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

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida It's theCUBE covering .conf18. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Splunk .conf18. It's Florida week. I'm Stu Miniman, and my co-host for this week is Dave Vellante. Dave, I'm really excited. You've done this show a handful of times. It's our seventh year doing theCUBE here. It is my first time here. Thought I understood a few of the pieces and what's going on, but it's really been crystallizing to me. When we talk about on theCUBE, for the last couple of years, data is at the center of everything, and in the keynote this morning they talked about Splunkers are at the crossroads of data. I've talked to a bunch of practitioners here. People come to them to try to get access to data, and the vision that they've laid out this week for Splunk Next is how they can do a massive TAM expansion, try to get from the 16,000 users that they have today to 10x more. So, what's your take been on where we are today and what Splunk of the future looks like? >> Well so Stu, as you know, the keynotes are offsite, about a half hour away from the hotel where we're broadcasting, and there's like 8,000 buses that they're jamming customers in. It's a bit of a pain to get there, so logistically it's not ideal. So I thought the keynotes today, just remotely, we didn't hop in the bus because we had to miss a lot of the keynotes yesterday, to get back here. So we watched remotely today. It just felt like there wasn't as much energy in the room. And I think that's for a couple of reasons, and I'll get into that. But before I do, you're right. This is my fourth .conf, and I was struck by in the audience at how few people actually, it was probably less than a third of the audience, when they asked people to stand up, had been to four or more .confs. A ton of people, first year or second year. So, why is that relevant? It's relevant because these are new people. The core of Splunk's audience are security people and IT operations management people. And so with that many newbies, newbies, they're trying to learn about how they can get more value out of the tool. Today's announcements were all about line of business and industrial IOT. And frankly, a lot of people in the audience didn't directly care. Now, I'll explain why it's important, and why they actually do care and will care going forward. But the most important thing here is that we are witnessing a massive TAM expansion, total available market expansion, for Splunk. Splunk's a one point six, one point seven billion dollar company. They're going to blow through two billion. This is a playbook that we've seen before, out of the likes of particularly ServiceNow. I'm struck by the way in which Splunk is providing innovation for non-IT people. It's exactly the playbook that ServiceNow has used, and it works beautifully, and we'll get into some of that. >> So Dave, one of the things that really struck me, we had seven customers on the program yesterday, and the relationship between Splunk and the customers is a little different. You always hear, oh well, I love this technology. Lots of companies. You've been telling me how passionate you were. But really partnerships that you talk about, when you talked about, we had an insurance company from Toronto, and how they're thinking about how the security and risks that they look at, how that passes on to their customers. So many, it's not just people are using Splunk, but it's how it affects their business, how it affects their ultimate end users, and that value of data is something that we come back to again and again. >> So the classic Splunk user is somebody in IT, IT operations management, or the security knock. And they're hardcore data people, they're looking at screens all day and they love taking a bath in data. And Splunk has completely changed their lives, because rather than having to manually go through log files, Splunk has helped them organize that sort of messy data, as Doug Merritt said yesterday. Today, the whole conversation was about expanding into line of business and industrial IOT. These are process engineers, there weren't a lot of process engineers in the audience today. That's why I think not a lot of people were excited about it. I'm super excited about it because this is going to power, I've always been a bull on Splunk. This is going to power the next wave of growth at Splunk. Splunk is a company that got to the public markets without having to raise a ton of capital, unlike what you're seeing today. You're seeing hundreds of millions of dollars raised before these companies IPO. So, Splunk today in the keynotes, first of all, they had a lot of fun. I was laughing my you-know-what off at the auditions. I mean, I don't really, some of that stuff is kind of snarky, but I thought it was hilarious. What they did is, they said, well Doug Merritt wasn't a shoo-in to keynote at this, so we auditioned a bunch of people. So they came in, and people were singing, they were goofing, you know, hello, Las Vegas! We're not in Las Vegas, we're in Orlando this year. I thought it was really, really funny and well done. You know Stu, we see a lot of this stuff. >> Yeah, absolutely. Fun is definitely part of the culture here at Splunk, love that we talked about yesterday, the geeky t-shirts with all the jokes on that and everything. Absolutely so much going on. But, Dave there's something I knew coming in, and we've definitely heard it today in the keynotes, developers are such an audience that everybody is trying to go after, and you talk about kind of the traditional IT and security might not really be the developer audience, but absolutely, that's where Splunk is pushing towards. They announced the beta of the Splunk Developer Cloud, a number of other products that they've put in beta or are announcing. What's your take as to how they go beyond kind of the traditional Splunk user? >> Yeah so that's what I was saying. This is to me a classic case of, we saw this with ServiceNow, who's powering their way through five billion land and expand, something that Christian Chabot, former CEO of Tableau used to talk about. Where you come in and you get a foot in the door, and then it just spreads. You get in like a tick, and then it spreads to other parts of the business. So let's go through some of the announcements. Splunk Next, they built on top of that today. Splunk Business Flow, they showed, what I thought was an awesome demo. They had a business person, it was an artificial example of the game company. What was the name of the game company? >> Stu: Buttercup Sames. >> Buttercup Games. So they took a bunch of data, they ingested a bunch of data on the business workflow. And it was just that, it was just a big, giant flow of data. It looked like a huge search. So the business user was like, well what am I supposed to do with this? He then ingested that into Splunk Business Flow, and all of a sudden, you saw a flow chart of what all that data actually said in terms of where buyers were exiting the system, calling the call center, et cetera. And then they were able to make changes through this beautiful graphical user interface. So we'll come back to that, because one would be skeptical naturally as to, is it really that easy? They also announced Splunk for industrial IOT. So the thing I like about this, Stu, and we've seen a lot of IOT announcements in the past year from IT companies. What's happening is that IT companies are coming in with a top-down message to industrial IOT and OT, Operations Technology, professionals. We think that is not the right approach. It's going to be a bottoms-up approach, driven by the operations technology professionals, these process engineers. What Splunk is doing, and the brilliance of what Splunk is doing is they're starting with the data. We heard today, OEE. What's OEE? I haven't heard that term. It's called Overall Equipment Effectiveness. These aren't words that you hear from IT people. So, they're speaking a language of OT people, they're starting with the data, so what we have seen thus far is, frankly a lot of box companies saying, hey we're going to put a box at the edge. Or a lot of wireless companies saying, hey, we're going to connect the windmill. Or analytics companies saying, we're going to instrument the windmill. The engineers are going to decide how it gets instrumented, when it get instrumented, what standards are going to be used. Those are headwinds for a lot of the IT companies coming in over the top. What Splunk is doing is saying, we're going to start with the data coming off the machines. And we're going to speak your language, and we're going to bring you tooling you can use to analyze that operations data with a very specific use case, which is predictive maintenance. So instead of having to do a truck roll to see if the windmill is working properly, we're going to send you data, and you're going to have to roll the truck until the data says there's going to be a problem. So I really like that. Your thoughts on Splunk's IOT initiative versus some of the others we've seen? >> Yeah, Dave. That dynamic of IT versus OT, Splunk definitely came across as very credible. The customers we've talked to, the language that they use. You talk about increasing plan for performance and up time. How can they take that machine learning and apply it to the IOT space, it all makes a lot of sense. Once again, it's not Splunk pushing their product, it's, you're going to have more data from more different sources, and therefore it makes sense to be able to leverage the platform and take that value that you've been seeing with Splunk in more spaces. >> So the other thing that they announced was machine learning and natural language processing four dot oh. They had BMW up on the stage, talking about, that was really a good IOT example, but also predicting traffic patterns. If you think about Waze, you and I, well I especially, use Waze, I know that Waze is wrong. It's telling me I'm going to get there at four thirty, and I know traffic is building up in Boston, I'm not going to get there until ten to five, and Waze somehow doesn't know that. BMW had an example of using predictive analytics to predict what traffic flow is going to look like in the future so I thought that was pretty strong. >> And I loved in the BMW example, they've got it married with Alexa so the business person, sitting at their desk can say, hey Alexa, go ask Splunk something about my data, and get that result back. So pretty powerful example, really obvious to see how we get the value of data to the business user, even faster. >> Now the problem is, I'm going to mention some of the challenges I see in some of these initiatives. The problem with NLP is NLP sucks. Okay, it's not that good today, but it's going to get better. They used an example on stage with Alexa, it obviously worked, they had it rehearsed. It doesn't always work that way, so we know that. They also announced the Splunk Developer Cloud. They said it was three Fs: familiar, flexible, and fast. What I love about this is, this is big data, actually in action. Splunk, as I've been saying all week, they never use the term big data when big data was all on the hype cycle, they now use the term big data. Back when everybody was hyping big data, the big vacuum was applications. Pivotal came out, Paul Maritz had the vision, We're going to be the big data application development platform. Pivotal's done okay there, but it's not taking the world by storm. It's a public company, it had a decent IPO, but it's not like killing it. Splunk is now, maybe a little late to the game, a little later than Pivotal, or maybe even on IBM, but they key is, Splunk has the data. I keep coming back to the data. The data is the linchpin of all of this. Splunk also announced SplunkTV, that's nice, you're in the knock, and you got smart TV. Woo hoo! That's kind of cool. >> Yeah but Dave, on the Developer Cloud, this is a cloud native application, so it's fitting with that model for next generation apps, and where they're going to live, definitely makes a lot of sense. >> They talked about integrating Spark and TensorFlow, which is important obviously in that world. Stu, you in particular, John Ferrier as well, spent a lot of time, Jim Kabilis in the developer community. What's your take on what they announced? I know it was sort of high level, but you saw some demos, you heard their language. There were definitely some developers in the room. I would say, as a constituency, they sounded pretty excited. They were a relatively small number, maybe hundreds, not thousands. >> One of the feedback I heard from the community is being able to work with containers and dockers, something that people were looking for. They're delivering on that. We talked to one of the customers that is excited about using Kubernetes in this environment. So, absolutely, Splunk is reaching out to those communities, working with them. When we talked to the field executive yesterday, she talked about- >> Dave: Susan St. Ledger >> How Splunk is working with a lot of these open source communities. And so yeah, good progress. Good to see where Splunk's moving. Absolutely they listen to their customers. >> So, land and expand, Splunk does not use that term. It's my term that I stole from Christian Chabot and Tableau. Certainly we saw that with ServiceNow. We're seeing a very similar playbook. Workday, in many ways, is trying it as well, but Workday's going from HR into financials and ERP, which is a way more entrenched business. The thing I love about Splunk, is they're doing stuff that's new. Splunk was solving a problem that nobody else could solve before, whereas Workday and ServiceNow, as examples, were essentially replacing legacy systems. Workday was going after PeopleSoft. ServiceNow was going after BMC. Tableau, I guess was going after old, tired OBI. So they were sort of disruptive in that sense. Splunk was like, we can do stuff that nobody's been able to do before. >> Yeah Dave, the last thing that I want to cover in this analysis segment is, we talk about the data. It's the people interacting with it. We've been talking for years, there's not enough skills in data scientists. There's so many companies that we're going to be your platform for everything. Splunk is a platform company, but with a big ecosystem at the center of everything they do. It's the data, it's the data that's most important. They're not trying to say, this is the rigid structure. We talked about a lot yesterday, how Splunk is going to let you use the data where you want it, when you want it. How do you look at what Splunk does, the Splunkers out there, all the people coming to them? Compare and contrast against the data scientists. >> Well this is definitely one of the big challenges. To me, the role of a Splunker, they're IT operations people, they're people in the security knock, and Splunk is a tool for them, to make them more productive, and they've fallen in love with it. You've seen the guys running around with the fez, and that's pretty cool. They've created a whole new class of skill sets in the organization. I see the data scientists as, again, becoming a Splunker and using the tools. Splunk are giving the data scientists tools, that they perhaps didn't have before, and giving them a way to collaborate. I'll come back to that a little bit. If I go through the announcements, I see some challenges here, Stu. Splunk next for the LLB. Is it really as easy as Splunk has shown? As time will tell, we're going to have to just talk to people and see how quickly it gets adopted. Can Splunk democratize data for the line of business? Well on the IOT side, it's all about the operations technology professionals. How does Splunk reach those people? It's got to reach them through partnerships and the ecosystem. It's not going to do a belly to belly direct sales, or it's not going to be able to scale. We heard that from Susan St. Ledger yesterday. She didn't get into IOT because it hadn't been announced yet, but she hinted at that. So that's going to be a big thing. The OT standards, how is Splunk going to adopt those. The other thing is, a lot of the operations technology data is analog. There's a headwind there, which is the pace at which the engineers are going to digitize. Splunk really can't control that in a big way. But, there's a lot of machine data and that's where they're focusing. I think that's really smart of Splunk. The other thing, generally, and I don't know the answer to this Stu, is how does Splunk get transaction data into the system? They may very well may do it, but we heard yesterday, data is messy. There is no such thing as unstructured data. We've heard that before. Well there's certainly a thing as structured data, and it's in databases, and it's in transaction systems. I've always felt like this is one of IBM's advantages, as they got the mainframe data. Bringing transaction data and analytic data together, in real time, is very important, whether it's to put an offer in front of the customer before you lose that customer, to provide better customer service. Those transaction systems and that data are critical. I just don't know the answer to how much of that is getting into the Splunk system. And again, as I said before, is it really that easy as Spark and TensorFlow integration enough? It sounds like the developers will be able to handle it. NLP will evolve, we talked about that as a headwind. Those are some of the challenges I see, but I don't think they're insurmountable at all. I think Splunk is in a really good position, if not the best position to take advantage of this. Why? Because digital transformation is all about data, and Splunk is data. They're all about data. They don't have to go find the data, obviously they have to ingest the data, but the data's there. If you're a Splunker, you have access to that data. All the data? Not necessarily, but you can bring that through their API platforms, but a lot of the data that you need is already there. That's a huge, huge advantage for Splunk. >> Well, Dave, this is one of the best conferences I've been at, with data at the core. It's been so great to talk to the customers. We really appreciate the partnership of Splunk. Splunk events team, grown this from seven years ago, when we started a 600 person show, to almost 10,000 now. So for those of you that don't know, there's so much that goes on behind the scenes to make something like this go off. Really appreciate the partnership and the sponsorship that allows us to help us document this, bring it out to our communities. The analysis segments that we do, we actually bring in podcast form. Go to iTunes or Spotify, your favorite podcast player, look for theCUBE insights. Of course go to theCUBE.net for the video. SiliconANGLE.com for all of the news. Wikibon.com for the research, and always feel free to reach out with us, if you've got questions, or want to know what shows we're going to be in next. For my cohost, Dave Vellante who is Dvellante on Twitter. I'm Stu Miniman, at stu on Twitter, and thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)