>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCube. Covering .conf18, brought to you by Splunk. >> We're back in Orlando, Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. John Rooney is here. He's the vice president of product marketing at Splunk. Lot's to talk about John, welcome back. >> Thank you, thanks so much for having me back. Yeah we've had a busy couple of days. We've announced a few things, quite a few things, and we're excited about what we're bringing to market. >> Okay well let's start with yesterday's announcements. Splunk 7.2 >> Yup. _ What are the critical aspects of 7.2, What do we need to know? >> Yeah I think first, Splunk Enterprise 7.2, a lot of what we wanted to work on was manageability and scale. And so if you think about the core key features, the smart storage, which is the ability to separate the compute and storage, and move some of that cool and cold storage off to blob. Sort of API level blob storage. A lot of our large customers were asking for it. We think it's going to enable a ton of growth and enable a ton of use cases for customers and that's just sort of smart design on our side. So we've been real excited about that. >> So that's simplicity and it's less costly, right? Free storage. >> Yeah and you free up the resources to just focus on what are you asking out of Splunk. You know running the searches and the safe searches. Move the storage off to somewhere else and when you need it you pull it back when you need it. >> And when I add an index or I don't have to both compute and storage, I can add whatever I need in granular increments, right? >> Absolutely. It just enables more graceful and elastic expansiveness. >> Okay that's huge, what else should we know about? >> So workload management, which again is another manageability and scale feature. It's just the ability to say the great thing about Splunk is you put your data in there and multiple people can ask questions of that data. It's just like an apartment building that has ... You know if you only have one hot water heater and a bunch of people are taking a shower at the same time, maybe you want to give some privileges to say you know, the penthouse they're going to get the hot water first. Other people not so much. And that's really the underlying principle behind workload management. So there are certain groups and certain people that are running business critical, or mission critical, searches. We want to make sure they get the resources first and then maybe people that are experimenting or kind of kicking the tires. We have a little bit of a gradation of resources. >> So that's essentially programmatic SLAs. I can set those policies, I can change them. >> Absolutely, it's the same level of granular control that say you were on access control. It's the same underlying principle. >> Other things? Go ahead. >> Yeah John just you guys always have some cool, pithy statements. One of the things that jumped out to me in the keynotes, because it made me laugh, was the end of metrics. >> John: Yes. >> You've been talking about data. Data's at the ... the line I heard today was Splunk users are at the crossroads of data so it gives a little insight about what you're doing that's different ways of managing data 'cause every company can interact with the same data. Why is the Splunk user, what is it different, what do they do different, and how is your product different? >> Yeah I mean absolutely. I think the core of what we've always done and Doug talked about it in the keynote yesterday is this idea of this expansive, investigative search. The idea that you're not exactly sure what the right question is so you want to go in, ask a question of the data, which is going to lead you to another question, which is going to lead you to another question, and that's that finding a needle in a pile of needles that Splunk's always great at. And we think of that as more the investigative expansive search. >> Yeah so when I think back I remember talking with companies five years ago when they'd say okay I've got my data scientists and finding which is the right question to ask once I'm swimming in the data can be really tough. Sounds like you're getting answers much faster. It's not necessarily a data scientist, maybe it is. We say BMW on stage. >> Yeah. >> But help us understand why this is just so much simpler and faster. >> Yeah I mean again it's the idea for the IT and security professionals to not necessarily have to know what the right question is or even anticipate the answer, but to find that in an evolving, iterative process. And the idea that there's flexibility, you're in no way penalized, you don't have to go back and re-ingest the data or do anything to say when you're changing exactly what your query is. You're just asking the question which leads to another question, And that's how we think about on the investigative side. From a metric standpoint, we do have additional ... The third big feature that we have in Splunk Enterprise 7.2 is an improved metrics visualization experience. Is the idea of our investigative search which we think we are the best in the industry at. When you're not exactly sure what you're looking for and you're doing a deep dive, but if you know what you're looking for from a monitoring standpoint you're asking the same question again and again and again, over and again. You want be able to have an efficient and easy way to track that if you're just saying I'm looking for CPU utilization or some other metric. >> Just one last follow up on that. I look ... the name of the show is .conf >> Yes. >> Because it talks about the config file. You look at everywhere, people are in the code versus gooey and graphical and visualization. What are you hearing from your user base? How do you balance between the people that want to get in there versus being able to point and click? Or ask a question? >> Yeah this company was built off of the strength of our practitioners and our community, so we always want to make sure that we create a great and powerful experience for those technical users and the people that are in the code and in the configuration files. But you know that's one of the underlying principles behind Splunk Next which was a big announcement part of day one is to bring that power of Splunk to more people. So create the right interface for the right persona and the right people. So the traditional Linux sys admin person who's working in IT or security, they have a certain skill set. So the SPL and those things are native to them. But if you are a business user and you're used to maybe working in Excel or doing pivot tables, you need a visual experience that is more native to the way you work. And the information that's sitting in Splunk is valuable to you we just want to get it to you in the right way. And similar to what we talked about today in the keynote with application developers. The idea of saying well everything that you need is going to be delivered in a payload and json objects makes a lot of sense if you're a modern application developer. If you're a business analyst somewhere that may not make a lot of sense so we want to be able to service all of those personas equally. >> So you've made metrics a first class citizen. >> John: Absolutely. >> Opening it up to more people. I also wanted to ask you about the performance gains. I was talking to somebody and I want to make sure I got these numbers right. It was literally like three orders of magnitude faster. I think the number was 2000 times faster. I don't know if I got that number right, it just sounds ... Implausible. >> That's specifically what we're doing around the data fabric search which we announced in beta on day one. Simply because of the approach to the architecture and the approach to the data ... I mean Splunk is already amazingly fast, amazingly best in class in terms of scale and speed. But you realize that what's fast today because of the pace and growth of data isn't quite so fast two, three, four years down the road. So we're really focused looking well into the future and enabling those types of orders of magnitude growth by completely re imagining and rethinking through what the architecture looks like. >> So talk about that a little bit more. Is that ... I was going to say is that the source of the performance gain? Is it sort of the architecture, is it tighter code, was it a platform do over? >> No I mean it wasn't a platform do over, it's just the idea that in some cases the idea of thinking like I'm federating a search between one index here and one index there, to have a virtualization layer that also taps into compute. Let's say living in a patchy Kafka, taking advantage of those sorts of open source projects and open source technologies to further enable and power the experiences that our customers ultimately want. So we're always looking at what problems our customers are trying to solve. How do we deliver to them through the product and that constant iteration, that constant self evaluation is what drives what we're doing. >> Okay now today was all about the line of business. We've been talking about, I've used the term land and expand about a hundred times today. It's not your term but others have used it in the industry and it's really the template that you're following. You're in deep in sec ops, you're in deep in IT, operations management, and now we're seeing just big data permeate throughout the organization. Splunk is a tool for business users and you're making it easier for them. Talk about Splunk business flow. >> Absolutely, so business flow is the idea that we had ... Again we learned from our customers. We had a couple of customers that were essentially tip of the spear, doing some really interesting things where as you described, let's say the IT department said well we need to pull in this data to check out application performance and those types of things. The same data that's following through is going to give you insight into customer behavior. It's going to give you insight into coupons and promotions and all the things that the business cares about. If you're a product manager, if you're sitting in marketing, if you're sitting in promotions, that's what you want to access and you want to be able to access that in real time. So the challenge is that we're now stepping you with things like business flow is how do you create an interface? How do you create an experience that again matches those folks and how they think about the world? The magic, the value that's sitting in the data is we just have to surface it for the right way for the right people. >> Now the demo, Stu knows I hate demos, but the demo today was awesome. And I really do, I hate demos because most of them are just so boring but this demo was amazing. You took a bunch of log data and a business user ingested it and looked at it and it was just a bunch of data. >> Yeah. >> Like you'd expect and go eh what am I supposed to do with this and then he pushed button and then all of a sudden there was a flow chart and it showed the flow of the customer through the buying pattern. Now maybe that's a simpler use case but it was still very powerful. And then he isolated on where the customer actually made a phone call to the call center because you want to avoid if possible and then he looked at the percentage of drop outs, which was like 90% in that case, versus the percentage of drop outs in a normal flow which was 10%- Oop something's wrong, drilled in, fixed the problem. He showed how he fixed it, oh graphically beautiful. Is it really that easy? >> Yeah I mean I think if you think about what we've done in computing over the last 40 years. If you think about even the most basic word processor, the most basic spreadsheet work, that was done by trained technicians 30-40 years ago. But the democratization of data created this notion of the information worker and we're a decade or so now plus into big data and the idea that oh that's only highly trained professionals and scientists and people that have PHDs. There's always going to be an aspect of the market or an aspect of the use cases that is of course going to be that level of sophistication, but ultimately this is all work for an information worker. If you're an information worker, if you're responsible for driving business results and looking at things, it should be the same level of ease as your traditional sort of office suite. >> So I want to push on that a little if I can. So and just test this, because it looked so amazingly simple. Doug Merritt made the point yesterday that business processes they used to be codified. Codifying business processes is a waste of time because business processes are changing so fast. The business process that you used in the example was a very linear process, admittedly. I'm going to search for a product, maybe read a review, I'm going to put it in my cart, I'm going to buy it. You know, very straightforward. But business processes as we know are unpredictable now. Can that level of simplicity work and the data feed in some kind of unpredictable business process? >> Yeah and again that's our fundamental difference. How we've done it differently than everyone in the market. It's the same thing we did with IT surface intelligence when we launched that back in 2015 because it's not a tops down approach. We're not dictating, taking sort of a central planning approach to say this is what it needs to look like. The data needs to adhere to this structure. The structure comes out of the data and that's what we think. It's a bit of a simplification, but I'm a marketing guy and I can get away with it. But that's where we think we do it differently in a way that allows us to reach all these different users and all these different personas. So it doesn't matter. Again that business process emerges from the data. >> And Stu, that's going to be important when we talk about IOT but jump in here. >> Yeah so I wanted to have you give us a bit of insight on the natural language processing. >> John: Yeah natural language processing. >> You've been playing with things like the Alexa. I've got a Google Home at home, I've got Alexa at home, my family plays with it. Certain things it's okay for but I think about the business environment. The requirements in what you might ask Alexa to ask Splunk seems like that would be challenging. You're got a global audience. You know, languages are tough, accents are tough, syntax is really really challenging. So give us the why and where are we. Is this nascent things? Do you expect customers to really be strongly using this in the near future? >> Absolutely. The notion of natural language search or natural language computing has made huge strides over the last five or six years and again we're leveraging work that's done elsewhere. To Dave's point about demos ... Alexa it looks good on stage. Would we think, and if you're to ask me, we'll see. We'll always learn from the customers and the good thing is I like to be wrong all the time. These are my hypotheses, but my hypothesis is the most actual relevant use of that technology is not going to be speech it's going to be text. It's going to be in Slack or Hipchat where you have a team collaborating on an issue or project and they say I'm looking for this information and they're going to pass that search via text into Splunk and back via Slack in a way that's very transparent. That's where I think the business cases are going to come through and if you were to ask me again, we're starting the betas we're going to learn from our customers. But my assumption is that's going to be much more prevalent within our customer base. >> That's interesting because the quality of that text presumably is going to be much much better, at least today, than what you get with speech. We know well with the transcriptions we do of theCUBE interviews. Okay so that's it. ML and MLP I thought I heard 4.0, right? >> Yeah so we've been pushing really hard on the machine learning tool kit for multiple versions. That team is heavily invested in working with customers to figure out what exactly do they want to do. And as we think about the highly skilled users, our customers that do have data scientists, that do have people that understand the math to go in and say no we need to customize or tweak the algorithm to better fit our business, how do we allow them essentially the bare metal access to the technology. >> We're going to leave dev cloud for Skip if that's okay. I want to talk about industrial IOT. You said something just now that was really important and I want to just take a moment to explain to the audience. What we've seen from IOT, particularly from IT suppliers, is a top down approach. We're going to take our IT framework and put it at the edge. >> Yes. >> And that's not going to work. IOT, industrial IOT, these process engineers, it's going to be a bottoms up approach and it's going to be standard set by OT not IT. >> John: Yes. >> Splunk's advantage is you've got the data. You're sort of agnostic to everything else. Wherever the data is, we're going to have that data so to me your advantage with industrial IOT is you're coming at it from a bottoms up approach as you just described and you should be able to plug into the IOT standards. Now having said that, a lot of data is still analog but that's okay you're pulling machine data. You don't really have tight relationships with the IOT guys but that's okay you got a growing ecosystem. >> We're working on it. >> But talk about industrial IOT and we'll get into some of the challenges. >> Yeah so interestingly we first announced the Industrial Asset Intelligence product at the Hannover Messe show in Germany, which is this massive like 300,000 it's a city, it's amazing. >> I've been, Hannover. One hotel, huge show, 400,000 people. >> Lot of schnitzel (laughs) I was just there. And the interesting thing is it's the first time I'd been at a show really first of all in years where people ... You know if you go to an IT or security show they're like oh we know Splunk, we love Splunk, what's in the next version. It was the first time we were having a lot of people come up to us saying yeah I'm a process engineer in an industrial plant, what's Splunk? Which is a great opportunity. And as you explain the technology to them their mindset is very different in the sense they think of very custom connectors for each piece. They have a very, almost bespoke or matched up notion, of a sense to a piece of equipment. So for an example they'll say oh do you have a connector for and again, I don't have the machine numbers, but like the Siemens 123 machine. And I'll be like well as long as it's textural structural to semi structural data ideally with a time stamp, we can ingest and correlate that. Okay but then what about the Siemens ABC machine? Well the idea that, the notion that ... we don't care where the source is as long as there's a sensor sending the data in a format that we can consume. And if you think back to the beginning of the data stream processor demo that Devani and Eric gave yesterday that showed the history over time, the purple boxes that were built, like we can now ingest data via multiple inputs and via multiple ways into Splunk. And that hopefully enables the IOT ecosystems and the machine manufacturers, but more importantly, the sensor manufacturers because it feels like in my understanding of the market we're still at a point of a lot of folks getting those sensors instrumented. But once it's there and essentially the faucet's turned on, we can pull it all in and we can treat it and ingest it just as easily as we can data from AWS Kineses or Apache Access logs or MySequel logs. >> Yeah and so instrumenting the windmill, to use the metaphor, is not your job. Connectivity to the windmill is not your job, but once those steps have been taken and the business takes those steps because there's a business case, once that's done then the data starts flowing and that's where you come in. >> And there's a tremendous amount of incentive in the industry right now to do that level of instrumentation and connectivity. So it feels like that notion of instrument connect then do the analytics, we're sitting there well positioned once all those things are in place to be one of the top providers for those analytics. >> John I want to ask you something. Stu and I were talking about this at our kickoff and I just want to clarify it. >> Doug Merritt said that he didn't like the term unstructured data. I think that's what he said yesterday, it's just data. My question is how do you guys deal with structured data because there is structured data. Bringing transaction processing data and analytics data together for whatever reason. Whether it's fraud detection, to give the buyer an offer before you lose them, better customer service. How do you handle that kind of structured data that lives in IBM mainframes or whatever. USS mainframes in the case of Carnival. >> Again we want to be able to access data that lives everywhere. And so we've been working with partners for years to pull data off mainframes. Again, the traditional in outs aren't necessarily there but there are incentives in the market. We work with our ecosystem to pull that data to give it to us in a format that makes sense. We've long been able to connect to traditional relational databases so I think when people think of structured data they think about oh it's sitting in a relational database somewhere in Oracle or MySequel or SQL Server. Again, we can connect to that data and that data is important to enhance things particularly for the business user. Because if the log says okay whatever product ID 12345, but the business user needs to know what product ID 12345 is and has a lookup table. Pull it in and now all of a sudden you're creating information that's meaningful to you. But structure again, there's fluidity there. Coming from my background a Json object is structured. You can the same way Theresa Vu in the demo today unfurled in the dev cloud what a Json object looks like. There's structure there. You have key value pairs. There's structure to key value pairs. So all of those things, that's why I think to Doug's point, there's fluidity there. It is definitely a continuum and we want to be able to add value and play at all ends of that continuum. >> And the key is you guys your philosophy is to curate that data in the moment when you need it and then put whatever schema you want at that time. >> Absolutely. Going back to this bottoms up approach and how we approach it differently from basically everyone else in the industry. You pull it in, we take the data as is, we're not transforming or changing or breaking the data or trying to put it into a structure anywhere. But when you ask it a question we will apply a structure to give you the answer. If that data changes when you ask that question again, it's okay it doesn't break the question. That's the magic. >> Sounds like magic. 16,000 customers will tell you that it actually works. So John thanks so much for coming to theCUBE it was great to see you again. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back. You're watching theCUBE from Splunk conf18 #splunkconf18. We'll be right back. (electronic drums)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back and we're live here in Las Vegas. This is 45,000 people here for Amazon Web Services re:Invent. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman. And our next guests are Barry Russell, general manager and business development of AWS Marketplace, and John Rooney, Vice President of product management for Splunk, partner of AWS. Also we cover Cube.com, Cube alumnis. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Thank you, it's wonderful to be back. >> So what's it like partnering with AWS? Because you guys got a big mention from Andy Jassy on my interview with him last week, really highlighting Splunk as a partner that's done so well on the platform, in the ecosystem. You guys were called out as just a real success story. Congratulations, what's the secret magic formula? Just can't be making great products? >> No, really, I think the secret formula is really about helping customers, and sort of what do customers need, and getting it to them. And there is this sort of virtuous cycle of the more AWS continues to innovate in how customers can build, deploy, manage services and applications, really build a whole business in the cloud, the more varied visibility needs there are. And that's what we provide. So it's a really good symbiotic relationship. It's a partnership that goes back years and years. I think I was here in 2012 on theCUBE re:Invent that year. And every year, it seems like there is no shortage of services. >> You and Jerry Chen have been on every year of AWS. >> I'm trying to dress better. That first year I wore a black Splunk t-shirt. And my Aunt Merry Jo was really upset. Like, "Can you please dress up?" So I'm wearing a sport jacket and shirt. So doing my best. >> Whatever you do, don't wear a tie. I'm boycotting the tie. >> I'll try not to. Yeah. >> Barry, we've been talking about the engagement and integrations that you've been doing. Talk about Splunk, the category that they're in, and why that's important in the marketplace. >> Yeah, well they've been great at innovating with us. In particular, they offer customers the ability to really deeply analyze what's happening in their environment. And as customers are migrating over, that's been super important for us. As a customer makes a decision to shut down data centers and migrate those application workloads over, they want to understand what's happening in their environment. They want security within that environment. And Splunk has been innovating around that. And for us, they've been a great partner because not only have they offered a traditional machine image-based software. But now they offer Splunk Cloud, which is a SAS based offering. Which we know many enterprise customers are moving to that model. >> What's the Splunk formula for the product? Because I hear there's a lot. And it's been debunked, but I'll bring it up because it's out there in people's minds. Whoa if we partner with Amazon I don't know they might take over our company. So I won't say there's a general fear, but I've heard that before. >> No, no, I think our relationship, again, with Amazon, it is around delivering the best possible service. the best possible products to our customers and we feel like the Amazon platform is, it's obviously best in industry, and best in class. Look around at the people that are here. And our customers are going there in droves. And they're looking at moving workloads. They're looking at starting. I mean, that's the other thing that's great. And the interesting thing, That we heard so much about serverless in the last couple of days and so much about sort of the next paradigm in building applications. That's all because the groundwork's been set in the cloud by Amazon for when the cloud in 2008, 2009, 2010 was all forklift a VM into the cloud and that sort of cloud. Well now we're completely re-architecting. We're really thinking about re-thinking the way applications and services are built. And again, that brings in new changes and challenges in visibility. I think the early, the sort of last decade or so at the early stage of, what were the concerns around the cloud? It's like, well, what about security and what about visibility? Obviously Verner talked today in the keynote about security is job one. Every developer needs to think about security. That's no longer a concern. That's not a blocker for cloud migration. Then obviously you have things like the Kinesis Firehose. All these other sources of information and sources of data so that customers who are moving their workloads to the cloud still have the same and probably better and more manageable visibility then they would have if they were pulling log files off disks in their data center. >> John you mentioned customers going through that transformation. I remember when we first started covering the Splunk conference with theCUBE. It was heavily virtualization environment. I mean, I first came across Splunk from the VMware community and the like. Customers are being pulled and going through those transformations. You mentioned Kinesis, you talk about, I think you've got an announcement for the Alexa for business also. You have a pretty broad spectrum. I mean, Splunk, how do you manage that portfolio internally and with customers? How do you manage the, I wouldn't say old guard for Splunk but you know manage the modernization and all these changes that are happening? >> Well, sort of the mental model for Splunk has always been, we'll go and get your data wherever it is and we'll pull it into Splunk so then you can correlate, visualize, search, and get value out of that data. And in some cases, that data is going to live, again, in the traditional distributed data center environment. Is going to be a log written to disk. There are still some industries where there are still mainframes. I know it seems crazy, but that is still a big piece and that's not necessarily going to go away tomorrow or the next day. But more importantly, I think increasingly, you're going to see, not just a, again, take an existing VM and forklift that into an IS environment. Lets re-architect an entire service. Lets rethink the way that we're delivering value to our customers. Those are the interesting opportunities for us It's a very close partnership with AWS. We're very closely aligned with the teams. So as they think about services, Cloud Trails, and the Kinesis Firehose, and Guard Duty. These things that they realize are valuable to their customers because they are here and their customers ask for it. We have just a good partnership that says, how can we plug in? How can we contribute to that initiative? >> Hey Barry, there's a word that John used that I want to ask you about. It's data. So you know when we interviewed Andy last year I put forth the premise, I think data is going to be the next flywheel for AWS. How does the marketplace look at that? You work with your partners, obviously integrations, the APIs but data is at the center of it. And how do you make sure that you are securing the data? Make sure that only the people have it but that partners can also help customers get more value out of it? >> Well you know all the applications we list in the catalog are put through security tests and we scan the applications themselves, the code, 24 hours a day seven days a week. It's part of the value we add. But working with ISVs like Splunk we also build API integration to services like Kinesis Firehose, like S3, like Aurora, so that customers have the opportunity to move their data over into AWS, which is where it's secure, and then leverage secure software to access and analyze that data. So I think he's exactly right in working in partnership with AWS. There's that connective tissue between a third party software and the native AWS service. >> Where's it go next for you guys? I mean, obviously, I think you're right about this whole partnership thing. Even though I brought that other question up. The growth is so massive. You can innovate with AWS. It's not like you're just partnering with them and putting it in a marketplace and hope someone buys it. There's growth. I think that's the nuance that people don't understand, is that you can do more with AWS. >> Well yeah I mean absolutely. I think the ability to be part of, the same way, again, in the keynote today, we talked about building in security from the get go. You start with security and with functionality. I think the notion of visibility and observability from a data standpoint. If you are building something, how do you know it's working? How can you provide the folks in operational roles and business roles the data and information that they need? So if you bake that in from the beginning, we now have an opportunity for Splunk to rethink our integration points. To rethink how we deliver value to customers. Again if you think about the Splunk origin story, we started with monitoring and troubleshooting in production environments. Right? Obviously, we built the company on that. We drink a lot of free soda in San Francisco based on those use cases. But if you think about now with DevOps and sort of the shift left movement that >> Your chair has grown significantly, big time because more services are available. >> More services are available but also people are rethinking the whole notion of product development and life cycle. And again I think DevOps, in many cases, the accelerant for DevOps has been cloud and obviously the accelerant for cloud has been AWS. >> Alright question for both of you guys because we've been talking about this on theCUBE and I've got Andy coming on in a few hours. We believe there is going to be a renaissance in software development. You mentioned software lifecycle. You can see it here. Verner's keynote about re-imagining architecture. He put the basic architecture slide up from a video streaming company, boxes and lines, normal architecture. Then S3 buckets, it looked completely different. So the question is with all the simplicity now, all this simplification in APIs. This is going to be a real boom for developers. We believe this is going to be a renaissance in software development, because it's not going to be you grandfather's software development lifecycle. Do you believe that, and how do you see software developers evolving? More craft? More artisanship? What do you see? >> I think that the confines of the scope of what a developer did five, ten, fifteen years ago is different. Developers didn't think about security. They didn't care about security. They didn't think about scalability. They didn't think about. What does elasticity of scale look like in my application? I don't know it worked in my dev environment. That now feels archaic. That's like leeches. Nobody does business like that anymore, right? And I think that's where the notion of >> Cloud9 was an impressive demo too. >> Absolutely. >> Things like that are coming down >> Yeah the idea that you have a fully powered IDE that includes interactivity in the cloud. Folks have sort of dreamt of that. If you think about how heavyweight the client based IDE has got to a certain point kind of in the late odds. Everyone went away from that and said nope we're just going to VI everything. I don't want to see, I don't want to plug in. I don't want to download anything. I just want to VI anything. Now it's sort of, we're back to. I have this full set of functionality. I have code completion, and I have all the things I need as a developer to help me. But its completely light weight. It's a service. It's a utility. It's like the faucet. So-- >> Here's what I would say. I would say that for the first time developers are going to have a rich set of options where they can choose how the customer deploys the software. Containers or serverless. API based or SAS. With the consumption model that matches that use case. Hourly, and metered, annual, or multi-year or consumed via an API service. >> It's going top be awesome and creative too. A lot of creativity. Final question because I know both of your companies very well. Both have really strong communities. The role of communities, certainly open source is growing exponentially. We're seeing that with the Linux Foundation and a variety of other places. With the cloud flywheel, with the open source flywheel, we believe communities are going to be very important. You guys both have strong communities, Splunk and AWS. What would you say to folks that aren't thinking about nurturing and building community into their products? >> I would say that our company was built by our early advocates. I mean again, our mission at the end of the day and from the very beginning was our core practitioners, our users. It's a little slightly different now AWS is sort of the classic developer but for us it was the sysadmin, the tier one and tier two SOC analysts and security. How do we help their lives? How do we make their job better? So we have to have an intimate understanding of what problems are they trying to solve? How do we solve that? How do we abstract away, essentially, the high-effort low-value parts of their job? Have the software do that, so they get to the point where their focus is on the. Essentially they get to apply their intellect, their expertise. Then they evangelize for us. So community is one hundred percent essential. It doesn't matter how great the mouse trap is if you are not connecting with people, if you are not making people part of that and allowing people to share ideas. >> So you had a strategy for community out of the gate. >> Yeah I think it's community first. >> Without community you don't get the feedback on how to improve your product. It's that simple. >> That simple, all right. Man, a great conversation. Marketplace is booming. General Manager of the Marketplace, Barry Russell. We got also John Rooney vice president of product marketing at Splunk. Very successful company. Gone from very small niche product, great community, to public company and now taking over the data world. Great to see you, John. Thanks for coming on. Barry, thanks for the commentary. >> Thank you. >> It' theCUBE 45,000 people here live in Vegas for re:Invent. I'm John Furrier and Stu. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's the Cube. Covering VeeamOn 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Dave Velante with Stu Menamin. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Kevin Rooney is here. He is the vice president of North American Channel Sales at Veeam, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, so the channel is where it's at in your company from day one, right? >> From day one I have to say that Veeam did a wonderful job in terms of their go to market was always through the channel. We're not changing DNA of the company in terms of getting them to engage with our partners and figure out how to work well with them. It's been the case since the beginning. >> How are you guys organized? Obviously you've got a sales force as well and that's what, an evangelist force? They're an overlay, they're sort of catalyst? How does that all? >> From a channel perspective we want to work to enable our partners obviously, understand the technology, understand how do we solve customer challenges. Then we align ourselves to our segment teams. So from an end-users sales standpoint we have the traditional enterprise, commercial S and B sled-fed teams. But really from a general standpoint I look at our salespeople and we carry quota. I mean, we are salespeople so we're not just in the enablement game, we're also in helping our partners to get closer to their customers and deliver the solutions that really do solve the problems that our customers are facing. >> So when you're real tiny company we know the channel. The channel wants to make money. How do I make money with you guys? Veeam had a hot product so the channel said okay good, I'm there. Now as you're a larger company moving upmarket, you know it's really got to provide more support and training and deal with your deal reg and all kinds of things. Can you talk about that transformation and what people are asking you for? >> Yeah, one of the things that I love about Veeam, and I've been on board for about 15 months. I've come from some larger companies certainly in my past. Even though we're getting bigger we're staying very entrepreneurial in our approach. We realize that we have to be very proactive in our approach with working with partners. We need to provide them the complete story. So profitability is certainly a component. Our partner program is consistently rated as one of the best in the business. It's because it allows partners to be profitable, but again the product and the solution is so complete. It just works, that it's the right fit for shared our customers. As we've gotten bigger we need to continue to make sure that we're staying very much engaged with our partners. We focus on our enablement. We make sure that they have the right level of training. We make sure that they understand what is our sales pitch into the customer base. Why is it that Veeam is a better option than what else they might be looking at. We started in the S and B, right? The company started in the S and B eight and a half, nine years ago when we started selling products. But absolutely were on that journey into the enterprise space. Without forgetting that S and B's we were born and bred. >> Kevin, one of the great things about Veeam is there's really a simplicity to the product set. Can you explain kind of the segmentation? You've got the S and B, you've got the enterprise. Does the product differentiate itself? Is there pricing and bundling, incentives? How does that break up when you go to market? >> Great question, the reality is that the solution is the same. It's funny that as companies you segment a market and the customers don't see themselves as any different whether they're 100-man shop or a Fortune 50. They have business problems that they have to solve. So the solution is the same, but we really realize that we need to make sure we dedicate a part of our end-user sales force against each of the segments to make sure they get the right level of service. The way that we do it is that everything below 250 seats we classify as S and B. We have a very significant commercial space that is almost everything else. Then we name about 1,000 accounts that we go after from an enterprise standpoint. But the reality is every single customer is just as important as the next. So it really was a matter of how do we best service them as opposed to hey, we treat them differently, we give them different pricing. None of that exists. It is just really a matter of our level of service for them. >> We talked to Peter Mackay earlier, he said about 30% of revenue is with service providers. How does that fit into the whole channel mix? >> That's a part that's growing each and every day. As the cloud becomes more and more important our cloud service providers become a more significant portion of our business. So it's really, it's the full spectrum. We work with the traditional resellers that are simply interested in the typical infrastructure, software sales. Then you have the cloud service providers that get more into that type of model. Then we certainly have the folks that do both. It's really, I think that's our next big jumping off point is that cloud business because literally there's no better solution for our customers and therefore our partners to do that hybrid model than Veeam. >> Speak a little bit to the channel readiness for cloud. I remember a few years ago it was like 10 or 15% of the channel was ready. I think a much higher percentage at least understands cloud, or trying to figure out how cloud fits into their practice. Are you riding that wave? Are you educating them on that next wave? >> I think we're all learning together. I mean it's a brand new world if you will. I think you're going to see, and we have seen, the folks that can't make that transition into what is required by our customers which is truly that hybrid. I do need on-premise, and I do need off-premise. >> We're all learning together. So we're educating. We're figuring out what are the right programs with the right sales approach. What is the right level of support? And I think that if we don't make this transition together there will be people left behind. >> Help us understand the make up of the channel. Sorry for the pejorative, but you've got the box sellers, you've got the cloud service providers, you've got solution providers, and you have this maybe I don't know what you call them, the DevOps, the hoodie crowd. This is more of an influencer than anything of our channel. The traditional guys that just move boxes, they're either evolving or they're going to probably die. Solutions guys, okay well the SAP, Oracle, Veeam Ware obviously, some of those guys. Then it was to say the cloud service providers and the DevOps, how do you refine that little model that I just painted? Is that a viable picture of the channel? >> It is, and I think you said it well. Those that don't make that transformation into what is really required by our customers, they dictate what we need to become, right? We can all sit back in think tank rooms and say what do we think we want to go out and be? But if it doesn't apply to solving the business challenges that our customers are facing, it doesn't matter. So those box pushers as you put it, they're going to go away. If they don't transform their business to truly meeting the requirements that the business is driving today, they won't be around. So we're working to try to identify and I think for the most part a lot of us in the technology sector recognize the partners that have made that transition or that are in the process of making that transition and we're investing heavily into them. They're the ones that have a deep and wide services bench. They're the ones who have the ability to do massive deployment type of activities. I mean, for the first time in the history of the channel the last two years we've seen over 50% of the revenues come from services. So if you're not working with partners that have that deep and wide services engagement ability then you're probably working with the wrong people. >> So what's that total ecosystem? >> Revenues over the last two years have now tilted to the majority being in the services side from the traditional infrastructure sales. Really that just lends itself to the fact that we're getting into more complex deployments. We're getting into longer engagements. So for those of us as vendors that are looking out for the partners that are going to help take these solutions to the next level for our shared customers, we have to have partners that have that ability to deliver those services to have those lengthy engagements. >> So the conversation that you're having with customers is changing as well, obviously. >> It's interesting, there was a day and it wasn't that long ago, that you sat down and you talked features. This is what my product does. That isn't the way that customers want to talk any longer. Yes, embedded in the discussion is the fact that our software can deliver all kinds of features and functionality. But you start out with what keeps you up at night? What do you worry about? What is it that your leadership is putting pressure on you, Mr. IT leader? I mean IT is no longer just a support mechanism for businesses, it's a way to make revenue. And if it's not done properly you're missing a tremendous opportunity. When we go in with our partners and they're having these discussions the correct way as well, is that we sit there and say what is it that we need to solve? We don't sit there and say let me tell you what Veeam 10.0 brings you. Yes, that is embedded into the conversation when we tell you how we can solve your problems. But we don't start with that. >> With 45,000 partners obviously that's a lot of partners. You're going to span all those constituencies that we had just talked about. How do you look at the ROI of partnership and where you invest and how you sort of manage that portfolio? It's a great question and it's a great challenge. Because look, we want as many people out as we possibly can delivering the Veeam value proposition. That said, we understand that we need to identify the partners that are actually investing back on ourselves. And that we're building a business together as opposed to customer asked for it, I provided it. That's going to happen and that's great. But we have to identify where it makes sense to place our bets, if you will. So whether that's from our field resources, whether it's from our dollars investment we're identifying the partners that have a deep and robust bench of services opportunity, understand the value of really data availability. That's what it is any longer. It's no more about high availability, it's business availability, it's data availability. And those partners that are willing to take the leap with us and start to invest and do the technical certifications, sales certifications, build a practice where Veeam is a part of it, that's where we're putting our investments. >> Kevin you spend a day with partners yesterday. Can you give our audience a little bit of insight. What are some of the key things you're doing? What feedback you're getting, what advice you are giving to the channel partners? >> All I say is it's been a wonderful ride. As I stated in the opening I've only been onboard for about 15 months so I can't take credit for all the greatness that has been going on at Veeam. (laughter) But the reality is it's been a great ride. But the ride we're about to take out for the next five to ten years is going to be entirely different and it's going to be a wonderful one. What we're telling partners is thank you for being a part of this to this point but boy is this going to be really interesting here as we go out over the next one, two, five years. I mean the work that we're doing with our alliance partners, the product we iterate on it every six to 12 months. I mean, a lot of the people in our space and I won't name names, but they sit on the same technology that's been in place for years. So they're not out looking to try to solve the next customer problem. My message to the partners is this is only going go get better. We are enterprise ready. We were born in that S and B space and we love that space and we're never going to look away from it. But come along with us because we solve all customer problems. So if I'm a partner sitting in the audience yesterday or today or in these meetings that we're having in the Expo Center, I feel pretty confident that I've hitched my ride into the right player. >> Well it talks to relevance. The partners wants to work with the company that is relevant, that has momentum. You guys have got a lot of tailwinds behind you. Kevin, thanks very much for coming on the Cube, it was great to see you. >> I appreciate it, thanks guys. >> All right you're welcome. Keep it right there, Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this. This is the Cube, we're live from New Orleans, VeeamOn. (upbeat digital music)

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering PagerDuty summit 2019 brought to you by PagerDuty. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Q. We're a PagerDuty summit. It's the fourth year of the show. He's been here for three years. It's amazing to watch it grow. I think it's finally outgrown the Western Saint Francis here in lovely downtown San Francisco and we're really excited to be joined by our next guest. He's Alex Solomon, the co founder, co founder and CTO PagerDuty. Been at this over 10 years. Alex, first off, congratulations. And what a fantastic event. Thank you very much and thank you for having me on your show. So things have changed a lot since we had you on a year ago, this little thing called an IPO. So I'm just curious, you know, we have a lot of entrepreneurs. I watch a show as a founder and kind of go through this whole journey. What was that like? What are some of the things you'd like to share from that whole experience? >>Yeah, it was, it was incredible. I I, the word I like to use is surreal. Like just kind of going through it, not believing that it's real in a way. And adjoining by my, my lovely wife who came, came along for this festivities and just being able to celebrate that moment. I know it is just a moment in time and it's not, it's not the end of the journey certainly, but it is a big milestone for us and uh, being able to celebrate. We invited a lot of our customers, our early customers have been with us for years to join us in that, a celebration. Our investors who have believed in us from back in 2010. Right, right. We were just getting going and we just, we just had a great time. I love it. I love 10 year overnight success. 10 years in the making. >>One of my favorite expressions, and it was actually interesting when Jenn pulled up some of the statistics around kind of what the internet was, what the volume of traffic was, what the complexity in the systems are. And it's really changed a lot since you guys began this journey 10 years ago. Oh, it has. I mean back then, like the most popular monitoring tool is Nagios and new Relic was around but just barely. And now it's like Datadog has kind of taken over the world and the world has changed. We're talking about not just a microservices by containers and serverless and the cloud basically. Right. That's the kind of recurring theme that's changed over the last 10 years. But you guys made some early bets. You made bets on cloud. He made bets on dev ops. He made bets on automation. Yeah, those were pretty good. >>Uh, those, those turn out to be pretty good places to put your chips. Oh yeah. Right place, right time and um, you know, some, some experiential stuff and some just some raw luck. Right. All right, well let's get into it. On top of some of the product announcements that are happening today, what are some of the things you're excited to finally get to showcase to the world? Yeah, so one of the big ones is, uh, related to our event intelligence release. Uh, we launched the product last year, um, a few months before summit and this year we're making a big upgrade and we're announcing a big upgrade to the product where we have, uh, related incidents. So if you're debugging a problem and you have an incident that you're looking at, the question you're gonna ask is, uh, is it just my service or is there a bigger widespread problem happening at the same time? >>So we'll show you that very quickly. We'll show you are there other teams, uh, impacted by the same issue and we'll, we, we actually leveraged machine learning to draw those relationships between ongoing incidents. Right. I want to unpack a little bit kind of how you play with all these other tools. We, you know, we're just at Sumo logic a week or so ago. They're going to be on later their partner and people T I think it's confusing. There's like all these different types of tools. And do you guys partner with them all? I mean, the integration lists that you guys have built. Um, I wrote it down in service now. It's Splunk, it's Zendesk, it goes on and on. And on. Yeah. So explain to folks, how does the PagerDuty piece work within all these other systems? Sure. So, um, I would say we're really strong in terms of integrating with monitoring tools. >>So any sort of tool that's monitoring something and we'll admit an alert, uh, when something goes down or over an event when something's changed, we integrate and we have a very wide set of coverage with all, all of those tools. I think your like Datadog, uh, app dynamics, new Relic, even old school Nagios. Right. Um, and then we've also built a suite of integrations around all the ticketing systems out there. So service now a JIRA, JIRA service desk, um, a remedy as well. Uh, we also now have built a suite of integrations around the customer support side of things. So there'll be Zendesk and Salesforce. That's interesting. Jen. Megan had a good example in the keynote and kind of in this multi system world, you know, where's the system of record? Cause he used to be, you want it, everybody wanted it to be that system of record. >>They wanted to be the single player in the class. But it turns out that's not really the answer. There's different places for different solutions to add value within the journey within those other applications. Yeah, absolutely. I, I think the single pane of glass vision is something that a lot of companies have been chasing, but it's, it's, it's really hard to do because like for example, NewRelic, they started an APM and they got really good at that and that's kind of their specialty. Datadog's really good at metrics and they're all trying to converge and do everything and become the one monitoring solution to the Rooney rule them all right. But they're still the strongest in one area. Like Splunk for logs, new Relic and AppDynamics for APM and Datadog for metrics. And, um, I don't know where the world's going to take us. Like, are they, is there going to be one single monitoring tool or are, are you going to use four or five different tools? >>Right. My best guess is your, we're going to live in a world where you're still gonna use multiple tools. They each can do something really well, but it's about the integration. It's about building, bringing all that data together, right? That's from early days. We've called pager duty, the Switzerland monitoring, cause we're friends with everyone when we're partners with everyone and we sit on top right a work with all of these different roles. I thought her example, she gave him the keynote was pretty, it's kind of illustrative to me. She's talking about, you know, say your cables down and you know, you call Comcast and it's a Zendesk ticket. But >>you know then that integrates potentially with the PagerDuty piece that says, Hey we're, you know, we're working on a problem, you know, a backhoe clipped the cable down your street. And so to take kind of that triage and fix information and still pump that through to the Zen desk person who's engaging with the customer to actually give them a lot more information. So the two are different tracks, but they're really complimentary. >>Absolutely. And that's part of the incident life cycle is, is letting your customers know and helping them through customer support so that the support reps understand what's going on with the systems and can have an intelligent conversation with the customer. So that they're not surprised like a customer calls and says you're down. Oh, good to know. No, you want to know about that urge, which I think most people find out. Oh yeah. Another thing >>that struck me was this, this study that you guys have put together about unplanned work, the human impact of always on world. And you know, we talk a lot in tech about unplanned maintenance and unplanned downtime of machines, whether it's a, a computer or a military jet, you know, unplanned maintenance as a really destructive thing. I don't think I've ever heard anyone frame it for people and really to think about kind of the unplanned work that gets caused by an alert and notification that is so disruptive. And I thought that was a really interesting way to frame the problem and thinking of it from an employee centric point of view to, to reduce the nastiness of unplanned work. >>Absolutely. And that's, that V is very related to that journey of going from being reactive and just reacting to these situations to becoming proactive and being able to predict and, and, uh, address things before they impact the customer. Uh, I would say it's anywhere between 20 to 40 or even higher percent of your time. Maybe looking at software engineers is spent on the some plant work. So what you want to do is you want to minimize that. You want to make sure that, uh, there's a lot of automation in the process that you know what's going on, that you have visibility and that the easy things, the, the repetitive things are easy to automate and the system could just do it for you so that you, you focus on innovating and not on fixing fires. Right? Or if you did to fix the fire, you at least >>to get the fire to the right person who's got the right tone to fix the type. So why don't we just, you know, we see that all the time in incidents, especially at early days for triage. You know, what's happening? Who did it, you know, who's the right people to work on this problem. And you guys are putting a lot of the effort into AI and modeling and your 10 years of data history to get ahead of the curve in assigning that alerted that triage when it comes across the, the, uh, the trans though. >>Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's another issues. Uh, not having the right ownership, get it, getting people, um, notified when they don't own it and there's nothing they can do about it. Like the old ways of, of uh, sending the alert to everyone and having a hundred people on a call bridge that just doesn't work anymore because they're just sitting there and they're not going to be productive the next day I work cause they're sitting there all night just kind of waiting for, for something to happen. And uh, that's kinda the, the old way of lack of ownership just blasted out to everyone and we have to be a lot more target and understand who owns what and what's, what, which systems are being impacted and they only let getting the right people on the auto call as quickly as possible. The other thing that came up, which I thought, you know, probably a lot of people are thinking of, they only think of the fixing guy that has to wear the pager. >>Sure. But there's a whole lot of other people that might need to be informed, be informed. We talked about in the Comcast example that people interacting with the customer, ABC senior executives need to be in for maybe people that are, you know, on the hook for the SLA on some of the softer things. So the assembly that team goes in need, who needs to know what goes well beyond just the two or three people that are the fixing people? Right. And that's, that's actually tied to one of our announcements, uh, at summit a business, our business response product. So it's all about, um, yes, we notify the people who are on call and are responsible for fixing the problem. You know, the hands on keyboard folks, the technical folks. But we've expanded our workflow solution to also Lupin stakeholders. So think like executives, business owners, people who, um, maybe they run a division but they're not going to go on call to fix the problem themselves, but they need to know what's going on. >>They need to know what the impact is. They need to know is there a revenue impact? Is there a customer impact? Is there a reputational brand impact to, to the business they're running. Which is another thing you guys have brought up, which is so important. It's not just about fixing, fixing the stuck server, it's, it is what is the brand impact, what is the business impact is a much broader conversation, which is interesting to pull it out of just the, just the poor guy in the pager waiting for it to buzz versus now the whole company really being engaged to what's going on. Absolutely. Like connecting the technical, what's happening with the technical services and, and uh, infrastructure to what is the, the impact on the business if something goes wrong. And how much, like are you actually losing revenue? There's certain businesses like e-commerce where you could actually measure your revenue loss on a per minute or per five minute basis. >>Right. And pretty important. Yeah. All right Alex. So you talked about the IPO is a milestone. It's, it's fading, it's fading in the rear view mirror. Now you're on the 90 day shot clock. So right. You gotta keep moving forward. So as you look forward now for your CTO role, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so that you kind of want to drive this shit? Absolutely. So, um, I think just focusing on making the system smarter and make it, uh, so that you can get to that predictive Holy grail where we can know that you're going to have a big incident before it impacts our customers. So you can actually prevent it and get ahead of it based on the leading indicators. So if we've seen this pattern before and last time it causes like an hour of downtime, let's try to catch it early this time and so that you can address it before it impacts for customers. >>So that's one big area of investment for us. And the other one I would say is more on the, uh, the realtime work outside of managing software systems. So, uh, security, customer support. There's all of these other use cases where people need to know, like, signals are, are being generated by machines. People need to know what's going on with those signals. And you want to be proactive and preventative around there. Like think a, a factory with lots and lots of sensors. You don't want to be surprised by something breaking. You want to like get proactive about the maintenance of those systems. If they don't have that, uh, you know, like say a multi-day outage in a factory, it can cost maybe millions of dollars. Right. >>All right, well, Alex, thanks a lot. Again, congratulations on the journey. We, uh, we're enjoying watching it and we'll continue to watch it evolve. So thank you for coming on. Alright, he's Alex. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at PagerDuty summit 2019 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.