from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cute conversation you know the we've been following a company called Activia for quite some time now they they've really popularized the concept of copy data management really innovative Boston based Waltham based company and with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and all 40 who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of actifi Oh guys great to see you I wish we were face to face that you're you're you're June event but this will have to do yeah you bet yeah so you know Brian you've been on the cube a bunch I'm gonna start with Paul if that's okay Paul you know just let's talk a little bit about your your background you've you've done a number of stance at a variety of companies you know big companies like IBM and others as well what attracted you to Activia in all honesty I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years and so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for fun on words there and and so Activia was just smack dab in the middle of that right and so when I was looking for my next adventure you know I had an opportunity to to meet with a shower CEO and Founder and describe and discuss kind of what activity was all about and candidly the the number of connections that we had that were the same a lot of our OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically so it was almost this perfect world right and I'm a Boston guy so it was in my in my old backyard and it was just a perfect yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for which was really a small growth company that was trying to you know get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and understanding and articulate the value proposition well as we're saying in Boston Paulie we got to get you back here I know I pack my cock let's talk about the let's talk about the climate right now I mean nobody expected this of course I mean it's funny I was I saw ash and an event in in Boston last fall we were talking like hey what do you expected for next year yeah a little bit of softening but you know nobody expected this sort of Black Swan but you guys I just got your press release you put out you had a good you had a good quarter you had a record first quarter um what's going on in the marketplace how you guys doing yeah well I think that today more than than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers how they manage through their supply chain and in frankly how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric and so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIOs mind I think our q1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets in their confidence in ectopy Oh has an important part of their data supplied nopal I want to come back to you first of all your your other people know you're next you're next Army Ranger so thank you for your service that's awesome you know I was talking to Frank's lute man we interviewed me other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and and he says the other managed by a playbook he's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military well this is weird this is a situation okay and that really is kind of how you're trained and and of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before so how are you seeing organizations generally actifi Oh specifically going to manage through this process what are some of the moves that you're advising recommending give us some insight there yeah so I'm it's really interesting it's a it's funny that you mentioned my military background I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day that you know one of the things that they trained for in the military is the eventualities of chaos right and so when you when you do an exercise they we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you're now dead and without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the unit has to go on and so what happens is you you learn by muscle memory like how to react in time suffice it or and you know this is a classic example of leadership and crisis and so um so it's just it's just interesting like so to me you have a playbook I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of them one of my famous quotes was you know let you know plan is good until somebody punches you in the face that's the reality of what just happened the business across the globe is it just got punched in the face and so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic and from a leadership perspective I think you can't lose your confidence right so I've watched some of my friends and of what some other businesses crippled in the midst of this and I'm because they're afraid instead of instead of looking at this in my first commentary that our first staff meeting Brian if I remember it was this okay so what makes active feel great in disembark like not why is it not great right and so we didn't get scared we jumped right into it we you know we adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter and we just down here the honestly date we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy I mean so it was insane it was really fun okay so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record Porter is really a broad-based the demand yeah so if you you know if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter we had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever we had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever and we had the highest number ever and so it was a it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries interesting I mean you use the term opportunistic and and I think you're right on I mean you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time you know we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian you you you're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer you're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic and and I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency you talked about digital initiatives you know data center transformations etc so maybe you could talk a little bit about that Brian did you do those things how did you do those things what kind of pace were you guys at how did you do it remotely with everybody working from home give us some color on that sure and you know Ashley if you were here you would probably remind us that Activia was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis so we we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade the and the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit as as relevant today everything starts with cost containment in hospital and in protection of the business and so cio is in the midst of this shock to the system I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital critical initiatives and what is a nice to have and I'm going to pause on my step and invest entirely in the critical mission and the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working for remotely getting people safe access to their systems and their applications in their data and then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to to really ensure the resiliency their applications so we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when you know instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable so so let's >> cyber resiliency so specifically what is aekta video doing for its customers from a product standpoint capabilities maybe it's part of the the 10 see announcement as well but but can you can you give us some specifics on where you fit in let's take that use case cyber resiliency yeah absolutely so I think there's there's a staff of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency at the lowest level you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're in fact and so the ability to go back in time test the recoverability of data test the validity of the data is step one step two is once you've found the clean point being able to resume operations being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase and that's something that Activia was founded on this notion of instant access to data and then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk you want to go back and clean that system you want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it and that's where our partnership with IBM freezing resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the activity of platform and then rappers and a complete managed services around it so they can help the customer not only get their their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable okay so so that's interesting so Paul Paul was it kind of new adoptions was it was it increases from existing customers kind of a combination and you talk to that yeah totally so like ironically to really come clean we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar through the metrics that we see historically so the mix need our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by we anticipated um that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base but candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that you know a value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or or just continue down the path of adoption during the time frame of Koba 19 across industries I would say that again um there was there were there were some industries I would say that pushed pause and so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during during this past period were the ones you would think of right so financial institutions primarily as well as some some of the medical so some of those transactions healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions and then I would say that that we did have some industries that push pause and you can probably guess what some of those are a majority of those were the ones that we're dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses things like retail stuff like that where we typically do have a pretty nice residence in a really nice value proposition but there were there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause like we're going to come back but overall the yeah the feedback was just in general it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal as strange as that sounds because I know speaking to a lot of my friends and gear companies your software companies they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well that's interesting I mean you're right I mean certain industries Airlines I'm interviewing a cio of major resort next week you know really interested to hear how they're you know dealing with this but those those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down but but we've we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot it didn't it didn't you know buffer the decline in IT spending that were expecting to be down you know maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it what about cloud we're seeing elevated levels in cloud demand guys you know have offerings there what are you seeing in cloud guys you want that yeah I'll start and then fall please please weigh in I think that'd be the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the MOOC table that we've been whipped over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months The Improv been on the you know 18 to 24 month road map have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year but in terms of the wholesale you know everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate I I don't think we've seen that quite yet I think the the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the the non number one or number two cloud providers but the rest of the hyper scalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps google for example a strategic partner of ours has a you know a huge offering when it comes to enabling work home and remote work so leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings I think gives them a wedge that the you know Amazon might not have so this it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend of seeing four years yeah and I would add a little bit if the you know IBM held their think conference this past week I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate there one of our OEM partners and oh yeah because you know when our the CEO presented his kind of opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really he really kind of put it down to two things and said you know any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud but they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it right and so every digital business is talking in one of those categories and so when I look 2q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as brian talked about all the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration but outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity didn't so and those that did not you know kind of just peeled back a little bit but overall I still I would agree with with ibm's assessment of the market that you know those are kind of the two hot spots and have a cloud is hot and the good news is we've got a nice guy operating Molloy yeah Arvind Krista talked about the the in and it has it maybe not I think but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in Publix Davis that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle the hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially which is submitted to me those those two things are great news for you guys obviously you know Red Hat is the linchpin of that I want to ask you guys about your your conference data-driven so we were there last year it was a great really great intimate event of course you know you hand up the physical events anymore so you've pushed to September you're going all digital would give us the update on on that program we're um we're eager to have the cube participate in our September event so I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks but awesome we love it we exactly so you can tell Frank to put that so we we've been participating in some of the other conferences I think most notably last week learning a lot and and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is I think first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed the digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they as they might so I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content or the users of our technology and then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in the years past our customers tell the story of how they're using data and this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible you know crisis and and hopefully renewal from crisis well one of my favorite interviews last year your show is the the guys from draft King so hopefully they'll be back on it will have some football to talk about let's hope I mean I want it I want to end with just sort of this notion of you know we've been so tactical the last eight weeks right I'm you guys too I'm sure just making sure you're there for customers making sure your employees are ok but as we start to think about coming out of this you know into a post probe Adaro it looks like it's gonna be with us for a while but we're getting back the you know quasi opening so I'm hearing you know hybrid is here to stay we agree for sure cyber resiliency is very interesting I think you know one of the things we've said is that that companies may sub optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience business resiliency in place you know that's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home how do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post ghovat era yeah so this is a really interesting topic for me in fact I've had many discussions over the last couple weeks with some of our investors as well as our executive staff and so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replace the cold-calling salesperson with an inside and you know inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and vdr because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or or physical building to go through and so like that that whole thing has been removed from the sales process and so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on they happen to be online however you couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices and and I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are gonna find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way and I do believe that the professional sales enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is gonna look at then it looks today and so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and and watching us learn together how we're gonna buy sell and market to each other in this post public way because I I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not gonna be the way it used to be what is it gonna look like I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's gonna look different for sure they're very very thoughtful comments and so Brian you know our thinking is the differentiation and the war yes it gets one in digital how is that affecting you know sort of your marketing and your thing around that we we fortunately decided coming into 2020 our fiscal 21 that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway we felt that it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates we saw you know way better ROI in terms of very targeted tentative digital campaigns or general-purpose ABM type of efforts so our strategy had essentially been set and and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds individually so you know we have essentially a two-pronged marketing you know attack Frank now which is you know digital creating inbounds and B DRS that are calling on those in bounds that are created digital and so it's a you know it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually come back into form you know how much we decide to actually go back into that that been I think that you know to someone to some extent we've talked about this in the past II you know the physical events and the the sheer spectacle and this year you know audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model and so I think this is this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling telling customers what they need to know to help their an assist their buying journey in their investigation journey into a new technology I mean the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid to me nice intimate events you know they're gonna live on but they're also gonna have a major digital component to them I'm very excited that you know we're a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September the a lot of the the bugs are gonna be worked out you know we've been going to it so it feels like 24/7 but really excited to have you guys on thanks so much really looking forward to working with you in in September it's data-driven so guys thanks a lot for coming on the cube oh my gosh thank you Dave so nice it's so nice to be here thank you alright pleasure you did thank you everybody thank you and thanks for watching this is Dave Volante for the cube and we'll see you next time [Music]

live from Orlando Florida it's the cube coverage conf 18 got to you by Splunk hey welcome back to Splunk kampf 18 conf 8 hashtag Splunk conf 18 my name is Dave Volante I'm here with my co-host a minimun you watching the cube the leader and live tech coverage there's two days of wall-to-wall coverage is our seventh year stew at conf we're seeing the evolution of Splunk from kind of analyzing log files to having deep business impact across the organization and doing more with data Jim Nichols is here is the DevOps manager in Improv odda healthcare company good to see it thanks for coming to the cube again thank you for having me thank you so tell us about M privada and then love the the title DevOps in the title we'll get into that sure first the company yep so in providers the healthcare IT security company and we provide health court healthcare organizations around the world with secure Identity Management multi-factor authentication and enable just ubiquitous access to whatever sort of medical systems that they need to get into and we really try to enable healthcare by establishing trust between the medical providers the patient's the data and do that all securely and seamlessly so that we're not Security's not a part of their workflow it's just in there and they don't have to think about it and they just get access to what they need when they need it so I hear yeah on your website trust between people technology and information reminds me a little bit of a certain software company that branding is all around us today that is there seems like there's a line up between what Splunk does in your company's mission oh they're there absolutely is and you know like Splunk in privada has a very strong on premises in the data center footprint and we're expanding that into the cloud and that's where most of my work is is kind of managing those cloud systems that kind of complement the on-premise appliance and we're looking at how that's going to move into the cloud and what that means and it's very similar to like what Splunk is done with Splunk enterprise and now moving into Splunk cloud and we're actually a customer's point cloud everything that we do that we could possibly do is out in the cloud not in the data center in you you've got DevOps two new titles maybe bring us inside you know what that means that improv odda you usually think about you know moving fast things are changing all the time it's themes that we heard in the keynote this morning so explain that a little bit yeah so the way the DevOps model that we follow at improv odd is really like kind of a consultant model where we've got a small team of a very senior very expert DevOps folks and they kind of get assigned out to the agile teams and they're a team member that gets planned into the Sprint's plan and what we're going to be dealing and really kind of make sure that those deployment events or the DevOps work that we need to do is planned in as part of the normal development work and that consultancy model is really good in regards to Splunk because we run the Splunk infrastructure we do all the training we do some of the basic dashboard work and make sure that no matter what the team products onshore offshore wherever they are we're all looking at data exactly the same way exact same dashboards and it really kind of forces the knowledge to get shared throughout the organization across products and how we think about things and so Splunk you know DevOps isn't like a tool or a thing or whatever but Splunk is definitely a great like enabling forcing function to make sure that we are sharing metrics how the system works what we're learning on and all that stuff in a really consistent way so you know the t-shirt met tricks I've seen that I have what do you think that means oh so it's like the same old same old man metrics so huh what does that mean to you guys you have new metrics do you have a sort of new set of KPIs that you're using ourselves so I think the metrics part is that it's maybe 10 years ago the IT industry figured out how to get every single metric about CPU memory disk ram and all the tool there are a lot of different tools for doing it you know Splunk zabbix data dog others I don't know if it's okay to talk about other products or whatever but you know when you get like a CPU alert that goes off all right the CPU usage is 92% is that good or is that bad it sounds kind of high and you get that alert you look at that CPU chart and it's like there's no context there's no information and you know you might be designing your system to run at 90% if it's doing some batch processing or something so it's like metrics it's like you need to get the alert you need to know what's going on but you really need to like get the insight into what it is and that's why a lot of this stuff that they show this morning at the keynote was really exciting where you've got the metrics in one place the logs in one place it's all in one place so you get that alert and you can look at it and then see what else is going on without having to like jump into a bunch of different systems and how about DevOps your DevOps in the title what is how do you guys look at DevOps what is DevOps to you and where did it come from and where is it going I think that I've been doing DevOps my entire career since I got out of college and I came out of WPI and was studying like performance evaluation and it's like how do you measure systems get the insight how do you make sure they're running efficiently and I think that what I was kind of doing on the performance engineering side kind of intersected with like the agile movement and folks get into agile development teams and trying to integrate that knowledge and the metrics and how you're gonna run it in production into that sort of product building process so I feel like I've been doing DevOps for a long time and called it different things over the years you know for for us at improv Adi it's really about enabling our developers to deliver functionality to our customers as fast and as safely as possible so you know we're in the healthcare industry and you know the the systems that we build and integrate and support support life right like these are doctors that are using these systems they have to work a hundred percent all the time and that adds some interesting wrinkles where you wouldn't really think about doing continuous deployment for the system that you know somebody's going to get logged into to get into their medical records you might want to be able to move that quickly if you need to if there's an emergency bug fix but the level of safety and testing that we need to put in before it actually gets into production that's really where we spend a lot of our time in DevOps is making sure that that's a fish but that's fast and then when it goes from going from like a test environment into production if it takes an hour for office is not that big of a deal we're doing like you know multi week to week release cycles or even longer and so as far as like DevOps a lot of the movement has been around like continuous delivery and deployment and we kind of use that to optimize like the test build and debug cycle and that way when we know when we get to production that's going to go smoothly and that there aren't going to be any unanticipated how do security fit into this conversation sometimes you know the the buzzword term you know dev sac ops is you know how to how to Splunk in your practice look at security well so you know where a security company you know you know and we wouldn't really ever call anything dev sack offs because security is ingrained in a part of every single thing that we do walking into the building every day when we badge in I think about it our security people like is the building's secure all the way into like what we're ending up doing in the system so obviously Splunk is a huge supporter of that so we've got audit trail information on all the systems and we can know not only what you are system administrators and DevOps users are doing but like what docker is doing what commands it runs and really get at a very very low level of detail and we literally have everything that ever happens on those systems is audited and we've built a whole set of alerts around things that we know about things that we think might be a problem and we use kind of our expertise in the healthcare security space and then apply that to all our cloud systems so it's like we never have a team called dev sack ops it's like it's it's just what we do it's the first most important thing that we think about every day is security so that's why it's a little bit different for us but we like some of the ideas and I've you know we've started doing some work around automated security testing on the application code you know running like static analysis dynamic analysis integrating web scanning tools into our CI CD pipelines so that it just makes it that much easier you know and not wait till the end before you ship it or whatever we have it right in the development process what's the regime for your organization you know the classic development and operations throw it over the fence and okay DevOps brings those together but you still got a spectrum of skills and presumably you've got people on you know some kind of maturity model where you've got sort of newer folks maybe guys coming out of college like you were several years ago and you're training them and sort of you're one unified team at the same time you you might have some degrees of specialization so what have you found is the right regime for the DevOps team well I think the consultant model that we've established works really well and we've got a very senior DevOps person that's on the agile team and they may do some of the really tricky bits but once we get out of the part that only us as DevOps can do we really try to get the developers to do it so a lot of that's like Splunk training how do you build a dashboard here's maybe a simple example dashboard now you do the next panel that sort of thing to try to level everybody up and get everybody on the same page you know turned in terms of this divide between like Devon Ops when I actually joined and provided DevOps was NIT it was managed as part of like our SAS management offering along with like a lot of the other applications that IT managed and one of the very first things that our senior vice-president did was like they get to be in development they can't Oregon is a we were working together we're all on the same teams we're all doing all that stuff but just mentally organizationally get rid of the divide put them in engineering and report to the VP of engineering just like the developers development managers and architects and that's the way we've just get rid of any organizational or thought divide between the between the groups Jim you mention alerts just now and we've heard a few times you get alerts and you know I imagined the beeper in the old days now you get an alert on your mobile phone where are we in terms of being able to take action on those alerts have the machines take action for us is that an objective that you have is that just too damn scary your thoughts yeah so my first my first impression is that it's a little scary we do have some problems that occur with some frequency right so losing an Amazon ec2 instance happens you know 10 times out of 100 instances in the cloud on a given month so there's certain types of those failures that we've automated around just because you have to as a part of just doing business in the cloud so why do the Amazon like auto scaling groups all that stuff we've got a couple of you know issues that happen that we want to just resolve faster and repair faster they don't impact customer experience or user experience but we just want to get on top of those sooner so we've started to automate some of the very thin small carefully controlled controlled use cases so that if the alert were to go up spurious lis I know it's not gonna then take down a system that was running and finding good false positives exactly so only were places where false positives can be tolerated is where we're looking to do that yeah you don't want to take the humans out of the equation just yet or maybe ever for some of the simple things we we have and we can and we will but some of the complicated things it's like just stop and look at it and think about it for 90 seconds and then make the action we're to come up with how to program that 90 seconds of thought is like maybe talk about it be complete about it off oh this way okay let me explain it to somebody a second time and make sure it's right and then go and do a quake like just philosophically that's where I have to get a sheen to do that so Jim you're wearing the revolution a word shirt my understanding in privada is now one of two two-time Award winners if I got it right you're a commander Award winner maybe you could explain what that means and what it means to you and your company sure so the commander award is really about getting you know other folks in your organization using Splunk looking you know either looking at a dashboard at a report or digging down into the data and you know so why I won the award was really around like our use of docker containers so it was really important to me that developers people in DevOps people and support don't really have like a strong like network operations function but those types of folks that they're all looking at the exact same thing all the exact same tools all the exact same data so kind of as part of that mission it's just I hold trainings I hold office hours I've got one of my DevOps folks down here today or at the conference to then kind of spread the Splunk gospel show people how to use it if they've got questions all that sort of stuff and then the other part of that is really just showing people what we can do and advocating for the making decisions based on the data we have it in data you know I have it in spunk let's look at that to make the decision so that's really what that commander Awards kind of all about so if you're doing the doctor stuff you're a bit of a trailblazer so we were only a few years into this container initiative I was walking the show floor I even saw some companies looking at like the serverless technology you know what what led you to kind of put these pieces together and you know it tell us a little bit about kind of the community that you lean on to learn these things yes so the the technology trend around containers was very strong and very fast like with Amazon's especially like that when they came out with their ECS orchestration it was really fast and very strong and really the the technology trend kind of led me into it and then the developers being like we're gonna use docker we're gonna have to figure you're gonna have to figure out how to Splunk it so really from the very beginning I've gone through each and every sort of possible way to get data out of a dr. container in this Splunk and part of that is you know networking with the Splunk folks pretty good relationship with the with the fella that wrote the logging driver that went into the dock or open source project and like looked at the code reviews and all that and then it's really just trying it out trying things out and eventually kind of got to the sweet spot now where I've got the developers are all using local docker compose and that's configured a certain way then when we run in Amazon it's using Amazon ECS where I've also been working on kubernetes for a while and the way that you configure your docker in each of those environments is totally different the code running in the is exactly the same so we've realized that vision but the runtime environment is totally different so kind of where we're at now the config may be totally different on the logging drivers but in the end when you load up Splunk and you look at it and Splunk it's exactly the same whether it's your local laptop and amazon in production staving staging or whatever and I think my kind of favorite part in terms of like the Splunk commander award and getting folks using Splunk is that the way that I have it set it up set up now there is literally no local log file for the developers on their laptop it just doesn't exist it all goes out to Splunk so you can do a lot with grep and text pad and stuff on your local local laptop and I get that but now that they're in Splunk and it's just it's been a great way to get folks on board with what its gonna look like in production I know what it looks like in dev so I can make sure that my logs are good I'm logging enough and not too much and all that stuff so that's really where docker is really software is the same now we've got the logging the same the tools are all the same but then the runtime bits those are a little bit different and that's abstracted away hopefully Jim what does a DevOps guy want from a vendor you got a lot of open source stuff that you're working with you got a lot of different tooling what do you look for in a vendor what's what's the thumbs-up and positives and what what stuff really kind of ticked you off well so you know we're we're a key trusted vendor for a lot of healthcare organizations so I can kind of talk about how I we prison if a customer or a user comes up comes to us with a problem doesn't matter what it is it's our problem and we go through exhaustive lengths to identify where the problem actually is and so that may be in our code that maybe in another vendors code some third party some open source thing doesn't matter we're after the evidence we're after the facts we don't care if it's not in our code we're gonna help our customer be successful and that's what we would want from any vendor right so if we contact them with a support case we've got a problem we don't want any of this uh looks like a firewall problem or something like get to the data get to the facts and if you can prove if the vendor can prove that the problem is somewhere else great but we want a reproducible test case we want this whole finger-pointing thing is like it's horrible inside of an organization in terms of like running operational systems but then when you've got like as your Google Cloud Amazon Cloud Salesforce service now all these things all working together like you can't people just going to own the problem basically and that's what that's what we do right so if the customer comes to us with an issue it's our problem and then we go from there and figure it out and that's really what any vendor that we work with especially like a production operational sort of system that's really what we look for so you look for collaboration and focus on solving the problem not not the finger-pointing you know a virtual single throat to choke if you will yeah exactly hm well thanks very much for joining us on the cube is great to have you yeah thank you thank you very much appreciate I keep right - everybody stew and I'll be back hashtag Splunk conf 18 you're watching the cube right back [Music]