>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM. Think the digital experience I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us manager of ECM solutions at auto owners insurance company, Ryan, welcome to the program. Thank you. And Michelle Christianson is here as well. VP of enterprise report management practice at end choice, Michelle. It's good to have you on the program. Thank you. Thank you. So let's, let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of and choice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about auto owners company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders, but give us an overview of auto owners insurance. >>Sure. So I don't want to said insurance is an insurance company. That's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Um, just by our name being auto owners insurance, which is how we started. Um, we write all personal lines, commercial lines and also have a life insurance company, >>So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about end choice. I know this, you guys are an IBM gold business partner, but this is end choices first time on the cubes. So give us a background. Sure, sure. Great. So in choice are an IBM gold business partner. Uh, we have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas, um, Austin, Texas, and, uh, Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM digital business automation space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped, uh, through the years. And we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM solutions. And talk to me a little bit Michelle, about how it is that you work with with, um, auto owners. >>So we assisted auto owners recently in their digital transformation journey and they were, uh, dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get for moving forward, you know, provided better customer satisfaction, um, experience, um, for their clients agents. And so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM digital business automation portfolio. Excellent client. Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about auto owners, your relationship with IBM and choice and how is it helping you to address some, the challenges in the market today? >>Sure. So I don't know if this has a long-term relationship with IBM. Um, originally starting back as we go as a mainframe customer and then, you know, more recently, um, helping us with different modern technology initiatives. Uh, they were instrumental in the nineties when we created our initial web offerings. And then more recently they've been helping us with our digital business automation, which has helped us to, um, mature our content, offering it. >>So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM. Right. And you mentioned the nineties, ah, a time when we didn't have to wear a mask on our faces. So a couple of decades it goes back. Yeah. >>Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that back, you know, back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things, >>Uh, the seventies, another good time. All right. So Michelle had talked to me a little bit about what end choices doing with IBM solutions to help auto owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said, this is a company that was founded in 1916. And I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation a lot harder than it sounds well. That's correct. Just as I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategies, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like auto owners, um, with their journey by first realizing, um, their existing, existing, digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need. And then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and process. And finally we re-invent, um, their strategic offering with modern capabilities. >>So we're focused on technologies like RPA machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure. So any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go forward. So this offers us, our clients, um, smarter and more into intuitive interfaces, creating basically a better user experience and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know, we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we reinvent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice have ha has helped auto owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern. And I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >>Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at auto owners with IBM. Um, when I started the team about seven years ago, we originally started using file NATS and data cap and case manager and content aggregator, um, as our first, um, movement from a traditional, um, platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform. And that helped us a lot to improve our business process, um, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable more recently, we've been working with Michelle and the team on our, um, migration to a content management on demand platform. And that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills, um, to our agents and customers, um, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are, um, important, um, for our customers to be able to see it to, um, engage from, with auto owners in a, in a digital era. >>So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that is that, is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents. So a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how, um, that like content manager on demand, for example, and what you're doing with ETF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >>Sure. So, uh, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management management on demand journey. Um, one is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Um, specifically some functionality around searching and searchability of our content, um, that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, um, ability to implement, uh, records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, um, as well as, um, some different options to be able to present the content, uh, to our customers and agents in a, in a better and more modern way. Um, and I'm choices role rolling that has really been, sorry, guide us on that journey, um, to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >>Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about hybrid cloud AI data, a big theme of, uh, IBM think is your, how is enChoice using hybrid cloud and AI, you mentioned some of the ways, but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like auto owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. Well, sure, sure. So, um, of course with the Calpec offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the cloud Pak for automation, um, several of those offerings are, some of them are, um, uh, built specifically to, uh, survive or to, to, um, be hosted in a hybrid environment. And as we working with auto owners, um, transforming their platforms going forward, for example, they just invested in, in a, um, a, uh, I just lost the word here. I, they just invested in a new platform mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. >>So, um, Ryan mentioned, uh, some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers and a particular, um, that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, um, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to management manage it. And of course, um, just that whole, um, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner. Um, we work with, uh, these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those? Um, it's great to take advantage of the new stuff, but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. >>And, um, so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those excellent leading edge. Ran, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, uh, sorry. Uh, an insurance company from the early 19 hundreds moving into the using container technology. I'll have stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about hybrid cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from, from your policy holders. >>Yeah, for sure. So, uh, first and foremost, um, we were a red hat open shift, uh, customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform. Um, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to, uh, move to cloud pack, um, and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. Um, at the end of last year, we updated our license thing so that we can move in that direction and we're starting to, um, deploy, um, digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform, which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability. Um, just a lot of ease of use things, um, for my team, um, to make their jobs easier, but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. Um, there's also a number of products that are in the, um, containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing, um, the same a couple, um, and those are both things that we're looking at auto owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents, um, to continue to grow the business >>Very forward-thinking uh, awesome Ryan, thanks for sharing with us. What auto insurance or auto owners insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how, how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from end choices perspective in terms of your digital transformation. Um, well we have been a hundred percent focus on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and, uh, and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey. Um, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know, helping transform our clients experience such that, you know, customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. >>So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients, we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. That is good. It sounds like the last year has been, uh, very fruitful for you. And I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM solutions, the transformation that you're both of your companies are on, and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. Thank you. Thank you for Rand Dunnings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM. Think that digital experience.

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us, Manager of ECM Solutions at Auto-Owners Insurance Company, Ryan, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. And Michelle Christensen is here as well, VP of Enterprise Report Management Practice at enChoice, Michelle, it's good to have you on the program. >> Thank you. Thank you. So let's, Ryan let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of enChoice and IBM, talk to us a little bit about Auto-Owners Company. I know this is a fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly 3 million policy holders but give us an overview of Auto-Owners Insurance. >> Sure. So Auto-Owners Insurance is an insurance company that's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 States throughout the United States. Despite our name being Auto-Owners Insurance, which is how we started, we write all personal lines, commercial lines, and also have a life insurance company. >> So comprehensive and that across those nearly 3 million policy holders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about enChoice. I know this, you guys are an IBM Gold Business Partner but this is enChoice's first time on the Cube, so give us a background. >> Sure, sure, great. So enChoice are an IBM Gold Business Partner. We have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in areas of Austin, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton, Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are a hundred percent focused on the IBM Digital Business Automation Space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped through the years and we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM Solutions. >> And talk to me a little bit Michelle about how it is that you work with with Auto-Owners. >> So we assisted Auto-Owners recently in their digital transformations journey and they were dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get moving forward, you know provide a better customer satisfaction experience for their client's agents, and so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a content manager on-demand solution as well as navigator and several other products within the IBM Digital Business Automation Portfolio. >> Excellent, Ryan Oh, sorry Michelle, go ahead. >> Nope. That's that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about Auto-Owners, your relationship with IBM and enChoice and how is it helping you to address some of the challenges in the market today? >> Sure. So Auto-Owners has a long-term relationship with IBM originally starting back years ago as a mainframe customer and then, you know more recently helping us with different modern technology initiatives. They were instrumental in the nineties when we redid our initial web offerings, and then more recently they've been helping us with our Digital Business Automation which has helped us to mature our content offering at Owners. >> So you have had a long standing relationship with IBM, Ryan, and then you mentioned the nineties at a time when we didn't have to wear masks on our faces. (laughing) So a couple of decades it goes back, yeah? >> Yes. For sure. Yes. Even further than that, that, you know back into the seventies from the mainframe side of things. >> The seventies, another good time. (laughing) All right. So Michelle, talk to me a little bit about what enChoice is doing with IBM Solutions to help Auto-Owners from a digital transformation perspective is as I said this is a company that was founded in 1916, and I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate that transformation. It's a lot harder than it sounds. >> Well, that's correct. Yes. As I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategy, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like Auto-Owners with their journey, by first realizing their existing digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need, and then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and processizations and finally we re-invent their strategic offering with modern capabilities. So we're focused on technologies like RPA, machine learning, artificial intelligence, they're more efficient, scalable, and secure, so any way we can bring those technologies into the equation we go for it. So this offers us, our clients smarter and more intuitive interfaces creating basically a better user experience, and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. >> Ryan talked to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I liked that Michelle said, you know we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we re-invent it. Talk to me about how IBM and enChoice has helped Auto-Owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern, and I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. >> Yeah, for sure. So, you know, we've, we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at Auto-Owners with IBM. When I started the team about seven years ago we originally started using file NATS and data cap, and case manager, and content aggregator as our first movement from a traditional platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform, and that helped us a lot to improve our business process, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable. More recently, we've been working with Michelle and the enChoice team on our migration to a content management on-demand platform, and that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills to our agents and customers, to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are important for our customers to be able to see it, to engage with Auto-Owners in a, in a digital era. >> So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that, is that is that a facilitation of like the digitization of processes that had some paper involved cause you guys have about 48,000 agents, so a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how that like content manager on-demand, for example and what you're doing with ECF, how has that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? >> Sure. So, you know, there's two parts to that in terms of that content management on-demand journey. One is the technology portion of it, but IBM's provided, and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past. Specifically, some functionality around searching and searchability of our content that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, ability to implement records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, as well as some different options to be able to present the content to our customers and agents in a in a better and more modern way and enChoice's role in that has really been to guide us on that journey to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. >> Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about Hybrid Cloud AI Data a big theme of IBM Think this year. How is enChoice using Hybrid Cloud and AI? You mentioned some of the other ways but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like Auto-Owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. >> Well, sure, sure. So of course with the Cloud Pak offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the Cloud Pak for automation, several of those offerings are some of them are built specifically to survive or to to be hosted in a hybrid environment, and as we're working with Auto-Owners transforming their platforms going forward for example, they just invested in, in a, a I just lost the word here. They just invested in a, a new platform, mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hats, and from there they'll drive forward into containerization. So Ryan mentioned some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers in a particular that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So, so it's going to be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to manage it. And of course, just that whole, the ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner, we work with these solutions to try to stay ahead of the game, to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense, when is it time to move into those. It's great to take advantage of the new stuff but nobody wants to be, you know, the bleeding game. We want to be the leading game. And so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs, tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those. >> Excellent leading edge. Ryan, talk to me a little bit. I love this a bank, sorry an insurance company from the early 1900's moving into the using container technology. I love stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about Hybrid Cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation, and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from from your policy holders. >> Yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, we were a Red Hat OpenShift customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform, and then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to move to a Cloud Pak and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. At the end of last year, we updated our licensing so that we can move in that direction, and we're starting to deploy digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability, just a lot of ease of use things for my team to make their jobs easier but also easier for us to adapt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. There's also a number of products that are in the containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing to name a couple. And those are both things that we're looking at Auto-Owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers, and our agents to continue to grow the business. >> Very forward-thinking, awesome Ryan. Thanks for sharing with us what Auto-Owners Insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out Michelle with what's next from enChoice's perspective in terms of your digital transformation. >> Well, we have been a hundred percent focused on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the, the technology itself, but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as, you know helping transform our client's experience such that you know customer experience becomes what enChoice does best. So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation, but making sure that we're taking our clients with us and with 500 clients we're, we're really busy. So that's always good. >> That is good. It sounds like the last year has been very fruitful for you, and I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle. I think that is so important and as well as employee experience, but having a good customer experience, especially these days. Table-stakes. I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM Solutions, the transformation that both of your companies are on and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for Ryan Dennings and Michelle Christiansen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think The Digital Experience. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's the Cube. Covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back, here on the Cube along with Dave Vellante, I am John Walls. We're live at .conf2017, as Splunk continues with day two of its get together here the nation's capital, Washington D.C. Home game for me, I love it. Dave's up the road in Boston, so, hey, you had to hit the road a little bit, but not as bad as it can be sometimes for you. >> No, I'll take D.C. over Vegas. Sorry, Vegas. >> Yeah, but you travel a lot, man, you do, you're on the road. Chris Kurtz travels a lot, too. He's come with us from Arizona State University, he's a systems architect out there. Chris, always good to see you, we had a chance to visit last year for the first time. >> Yep. >> A member of the Splunk trust. And a gentleman with quite a diverse background, I mean. You supported Mars missions. As far as the... >> The Spirit and Opportunity. >> Facilitated out in Phoenix. Working now, as you said, at Arizona State, but also the Trust. Let's talk about that a little bit, because there was some conversation yesterday from the keynote stage about expanding that group? >> Absolutely. >> Adding 14 new members. And for a lot of people at home, who might not be familiar with the Splunk trust, talk about the concept and how you put it into practice. >> Absolutely, so, the Splunk trust is the organization that Splunk set up as a community leader, as a community activist. Our, kind of, watch word is, is that, "We're not the smartest people in the room, "but we'll be the most helpful." and, so, our purpose is... >> John: I'm not sure about that first part, too, by the way. >> Thank you, very much. >> John: I think you're short-changing yourself. >> So, our organization preface is we act as members of the community to help direct community people who have issues and help them externally, but also, to help Splunk and what direction they should go. "Hey, we see this pain point from a lot of the customers, "this is something that maybe Splunk should concentrate on." We're often given access to betas or even earlier, or, you know, even potential products. It's, "How should we build this, is this something that "you would use? "Is this something that you would like?" Table data sets was a feature that I worked on for a year, that was released last year. You know, "Is this something that you would use, "is this something that you would want?" and, sometimes, you know, users fall through the cracks in the support system and they don't know how to get support help, or they don't know where to get directed, and we can volunteer and say, you know, "Show them where the Splunk answers group is very powerful." There's an app for that, we can show them Splunkbase and help them when those things fall through the cracks. So, we provide community enrichment and support, but we're not an official representative of Splunk, even though we're appointed by Splunk on a year-to-year basis. >> John: There aren't that many of ya, right? >> Well, there's a couple, 42 this time. And, you serve for a year and it can be renewed each year, you reapply. Or you can be volunteered, you know, somebody else can... >> Nominate you. >> Can nominate for us. And there's no guarantee. We, the members of the trust vote and then that goes to Splunk and Splunk makes the final decision. Some companies allow that, some don't, it depends. ASU is very generous and let's me participate and give them my time to the organization. >> And I said ASU, Arizona State University. >> That's what I was thinking. >> I never fully introduced that, I'm sorry. >> What do you have to do to qualify and what's the hurdle? >> So, be the most helpful person in the room, that's what you need to do to qualify. So you need to be a part... You can't work for Splunk, you have to be a partner or a customer, and you need to give to the community in some way. So, you need to give back to the community. You participate on Answers, which is the online, kind of, self-support forum. You need to speak in the community, maybe run a user group, a lot of us do run the user groups. I run the user group in Arizona. And, you need to be respected amongst the community and, people go, you know, "I want to go to them, "they'll help me or at least get me to the right person." >> Is it predominantly or exclusively technical practitioners, or not necessarily? >> This year, they divided us in to, kind of, organizational units, so there's architects, and practitioner, and developer. So, we're all technical, but, this year we're going to have the ability to focus a little more on a specific area. You know, "What do you do for a living, "what do you do with Splunk? "Do you architect with Splunk internally, "do you just provide Splunk practice? "Are you a Splunk developer that makes apps? "How do you use Splunk on a daily basis?" And, again, there are partners as well. So, Aplura and Defense Point, I think, are both tied with four members a piece. So that's one of those things that, you know, they're going out to individual customers and helping them everyday. >> So, it's really taking this notion of a customer advisory board to a whole another level. I mean, it's not a passive, you know, group of people that, maybe, meets once a year. >> Right. >> It's an ongoing, active, organic institution essentially. >> Absolutely, we have quarterly meetings online and at those meetings a different Splunk, sometimes executives, sometimes product managers or engineering managers, you know, come and speak to us. And it can be anything from, "Hey, we're developing this "internal product and are we interested, you know, "is that useful to you?" Or, "What enhancements do you feel the product need?" Or, you know, "This is a new feature we're working on "to look and feel." I was consulted about the conf logo. "Hey, Chris, you're an average customer, "which of these four logos do you think really, you know, "kind of helps set the mood?" And, you know, did they take my advice? Does it really matter, no, but they were willing to just... I'm not associated, I'm not in the bowels of the company. >> So this isn't your logo over here? >> That is actually the one that I chose. >> Oh, excellent, I would assume so, right. >> Who organizes the quarterly meetings? >> So, the quarterly meetings are organized by Splunk in the community. There's a community group that's underneath Brian Goldfarb, who's the Chief Marketing Officer. So, he organizes the quarterly meetings. He gets to herd all the cats, because we're all across the world. You know, you have to figure out a time zone, you have to figure out where, you have to figure out when. But, most of the time, there's some suggestions. "Hey, you know, the engineering manager "for section x would like to speak." But, sometimes it's like, "Yeah, we would like to talk "to the person in charge of Search Head Clustering," for example. "We see some pain points in the community," or something like that, so, it's wide-ranging. But, you know, we're not just a group to rubber stamp anything that Splunk does, but we're also not a group to just sit there and complain about things we don't like. It's really very much a give and take. Splunk is generous and open enough to give us that access, and we take that very seriously. To be able to help guide Splunk in making their product the best it can be. It's an amazing product, I'm an evangelist, have been since I started using it. But, also, to help the customers. If the customers are having a pain point, we're probably going to hear about that first. >> Dave: When did you start using? >> I've been using Splunk for about five years. And when I started using Splunk at ASU, it had been a 50GB license and they'd just bought another 100GB, and it needed re-working, it needed architecting. So, when I came in, our chief information security officer and our VP for operations are the ones who directed me. And I said, "What do you want to grow for?" And they said, "Architect it for a terabyte, "assume it's going to take us several years to get there." So, I rebuilt the current environment and we architected it for a terabyte and here we are, four-and-a-half, five years later, we're at a terabyte. And, we're still growing and we're looking at Cloud, you know, we're looking at other use-cases. I think the biggest ship for us is that, we talked about this briefly last year, is that I work for John Rome, who's the Deputy CIO for Arizona State, and he's in charge of business intelligence and analytics. So, it is an enterprise application for data at ASU. It is not part of the security office, it's not part of operations, it's not part of depth. Those are all customers. And, so, internally those are customers and I think that's an amazing opportunity to say that, "Those are customers of mine." So, I'm not beholden to, you know, building the system so it's only useful for security, or building it so it's only useful for operations. They're my customers, and we avoid any appearance of, "Oh, I don't want to put my data in a security product. "I don't want to put my data in an operations product." Nobody questions putting their data in the data warehouse, that's the appropriate place for the data to go. So, that's the beauty of the system that we've developed, is they're both customers of mine. >> All right, so let's talk about your work at Arizona State, little bit. I don't know the size now, I'm trying to think of it, a huge... >> Chris: We're the largest single university in the United States. >> Probably what, 60,000-70,000? >> Total enrollment 104-110,000. A lot of that's online, I think we have about 78,000 or more at the main campus. But, we're the single largest university in the U.S. There are groups like the University of California that's larger overall, but not single institution. >> So, you know... >> Massive. >> Big project, yeah. Where are you now, then? What have you been using Splunk for that maybe you weren't last year when you and I had a chance to visit? >> Yeah, so, we started using it as a security product. It was brought in to make security more agile in getting that information from the operations and the networking groups, firewalls was the first thing we were brought in for. Now, we're starting to look at other use-cases, we're starting to look at edge cases. "Are we using it for academic integrity?" So, the very beginning so that we're looking at, "If a student is taking a test, are they the person "taking the test?" We're looking at it to make sure the students' accounts are safe and not compromised. We're looking at rolling out multi-factor to the university and being able to protect that. And, we're taking a lot of those functions and pushing them down to our help desk, so the help desk has all of the tools they need to be able to support the student and take care of their issue on the first call. That's really important, we have an amazing help desk organization, amazing care organization. And that's the goal is, it doesn't matter how long the call takes, you do that on the first call. And Splunk is a key portion of that to be able to provide them with the right information. And they don't have to go and try to get somebody from network engineering just to solve the student problem, they can see what the problem is from the beginning. >> Academic integrity, explain that. >> Yeah, so, you know, I don't think that there's any student who doesn't want to do their own work and do the best possible thing they can. But, sometimes, students get in a position where they need some help and, maybe, that isn't always exactly what they should do. So, you need to make sure that the student is taking the test that they're signed up for, that they didn't have any assistance, especially in online classes. We need to keep our degree important and valid, and, obviously, none of our students want to, but occasionally you find somebody who hasn't done exactly what they're supposed to. And we need to be able to validate that. So, we need to be able to validate that someone did what they said they did or did the work that they said they did. It's just like, nobody wants to plagiarize, but, occasionally it does happen and we need to protect ourselves and protect the students. >> And you can do that with data? >> We can absolutely do. >> You can ensure that integrity, how? Explain that a little bit. >> A little bit, yeah. So, we look at where the student logs in from. If the login routinely from Tempe, Arizona and then, suddenly there's a login from someplace else. Oftentimes, that has nothing to do with academic integrity, that has to do with there is an account compromise. We need to protect the students' personal information, both HIPAA and FIRPA. We need to protect their privacy information, just generally available PII. So we look at when they logged in, where they logged in, how they logged in. Did the how-to factor worked? I think academic integrity is really a much smaller portion of that, I think the more thing is we need to protect those students. So, we look at how they logged in, when they logged in, what type of machine they logged in from. I mean, if you're using a Surface and you've been using a Surface to login for months and then, all of a sudden, you login from an iPhone, you might have gotten a new iPhone, but, you know, you might not have. So, we put all those pieces of information, all those launch together to build a case that, "Do we need to reset this user's password for safety?" >> But I think academic integrity's important from the brand as well, because the consumers of your students, the employers out there, they may be leery of online courses. So, to the extent that you can say, "Hey, we've got this covered, we actually can ensure "that academic integrity through data." That enhances the value of the degree and the ASU brand, right? >> Absolutely, we don't think that any student wants to do anything that they're not supposed to. It does happen, you know. >> But even if it's one, right, or even if it's the perception of the employer that it can happen? >> John: The possibility. >> Yeah, and I think that's a really good point, is that we need to protect that brand and we need to protect the students. I think protecting students is the number one thing, protecting employees is the number one thing. Everything else falls from that. >> Okay, what about other student behaviors? I mean, you're sort of trafficking around campus, maybe, food consumption, dorm living, I mean, all these kinds of things that with sensors or, what have you, you could extract reams of data? >> We're doing a lot of that. We're partnering with Amazon to look at the Amazon Echo and using them in dorms to provide them voice interface. "Echo, where is my next class?" Or, "What time does the Memorial Union open?" Or, "How late can I get a pizza," and that type of thing. We want to build an environment that's not only fun for the students, but very powerful, and uses the latest technology. >> Pricing, I want to talk pricing, all right? I dig for the one little wart in Splunk and it's hard to find. But, I've heard some chirping about pricing because pricing is a function of the volume of data. The data curve is growing, it's reshaping. What are your thoughts? What do you tell Splunk about pricing? >> So, a lot of people say, "Man, Splunk is expensive." And, I don't think Splunk is expensive. Once you've achieved a volume, it's got a good pricing structure. I think that anything that Splunk tries to do to change the pricing model is a bad direction. >> Dave: So you like it the way it is? >> I like it the way it is. I believe that we've made an investment in a perpetual-licensed product and I certainly don't think that what we're spending on it, for a maintenance year is a bad thing. And i think that we get a good value for the product. And we're going to continue to use it for years to come. >> I've always felt, like, "Your price is too high," has never been a deal-breaker for software companies. They've generally navigated through that criticism. And it's been, you know, ultimately an indicator of success more than anything else. But, your point is if the values there, you pay for it. Are you able to find ways to save money using Splunk that essentially pay for that premium? >> Absolutely, so one of the very first things we did with Splunk, is we looked at our employee direct deposit, we talked about this briefly last year. We looked at employee direct deposit and we were being targeted by a Malaysian hacking group who was using phishing emails to phish credentials from us. You know, you send an email that looks very much like a university login and says, "You need to login "and change your password or you're not going to be able "to work in an hour." A lot of employees, especially employees in areas that aren't high tech, you know, in the psychology department, they may fill-in that information and then the hackers login and change their direct deposit. And then the university ends up paying the employee again and eating those costs. Our original use-case was on-the-fly, we saved $30,000 in a single payroll run. Pretty easy to pay for Splunk when you do that. And so, that was our very original use-case. And that came from just looking at the data. "Is this useful, where are these people logging in from?" There's a change, you know, and I think that that's very important. The thing I love about Splunk is, because it's schema on demand, because there's no hard schema, and that it's use-case on demand. Is that, every single good use-case in the very beginning was standing around the water cooler, having a drink and saying, "I wonder if combine data set A, "we combine data set B, we come up with something that "nobody was asking about." And now when we something that we can help fix, we can help grow, we can make more efficient. To the question of how you deal with all that data is, you tune, you decide what data is important, you decide what data is unimportant, you clean up the logs that you don't care about. And we spent a year, we didn't buy Splunk for one year, we didn't buy a new license, or didn't buy an expansion license, because we took a year to compact and say, "Okay, all the data we're getting "from this firewall, is that all necessary, "is there anything redundant?" "Does it have redundant dates, does it have redundant "time stamps, et cetera." >> Right. >> And I pulled that information out and that just gave us a little bit of breathing room, and then we're going to turn around and take another chunk. >> Help. >> No schema on right sounds icky but it's profound. >> You mentioned the word, help, again, big word, key word. Chris Kurtz, one of the most helpful guys in the community of the Splunk. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for being with us, Chris Kurtz. Back with more, Dave and I are going to take a short break, about a half-hour, we'll continue our coverage here live at .conf2017. (upbeat music)