>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Splunk .conf19. Brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is day three live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunk's .conf. Its 10 years anniversary of their big customer event. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE. This is our seventh year covering, riding the wave with Splunk. From scrappy startup, to going public company, massive growth, now a market leader continuing to innovate. We're here with the CEO, Doug Merritt of Splunk. Thanks for joining me, good to see you. >> Thank you for being here, thanks for having me. >> John: How ya feelin'? (laughs) >> Exhausted and energized simultaneously. (laughs) it was a fun week. >> You know, every year when we have the event we discuss Splunk's success and the loyalty of the customer base, the innovation, you guys are providing the value, you got a lot of happy customers, and you got a great ecosystem and partner network growing. You're now growing even further, every year it just gets better. This year has been a lot of big highlights, new branding, so you got that next level thing goin' on, new platform, tweaks, bringing this cohesive thing. What's your highlights this year? I mean, what's the big, there's so much goin' on, what's your highlights? >> So where you started is always my highlight of the show, is being able to spend time with customers. I have never been at a company where I feel so fortunate to have the passion and the dedication and the enthusiasm and the gratitude of customers as we have here. And so that, I tell everyone at Splunk this is similar to a holiday function for a kid for me where the energy keeps me going all year long, so that always is number one, and then around the customers, what we've been doing with the technology architecture, the platform, and the depth and breadth of what we've been working on honestly for four plus years. It really, I think, has come together in a unique way at this show. >> Last year you had a lot of announcements that were intentional announcements, it's coming. They're coming now, they're here, they're shipping. >> They're here, they're here. >> What is some of the feedback you're hearing because a lot of it has a theme where, you know, we kind of pointed this out a couple of years ago, it's like a security show now, but it's not a security show, but there's a lot of security in there. What are some of the key things that have come out of the oven that people should know about that are being delivered here? >> So the core of what we're trying to communicate with Data-to-Everything is that you need a very multifaceted data platform to be able to handle the huge variety of data that we're all dealing with, and Splunk has been known and been very successful at being able to index data, messy, non-structured data, and make sense of it even though it's not structured in the index, and that's been, still is incredibly valuable. But we started almost four years ago on a journey of adding in stream processing before the data gets anywhere, to our index or anywhere else, it's moving all around the world, how do you actually find that data and then begin to take advantage of it in-flight? And we announced that the beta of Data Stream Processor last year, but it went production this year, four years of development, a ton of patents, a 40 plus person, 50 plus person, development team behind that, a lot of hard engineering, and really elegant interface to get that there. And then on the other end, to complement the index, data is landing all over the place, not just in our index, and we're very aware that different structures exist for different needs. A data warehouse has different properties than a relational database which has different properties than a NoSQL column store in-memory database, and data is going to only continue to be more dispersed. So again, four plus years ago we started on what now is Data Fabric Search which we pre-announced in beta format last year. That went production at this show, but the ability to address a distributed Splunk landscape, but more importantly we demoed the integration with HTFS and S3 landscapes as the proof point of we've built a connector framework, so that this really cannot just be a incredibly high-speed, high-cardinality search processing engine, but it really is a federated search engine as well. So now we can operate on data in the stream when it's in motion. We obviously still have all the great properties of the Splunk index, and I was really excited about Splunk 8.0 and all the features in that, and we can go get data wherever it lives across a distributed Splunk environment, but increasingly across the more and more distributed data environment. >> So this is a data platform. This is absolutely a data platform, so that's very clear. So the success of platforms, in the enterprise at least, not just small and medium-sized businesses, you can have a tool and kind of look like a platform, there's some apps out there that I would point to and say, "Hey, that looks like a tool, it's really not a platform." You guys are a platform. But the success of a platform are two things, ecosystem and apps, because if you're in a platform that's enabling value, you got to have those. Talk about how you see the ecosystem success and the app success. Is that happening in your view? >> It is happening. We have over 2,000 apps on our Splunkbase framework which is where any of our customers can go and download the application to help draw value of a Palo Alto firewall, or ensure integration with a ServiceNow trouble ticketing system, and thousands of other examples that exist. And that has grown from less than 300 apps, when I first got here six years ago, to over 2,000 today. But that is still the earliest inning, for earliest pitch and your earliest inning journey. Why are there 20,000, 200,000, two million apps out there? A piece of it is we have had to up the game on how you interface with the platform, and for us that means through a stable set of services, well-mannered, well-articulated, consistently maintained services, and that's been a huge push with the core Splunk index, but it's also a big amount of work that we've been doing on everything from the separation between Phantom runbooks and playbooks with the underlying orchestration automation, it's a key component of our Stream Processor, you know, what transformations are you doing, what enrichments are you doing? That has to live separate than the underlying technology, the Kafka transport mechanism, or Kinesis, or whatever happens in the future. So that investment to make sure we got a effective and stable set of services has been key, but then you complement that with the amazing set of partners that are out here, and making sure they're educated and enabled on how to take advantage of the platform, and then feather in things like the Splunk Ventures announcement, the Innovation Fund and Social Impact Fund, to further double down on, hey, we are here to help in every way. We're going to help with enablement, we're going to help with sell-through and marketing, and we'll help with investment. >> Yeah, I think this is smart, and I think one of the things I'll point out is that feedback we heard from customers in conversations we had here on theCUBE and the hallway is, there's a lot of great feedback on the automation, the machine learning toolkit, which is a good tell sign of the engagement level of how they're dealing with data, and this kind of speaks to data as a value... The value creation from data seems to be the theme. It's not just data for data's sake, I mean, managing data is all hard stuff, but value from the data. You mentioned the Ventures, you got a lot of tech for good stuff goin' on. You're investing in companies where they're standing up data-driven companies to solve world problems, you got other things, so you guys are adjusting. In the middle innings of the data game, platform update, business model changes. Talk about some of the consumption changes, now you got Splunk Cloud, what's goin' on on (laughs) how you charge, how are customers consuming, what moves did you guys make there and what's the result? >> Yeah, it's a great intro on data is awesome, but we all have data to get to decisions first and actions second. Without an action there is no point in gathering data, and so many companies have been working their tails off to digitize their landscapes. Why, well you want a more flexible landscape, but why the flexibility? Because there's so much data being generated that if you can get effective decisions and then actions, that landscape can adapt very, very rapidly, which goes back to machine learning and eventual AI-type opportunities. So that is absolutely, squarely where we've been focused, is translating that data into value and into actual outcomes, which is why our orchestration automation piece was so important. One of the gating factors that we felt has existed is for the Splunk index, and it's only for the Splunk index, the pricing mechanism has been data volume, and that's a little bit contrary to the promise, which is you don't know where the value is going to be within data, and whether it's a gigabyte or whether it's a petabyte, why shouldn't you be able to put whatever data you want in to experiment? And so we came out with some updates in pricing a month and change ago that we were reiterating at the show and will continue to drive on a, hopefully, very aggressive and clear marketing and communications framework, that for people that have adjusted to the data volume metric, we're trying to make that much simpler. There's now a limited set of bands, or tiers, from 100 gigs to unlimited, so that you really get visibility on, all right, I think that I want to play with five terabytes, I know what that band looks like and it's very liberal. So that if you wind up with six and a half terabytes you won't be penalized, and then there's a complimentary metric which I think is ultimately going to be the more long-lived metric for our infrastructurally-bound products, which is virtual CPU or virtual core. And when I think about our index, stream processing, federated search, the execution of automation, all those are basically a factor of how much infrastructure you're going to throw at the problem, whether it's CPU or whether it's storage or network. So I can see a day when Splunk Enterprise and the index, and everything else at that lower level, or at that infrastructure layer, are all just a series of virtual CPUs or virtual cores. But I think both, we're offering choice, we really are customer-centric, and whether you want a more liberal data volume or whether you want to switch to an infrastructure, we're there and our job is to help you understand the value translation on both of those because all that matters is turning it into action and into doing. >> It's interesting, in the news yesterday quantum supremacy was announced. Google claims it, IBM's debating it, but quantum computing just points to the trend that more compute's coming. So this is going to be a good thing for data. You mentioned the pricing thing, this brings up a topic we've been hearing all week on theCUBE is, diverse data's actually great for machine learning, great for AI. So bringing in diverse data gives you more aperture into data, and that actually helps. With the diversity comes confusion and this is where the pricing seems to hit. You're trying to create, if I get this right, pricing that matches the needs of the diverse use of data. Is that kind of how you guys are thinkin' about it? >> Meets the needs of diverse data, and also provides a lot of clarity for people on when you get to a certain threshold that we stop charging you altogether, right? Once you get above 10s of terabytes to 100 terabytes, just put as much data in as you want. The foundation of Splunk, going back to the first data, is we're the only technology that still exists on the index side that takes raw, non-formatted data, doesn't force you to cleanse or scrub it in any way, and then takes all that raw data and actually provides value through the way that we interact with the data with our query language. And that design architecture, I've said it for five, six years now, is completely unique in the industry. Everybody else thinks that you've got to get to the data you want to operate on, and then put it somewhere, and the way that life works is much more organic and emergent. You've got chaos happening, and then how do you find patterns and value out of that chaos? Well, that chaos winds up being pretty voluminous. So how do we help more organizations? Some of the leading organizations are at five to 10 petabytes of data per day going through the index. How do we help everybody get there? 'Cause you don't know the nugget across that petabyte or 10 petabyte set is going to be the key to solving a critical issue, so let's make it easy for you to put that data in to find those nuggets, but then once you know what the pattern is, now you're in a different world, now you're in the structured data world of metrics, or KPIs, or events, or multidimensional data that is much more curated, and by nature that's going to be more fine-grained. There's not as much volume there as there is in the raw data. >> Doug, I notice also at the event here there's a focus on verticals. Can you comment on the strategy there, is that by design? Is there a vertical focus? >> It's definitely by design. >> Share some insight into that. >> So we launched with an IT operations focus, we wound up progressing over the years to a security operations focus, and then our doubling down with Omnition, SignalFx, VictorOps, and now Streamlio is a new acquisition on the DevOps and next gen app dev buying centers. As a company and how we go to market and what we are doing with our own solutions, we stay incredibly focused on those three very technical buying centers, but we've also seen that data is data. So the data you're bringing in to solve a security problem can be used to solve a manufacturing problem, or a logistics and supply chain problem, or a customer sentiment analysis problem, and so how do you make use of that data across those different buying centers? We've set up a verticals group to seed, continue to seed, the opportunity within those different verticals. >> And that's compatible with the horizontally scalable Splunk platform. That's kind of why that exists, right? >> That the overall platform that was in every keynote, starting with mine, is completely agnostic and horizontal. The solutions on top, the security operations, ITOps, and DevOps, are very specific to those users but they're using the horizontal platform, and then you wind up walking into the Accenture booth and seeing how they've taken similar data that the SecOps teams gathered to actually provide insight on effective rail transport for DB cargo, or effective cell tower triangulation and capacity for a major Australian cell company, or effective manufacturing and logistics supply chain optimization for a manufacturer and all their different retail distribution centers. >> Awesome, you know, I know you've talked with Jeff Frick in the past, and Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante about user experience, I know that's something that's near and dear to your heart. You guys, it has been rumored, there's going to be some user experience work done on the onboarding for your Splunk Cloud and making it easier to get in to this new Splunk platform. What can we expect on the user experience side? (laughs) >> So, for any of you out there that want to try, we've got Splunk Investigate, that's one of the first applications on top of the fully decomposed, services layered, stateless Splunk Cloud. Mission Control actually is a complementary other, those are the first two apps on top of that new framework. And the UI and experience that is in Splunk Investigate I think is a good example of both the ease of coming to and using the product. There's a very liberal amount of data you get for free just to experiment with Splunk Investigate, but then the onboarding experience of data is I think very elegant. The UI is, I love the UI, it's a Jupyter-style workbook-type interface, but if you think about what do investigators need, investigators need both some bread crumbs on where to start and how to end, but then they also need the ability to bring in anybody that's necessary so that you can actually swarm and attack a problem very efficiently. And so when you go back and look at, why did we buy VictorOps? Well, it wasn't because we think that the IT alerting space is a massive space we're going to own, it's because collaboration is incredibly important to swarm incidents of any type, whether they're security incidents or manufacturing incidents. So the facilities at VictorOps gave, on allowing distributed teams and virtual teams to very quickly get to resolution. You're going to find those baked into all products like Mission Control 'cause it's one of the key facilities of, that Tim talked about in his keynote, of indulgent design, mobility, high collaboration, 'cause luckily people still matter, and while ML is helping all of us be more productive it isn't taking away the need for us, but how do you get us to cooperate effectively? And so our cloud-based apps, I encourage any of you out there, go try Splunk Investigate, it's a beautiful product and I think you'll be blown away by it. >> Great success on the product side, and then great success on the customer side, you got great, loyal customers. But I got to ask you about the next level Splunk. As you look at this event, what jumps out at me is the cohesiveness of the story around the platform and the apps, ecosystem's great, but the new branding, Data-to-Everything. It's not product-specific 'cause you have product leadership. This is a whole next level Splunk. What is the next level Splunk vision? >> And I love the pink and orange, in bold colors. So when I've thought about what are the issues that are some of the blockers to Splunk eventually fulfilling the destiny that we could have, the number one is awareness. Who the heck is Splunk? People have very high variance of their understanding of Splunk. Log aggregation, security tool, IT tool, and what we've seen over and over is it is much more this data platform, and certainly with the announcements, it's becoming more of this data fabric or platform that can be used for anything. So how do we bring awareness to Splunk? Well, let's help create a category, and it's not up to us to create the category, it's up to all of you to create the category, but Data-to-Everything in our minds represents the power of data, and while we will continue internally to focus on those technical buying centers, everything is solvable with data. So we're trying to really reinforce the importance of data and the capabilities that something like Splunk brings. Cloud becomes a really important message to that because that makes it, execution to that, 'cause it makes it so much easier for people to immediately try something and get value, but on-prem will always be important as well 'cause data has gravity, data has risk, data has cost to move. And there are so many use cases where you would just never push data to the cloud, and it's not because we don't love cloud. If you have a factory that's producing 100 terabytes an hour in a area where you've got poor bandwidth, there's no option for a cloud connect there of high scale, so you better be able to process, make sense of, and act on that data locally. >> And you guys are great in the cloud too, on-premise, but final word, I want to get your thoughts to end this segment, I know you got to run, thanks for your time, and congratulations on all your success. Data for good. There's a lot of tech for bad kind of narratives goin' on, but there's a real resurgence of tech for good. A lot of people, entrepreneurs, for-profit, for-nonprofit, are doing ventures for good. Data is a real theme. Data for good is something that you have, that's part of the Data-to-Everything. Talk about the data for good real quick. >> Yeah, we were really excited about what we've done with Splunk4Good as our nonprofit focused entity. The Splunk Pledge which is a classic 1-1-1 approach to make sure that we're able to help organizations that need the help do something meaningful within their world, and then the Splunk Social Impact Fund which is trying to put our money where our mouth is to ensure that if funding and scarcity of funds is an issue of getting to effective outcomes, that we can be there to support. At this show we've featured three awesome charities, Conservation International, NetHope, and the Global Emancipation Network, that are all trying to tackle really thorny problems with different, in different ways, different problems in different ways, but data winds up being at the heart of one of the ways to unlock what they're trying to get done. We're really excited and proud that we're able to actually make meaningful donations to all three of those, but it is a constant theme within Splunk, and I think something that all of us, from the tech community and non-tech community are going to have to help evangelize, is with every invention and with every thing that occurs in the world there is the power to take it and make a less noble execution of it, you know, there's always potential harmful activities, and then there's the power to actually drive good, and data is one of those. >> Awesome. >> Data can be used as a weapon, it can be used negatively, but it also needs to be liberated so that it can be used positively. While we're all kind of concerned about our own privacy and really, really personal data, we're not going to get to the type of healthcare and genetic, massive shifts in changes and benefits without having a way to begin to share some of this data. So putting controls around data is going to be important, putting people in the middle of the process to decide what happens to their data, and some consequences around misuse of data is going to be important. But continuing to keep a mindset of all good happens as we become more liberal, globalization is good, free flow of good-- >> The value is in the data. >> Free flow of people, free flow of data ultimately is very good. >> Doug, thank you so much for spending the time to come on theCUBE, and again congratulations on great culture. Also is worth noting, just to give you a plug here, because it's, I think, very valuable, one of the best places to work for women in tech. You guys recently got some recognition on that. That is a huge accomplishment, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you, we had a great diversity track here which is really important as well. But we love partnering with you guys, thank you for spending an entire week with us and for helping to continue to evangelize and help people understand what the power of technology and data can do for them. >> Hey, video is data, and we're bringin' that data to you here on theCUBE, and of course, CUBE cloud coming soon. I'm John Furrier here live at Splunk .conf with Doug Merritt the CEO. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back. Here on theCUBE, we continue our coverage of .conf2017, Splunk's get together here with some 7,000 plus attendees, 65 countries, we're right on the showfloor. A lot of buzz happening down here and it's all good. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We are live, as I said, in our nation's capital, and we're joined by a guest who represents her organization that is a member of the Splunk4Good program. We're going to explain that in just a little bit, but Sherrie Caltagirone is the founder and executive director of the Global Emancipation Network, and Sherry, thanks for being with us. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much for having me on, John. >> So your organization has to do with countering and combating global trafficking, human trafficking. >> That's right. >> We think about sex trafficking, labor trafficking, but you're a participant in the Splunk4Good program, which is their ten year pledge to support organizations such as yours to the tune of up to $100 million over that ten years to all kinds of organizations. So first off, let's just talk about that process, how you got involved, and then we want to get into how you're actually using this data that you're mining right now for your work. So first off, how'd you get involved with Splunk? >> Absolutely. It was really organic in that it's a really small community. There are a lot of people in the tech space who I found really want to use their skills for good, and they're very happy to make connections between people. We had a mutual friend actually introduce me to Monzy Merza, who's the head of security here at Splunk, and he said, "I'm really passionate about trafficking, I want to help "fight trafficking, let me connect you with Corey Marshall "at Splunk4Good." The rest is really history, and I have to tell you, yes, they have pledged up to $100 million to help, and in products and services, but what's more is they really individually care about our projects and that they are helping me build things, I call them up all the time and say, "Hey let's brainstorm an idea, "let's solve a problem, "let's figure out how we can do this together, and they really are, they're part of my family. They're part of GEN and Global Emancipation Network. >> That's outstanding. The size of the problem struck me today at the keynote when we talked about, first off, the various forms of trafficking that are going on; you said up to two dozen different subsets of trafficking, and then the size and the scale of 25 to 40-some million people around the globe are suffering. >> Yeah. >> Because of trafficking conditions. That puts it all in a really different perspective. >> You're right. Those weren't even numbers that we can really fathom what that means, can we? We don't know what 20 million looks like, and you're right, there's such a wide discrepancy between the numbers. 20 million, 46 million, maybe somewhere in between, and that is exactly part of the problem that we have is that there is no reliable data. Everyone silos their individual parts of the data that they have for trafficking, all the the different stakeholders. That's government, NGOs, law enforcement, academia, it's all kinds. It runs the gamut, really, and so it's really difficult to figure out exactly what the truth is. There's no reliable, repeatable way to count trafficking, so right now it's mostly anecdotal. It's NGOs reporting up to governments that say, "We've impacted this many victims," or, "We've encountered so-and-so who said that the "trafficking ring that they escaped from had 20 other people "in it," things like that, so it's really just an estimate, and it's the best that we have right now, but with a datalet approach, hopefully we'll get closer to a real accurate number. >> So talk more about the problem and the root of the problem, how it's manifesting itself, and we'll get into sort of what we can do about it. >> Yeah. It's really interesting in that a lot of the things that cause poverty are the same things that cause trafficking. It really is, you know, people become very vulnerable if they don't have a solid source of income or employment, things like that, so they are more willing to do whatever's necessary in order to do that, so it's easy to be lured into a situation where you can be exploited, for example, the refugee crisis right now that's happening across Europe and the Middle East is a major player for trafficking. It's a situation completely ripe for this, so people who are refugees who perhaps are willing to be smuggled out of the country, illegally, of course, but then at that point they are in the mercy and the hands of the people who smuggled them and it's very easy for them to become trafficked. Things like poverty, other ways that you're marginalized, the LGBTQ community is particularly vulnerable, homeless population, a lot of the same issues that you see in other problems come up, creates a situation of vulnerability to be exploited, and that's all trafficking really is: the exploitation of one individual through force, coercion, fraud, position of authority, to benefit another person. >> These individuals are essentially what, enslaved? >> Yeah. It's modern day slavery. There's lots of different forms, as you mentioned. There's labor trafficking, and that's several different forms; it can be that you're in a brick factory, or maybe you're forced into a fishing boat for years and years. Usually they take away your passport if you are from another country. There's usually some threats. They know where your family lives. If you go tell anyone or you run away, they're going to kill your family, those sorts of things. It is, it's modern day slavery, but on a much, much bigger scale, so it's no longer legal, but it still happens. >> How does data help solve the problem? You, as an executive director, what kind of data, when you set the North Star for the organization from a data perspective, what did that look like, and how is it coming into play? >> Well, one of the benefits that we have as an organization that's countering trafficking is that we are able to turn the tables on traffickers. They are using the internet in much the way that other private enterprises are. They know that that's how they move their product, which in this case is sadly human beings. They advertise for victims online. They recruit people online. They're using social media apps and things like Facebook and Kick and Whatsapp and whatnot. Then they are advertising openly for the people that they have recruited into trafficking, and then they are trying to sell their services, so for example, everyone knows about Backpage. There's hundreds of websites like that. It runs the gamut. They're recruiting people through false job advertisements, so we find where those sites are through lots of human intelligence and we're talking to lots of people all the time, and we gather those, and we try to look for patterns to identify who are the victims, who are the traffickers, what can we do about it? The data, to get back to your original question, is really what is going to inform policy to have a real change. >> So you can, in terms of I guess the forensics that you're doing, or whatever you're doing with that data, you're looking at not only the websites, but also the communications that are being spawned by those sites and looking to where those networks are branching off to? >> Yeah. That's one of the things that we really like to try to do. Instead of getting a low-level person, we like to try to build up an entire network so we can take down an entire ring instead of just the low fish. We do, we extract all the data from the website that we can to pull out names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, things like that, and then begin to make correlations; where else have we seen those phone numbers and those addresses on these other websites that we're collecting from, or did this person make a mistake, which we love to exploit mistakes with traffickers, and are they using the same user handle on their personal Flickr page, so then we can begin to get an attribution. >> John: That happens? >> Absolutely. >> It does, yeah. >> Sherrie: Without giving away all my secrets, exactly. >> Yeah, I don't to, don't give away the store, here. How much, then, are you looking internationally as opposed to domestically, then? >> We collect right now from 22 different countries, I think 77 individual cities, so a lot of these websites are usually very jurisdictionally specific, so, you know, like Craigslist; you go into Washington state and click on Seattle, something like that. We harvest from the main trafficking points that we can. We're collecting in six different languages right now. A lot of the data that we have right now is from the U.S. because that's the easier way to start is the low-hanging fish. >> What does your partner ecosystem look like? It comprises law enforcement, local agencies, federal agencies, presumably, NGOs. Will you describe that? >> Yeah. We do, we partner with attorneys general, we partner with law enforcement, those are the sort of operational partners we look for when we have built out intelligence. Who do we give it to now, because data is useless unless we do something with it, right? So we we build out these target packages and intelligence and give it to people who can do something with it, so those are really easy people to do something with. >> How hard is that, because you've got different jurisdictions and different policies, and it's got to be like herding cats to get guys working with you. >> It is, and it's actually something that they're begging for, and so, it's a good tool that they can use to deconflict with each other, 'cause they are running different trafficking-related operations all the time, and jurisdictions, they overlap in many cases, especially when you're talking about moving people, and they're going from one state to another state, so you have several jurisdictions and you need to deconflict your programs. >> Okay, so they're very receptive to you guys coming to them with they data. >> They are; they really want help, and they're strapped for resources. These are for the most part, not technically savvy people, and this is one of the good things about our nonprofit is that it is a staff of people who are very tech-savvy and who are very patient in explaining it and making it easy and usable and consumable by our customers. >> So if I'm an NGO out there, I'm a non-profit out there, and I'm very interested in having this kind of service, what would you say to them about what they can pursue, what kind of relationship you have with Splunk and the value they're providing, and what your experience has been so far. >> It's been wonderful. I've been over at the Splunk4Good booth all day helping out and it's been wonderful to see not only just the non-profits who have come up and said, "Hey, I run a church, "I'm trying to start a homeless shelter for drug-addicted "individuals, how can you help me," and it's wonderful when you start to see the light bulbs go off between the non-profit sector and the tech sector, between the philanthropic organizations like Splunk4Good, the non-profits, and then, we can't forget the third major important part here, which is, those are the tech volunteers, these are the people who are here at the conference and who are Splunk employees and whatnot and teaching them that they can use their skills for good in the non-profit sector. >> Has cryptocurrency, where people can conduct anonymous transactions, made your job a lot more difficult? >> No, it hasn't, and there's been a lot of research that has gone into block chain analysis, so for example, Backpage, all the adds are purchased with Bitcoin, and so there's been a wonderful amount of research then, trying to time the post to when the Bitcoin was purchased, and when the transactions happen, so they've done that, and it's really successful. There are a couple of other companies who do just that, like Chainalysis, that we partner with. >> You can use data to deanonymize? >> That's correct. It's not as anonymous as people think it is. >> Love it. >> Yeah, exactly. We love to exploit those little things like that. A lot of the websites, they put their wallets out there, and then we use that. >> Dave: You're like reverse hackers. >> That's right. It's interesting that you say that, because a lot of our volunteers actually are, they're hacker hunters. They're threat and intel analysts and whatnot, and so, they've learned that they can apply the exact same methods and techniques into our field, so it's brilliant to see the ways in which they do that. >> Dave: That's a judo move on the bad guys. >> Exactly. How long does this go on for you? Is this a year-to-year that you renew, or is it a multi-year commitment, how does that work? >> It's a year-to-year that we renew our pledge, but they're in it for the long haul with us, so they know that they're not getting rid of me and nor do they want me to, which is wonderful. It's so good, because they help, they sit at the table with me, always brainstorming, so it's year-to-year technically, but I know that we're in it together for the long haul. >> How about fundraising? A big part of your job is, you know. >> Of course it is. >> Fundraising. You spend a lot of time there. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, absolutely. Some of our goals right now, for example, is we're really looking to hire a full-time developer, we want a full-time intelligence analyst, so we're always looking to raise donations, so you could donate on our website. >> John: Which is? >> Which is globalemancipation.ngo. Globalemancipation.ngo. We're also always looking for people who are willing to help donate their time and their skills and whatnot. We have a couple of fundraising goals right now. We're always looking for that. We receive a lot of product donations from companies all over the world, mostly from the tech sector. We're really blessed in that we aren't spending a lot of money on that, but we do need to hire a couple of people so that's our next big goal. >> I should have asked you this off the top. Among your titles, executive director and founder, what was the founder part? What motivated you to get involved in this, because it's, I mean, there are a lot of opportunities to do non-profit work, but this one found you, or you found it. >> That's right. It's a happy circumstance. I've always done anti-human trafficking, since my college days, actually. I started volunteering, or I started to intern at the Protection Project at Johns Hopkins University, which was a legislative-based program, so it was really fantastic, traveling the world, helping countries draft legislation on trafficking, but I really wanted to get closer and begin to measure my impact, so that's when I started thinking about data anyways, to be able to put our thumb, is what we're doing. Working. How are we going to be able to measure success and what does that look like? Then I started volunteering for a rescue operations organization; the sort of knock down the doors, go rescue people group, and so, I really liked having the closer impact and being able to feel like hey, I can do something about this problem that I know is terrible and that's why it spread. A lot of the people I worked with, including my husband, come from the cyberthreat intelligence world, so I feel like those ideas and values have been steeped in me, slowly and surely, over the last decade, so that just ages myself a little bit maybe, but yes, so those ideas have been percolating over time, so it just kind of happened that way. >> Well, you want to feel young, hang around with us. (laughing) I should speak for myself, John, I'm sorry. >> No, no, you're right on, believe me. I was nodding my head right there with you. >> Can you comment on the media coverage? Is it adequate in your view? Does there need to be more? >> On trafficking itself? You know, it's really good that it's starting to come into the forefront a lot more. I'm hearing about it. Five years ago, most of the time, if I told people that there are still people in slavery, it didn't end with the Civil War, they would stand at me slackjawed. There have been a few big media pushes. There's been some films, like Taken, Liam Neeson's film, so that's always the image I use, and that's just one type of trafficking, but I'm hearing more and more. Ashton Kutcher runs a foundation called Thorn that's really fantastic and they do a similar mission to what I do. He has been able to raise the spotlight a lot. Currently there's a debate on the floor of the Senate right now, too, talking about section 230 of the CDA, which is sort of centered around the Backpage debate anyway. Where do we draw the line between the freedom of speech on the internet, with ESPs in particular, but being able to still catch bad guys exactly. The Backpage sort of founder idea. It's really hot and present in the news right now. I would love to see the media start to ask questions, drill down into the data, to be able to ask and answer those real questions, so we're hoping that Global Emancipation Network will do that for the media and for policy makers around the world. >> Well it is extraordinary work being done by an extraordinary person. It's a privilege to have you on with us, here on theCUBE. We thank you, not only for the time, but for the work you're doing, and good luck with that. >> Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it. >> You bet. That's the Global Emancipation Network. Globalemancipation.ngo right? Fundraising, always helpful. Back with more here on theCUBE in Washington D.C., right after this. (electronic beats)