an acceptance like I have a beautiful house and I have big windows a lots of alarms and a dog, not a big dog, but still, I have a dog. >> A yipper. >> Yeah, I have a yipper. It's worse to me if somebody broke into my house, was there for a while and my wife came home at night and the person was still there. That to me is fundamentally worse than getting an alarm and saying, somebody broke the window, went in, stole a picture frame. You're going to get breached, it's how quickly you respond and what the assets are. >> And is it all shapes and sizes, too I mean, we talk about big companies here you've mentioned three but is it the mid-level guys and do smaller companies have the same concerns or same threats and risks right now? >> See these are the you heard about. What about all the breaches you don't know. >> That's the point, how big of a problem are we talking about? >> It's a wide scaling problem right and to the previous question, the value now in 2017, is what is the quality of your intelligence? Like what actions can I take, with the software that you're giving me, or with the service that you're giving me because you could detect all day but what are you going to do about it? And you're going to be held accountable for that. >> I'm watching the service now screen over here and I've seen them flash the stat 191 days to detect an infiltration. >> That sounds optimistic to me. I think most people would be happy with that if they could guarantee that. >> I would think the number's 250 to 300 so that now maybe they're claiming they can squeeze that down but, are you seeing any compression in that number? I mean it's early days I know. >> I think that the industry continues to be extremely complicated. There's a lot of vendors, there's a lot of products. The average Fortune 500 company has 72 security products. There's a stat that RSA this year that there's 1500 new security start ups every year. Every single year. How are they going to survive? And which ones do you have to buy because they're critical and provide valuable insights. And which ones are going to be around for a year or two and you're never going to hear about again. So it's a extremely challenging complex environment. >> From the bad guys are so much more sophisticated going from hacktivists to whatever State sponsored or criminal. >> That's the bottom line, I mean the bad guys are better, the bad guys are winning. The white hats fought their way out to the black hats, right. The white hats are trying, trying hard, we're trying to get organized, we're trying to win battles but the war is clearly won by the by the black hats. And that's something that as an industry we're getting better at working towards. >> Robert, as an investor what's your sentiment around valuations right now and do you feel as though. >> Not high enough. >> Oh boy. >> Managed security companies should be trading way higher value. >> Do you feel like they're somewhat insulated? >> Its a really good question, we're in that space you know we're we're about a $200 million private company. We're the largest privately held, managed security company in the world actually. And so I always think every time we're worth more I think wow, we couldn't be worth more, the market can't get bigger. Because your values always based for potential size. Nobody values you for what you're worth today. Because an investor doesn't buy history an investor doesn't buy present state, an investor buys future state. So if the valuations are increasing, it's a direct correlation because the macro factors are getting bigger. And so the answer to your question is values are going to go up because the market is just going to be fundamentally bigger. Is everybody going to survive? No, but I think you're going to see valuations continue to increase. >> Well in digital business everybody talks about digital business. We look at digital business as how well you leverage data. We think the value of data is going through the roof but I'm not sure customers understand the intrinsic value of the data or have a method to actually value their data. If they did, we feel like they would find it's way more valuable and they need to protect it better. What are you seeing in that regard with customers? >> There's an explosion of data in that with IoT, internet of things, and the amount of additional data that's come now. But, to your point, how do you sequence and label data? That's been a multi-decade old question more organizations struggle with. Many have gone to say that, it's all important so let's protect it all, right. And verses having layers of approach. So, it's a challenging problem, I don't think across all our customer base. That's something that each wrestling with to try to solve individually for their companies. >> Well, I think you also have the reality though of money. So, it's easy to say all the data is important, Structured unstructured, but you look at a lot of the software and tools that you need around this floor are sold to you on a per user or per ingestion model. So, even though all your data is critical. You can't protect all your data. It's like your house, you can't protect every single component of it, you try, and every year gets better maybe get a better alarm maybe I'll get rid the yappy dog and get a Doberman you know you're constantly upgrading. But you can't protect everything, because reality is you still live in an unstructured, unsafe world. >> So is that the complexity then, because the a simple question is why does it take so long to find out if there's something wrong with your house? >> I think it's highly complex because we're dealing with people who are manipulating what we know to their benefit in ways we've never done it. The Wannacry breach was done in a way that had not been done before. If it had done before we could have created some analytics around it, we could created some, you know, metrics around it but these are attacks that are happening in a way we've never seen before and so it's this element of risk and data and then you always have human nature. Gary Moore was that the Council this morning. The writer of Crossing the Chasm, legendary book, and he said something very interesting which was Why do people always get on a flight and say, good luck with the flight, hope you fly safe. But they don't think twice about hopping in their car and driving to the grocery store. Whereas statistically, your odds of dying in that car are fundamentally greater, and it's human nature, it's how we perceive risk. So it's the same with security and data in cyber security. >> As security experts I'm curious and we're here in DC, how much time you think about and what your thoughts might be in the geopolitical implications of security, cyber war, you know it's Stuxnet, fast forward, whatever, ten years. What are you thoughts as security practitioners in that regard? >> The longest and most heated battles in the next World War, will not be on Earth, they'll be in cyberspace. It's accepted as a given. That's the way this Country is moving. That's the way our financial systems are tied together and that's the way we're moving forward. >> It's interesting we had Robert Gates on last year and he was saying you know we have to be really careful because while we have the United States has the best security technologies, we also have the most to lose with our infrastructure and it's a whole new you know gamification or game theory balance we have to play. >> I would agree with him that we have some of the best security technology in the world but I would say that our barometer and our limiter is the freedom of our society. By nature what we love about our country and Canada is that we love freedom. And we love giving people access to information and data and free speech. By nature we have countries that may not have as good a security, but have the ability to limit access to outsiders, and I'm not saying that's good by any means but it does make security a little bit easier from that perspective. Whereas in our system, we're never going to go to that, we shouldn't go to that. So now we have to have better security just to stay even. >> To Dave's point talking about the geopolitical pressures, the regulatory environment being what it is, you know legislators, if they smell blood right, it in terms of compliance and what have you, what are you seeing in terms of that shift focus from the Hill. >> Great question. I did a speech to about two thousand CIO's, CISO's not long ago and I said, how many people in this room buy security to be more secure and how many people buy because you have to be compliant. 50/50, even the security ones admitted that how they got budget was leveraging the compliance guys. It was easier to walk into CEO's office and say look, we have to buy this to meet some kind of a political, compliance, Board issue. Than it was to say this will make us better. Better is a hard sell. So that, has to go to the head to pull the trigger to do some of that. >> You know, I think in this geopolitical environment it's look at the elections, look at all the rhetoric. It's just there is going to be more of that stuff. >> A lot's changed in crypto and its potential applications in security. More money poured into ICO's in the first half than venture backed crypto opportunities. >> There are practical applications of blockchain technology all across the board, right, but as you mentioned is fundamentally built on pathology. On core gut security work and making a community of people decide whether something's authentic or not. It's a game changer, as far what what we could do from a platform standpoint to secure our financial systems and short answer it's volatile. As you saw with the fluctuation of Bitcoin and then the currency of Bitcoin, how it's gone up and down. It's quite volatile right now because there's a lot of risk So I say what's the next Bitcoin in six months or eighteen months and what's going to happen to the old Bitcoin and then all the money that into there, where is that going to go? So that's a discuss the pivot point I think for the financial services industry and more and more their larger institutions are just trying to get involved with that whole network of blockchain. >> Crypto currencies really interesting. In some ways it's the fuel that's funding the cyber security ransomeware. I mean it's one of the easiest ways to send money and be completely anonymous. If you didn't have crypto currency, how would you pay for ransomware? You give them your checking account? You deposit into their checking account? So, I think that you're seeing a big surge of it but if you look at the history of money or even checks, checks were developed by company called Deluxe here in the United States 104 years ago. They're a customer of ours, that's why I know this, but the basis of it is that somebody, a real institution with bricks and mortar and people in suits is backing that check, or that currency. Who's backing crypto currency today? So you have, by nature, you have this element of volatility and I don't know if it's going to make it or it's not going to make it. But inevitably has to cross from a purely electronic crypto form to some element of a note or a tender that I can take from that world and get backing on it. >> That's kind of what Warren Buffet has said about it. I mean I would respond that it's the community, whatever that means, that's backing it. I mean, what backs the greenback, it's the US Government and the US military. It's an interesting. >> Right like, at the end of the day I would still rather take a US dollar than even a Canadian dollar or a UK dollar. >> Gentlemen thanks for being with us. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you for the coffee mug. >> This is incredible. >> There's actually stuff in it too so be careful. >> I drank it is that okay? >> Can I go to the hospital. >> Atif, thanks for the time and Robert good luck with that new dog. (all laughing) >> Don't tell my wife I got rid of her dog. >> In time. >> In time. All things a time, theCUBE continues live here Washington DC at .conf2017 right after this.

>> Live from the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Splunk .conf2016. Brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts John Furrier and John Walls. >> And welcome back here on theCUBE. The flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV where we extract a signal from the noise. We're live at conf2016 here in Orlando, Florida on the show floor. A lot of activity, a lot of excitement, a lot of buzz and a really good segment coming up for you here. Along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls and we're joined by two gentlemen from the Herjavec Group, Robert Herjavec. Good to see you, sir. >> Greetings. Thank you for having us. >> The CEO, and Atif Ghauri is Senior VP at Herjavec. Good to see you, sir. >> Yes. >> First off, Robert, congratulations. Newly married, your defense was down for a change. Congratulations on that. (laughter) >> Oh thank you. It was wonderful. It was a great wedding, lots of fun but casual and just a big party. >> Yeah, it was. Looked like, pictures were great. (laughter) People obviously know you from Shark Tank. But the Herjavec Group has been, really, laser focused on cyber security for more than a decade now. Tell us a little bit about, if you would, maybe just paint the broad picture of the group, your focus, and why you drilled down on cyber. >> Yeah, I've been in the security business for about 30 years. I actually helped to bring a product called CheckPoint to Canada firewalls, URL filtering, and that kind of stuff. And we started this company 12 years ago, and our vision was to do managed services. That was our vision. No other customer's vision, but our vision. And we thought we'd do $5 million in sales in our first year and we did $400000. The market just wasn't there. SIEM technology, log aggregation isn't what it is today. I mean, I think at the time, it was enVision. What was it called? >> Yeah, enVision. >> enVision. And then RSA bought them. That was really the first go-to-market SIEM. Then you had ArcSight and Q1. So our initial business became around log aggregation, security, writing parsers. And then over time it grew. It took us five years to get to $6 million in sales, and we'll do about $170 million this year. We went from a Canadian company to really a global entity. We do a lot of business in the States, UK, Australia, everywhere. >> But you're certainly a celebrity. We love havin' you on theCUBE, our little Shark Tank in and of itself. But you're also an entrepreneur, right? And you know the business, you've been in software, you've been in the tech business, so you're a tech athlete, as we say. This world's changing right now. And I'm certain you get a lot of pitches as entertainment meets business. But the fact that the entrepreneurial activity, certainly in the bay area and San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, where I live, and all around the world, is really active. Whether you call the programmer or culture or just the fact that the cloud is allowing people to start companies, you're seeing a surge in entrepreneurship in the enterprise. (laughs) Which is like, was boring in the past, you know? You just mentioned CheckPoint in the old days, but now it's surging. Your thoughts on the entrepreneurial climate? >> I dunno if the enterprise entrepreneurship element is surging. By the way, I'm going to say intrepreneur, just the way I say it. Cuban always makes fun of me. (laughter) We don't say it like that in America! I'm like, screw off! (laughter) >> That's how you say it! >> I want to say it the way I want to say it. >> Well, internal entrepreneurs, right? Is that what you mean by intrepreneurship? >> Well, no. I'm just, it's just the way I say it. >> It's a Canadian thing. >> But business to business enterprise, we've always been in the enterprise business. So we're seeing a lot of growth in that area, a lot of VC money's going into that area, because it's more, you know, you can measure that level of return and you can go and get those customers. But on our show, we're a bubble. We don't do a lot of tech deals like we're talking because it's boring TV. Tech people love tech, consumers love the benefit of tech. You know, no consumer opens up their iPhone and says, oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my iPhone. They just love their iPhone. And our show is really a consumer platform that is-- >> It's on cable TV, so it's got a big audience. So you got to hit the wide swath-- >> We're one of the highest-rated shows on network television. Eight years, three Emmys. You know, it's a big show now. And what we've all learned is, because Mark Cuban and I are tech guys, we used to look for stuff we know. We don't invest in stuff we know any more. We invest in slippers, ugly Christmas sweaters, food products, because if you can tap into that consumer base, you're good to go. >> So bottom line, has it been fun for you? I mean, the show has been great. I mean, obviously the awards have been great. Has it been fun for you? What's it been like, what's the personal feeling on being on the Shark Tank. >> You know, filming is fun, and hanging out is fun, and it's fun to be a celebrity at first. Your head gets really big and you get really good tables at restaurants. There's no sporting venue-- >> People recognize you. >> Yeah. >> You get to be on theCUBE. (laughter) >> I get be on theCUBE. >> Doesn't happen every day. >> You get to go everywhere. But after a while it gets pretty dry. But it really helps our brand. We compete, typically, against IBM, Verizon, and you know, the CEO of IBM, you're not going to see him selling his security. >> Well I know they're doin' a lot, spending a lot of cash on Watson, trying to get that to work, but that's a whole 'nother story. But let's get down and dirty on Splunk. You're here because you're doin' a talk. Give a quick take on what you're talking about, why are you here at .conf for Splunk? >> Yeah, we're doing a talk on data transformation. The world today is about data. And the amount of data points and access points and the internet of things, it's just exponential growth. The stat I always love, and Atif's heard it 1000 times is, there's roughly three billion people on the internet today, and there's roughly six billion or seven billion IP addresses. By 2020, according to the IPV Committee, there'll five, six billion people connected. And hundreds of trillions of IP addresses. >> And the IoT is going to add more surface area to security attacks. I mean, it used to be, the old days, in CheckPoint, the moat, the firewall, backdoor, frontdoor. >> The idea of the perimeter is gone now. There is no such thing as a perimeter any more, because everything you can access. So a lot of work in that area. And all of that comes to data and log aggregation. And what we've seen for years is that the SIEM vendors wanted to provide more analytics. But if you really think about it, the ultimate analytics engine is Splunk. And Splunk now, with their ESM module, is moving more into the security world and really taking away market share. So we're very excited by, we have a great relationship with the Splunk guys, we see nothing but future growth. >> And you're using Splunk and working with it with your customers? >> We do, we've been using Splunk for a while. We have a private cloud. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so we eat our own dog food. So not only do we sell Splunk, but we also use it in-house. We've been usin' it for over five years, and it powers our analytics platform, which is a fancy way to say, reduces the noise from all the different clutter from all the IoT, from all the different type of alerts that are comin' in. Companies need a way to filter through all that noise. We use Splunk to solve that problem for us internally, and then, of course, we sell it and we manage it for Global 2000 customers, Fortune 100 companies all over the world. >> Tell us what about the role of data, 'cause data transformation has been a big buzzword it's a holistic message around businesses digitizing and getting digital assets in front of their customers. We have a big research division that does all of this stuff. By the end of the day, you know, the digitization business means you're going to have to go digital all the way. And role of data is not the old data warehousing days, where it's fenced away, pull it in, now you need data moving around, you need organic sharing of data, data's driving policies and new pattern recognitions for security. How do you guys see that evolving? How do you talk to your customers, because in a way, the old stuff can work if you use the data differently. We're seeing a pattern, like, hey, that's an algorithm I used 10 years ago. But now, with new data, that might be workable. What are some of the things that you're seeing now that customers are doing that you talk to that are leveraging data, like Splunk, in a new way? >> Well, that's really where Splunk adds so much value, because a friend of mine is the dean of USC. And he has a great saying, more data is not necessarily more information. And so, the mistake that we see customers making a lot is they're collecting the data, but they're not doing the right things with it. And that's really where Splunk and that level of granularity can add tremendous value, not just from logging, but from analytics and going upstream with it. >> Yeah, and also, to that point, it's just automation. There's too much data >> That's a great point. >> And it's only going to get bigger, right, based on that stat Robert rattled off. Now, we need some machine learning analytics to move it further. And all points aside, machine learning isn't where it needs to be right now. Today in the market, it still has a long way to go. I would call it a work in progress. But however, it's the promise, because there's too much data, and to secure it, to automate behavior, is really what what we're looking for. >> The example I saw is the innovation strategy's comin' to take, and they're growin' with mobility, growin' with cloud, increase the surface area, IoT. But the supervised areas of the enterprise were the doors, right? Lock the doors. And perimeter is now dead. So now you have an unsupervised environment and the enterprise at risk. Once the hackers get in, they're havin' their way. >> The internet is, like, a kindergarten playground where there are no rules and the teacher went home at lunch. (laughter) That is the internet. And kids are throwin' crap. >> And high school. I think it would be high school. Kindergarten through high school! >> And you have different-aged kids in there. >> It's chaos, bedlam! >> Very well said. The internet is chaos, but by nature, that's what we want the internet to be. We don't want to control the chaos because we limit our ability to communicate, and that's really the promise of the internet. It's not the responsibility of the internet to police itself, it's the responsibility of each enterprise. >> So what new things are happening? We're seeing successes. Certainly, we're reporting on companies that are being successful are the ones that are doing reverse of what was once done, or said differently, new ways of doing things. Throwin' out kind of tryin' to do a hybrid legacy approach to security, and seeing the new ways, new things, new better cat and mouse games, better honeypots, intelligent fabrics. What do you guys recommend to your customers and what do you see, in your talk, this digital transformation's definitely a real trend, and security is the catastrophic time bomb that's ticking for all customers. So that's, it dwarfs compliance, risk management, current... >> Well, I dunno if that's necessarily true, that it's a time bomb. You know, the number one driver for security, still, is compliance. We sell stuff people don't really want to buy. Nobody wakes up and the morning and says, yeah, I want to go spend another $5 million on security. They do it, frankly, because they have to. If none of their competitors were spending money on security, I don't think most enterprises would. I mean, whenever you have to do something because it's good to do, you have a limited up cycle. When you do something because there's a compliance reason to do it, or bad things happen to you, you're really going to do it. >> So you think there's consumer pressure, then, to have to do this, otherwise-- >> Interesting stat, the Wall Street Journal did a study and asked 1000 people on a street corner in New York if, for a hamburger, they will give away their social insurance number, their home number, and their name. 72% of people gave out that information freely. >> Better be a good hamburger. (laughs) >> Back to your point, though, I want to get a-- >> So I think consumers have an expectation of security, and how they police that is they simply go to somebody else. So if you're my retailer and you get breached, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go next door. But I think that the average consumer's expectation is, security's your responsibility, not mine. >> Okay, so on the B to B side, let's get that. I wanted to push you on something I thought I kind of disagreed with. If compliance, I agree, compliance has been a big part of data governance and data management. >> Yeah, PCI has been the biggest driver in security in the last five years. >> No doubt. However, companies are now sharing data more with other companies. Financial institutions are sharing core data with other financial institutions, which kind of teases out the trend of, I'll give you some of my data to get, to fight the fraud detection market because it's a $1 trillion problem. So as you start to see points of growth where, okay, you start to see people go outside their comfort zone on compliance to share data. So we're tryin' to rationalize that. Your thoughts? I mean, is that an indicator? Do you see that as a trend, or, I mean, obviously locking down the data would be, you know. >> I think it's challenging. I mean, we were at the president's council on security last year at Stanford. And you know, President Obama got up there, made some passionate speech about sharing data. For the goodness of all of us, we need to share more data and be more secure. I got to tell you, you heard that speech and you're like, yeah baby, I'm going to share my data, we're all going to work together. Right after him, Tim Cook got up there (laughter) and said, I will never share my data with anybody in the government! And you heard him, and you're like, I am never sharing my data with anybody. >> Well there's the tension there, right? >> Well, this is a natural-- >> Natural tension between government and enterprise. >> Well, I think there's also a natural tension between enterprises. There's competitive issues, competitor pressures. >> Apple certainly is a great case. They hoard their data. Well, this is the dilemma, right? You want to have good policy, but innovation comes from experimentation. So it's a balancing act between what do you kind of do? How do you balance-- >> Yeah, it's a great time to be in our space. I mean, look at this floor. How many companies are here? Splunk is growing by 30%, the show itself, 30% per year. They're going to outgrow this venue next year and they're going to go, probably, Vegas or somebody. I think that's exciting. But these are all point products. The fastest-growing segment in the computer business is managed services, because the complexity in that world is overwhelming, and it's extremely fragmented. There's no interlinking. >> Talk about your business in there right now. What are you guys currently selling, how many employees do you have, what's the revenues like, what's the product mix? >> Yeah, so we are a global company. So we have 10 offices worldwide and close to 300 employees. We're one of the fastest-growing companies in North America. We sell, our focus is managed security services. We do consulting as well as incident response remediation, but the day-to-day, we want your logs, we want to do monitoring, we want to help with-- >> So you guys come in and do deployments and integration and then actually manage security for customers? >> We do the sexy of gettin' it in, and then we also do the unsexy of managing it day-to-day. >> Atif, nothing unsexy about our work. (laughter) >> It's all sexy, that's what theCUBE show's about. >> It's all sexy! >> That's why theCUBE's a household name. We have celebrities coming on now. Soon we'll be on cable. >> That's right! This will be a primetime show. (laughter) >> Before we know it! >> That's funny, I got approached by a network, I can't tell you who, big network with a big producer to do a cybersecurity show. And so, they approached me and they said, oh, we think it's going to be so hot. It's such a topical thing. So they spent a day with me and our team to watch what we do. There is no cybersecurity show! (laughter) They're like, do you guys do anything besides sit on the computer? >> You have a meeting and you look at the monitor. It's not much of a show. >> Does anybody have a gun?! (laughter) >> It's not great for network TV, I think. >> Build a wall. >> Someone has to die in the end. That has to be network TV. And yeah, but I mean, there's a problem. There's 1.4 million cyber jobs open right now. And that's not even including any data science statistics. So you know, so we're reporting that-- >> I'm sure it's the same thing in data science. >> Same problem. How do you take a high skill that there's not enough talent for, hopefully, computer science education, all that stuff happens, and automate it. So your point about automation. This is the number one problem. How do you guys advise clients what the hell do they do? >> You know, automation's tough. We just had this meeting before we got on here, because in our managed service, it's people-driven. We want to automate it. But there's only a certain amount of automation you can do. You still need that human element. I mean, if you can automate it, somebody can buy a product and they're secure. >> Machine learning isn't where it's supposed to be. Every vendor aside, machine learning's not where it needs to be, but we're getting there. Having succinct automation helps solve the cybersecurity labor shortage problem, because the skill level that you hire at can go lower. So you reduce the learning curve of who you need to hire, and what they do. >> That's a great point. I think the unsupervised machine learning algorithms are going to become so much smarter with the Splunk data, because they are, that's a tough nut to crack because you need to have some sort of knowledge around how to make that algorithm work. The data coming in from Splunk is so awesome, that turns that into an asset. So this is a moving train. This is the bigtime. Okay, go step back for a second, I want to change gears. Robert, I want to get your thoughts, because since you're here and you do a lot of, you know, picking the stocks, if you will, on Shark Tank, in the tech world, our boring tech world that we love, by the way. >> We love it too. >> How do you, as someone who's got a lot of experience in cycles of innovation, look at the changing digital transformation vendor landscape, Splunk, companies like Oracle tryin' to transform, Dell bought EMC, IBM's pivoting, Amazon is booming. How do you look at the new digital enterprise, and how do you look at that from, if you're a customer, an investor, where's the growth stocks, where's the growth companies, what's the growth parameters, what's your thoughts? >> One of the reasons a lot of our industry, why I got into tech was I had no money, my dad worked in a factory, my mom was a receptionist. And the old adage is, to make money, you need money. To get ahead, it's not what you know, it's who you know. I didn't know anybody. And the value of tech is tech transforms every three years. We follow these cycles where we eat our own young and we throw away stuff that doesn't add value. Tech is the great equalizer, 'cause if you don't add value, nobody cares. And you know, when I'm starting out as a guy with a small company, I love that! We're going to kick ass, we're going to add value. Now that we're a little bigger-- >> Well, when you're a young company you can eat someone's lunch, because if they're not paying attention, you can come in and-- >> For sure. It gets harder as you get bigger because now we're the big guys that somebody in their basement's tryin' to take out. But you know, we see tremendous innovation in security. If you look back three years, who were the leaders in the SIEM space? ArcSight, Q1, Nitro to a lesser degree, and enVision. Today, does RSA have a strategy around a SIEM? They have Netwitness, you know, security analytics, which is kind of a SIEM. Q1 is in the throes of the IBM machine, somewhere in their gut, nobody knows. ArcSight, who buys ArcSight anymore? It's so complicated. Who's the leader? Splunk! >> So back to the old classic team. Obviously, you have good people on the management team. Product matters now, in tech, doesn't it? More than ever. Obviously, balance sheet. Okay, let's get back to the data transformation. So you know, data is so critical now, and again, it's more from that data warehouse, which still is around, but to real-time data having value, moving it into different applications. Question is, how do you value data? I mean, you can't put it on the balance sheet. I mean, people value factories. GE said, we have all this investment in machines and assets. They worry about someone getting their data and doing a judo move on them. So data is truly an asset that's flying out of their network. How does companies value data? Can it ever be on the balance sheet? How do you look at that? >> I don't think data, in of itself, has any value. It's the effect of the data that has the value. And it's a very singular, it's what somebody does to it. Whatever the data is worth to you, from a business perspective, it's worth fundamentally more to an outside bad party because they can package that data and sell it to a competitor, a foreign government, all those kind of places. So it's the collection of raw data and applying it to something that has meaning to a third party. >> So it's like thermodynamics, really. Until it's in motion, it's really not worth anything. I mean, that's what you're saying. Data's data until it's put to work. >> Right, I don't think you're ever going to see it on a balance sheet as a hard, core value, because it has to have a transformative value. You have to do something with it. It's the something. >> So pretend you're in Shark Tank and you're a data guy, and you say, boss, I need more budget to do security, I need more budget to expand our presence. And the guy says sorry, I need to see some ROI on that data. Well, I just have a gut feeling that if we move the data around, it's going to be worth something. Oh, I pass. You can't justify the investment. So a lot of that, I mean, I'm oversimplifying it, but that's kind of like a dialogue that we hear in customers. How do you get that-- >> What I always tell CIOs and CCOs, it's challenging to get budget to do a good thing or the right thing. It's easier to get budget to do the necessary thing. And so, necessary is defined by the nature of your business. So if you make widgets and you want to get more budget to protect the widgets, no one cares. No one's sitting around, and like oh, are my widgets safe? They are, to certain degree, and they'll have limited budget for that. But if you go to them and say, you know what, we have a risk that if somebody can attack our widgets, we're going to be down for three days. And being down for three days or three hours has a dollar cost of $5 million. I need an extra $2.5 million to protect that from happening. As a business guy and a CEO, I understand that. >> That's great advice. >> And that's the biggest challenge, still, with security people is, we're technical people. We're not used to talking to business guys. >> It's like house insurance, in a way, or insurance. You invest this to recover that. >> It's a great analogy. You know, I used to race cars, and I had a life insurance premium for key man insurance. And my insurance agent comes along and says, you should buy a bigger policy. I'm like, I don't need a bigger policy. It's so much money, we're okay. And then he says to me, you know, if you die in a racecar, I'm not sure you're covered. (laughter) But if you pay me another $10000 a year in coverage, you're covered. Did I buy it? Absolutely. And it's the same analogy. >> That's very necessary. Personal question for you. So if you're, your dad had a factory, you mentioned. I saw that you mentioned that earlier. If he had a factory today in a modern era of IoT, and you were going to give him a digital transformation consulting project, how would you advise him? Because a lot of people are taking their analog business and kind of digitizing it. Some already have sensors in there. So you see it in manufacturing, and certainly, the industrial aspect of IoT has been a big deal. How would you advise your dad building a factory today? >> Yeah, so I think there's two aspects to it. One is just, you know, everything we've been talking about, data transformation, data analytics, making things better, none of those things are possible unless you're actually collecting the data. It's like, customers come to us and say, you know what, we don't want you to just manage our logs and tell us what's going on, we want higher-level value. And I'm like, no, I get that, but unless you're actually aggregating the logs, none of the upstream stuff matters. So first thing is, you have collect the data. Whether that's sensors, old devices, mechanical devices, and so on. The second part of it is, the minute you open up your factory and open up the mechanical devices and attach them to a PC or anything that's network-based, you're open for risk. And so, we're seeing that now in utilities, we're seeing that with gas companies, oil companies. You know, up until a few years ago, you couldn't physically change the flow of a pipeline, unless there was a physical connection, a mechanical on-off. It was very binary. Today, all those systems are connected to the internet. And it saves companies a lot of money 'cause they can test them and stuff. But they're also open to hackers. >> Bigtime. >> Well gentlemen, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> And who says tech hasn't got a little pizazz, I mean-- (laughter) >> Come on, I was on Dancing with the Stars, that's a lot of pizazz! >> It's been great! >> You guys are exciting, but you are, no! >> Dancing with the Stars, of course! >> All right. >> Thank you very much. >> Well, thanks for bein' in theCUBE Tank, we appreciate that. >> Thank you. >> Don't call us, we'll call you. (laughter) Gentlemen, thank you very much. >> We're booked, maybe we can get you on next time. >> Okay, we're out. >> .conf2016, CUBE coverage continues live from Orlando. (electronic jingle)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C., it's the Cube covering .conf 2017 brought to you by Splunk. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to our nation's capitol. Here in Washington, D.C., the Cube which is Silicon Angle TV's flagship broadcast, broadcasting live today and tomorrow from D.C. here at .conf 2017, Splunk's annual get-together. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. Now, we're joined by Chidi Alams who is the Head of IT and Security for Heartland Jiffy Lube. We all know Jiffy Lube for sure. Chidi, thanks for being with us. Good to see you. >> Of course, thanks for having me. >> Before I jump in, I was looking at your, kind of the portfolio of responsibilities earlier. Information security, application development, database development, reporting services, enterprise PM, blah, on and on and on. When do you sleep, Chidi? >> I don't. (laughing) That's the easy answer. The reality is I also have two young children at home, so between work and the family life, I'm up all the time. >> John: I imagine so. >> But I would have it no other way. >> Dave: How old are your kids? >> Three and two. >> Oh, you won't sleep for a decade. >> Right. >> I know. >> Wait til they start driving. >> That's what they tell me. >> Then it gets even better or worse, depends on how you look at it. >> That's how you learn how to sleep on airplanes. (laughing) >> Well, let's look at the big picture of security at Jiffy Lube. Your primary concerns these days, I assume, are very much laser-focused on security and what you're seeing. What are the kinds of things that keep you up at night? Other than kids these days? >> So, we're a very large retailer and brand recognition is something that we're very proud of, however, with that comes a considerable amount of risk. So the bad guys are also aware of Jiffy Lube. They understand that as a retailer, we have credit cards, we have very sensitive data. When I started with Jiffy Lube about two and a half years ago, I started a program to focus not only on keeping the bad guys out, right, that's essentially table stakes in any security program, but also implementing a discipline approach around insider threat. Frankly, that's where Splunk has proved to be a significant value for our organization because now we have visibility with respect to both of those risks. Additionally, we've spent a lot of time just taking more of a risk-based approach to security. Quite often what happens, technologists tend to focus on implementing technology and kind of filling gaps that way. The first thing that we did was assess organizational risk based on our most critical assets. Once we were able to determine asset X, in most cases a data asset, was really critical to the organization, credit card data, we were able to build a unified solution and program to ensure that we protect not only our brand, but our customers' data all the time. >> So, first of all I'll say, I love Jiffy Lube. I'm a customer. I go there all the time. It's so convenient, great service. Generally, very customer service oriented, but I see your challenge with all this distributed infrastructure and retail shops around. I would imagine there's somewhat of a transient, some turnover in employee base. >> Chidi: Yeah. >> The bad guys can target folks and say, "Hey, here's a few bucks. "Let me in." So how do you use data and analytics? I'm sure you have all kinds of screening and all kinds of corporate policies around that that's sort of one layer, but it's multi-dimensional. So how do you use technology and data to thwart that risk internally? >> Sure. So I think the key there is having a holistic program. That's a term that's thrown around a lot, so for me, that means a clear focus on people-processed technology. As I mentioned earlier, the tendency is to start with your comfort zone, so with us as technologists, it's technology, but the people aspect, I have found in my career, is always the largest variable that you have to account for. So disgruntled employees. In retail, regardless of how robust and how strong a culture you create, you're always going to have higher turnover than any industry, particularly in the field. Having very tight alignment with HR, Operations, other stakeholders to ensure that, look, when someone leaves, we track that effectively. That's all data-driven, by the way, so that we're able to track the lifecycle of an employee not only on the positive side when they enter the organization, but when they exit. If the exit is immediate, we have triggers and data-driven events that alert us to that so we can respond immediately. Then, I mentioned insider threat. It's not just employees out in the field. Globally, insider threat is probably the biggest blind spots for organizations. Again, the focus is on the outside, so when we look at things like data exfiltration which is a risk in any large organization where there's a lot of change and transformation, you have to have a good baseline of activity that's going on and understand what activity is truly normal versus activity that could be anomalous and an indicator of a bad actor within the enterprise. We have all that visibility and more now with Splunk. >> What is the role that Splunk plays? How has that journey evolved? I don't know if you've been there long enough, but pre-Splunk, post-Splunk, maybe you could describe that. >> Yeah, so pre-Splunk we were very, very reactive. Let me answer that by providing a little more context about how we're leveraging Splunk. So Splunk Enterprise Security is our centralized hub. Data across the enterprise comes to Splunk Enterprise Security. We have a team of SOC analysts that work around the clock to monitor events that, again, could be indicators of something bad happening. So with that infrastructure in place, we've gone from a very reactive situation where we had analysts and engineers going to disparate systems and having to manually triangulate and figure out, hey, is this an event? Is this something worthy of escalation? How do we handle this? Now, we have a platform not only in Splunk, but with some other solutions that gives us data, one, that's actionable. It's not hard to aggregate data, but to make that data meaningful and expose only what's legitimate from a triage and troubleshooting perspective. So those are some of the things we've done that Splunk has played a role in that. >> Okay. Talk about the regime for cybersecurity within your organization. It used to be, oh, it's an IT problem. In your organization, is it still an IT problem? Is the balance of the organization taking more responsibility? Is there a top-down initiative? I wonder if you could talk about how you guys approach that? >> That's a great question because it speaks to governance. One of the things that I did almost immediately when I started with Jiffy Lube was worked very closely with the senior leadership team to define what proper governance looks like because with governance, you've got accountability. So what happens all too often is security is just this thing that's kind of under-the-table. It's understood we've got some technology and some processes and policies in place, however, the question of accountability doesn't arise until there is a problem, especially in the case of a breach and most certainly when that breach leads to front-page exposure which was something I was very concerned about, again, Jiffy Lube being a very large retailer. Worked very closely with the senior leadership team to first of all, identify the priorities. We can't boil the ocean, there are a lot of gaps. There were a lot of gaps, but working as a team, we said, "Look, these are the priorities." Obviously, customer data, that's everything. That's our brand. We want to protect our customers, right. It's not just about keeping their vehicles running as long as possible. We want to be good stewards of their data. So with that, we implemented a very robust data-management strategy. We had regular meetings with business stakeholders and education also played a critical role. So taking technology and security out of the dark room of IT and bringing it to the senior leadership team and then, of course, being a member of that senior leadership team and speaking to these things in a way that my colleagues in Operations or Finance or Supply Chain could readily connect with. Then, translating that to risk that they can understand. >> So it's a shared responsibility? >> Absolutely. >> A big part of security. You talked before about keeping the bad guys out. That's table stakes. Big part of security, at least this day and age, seems to be response, how effectively the organization responds and, as you well know, it's got to be a team sport. It's kind of a bro mod, but the response mechanism, is it rehearsed? It is trained? Can you describe that? >> Both. I agree, response is critical, so you have to plan for everything. You have to be ready. Some of the things that we've done: one, we created a crisis management team, an incident response team. We have a very deliberate focus and a disciplined approach to disaster recovery and business continuity which is often left out of security conversations. Which is fascinating because the classic security triad is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. So the three have to be viewed in light of each other. With that, we not only created the appropriate incident response teams and processes within IT, but then created very clear links between other parts of the business. So if we have a security event or an availability event, how do we communicate that internally? Who is in charge? Who manages the incident? Who decides that we communicate with legal, HR? What is that ecosystem look like? All of that is actually clearly defined in our security policy and we rehearse it at least twice a year. >> You know, we just had Robert Herjavec on from the Herjavec Group just a few minutes ago. He brought up a point I thought pretty interesting. He says, "Security, obviously, is a huge concern." Obviously, it's his focus, but he said, "A problem is that the bad guys, the bad actors, "are extremely inventive and innovative "and keep coming up with new entry points, "new intrusion points." That's the big headache is they invent these really newfangled ways to thwart our systems that were unpredicted. So how does that sit with you? You say you've got all of these policies in place, you've got every protocol aligned, and all-of-a-sudden the door opens a different way that you didn't expect. >> Yeah, one of my favorite topics that really speaks to the future and where I believe the industry is going. So traditionally, security has been very signature-based. In other words, we alert against known patterns of behavior that are understood to be malicious or bad. A growing trend is machine learning, artificial intelligence. In fact, at Jiffy Lube, we are experimenting with a concept that I refer to now as the security immune system. So leveraging machine data to proactively asses potential threats versus waiting for those threats to materialize and then kind of building that into our response going forward. I think a lot of that is still in the early phases, but I imagine that in the very near future that'll be a mandatory part of every security plan. We've got to go beyond two-dimensional signature-based to true AI, machine learning. Taking action, not just providing visibility via response and alerts, but taking action based on that data proactively in a way that might not include a human actor, at least initially. >> What's the organizational structure at your shop? Are you the de-facto CISO? >> Chidi: I am. >> And the CIO? >> Chidi: I am. I wear both hats. >> Yeah, so that's interesting. You know where I'm going with this. There's always the discussion about should you separate those roles. I can make a case for either way, that if you want the best security in IT, have the security experts managing that. The same time, people say, "Well, it's like the fox "watching the hen house and there's lack of transparency." I think I know where you fall on this, but how do you address the guys that say that function should be split? What's the advantage of keeping them together in your view? >> Yeah, so I think you have to marry best practice with the realities of a particular organization. That's the mistake that I think many make when they set about actually defining the appropriate org structure. There's no such thing as a copy and paste org structure. I actually believe, and I have no problem going on record with this, that the best practice does represent in reality a division between IT and security, particularly in larger organizations. Now, for us, that is more of a journey. What you do initially and your end-state are two different things, but the way you get there is incrementally. You don't go big bang out of the gate. Right now, they both roll up to me. Foreseeably, they will roll up to me, but that works best for the Jiffy Lube organization because of some interesting dynamics. The board of directors by the way, given the visibility of security, does have a say on that. Now that we're in transformation mode, they do want one person kind of overseeing the entire transformation of IT and security. Now, in the future, if we decide to split that up and I think we have to be at the right place as an organization to ensure that that transition is successful. >> I'm glad you brought up the board, Chidi, because to me, it's all about transparency. If the CIO can go to the board and say, "Hey, here's the deal. "We're going to get hacked, we have been hacked, "and here's what we're doing about it. "Here's our response routine," and in a transparent way has an open conversation with the board, that's different than historically. A lot of times CIOs would say, "Alright, we've got this covered," because failure meant fired. That's a mistake that a lot of boards made. Now, eventually, over time the board may decide, look, the job's too big to have one person which is kind of what you're ... But how do you feel about that? What's your sentiment on that transparency piece? How often do you meet with the board and what are the discussions like? >> Yeah, great topic. So, a few things. One, and you've hinted to this, it's very important for the CIO or the CISO to have board-level visibility, board-level access. I have that at Jiffy Lube. I've had to present to the board regarding the IT strategy. I think it's also important to be an effective communicator of risk. So when you're talking to the board, what I've done is I've highlighted two things and I believe this very strongly. As a security leader, you have to practice due care and due diligence. So due care represents doing your job within the scope of whatever your role is. Due diligence involves maintaining that over a period of time, including product evaluations. If you have due care and due diligence and you're able to demonstrate that, even if your environment is compromised, you have to have the enterprise including the board realize that as long as those two things are in place, then a security officer is doing his job. Now, what's fascinating is many breaches can be mapped back to a lack of due care and due diligence. That's why the security officer gets fired to be very blunt, but as long as you have those things and you articulate very clearly what that represents to the board and the senior leadership team, then I think you just focus on doing your job and continuing to communicate. >> John wanted to know if you had any Jiffy Lube coupons before we go. >> Yeah, 'cause in my car on the way home I thought I'd just jump in there. >> I'm all out, but I'll (laughs). >> You got one right down the street from the house. They probably know me all too well because I take the kids' cars there too. >> That's right. We'll hook you up, don't worry about it. >> We appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. A newly-converted Dallas Cowboys fan, by the way. >> That's right. Very proud. >> Perhaps here in Washington, we can work on that. >> We'll see about that. >> Alright, we'll see. Chidi, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. Chidi Alams from Heartland Jiffy Lube. Back with more here on the Cube in Washington, D.C. at .conf 2017 right after this. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas for the CUBE's special coverage of Oracle's ModernCX, Modern Customer Experience, this is the Cube, I'm John Furrier, my cohost Peter Burris. Our next guest is Tony Nadalin. Tony Nadalin is the global vice president of the Global Consulting at Oracle for the marketing cloud. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. >> So you've got to implement this stuff, and we've heard a lot of AI magic and there's a lot of meat on the bone there. People are talking about there's a lot of real things happening. Certainly, Oracle's acquired some great technologies over the years, integrated it all together. The proof is in the pudding. When you roll it out, the results have to speak for themselves. >> Tony: Yes, absolutely. >> So share with us some of those activities. What's the score board look like? What's the results? >> I think what's really important, and Lewis spoke about this yesterday, it's people and product. The customers are buying visions. They're looking at creating and changing the customer experience. They're not just buying a piece of technology. They're buying a transformation. I think what's really important and what we do a lot in services, in all services, not just Oracle Marketing Cloud Services, but just healthy services, is when customers are implementing, they're not just implementing technology, they're not just plumbing the pipes. They are putting in changes. They're looking at the people, the process, the technology. We have a really good relationship with our customers and our partners and we're constantly looking at the complete set of services, the complete suite. From what I call transformational services, where we come in and try to understand what are you trying to change? How are you trying to change your customer experience? As a marketer, owning not only what you do, and how all the different channels are working together across all the different products that they are. They purchase Eloqua, Responsys, BlueKai, Maxymiser, et cetera. >> So you're laying it all out, it's like you're sitting in a room, now I'm oversimplifying it, but it's not just rolling out stuff. You've got planning. >> Tony: You've got to plan it. >> Put the pieces together. >> You do, and it's a readiness. It's a readiness of the organization, you think about it, you've got within a marketing organization, you've got many teams coming together that have to be united around the brand, the consistency, how they're engaging with customers. But also, not only across like an acquisition team, or loyalty or an upsell and cross sell team, how does that, as we were looking at the products key notes, how does that then extend into the services engagement? How does it extend into the sales engagement? How are we making sure that everyone is using the same messaging, the same branding, leveraging each other? It's a real transformation at a people, process and technology level. So that when you're then implementing, you're implementing changes. And so we've got some great services and great partners that make sure that when the customers are going through that transformation, they're sort of going it fully readied. And our role, from a services perspective, is to ensure then, sort of define the transformation, define the strategy, like plan the plan, and then go execute the plan. And then putting in the plumbing, getting everyone readied. The analogy I used, I'm sure you've got kids, right? When we have toddlers, and you build the kid's first bikes. Your goal is to build that bike, put the training wheels on the bike, and ultimately sort of stand behind your child to a point that when you let them go, they're not going to graze their knees. Then from an ongoing basis, continue to stand behind them, then get ready to take the training wheels off. Then training wheels come off. Maybe at one point they may become BMX champions, right? But you're sort of behind them through the whole-- >> John: There's progression. >> Progression, exactly. >> With my kids, it's simply man to man, then zone defense. (laughter) >> But it's progression, right? A lot of customers, we have not only the onboarding and implementation services, but these ongoing services that are so key. Because obviously it's important to ensure that your customers are realizing. When I think of our services and the journey, there's the discovery, the transformation, and the strategy. That's like the discovery. But you've then got the realization. And then the optimization and the realization to me is that you're realizing that initial step. You're realizing the technology and you're realizing people and process. You're getting people stood up. Skills, people, organizations, technology, data. You're realizing it all so they can then take the next step. >> Alright, so what's the playbook? A lot of times, in my mind's eye, I can envision in a white board room, board room, laying it all out, putting the puzzle pieces together, and then rolling out implementation plan. But the world is going agile, not waterfall anymore, so it's a combination of battle mode, but also architectural thinking. So not just fashion, real architectural, foundational. >> Peter: Design thinking. >> Tony: Exactly, architectural. >> John: Design thinking. What's the playbook? What's the current state of the art in the current-- >> Well we have obviously product consultants, architects, solution consultants, content creators. It's the whole spectrum of where the customer needs to focus on. And I think-- >> John: So you assemble them based upon the engagement. >> Based upon the engagement and understanding, like what are the customer's strengths? Where are they now? Where are they trying to get to? There's some customers, you know, we have a whole range of services, and we have a whole range of customers. So there are some customers who are like, "We have our own teams today, "we want to augment our teams with your teams, "we want to have hybrid models." Or, "We have our own teams today, but not only have you got great people, but you've got great processes." So like, look at Maxymiser as an example. A lot of our Maxymiser customers, not only use our platform, but they use our people. They're not just buying our people, they're buying a sort of agile, Kanban, JavaScript development practices that are a different level of software development. It's not just the people that can code, it's the development practices. So it's that whole operational services where we bring to the table just a different degree of operational excellence. But we're also to go in to our customers that have their own teams and provide them also consulting perspective around how they can also sharpen their edge. If they want to sort of keep, you know. So whole spectrum of services. >> So let me see if I can throw something out there, in kind of like the center, the central thesis of what you do and how it's changed from what we used to do. Especially a company like Oracle, which has been a technology company at the vanguard of a lot of things. It used to be that customers had an idea of what they wanted to implement. They wanted to implement an accounting system. The processes are relatively known. What was unknown was the technology. How do, what do I buy? How do I configure? How do I set it up? How do I train? How do I make the software run? How do I fix? So it was known process, unknown technology. As a consequence, technology companies could largely say, yeah, that value is intrinsic to the product. So you buy the product, you've got it now. But as we move more towards a service world, as we move more toward engaging the customer world where the process is unknown, and the technology, like the cloud, becomes increasingly known. Now we're focused on more of an unknown process, known technology, and the value is in, does the customer actually use it. >> I think the value is actually in does the customer get value. I think there's a, I've managed customer success organizations and customer service organizations, and the one thing I see in SAS, is usage doesn't always equate to value. So I think as a services organization, it's important to understand the roadmap to value. Because a lot of times, I would say in commodity software, sort of the use of it by default in itself was enough. That you were moving to a software platform. I think SAS customers, especially marketers, are looking for transformation. They're looking for a transformation and a change in value. A change in value in the conversation they're having with the customer. A change in acquisition, loyalty, retention, a change in being relevant. As Joseph was saying this morning, being relevant with the customer, and that value is more than just implementing some technology. >> So it's focusing on ensuring that the customer is getting value utility out of whatever they purchase. >> Tony: Correct. >> Not just that they got what they purchased. So as we move into a world where we're embedding technology more and more complex, it's two things happen. One is, you have to become more familiar of the actual utilization. And what does it mean, and I think marketing cog helps that. What is marketing, how does it work? And second one, the historical norm has been, yeah, we're going to spend months and years building something, deploying something, but now we're trying to do it faster, and we can. So how is your organization starting to evolve its metrics? Is it focused on speed? Is it focused on, obviously value delivered, utilization. What are some of the things that you are guiding your people to focus on? >> Well I think, I very much take a outside-in view. So to me, if I look at why a customer is buying, and what do they want. Obviously most customers want fast time to value, as reduced effort, obviously, and little surprises. I think having a plan and being able to execute your plan. And this whole, as we were talking like one-to-many versus one-to-one. >> And timing too, no surprises and they want to execute. >> And time to value, right? And speed. And I think as we were talking, similar to as a marketer is trying to engage any customer and sort of going from that one-to-many to that one-to-you, what's important now for any organization, a services organization, any company, is to understand what does your business look like? Because why you bought from Oracle, whether you be in a certain vertical or a certain space, or a certain maturity as a customer, it's important that we have the play books, and we do, that say that if you're a customer of this size, of these products in this vertical, then we have the blueprints for success. They may not be absolutely perfect, but they're directional, that we can sort of put you on the fast path. That we've seen the potholes before, we've seen the bumps, we understand the nuances of your data, your systems, your people, your regulations. So that we can actually, we have a plan. And it's a plan that's relevant to you. It's not a generic plan. And I think that's the biggest thing where good companies show up then deliver solutions that they're not learning 100%. There's always going to be nuances and areas of gray that you work through, where the customer's just as much as vendors as they transform. We're not just swapping like for like, but when you transform, there's changes that occur on the customer side. There's new awarenesses of I didn't realize we did that. I didn't realize I want to change doing that. And I've actually changed maybe my whole thought. >> What's the change coming from this event? If you look at the show here, ModernCX, some really good directional positioning. The trajectory of where this is going, I believe is on a great path. Certainly directionally relevant, 100%. Some stuff will maybe shift in the marketplace. But for the most part, I'm really happy to see Oracle go down this road. But there's an impact factor to the customers, and the communities, and that's going to come to you, right? So what are you taking away from the show that's important for customers to understand as Oracle brings in adaptive intelligence? As more tightly coupled, highly cohesive elements come together? >> I think to me, it's transformation. Customers really do understand what are they trying to achieve as they transform? Not just by a piece of technology, but come into it understanding, okay, what are we trying to transform? And have we got like all change management? All transformational management? Have I got the right buy-in across the organization? As a marketer, if I'm trying to transform the organization, have I got the right stakeholders in the room with me? Am I trying to influence the right conversations? You look at the conversation yesterday with Netflix. The discussion, or Time-Warner, sorry. Around their transformation around data. That wasn't a single entity determining that. That was a company driven strategy. A company driven transformation. And I think to really change the customer experience, and control the brand of that across all touchpoints of the company, it requires transformation and it requires being realistic around also how long that journey takes. Depending on the complexity and size of the company. It requires investment of people, of energy, or resources and really understanding where is your customer today? Where is your competition? And to Mark's point, it's like the market is being won here, you're having to compete against your competition, you're having to be better than them, you're having to understand your competition just as much as you understand yourself, so you're leapfrogging. Because just as much as you're going after your competitors customers, your customers are coming up for your customers, right, your competitors are coming up for your customers. I think transformation and understanding how to engage the right services leaders, be it Oracle or any of our partners, to really transform your business is to me the biggest take away. The technology then, be it Chatbox or AI, I mean they augment, they help, they're going to be channels, but I think transformation is key. >> It's really not the technology, it's really what you're doing it with, at the end of the day. Tony, thanks for coming on the CUBE. We really appreciate it, and again, when the rubber hits the road, as Peter was saying earlier, it's going to be what happens with the product technologies for the outcomes. >> Tony: Absolutely. >> Thanks for sharing your insights here on the CUBE. Sharing the data, bringing it to you. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE with Peter Burris, more live coverage for the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from Oracle's ModernCX after this short break. (upbeat music) >> Narrator: Robert Herjavec >> Interviewer: People obviously know you from Shark Tank. But the Herjavec Group has been really laser focused on cyber security.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara, California, it's theCUBE covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by The Linux Foundation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in Santa Clara, California at the Open Networking Summit 2017. Really happy to be joined by my co-host for the next couple of days, Scott Raynovich. And we've been talking to a lot of providers and technical people, but now we want to talk to customers. We love talking to customers, and we're really excited to have Rashesh Jethi. He's the SVP, Head of R&D for the Americas for Amadeus, which is a big travel company. Welcome. >> Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you, Scott. >> So like I said, we'd love to talk to a practitioner. So you're out on the frontlines, you're seeing all this talk of software-defined and software-defined networking. From your point of view, how real is it, where are we on this journey? What do you see from your point of view? >> Super real. Have you searched for a flight lately? >> I have searched for a flight. >> Excellent. I'm proud to tell you that your flight search very likely was powered by Amadeus, and it's running on a software-defined data center completely. So this stuff is real. We are, I believe, one of the first companies who have actually taken this from what was a very strong academic kind of research project onto this start-up ecosystem, but we're actually out there deploying it, running real world business, using a very purposeful and deliberate software-defined strategy. >> And it's interesting because you said before we got on camera that you guys are actually very active participants in the open source movement and development of this stuff. You're not just kind of a participant waiting in the wings for this stuff to get developed. >> I mean absolutely, and to me, that's one of the reasons which if you're serious about open source, you have to use it. You can't just talk about it. You can't just say it looks like a nice idea. You have to get out there and get your hands dirty and do it. But the other thing also is you have to contribute back. I think that's a big tenet of the open source community. And we all and certainly the company, we grew up and we've seen tech evolve through the ages. And a big part, especially in the last 10 years or so, has been the open source movement, and it's contributing back. It's one of the reasons I'm here. It's one of the reasons the conference organizers invited me, is to actually talk about how we use open source and software-defined strategy for our technology. >> That's cool. So where do you run this software? You run it in private cloud, public cloud? Do you guys build your own data centers? How do you run it? >> Quick history lesson and our quick history-- >> Let's back up. First off, where is Amadeus today for people that aren't familiar with the company? >> We are actually a 30-year-old company. We are celebrating our 30th birthday this year. The company was started in the late '80s as a consortium between four leading European airlines, Lufthansa, Air France, Iberia, and Scandinavian. So we started off, which was very typical at that time, as a mainframe shop, and that's where a lot of our core systems were built. We're a big provider of technology in general to the travel industry even though we were founded by airlines. So to put it in perspective, we carry about 95% of the world's scheduled commercial seats, airline seats, on our platform. >> 95%. >> 95%, so we work with the world's-- >> Are available to purchase. Obviously, 95% of the purchases don't go through your system. >> Right. They are available. They are used by over 90,000 travel agents, retail travel agents, corporate travel, online travel. And we work with over, like I said, 700 airlines, work for their inventory. So chances are if you travel on an airplane, very good chances that our software was used to make the reservation. We also have airline ID systems and hotel ID systems, and we work with the airports. And this is where we do departure control, flight management, baggage reconciliation, a lot of the back end processes. And we started the company, essentially runs as we write our own software. We are offered as a service from day one, so we are one of the oldest software service providers in the industry. And obviously, when we got started to do that, you had to own your own infrastructure. So we are pretty good at it. We have very strong kind of technical chops. We have a large data center outside Munich Airport and a bunch of smaller data centers all over the world. And what we're doing now is really very deliberately making the journey towards a cloud, both our private cloud, so taking our own infrastructure, virtualizing it, and making it available as a service for our own applications, and then where it makes sense, to leverage public cloud infrastructures where they are available. >> So different apps in different clouds, is that-- >> Different apps in different clouds based on customer preferences. The core reservation booking engines, they are in our own private cloud because we do have a lot of regulatory security, privacy considerations. So that stuff, we keep kind of close where we can keep a very watchful eye on it, but there are a lot of transactions we are also talking about. The volume of searches has grown up, right? Obviously, Google has seen a lot of search volume. If you look at our business, it used to be when you wanted to book a flight, you'd go to a travel agent and be able to look at a bunch of flight options and you'd pick one. About 20 years ago, you call it the look to book ratios. You'd look at 10 to 20 options and you'd book one. You want to guess what it is today? >> The look to book ratio was 20 to one. That's got to be way higher. That's got to be 80 to one. >> It's more like 1,000 to one. >> 1,000 to one. >> 1,000 to one. It's partly people like you and I who have a spare moment and have a vacation in mind, and we are looking at options. But keep in mind, anything that you search, it has to come into our systems. We have to configure the journey. We have to price it. We have to make sure it's available before we offer it up to you, right? So it's very transaction and computing intensive even before it touches any of the back ends where we do core kind of booking and passenger processing. And so to handle that scale, those are the kind of very logical applications that make sense for the public cloud. And those are the ones that we've looked to move. Certainly, for customers, we are a global company. We have customers all over the world. Some customers want to have some of these systems closer to their geographic location. So we look at all use cases kind of. >> That's amazing to think of. These things have so changed behavior and the way that we interact. I assume that 20 to one was a function because you would sit down. Now you sit down at your desk, time to book that flight, and maybe you don't get it done that day. You come back two or three times. But as you said, now it's grabbing little bits of time throughout the day whenever we can. But do you get paid on a regular subscription, or do you get paid on the transaction? Has that just increased your overhead, whatever the ratio 20 to 1,000 is? >> Absolutely, no, our business model has been very consistent from day one. We get paid on the number of bookings we make and the number of people that board aircraft, I mean roughly speaking. There are smaller lines of businesses, but those are our two main revenue drivers. So we see a lot of transaction volume upfront, but it doesn't translate to a booking which logically, it won't. Yes, that's noise or revenue for us, but we still have to service that volume because that's eventually, the funnels just gotten wider. And so it makes sense to do that in the most cost efficient manner but without compromising quality, without compromising speed. I mean if you're like me, if you have to wait for more than two or three seconds, you're like, "Ah, I'm moving on." >> Oh, two seconds. It's milliseconds, isn't it? >> Absolutely. >> And by the way, I still don't always find the flight I want. So where are those extra flights? Can you provide those for your service? >> Jeff: That extra 5% those are under. >> That's very different. It's got nothing to do with open source and kind of what we're talking about here, but a lot of what you're doing in there from an engineering perspective is just looking at, for example, machine learning algorithms. And what you said is actually a very common complaint, is how do I find kind of the right sort of flights. And more importantly, if you have certain preferences with airports or airlines or loyalty programs or time of day, how do I provide you context-sensitive results? We are doing a lot of kind of core R&D work for that, but our customers are doing amazing work as well. KAYAK is one of our customers, very close to our offices in the Boston area, and they do pretty amazing work in terms of getting their context right and then applying machine learning technologies and artificial intelligence. It's very, very early days but very exciting, very promising. >> One of the cool features I like are these fare alerts. I don't know if you use them. It tells you, it predicts this is going to go up. You better book now, wait. Do you guys do that sort of thing too? >> Our customers do that. We have a very simple model. Our customers are travel agencies, online, American Express, Expedia, metasearches like KAYAK, Skyscanner, et cetera, the airlines themselves whose products we host in our system and we sell. So a lot of our engineering work is learning to offering kind of core innovation so that they can offer products for people like you and me, their customers, the best products out there. So we focus on enabling them. And then at an operational level, we try to do it in the most efficient manner and the most future proof that we can think of. >> What about security? I mean it sounds like a lot of sensitive data changing hands here, right, where are people going to sit on an airplane, where are they going. You must have incredible security demands on your data now. >> Yes. (Jeff and Scott laugh) I mean you understand, obviously, it's paramount to us. And the good news is, look, we've been in this business for 30 years. We have really deep domain expertise in that. And also, you'll understand why I wouldn't want to talk too much about what we do and how we do it, but absolutely, that's one of the-- >> Scott: You just lock it down. >> Prime drivers of everything we think all the way from application design to things like the infrastructure planning and design to the physical level. I mean everything you can think of and probably a couple of things you may not think of. >> Hopefully a few things we didn't think of. So where do you go next? It sounds like you're enabling a lot of the innovation on your partner's side. You just mentioned KAYAK and people writing some of the machine learning and AI algorithms to help the end traveler find what they're looking for. Where are you guys concentrating? You said you've been at it for 30 years. What are some of the next big hurdles that you're looking to take down? >> It's wonderful, I think, being close to our customers. And one of the reasons I'm in Boston, we are a European company. We are actually headquartered in Madrid. Our core engineering team, our central engineering team is in France. The reason I'm in Boston and my team is in Boston is we've started doing a lot of business here in North America, and we try to stay very close to our customers. And when you listen carefully, and that's why we have two ears and one mouth is to hopefully try to listen a lot, you do see their pain points, you do see where they are going with kind of their business. And it gives us a chance to have a front row seat in designing new products that they can use. So to me, it's kind of two pronged. One is we want to offer the best technology we can to our customers at the best price point we can. And obviously, by now, you've figured out it's mission critical stuff has to always be on. Keeping those kind of boundary conditions in mind, you want to be the best technology provider, and then we want to innovate. So one of the things I'm seeing at this conference, there's a lot of friends from the service providers who are talking about 5G technology. And so with connected cars, with virtual reality, I mean these are all trends that are going to impact us as travelers in a positive way. And so we have a dedicated innovation team across all our business lines. We do a lot of work with academic institutions, with ETH in Zurich, with MIT here, close to my office in Boston. And there's just a chockfull of possibilities in terms of what can be done. >> All right, I'll give you the last word, impressions on the show. What do you get out of a show like this? Why is it important for you to come? >> It's amazing. I mean this morning, Martin Casado was there. He's called kind of the grand daddy of software-defined networking (mumbles). >> He's not that old yet, but he's going to like seeing that clip. (laughs) >> It's true. I read that at The Guardian. It was on one of the newspapers. But the fact is we used NSX for virtualization in our entire data center, and we have close to 20,000 infrastructure devices. All our computers are virtualized, 100% of it, and it's all using NSX from VMware, right? Now this was a sort of brilliant idea by an extremely intelligent and persuasive graduate student at Stanford 15 years ago that is, as he announced this morning, is a billion-dollar business today, right? And we are actually using the technology, and it's very real, to process all of this. So it's great to be able to see what people like him, I mean from Google, he's a great partner of ours. We use Kubernetes for kind of the container deployment strategy for our cloud network. We hear him speak about what they're thinking about in terms of investments and how the network is going to essentially drive the movement of data analytics. It's just phenomenal to get the top leadership. I'm obviously very honored and privileged to be presenting to this audience and to share our thoughts and what we're doing and just to see a lot of the buzz around here and what wonderful ideas are happening in the Valley. There's so much action, as always, going on. >> Great, great, great summary. Well, glad you could take a few minutes to stop by theCUBE. >> Completely my pleasure. Thank you very much. Great meeting you, and have a great rest of the show. >> All right. He's Rashesh, he's Scott, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Open Networking Summit 2017 in Santa Clara. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec. >> People obviously know you from Shark Tank, but The Herjavec Group has been really laser focused on cybersecurity. >> I actually helped to bring upon Checkpoint to (mumbles) firewalls, URL filtering, that kind of stuff. >> But you're also...