(soft music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's covers of Splunk's dot com virtual event, their annual summit. I'm John Ferry, host of the cube. We've been covering dot conf since twenty twelve. Usually a physical event in person. This year it's virtual. I'm here with Claire Hockin, the CMO of Splunk. She's been here three and a half years. Your first year as CMO, and you got to go virtual from physical. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much, John. Great. >> I got to ask you, I mean, this has been the most impressive virtual venue, you've taken over the hotel here in Silicon valley. You're entire teams here. It feels like there's a dynamic of like the teamwork. You can kind of feel the vibe. It's almost like a little VIP Splunk event, but you're broadcasting it to the world. Tell us what's happening. >> Yeah, it's been, I think for everyone a year where we really hope to be back to having a hybrid event, so having a big virtual component, but running dot conf as we had before from Las Vegas, which wasn't possible. So what we thought in the last six weeks is that we would actually bring the Splunk studio to a physical location. So we've been live all of this week from California, where we're sitting today and really thought through bringing the best of that programming to our, you know, our amazing audience of twenty six thousand people. So we were sitting here in a studio, we have a whole live stage and we've activated the best of dot conf to bring as many Splunkers as we can. And as many external guests to make it feel as real and as vibrant as possible. So. >> I have to say I'm very impressed. Since twenty twelve we've been watching the culture evolve. Splunk has always been that next big thing. And then the next big thing again, it seems to be the theme as data becomes so bigger and more important even than ever. There's a new Splunk emerging, another kind of next big thing. And this kind of says the patterns like do something big, that's new, operationalize it and do something new again. This is a theme, big part of this culture here. Can you share more about how you see this evolving? >> Sure. And I think that's what makes Splunk such a great place to be. And I think it attracts people who like to continually challenge reinvent. And I think we've spent a lot of time this year building out our portfolio, going through this cloud transformation. It just gives you a whole new landscape of how you unlock that power of data and how customers use it. So we've had a lot of fun, always building on top of that building, you know, our partnerships, what customers do and really having fun with it. I think one of the best things about Splunk is we do have this incredibly fun and playful brand and as data just becomes something that is more and more powerful, it's really relatable. And we have fun with activating that and storytelling. So, yeah. >> And you have a new manager, Teresa Carlson came in from Amazon web services. You have a lot more messaging kind of building on previous messaging. How are you handling and looking at the aperture of, that's growing from a messaging standpoint, you have a partner verse, which has rebranded of your solution of your ecosystem, kind of a lot of action going on in your world. What's the update? >> Yeah. It keeps us busy. And I think at one end, you know, the number of people that are using Splunk inside any customer base is just growing. So you have different kinds of users. And this year we're really working hard on how to partner and position Splunk with developers, but at the top end of that, the value of data and the idea of having a data foundation is something that's incredibly compelling for CTOs. So working really hard about looking at Splunk and data from that perspective, as well as the individual uses across areas like security and observability. So. >> You know, one of the things I wanted to ask you is, I was thinking about this when I was driving in this morning, Splunk has a lot of customers and you keep your customers and you've have a lot of customers that organically came into the Splunk through the product leadership and just great product. And then as security became more important, Splunk kind of takes that territory now. Now mainstream enterprise with the platform are leaning into Splunk solutions, and now you've got an ecosystem. So it's just becoming bigger and bigger just seems that the scale of the Splunk is growing radically bigger than it was, Is that happening? And what's your take on that? >> I think that's definitely a thing, John. So I think that the power of the ecosystem is amazing. We have customers, partners, as you've seen and everything just joins up. So we're seeing more and more dot joining through data. And we're just seeing this incredible velocity in terms of what's possible and how we can co-build with our partners and do more and more with our customers. So Splunk moves incredibly quickly. And I think if anything, we're just, gaining velocity, which is fun and also really challenging. >> Cloud-scale. And certainly during the pandemic, you guys had a tailwind on the business side, talk about the journey that you've had with Splunk as in your career and also for the customers. How are they reacting and what can they expect as Splunk continues to evolve? >> I think we're working really hard to make sure that Splunk is easier to use. Everything gets every more integrated. And I think our goal and our vision is you just capture your data and you can apply it to any use case using Splunk. And to make it sort of easier see that data in action. And one of the things I love from today was the dashboard studio. They're just these beautiful visualizations that really are inspiring around how data is working in your organization. And for me, I've been a Splunker for three and a half years. And I just think there is just so much to do, and there's so much of our story ahead of us and so much potential. So just really enjoying working with customers on the next data frontier, really. >> You have the Jedi Knight from Star Wars speaking, you had the F1 car racing. Lando was here, kind of the young Jedi, the old Jedi. The generations are coming together. You're seeing that old IT world, which relied on Splunk. And now you have this new developer real-time shifting left with security DevOps now going mainstream, you kind of have the confluences of these cultures coming together. It's not really clashing. It's kind of jelling. How are you handling that? How do you see that? What's Splunk kind of doing? Because I can see the themes, am I right? >> No, no. One of the stories from this morning that really struck me is we have Cal Poly and we worked with Cal Poly on their security and they actually have their students using Splunk and they run their whole security environment. And at the very top end, you have Walmart, the Fortune one, just using Splunk at a massive, incredible scale. And I think that's the power of data. I mean, data is something that everyone should and can be able to use. And that's what we're really seeing is unlocking the ability to bring, you know, bring all of your data in service of what you're trying to do, which is fun. And it just keeps growing. >> We had Zach Brown, the CEO of F1 McLaren Racing Team, here on the queue earlier. And it was interesting cause I was like driving the advantage with data, you know, kind of cliche, but they're using data very specifically, highly competitive. It almost kind of feels like a cloud kind of scale model because we've got thousands of people working on the team. They're on the track, they're competing, they're using data, they got to be agile and they got to be fast real time. Kind of sounds like the current enterprise's these days. >> Absolutely. And I think what's interesting about McLaren that the thing I love is either they have hundreds of terabytes of data moving at just at incredible speed through Splunk Enterprise, but it all goes back to their mission control in the UK. And there are 32 people that look at all that data. And I think it's got a half second delay and they make all the decisions for the car on the track. And that I think is a great lesson to any enterprises you have to, you know, you have to bring all that data together and you have to look at it and take decisions centrally for the benefit of your whole team. And I think McLaren is a really good example of when you do that it pays dividends and the team has had a really, really great season. >> Well, I want to say congratulations for pulling off a great virtual event. I know you had your physical event was on track and literally canceled the last minute because of the pandemic with the Delta virus. But it was amazing, made for digital TV kind of event. >> Absolutely, >> This is the future of media. >> Absolutely. And it is a lot of fun. And I think I'm really proud. We have done all of this with our in-house team, the brand, the experiences that you see, which is really fantastic. And it's given us a lot of ideas for sort of, you know, digital media and how we story tell, and really connect to our twenty thousand customers or two hundred and thirty thousand community members and keep everyone connected through digital. So this has been a lot of fun and a really nice moment for us this week. >> You know it's interesting, I was saying to the team here on one of our breaks, is that when you have this kind of agility with media to tell your own story directly, you're almost telling more stories there before. And there's a lot to tell you have a lot of successful customers, the new partners. What's the coolest story that you've seen. What would you share that you think is your favorite? If you could pick one or a few of them, what are your top stories that you see happening? >> So I've talked about Cal Poly, which I love because it's students and you know, the scale of Walmart, but there are so many stories. And I think the ones that I love most are the data heroes. We talk about the data here is a lot of Splunk and the people that are able to harness that data and to take action on that data and make something amazing happen. And we just see that time and time again, across all kinds of organizations where data heroes are surfacing, those insights. Those red flags, if you like and helping organizations stay on step ahead. And Conf is really a celebration of that. I think that's why we do this every year. And we really celebrate those data heroes. So across the program, probably too many to mention, but in every industry and at every scale, people are, you know, making things happen with data and that's an incredibly exciting place to be. >> Well you have a lot of great customers to, to use as references. But I got to ask you that as you go forward this year in marketing, what are your plans to take on this new dynamic? You've got hybrid events, you've got the community is always popular and thriving with Splunk at large-scale enterprises, global system integrators, doing business deals with you guys, as you guys are continuing to grow and grow and grow, what's the strategy? How do you keep the Splunk coolness going? Cause that's, you know, you guys are growing so fast. That's your job, is to keep things on track. What's your strategy? >> I think I look at that and just, we put the customer at the heart of that. And we think, you know, who are the personas, who are the people that use Splunk? What's their experience? What are they trying to do? What are those challenges? And we design those moments to help them move forward faster. And so that I think is just a really good north star. It is really unifying and our partners and customers, and every Splunker gets really behind that. So stay focused on that. >> Thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate it. Congratulations for great event. And thanks for having the Cube. We love coming in and sharing our media partnership with you. Thank you for coming. >> Thank you so much. And next year is your tenth year John. So we look forward to celebrating that as well. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Okay it's the Cube coverage here live in the Splunk studios. We are a virtual event, but it's turning out to be a hybrid event. It's like a VIP event, a lot of great stories. Check them out online. They'll be recycling through so much digital content. This is truly a great digital event. Jeffery, hot of the Cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Cameraman: You're on camera. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier, we are joined by Chris Kaddaras. He is the Senior Vice President Americas at Nutanix, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Well, thanks for having me. >> Rebecca: Returning to theCUBE I should say. >> Yes, good to be back. >> So you are relatively new to the Americas business. I wanna hear how you're adjusting and sort of observations that you've made about the enterprise customer and what's on their mind. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting journey 'cause I did spend the early part of my career in the Americas business with different companies so I started here in the Americas. You can tell by my accent, and I spent the last nine years in the AMEA business and getting reintroduced is really an interesting thing. Our customers have a much higher adoption rate of technology in the Americas than they do in some other parts of the world. So they're willing to take on new transformational technologies much earlier and deal with that risk seeing that they're gonna get those benefits so it's been a really exciting journey in the last month, month and a half to talk to customers who really embrace our technology because it's so transformational to what they've done in the past, and they're really seeing a lot of the benefits of that so it's been fun. >> What accounts for this difference in mindset, you say? >> You know, I think it has to do first off with in the Americas business, there's a lot of competition in the marketplace and when you get competition you get pressures that come with that competition. You have to evolve, you have to evolve how you deliver IT, how you deliver applications, and the business needs to evolve that supports that, so that pressure in the business environment creates a lot of new things and a lot of risk taking, a lot of transformation. A lot of things that have to happen for customers to deliver services to their end-user business sooner. >> That was a theme we were just talking about before you came on about your culture inside Nutanix and also your customer culture. They're risk takers, they're rebels. Like the Jedi Knight we saw on stage Mark Hamill. The Star Wars scene, which by the way was perfect. Great demographic to target there. Everyone loves Star Wars, in fact. But I gotta ask you, this show here is very intimate, not massive numbers. Not like the other big shows, your customers like coming here from what we've been hearing. You have a chance to sit down with them while they're here, what's the conversations that you're having with them? What's some of the new things that's emerging from their needs that you're hearing? >> Yeah, that's evolving, it's an interesting thing. I compare our customers to almost like a religious following, I know it's sometimes difficult to use religion in these conversations but it's really like that, these customers bought in, they're insurgents in what they're doing. They're really trying to evolve their organization because it's transformational, now what we're seeing at this show, because the numbers have gotten a lot bigger, last year we were like five thousand, the year before that we were another two thousand less than that so it's gotten a lot bigger, and our customers are coming back and saying we want you to be a bit more intimate, okay so we've had that in the past, we've had smaller teams, we've been really close to your engineering, we've been really close to you development roadmap. As you start to evolve into multiple products as you start to get bigger, you need to keep that intimacy with us, the customer because that's gonna give you the true north as to where you need to go, so we're getting that feedback, some of it's hard. Some of it's you're getting too big. You're getting too dispersed, you need to make sure you take care of us and what we need to do in our journey. But that's part of growing up as a company and that's the reason why we're here. To hear customer feedback. >> And you guys have that true north. Essentials, the enterprise opportunity. Multi-cloud right around the corner on top of your core business which is doing great by the way, got a great customer base. Getting beyond that core is critical. Building on that core, and this product risk potential, we talked with Sunil too, the next waves are coming so customers kind of want that assurance. So I gotta ask you, when you go out there and you're selling the customers and you tell them that Nutanix is the bridge to the future, what's the value proposition, I mean obviously we touched on the enablement side. Obviously consolidation's a side effect of the benefits of the technology you have. People love that, but what's the value proposition as the customers want the bridge to the future? Not just today's speeds and feeds and the greatest of today, what's the pitch with the enterprise and the multi-cloud? >> I think the biggest thing for our value proposition to a customer is to allow them to actually decide on a platform to build on. So instead of actually doing all the plumbing getting together and building these three tier architectures and figuring out how to build SaaS and compute farms and how they're gonna deal with multiple hypervisors, so let's get them out of that business, let's make it really simple. Develop a platform that they can launch off of. Now, that platform needs to think about new applications on those platforms so let's take it up a notch in regards to what we're looking at, let's forget about infrastructure, let's make it invisible as we've talked about in this conference. Let's look at how do we actually start to add services onto that platform that gives the customer choice, not locks the customer in. Which is the key thing that we have to do for our customers. Most of our competition today, it's a lock-in strategy, you pick the platform, you're locked in to the entire application set, locked in to the compute set, you're locked in to the storage set, you have no decision on hypervisor, and you don't have a lot of options around platforms and applications, so the good thing about Nutanix is we don't have the innovator's dilemma problem. We're not trying to protect a base. We're trying to help our customers and come from that optic of how do we allow our customers to have the most choice possible in building that platform for their new application so that's the discussion with our customers. It's invigorating for our customers. It's actually freeing for them to understand how we can do this versus what their options are in the marketplace today. >> So when they're at this conference and they're getting all this news about new products, lots of new announcements. How do you recommend that they wrap their brains around this and digest it and then execute on it? >> Yeah, it's hard, we're not doing a good job there today, just we're not. Now this is a journey of all of these companies like us, it's how do you go through that, I have the needle and going from a single product company to a multi-product platform company. Not many companies can do this. It's very difficult, so I understand what we're doing, what you do is come up with a lot of different products. A lot of different solutions for our customers and then you rationalize, right? We're right in the middle of that rationalization period where some products are features. We have to fold them together, right? Some products need to stand on their own. Some products need to be integrated into the core. All of those things are happening and the nice thing is you have to start with, let's just roll everything out. Let's get customers to tell us what we need to do, let's get our partners to inform us a little bit more. And then they'll educate us on the direction. It's not always our answer, right? When you're inside a company, if you think you have all the answers for the way the products need to be delivered, the way they need to be marketed to our customers, you're fooling yourself. So that's our direction today. >> Well Chris you guys have a good business to build on that's still relevant and cool for your customers and the enterprise which is great, you don't have to worry about product leadership. You got it there, as you guys, for you in particular and your customers you're also transitioning to software. You got the full stack, that's an advantage. You don't have to rely on other hypervisors, you mentioned that. We know who that is, Microsoft and VMware. Now you have a software business. So now the sales shifts to software which by the way is great from economics, the economics and valuations on software business are super high. >> Sure. >> So on the consumption side for customers this is gonna be something that you're gonna be involved in, you gotta bring Nutanix out to the field. You gotta roll it out for the customers. They're gonna consume Nutanix with software. How's that going, can you share some insight into the customer's orientation to the software model, what are some of the things that you're doing around kind of balancing that greatness of the leadership to the transitional software? >> That's a transition we started about a year ago, and some of the things that you may be bored with but we need to talk about is there's some real plumbing and structural work that we need to do internally so the first thing we did is we decided to make it pretty much open to our sales teams to be only compensated on software and they really don't have any discussion or care of what the underlying compute infrastructure needs to be so they need to be open to that. And that's one thing that's a little bit boring but once we actually did that, then the whole optics changed to how we actually go to market. So when we go to customers, we have discussions that are very open and when we're partnering in the marketplace with all of our OEM partners and all of our resale partners and all of our GSI partners it's a discussion around what's right for the customer here, what platform do you wanna consume, so that's the first move. The second thing is changing our licensing model to make it more inclusive for customers and what they want to achieve so moving our customers to a term based licensing model was really important. We've done that in the last year and then allowing our customers that consume very easily when you move to those terms so how do I consume a node of software? How does that work, how do I consume multiple products on top of that node? Let's make it simple, you know. Our previous go to market was relatively simple. It was just you buy X amount of Nutanix nodes. It came with hardware and software and customers really loved it. But as we transition to a software model it becomes a little more complex because you have multiple titles. Also, how do we allow our customers to do things like ELAs, what they may wanna consume have more agility around their software licensing mechanism. Get a lot more licenses up front. They don't have to buy every time. They can project what they're looking to do from a budget spend perspective and consume in a very frictionless way. So we're in the middle of really evolving our kind of enterprise type purchase agreement society, I wouldn't call it ELAs because ELAs in the marketplace have kind of got a bad name, right? There's a lot of things about that our other competitors do around true-ups that we don't plan on doing and we don't want to so we wanna work with our customers and partners as to how do you wanna buy those new enterprise price purchase agreements moving forward. >> I wanna ask you about Nutanix's brand awareness and brand identity because as you said earlier in this conversation you're hearing feedback from customers you're getting too big, and I think that so much of the beauty of the brand of Nutanix is this sort of renegade rebel kind of idea that this is who we are as a company. So when you hear that feedback you're getting too big, guys, you're becoming the man. How do you respond and what's the internal strategy there? >> Yeah, so the first response is I agree with them, right, because I see it as well, I've only been here for two and a half years and we're losing a little bit of connection. Now , I'm really comfortable to admit that. It's important that you actually admit that so that you can change, so the things that we're gonna do are a few things. We do have a customer advisory board that meets, right now it only meets once a year in certain markets and we need to actually increase the frequency of that, get more customer voices back into what we're doing, we got some really great feedback, constructive criticism from our customers this week, big customers that said you need to think about this and it was really refreshing to hear that. Sometimes difficult, we also have the voice of our customers which is our field organization, right, so our sales reps, our Ses, our services people, our customer success people, they're in front of customers every day. Out support people, providing that vehicle of feedback back through our executive teams, our engineering teams is really important, so we're formalizing that internally. We have some informal teams today but we're not getting the message through. They're not being heard well enough. Their voice isn't resounding as much as it should be. So we're gonna start to create and develop that within the company. >> So, growing pains, you have to fix those things. Software model, looking good, so things are clicking right now, net promoter score in the 90s which is pretty much unheard of. You have a great, loyal customer base. Good news there? >> Yeah, I mean great news, we're talking about first world problems here, right? We have a huge market, the market's growing at an incredible rate. It's all about how we take our fair share and more of that marketplace so these are the discussion that we're having. I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the world. Any other country >> Well, you're Chris, you're in sales, you're running all the fields. Sales and you guys got a humble culture with a heart, as Dheeraj talked about. You gotta be aggressive, you gotta be competitive, and you gotta go win those deals. You gotta win those competitive deals. This is a big opportunity for you guys. >> Yeah, and it's really from our perspective it's turned a bit into a two horse race at this point in time, we think we have the best choice solution for the marketplace for customers who want flexibility and choice. I can't imagine why you wouldn't at this point in time. Our competitors are strong, and they're good. They're good people, they work hard, they have great people and great technologies. Our entire value proposition around how to provide customers flexibility on what they're trying to achieve in their future and I think if we do that then we'll be in a good place. >> Well, my analysis on the opening yesterday was knowing, following you guys for 10 years knowing the competition, who could out-muscle you if you were head to head. You guys are faster and nimbler. You guys can be moving quicker, just be faster and innovate. >> Yeah, I think we're doing that on technology. We're doing that on our support structure with our NPS scores, we're clearly doing that on engineering new product. I mean coming out with an amazing product. Moving forward, I think we need to do a better job of how we align to our customers. As we've grown from a mid market company to an enterprise company to a global account company. These things come with complexities, right? You have to hire different people that have different skills, it's a scaling problem and those are things that we can easily do. I'm happy to do those and those are things that we are hiring new people that help us through that journey and it's really a fun thing to do and we're seeing a lot of positive results for our customers. >> Exciting times, well Chris Kaddaras thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. (electronic music)