[Music] [Applause] welcome back everybody traffic here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios having a cube conversation the madness of the fall conference season is just over the horizon but hasn't it yet so we're excited we get some time to bring people into the studio and we're excited to have a mini time cube alone but he's never been to the studio before it's Franco farm the CMOS Blanc Brian great to see you great to be here this is amazing I could say how you like the day love it it's awesome it's nice you don't have to set up the lights every time like we do it at all the various shows so what's going on it's Blanc give us give us an update just had the quarterly or the quarterly announcement came out a month or so ago I wasn't into that before you came in another rock and roll revenue growth you guys just seemed to be hitting it time and time and time again on fire things are going great it's Blanc we just you know huge rounds of customer success lots of new products and technology I think it's been a big focus for us how do we continue to drive the innovation engine for security and for IT and really transform how you know as the leader in Big Data how we help our customers right super fun and from the marketing side you know we're driving an enormous amount of transformation I think you see this happening for CMOS everywhere their businesses are changing you know I fundamentally believe that the marketing department is the market department going through the most transformation right now Ramos or under the most pressure to change and so there's so much going on and how we're thinking about digital first how we're thinking about being data-driven Splunk on Splunk in many ways how we're using our own technology by our business and community which I know you guys are super passionate about here right who ended no a community but your kind of reputation when you came in is you're a data guy you like to measure the data you like to you know see how things are working not like you're your dad's old marketing department where you just kind of throw it up and write 50 percent of that budget is wasted we're just not sure which 50 percent yeah that was a great excuse for a long time you know I we talk about kind of hashtag math camp is one of the things we talk about a lot how do we think about leveraging data in everything that we do how do we get data-driven insights how do we have data-driven instrumentation and ultimately how are we using that to drive the marketing department I think what we're seeing so many places is first the accountability required and marketing is changing right you can no longer say if a 50-percent works I don't know what half its what's working right now for our customers and I you know we see the need to leverage data and digitization across businesses being a key part of that but we also can't lose sight in many ways of the need for community and the emotional connection that brands have with customers and I think one of the things no see the t-shirt that's right energy like one of the things we're doing really uniquely beyond being amazing at delivering big data solutions for our customers is creating that community in that connection building that emotion and doing that in a way where we can connect the dots from you know the relationship that we're building customer success and ultimately you know super happy and satisfied right customers and we've seen that we've been going to sponge-like compact who is my first cube gig in 2012 oh my god back at the Aria knows that the cosmos is the Cosmo so you guys have you know a super vibrant community really passionate and engaged and I don't know if it's by smart planning or circumstance or you know a little bit of both but you know kind of your play in the security market as the security market has just exploded yeah and using machine data which oh by the way has something to do with IOT and IOT so you know you guys are really well positioned sitting on all that machine generator you think about the roots around IT first right how do we help IT professionals find out what's going wrong with their systems and fix them as fast as possible they can really focus on customer outcomes taking those same patterns to security which you rightly acknowledge on fire super important board level issues and now we think about businesses going through digital evolution but they're iteratively trying to add more and more digital components you see it in the marketing department right we have better access to data so we can become more digital and as we see our customers evolve the patterns that were successful in IT and security now work in other parts of the business a great example this is a customer sample Yelp wait in Bay Area I don't know if for you if it's not on Yelp and I'm not looking at a review I can't eat there because it's too much risk but the they they were working through how did they improve the quality of the experiences customers have a food delivery it's not a mighty thing this so it's not security but it's how do you take their data and begin to investigate the root causes of issues right how do you then monitor and detect changes in those patterns and how do you automate and analyze the resolution with the end goal of very clearly having bet warmer food for customers right so it's been an amazing experience for them and if amazing outcomes and all of that is as more and more data explodes across the business you see Splunk adding value in every department so I'd love to get your take something we talk a lot about on the cube and you've been in the business for a long time before spunk as well and that's you know before data was really a liability it was expensive to gather it was expensive to store you had to buy a bunch of boxes and stick it in a data center and usually bought like 75% more than you needed in case you had a bump so it was really kind of a liability now obviously as you said data is a huge asset some would say the oil etc it's an asset but it's not measured on the balance sheet it's still not measuring on the balance sheet today so when you see some crazy valuations for a lot of companies say at Facebook or Google it's really a reflection of a multiple of the value of their data not necessarily just a multiple of the value their revenue or their earnings so as you work with your customers and as you measure kind of ROI on return of an investment say the Yelp investment it's a very different measure of ROI if the date if the investment on the data side is to drive better outcomes it's to drive more revenue is to drive maybe new product development innovation and yet again it's not really measured as an asset so how does that kind of play into how people decide to do projects how they measure the success of projects when it's it's not the cost center of it and that's the transformation that's happening right right digital is happening everywhere which really means data is happening everywhere and it's not just the structured data that we're used to it's all the unstructured data though data that people were unaware necessarily had enormous amounts of value certainly not balance sheet value but any value right right I think the world has realized in every department that that data has value and so those decisions on where to have projects if you will stems from that understanding and then the best way to evaluate it is what our customers doing right we're working with dahmer automotive company and their challenges were how do they secure you know their automotive systems their their plant systems and they had out there in the old world that was disconnected it was offline and as more and more of that becomes digital it's way easier to sort of take advantage of software like Splunk and apply it to those use cases and start to realize the value and the value at the end of the day comes from I'm solving a set of problems I'm more secure I'm happier customers I'm delivering better process I have faster time to resolution with my systems recovery and in marketing if you think about it from the CMO lens which could be you know it's really important we can start to tune you know our investments and the campaigns that we're running and the messages that we're using for the audience and it's particularly important in b2b marketing where you have a lot of data I put its longer sales cycles and I don't know you know I believe it's the CMO in many ways and the marketing department works for sales but it's our responsibility to drive the demand to help our business right but at the same time it's critical that we don't lose sight of that creates having that community that is so important to the loyalty that happens over time with brick right and that's another just such an interesting point right is back in the day you know the brand's controlled the messaging the brands controlled the information the brand's controlled the content that's no longer the case anymore by the time somebody inquires to you or participates in a campaign or shows a better spunk event or or goes to the website they've probably done some homework they've probably talked to their peers they've probably done some investigation on online and I know and I go online to investigate stuff I'm looking at the other people talking about the products that I'm interested not necessarily the company's product so it's a really different challenge from a CMO perspective to engage enable and help those people be your advocates while at the same time you don't really have this quite as control the message as you used to have back well hey that's actually I think a great thing right most customers are doing more due diligence on their own and I think there's there's research you can see research from others that say something to the effect of 60 or 70 percent of the decision-making process is occurring before they even engage the brand right and so once you recognize that how you tie all these things together becomes super important so I'll go back to community I don't want to over harp on it but that's the only way that you can effectively manage the unknown unknowns in that first 70% how do you get your customer advocates to tell their stories the value they're getting how do you make sure that the content that you think is relevant to the industry is out there you're contributing to it how do you in your just think about what you guys are doing right how do you distribute the value chain of content creation to more valuable individuals that then can tie back to organizations and how do you tie it the stories that we tell right right so I want to I want to test another hypothesis bite because again you're smart guys and we talk about a lot here which is really kind of classic old-school have a big number with some small conversion rate and that's your yield yep versus having a relatively small but targeted number with a much higher conversion rate because these are actually the people that care versus more of a kind of broadcasting yeah strategy are you seeing some of that are you trying to execute I think that's critical in the future of all marketing right the broad reach stuff is expensive it's really hard to measure the impact and yeah if you can do 10 million here and 50 basis points you'll get to some outcome but the world is pivoting to vary outcome driven right how many transactions that I Drive what's the value of those transactions or more importantly how successful were my customers that we care at Splunk deeply about getting the software adopting the software getting value from the software and so that has nothing to do with big broad you know hit a hundred million people right it's hit the right ten thousand people right pull them through a customer journey that starts with their research phase ultimately puts them through the adoption phase an incredibly successful way and that Tunes everything you're in best your philosophy what you reward because they think in the the older school model there was this belief that more is better right just do more what you're a successful company so what are you gonna do just do more more and more and more and more and more and you get these linear growth patterns on more and eventually that stops working because something else breaks and you realize that more wasn't actually doing anything it just felt good in the moment it was just more it was just more and it kept people busy and it was great it was great in those sense and so that's why measurement that's why being able to take your data and get value from your data and listen to your data is so critical in every department and marketing more than anyone else now has that data so you can be targeted I mean if I can tell you if I only touched five people and those five people became incredibly successful customers that's an amazing marketing campaign right with huge success yeah versus I ran a commercial during the Super Bowl and I touched you know 240 million people but no one bought any software you might feel good about that right but it isn't necessary driving the outcomes and the results and then b2b that's so critical yeah and obviously we're huge believers of that and also on the community side as well because you know we want to get peers you know your buyers peers talking about their experience with the product is very very different than reading your marketing brochure or those types of things so it's such a critical component I mean just with the Yelp example that's a pure concept that applies exactly the same to enterprise software community like community is critically but digital is the trend that's driving all the change right that gives you access to data which forces accountability into new parts of the organization that never really had it before no more excuses and now you have this incredibly new community driven model which never used to be important but actually to me is the lifeblood of the long-term investment that marketers are making right right the other thing that you guys have done a good job kind of growing with the times if you will and that's customers want choice and they want buying choice right so you guys have obviously adopted cloud you have more subscription type of opportunity so what if you could speak to you know from a marketer point of view you have to kind of repackage things you've got to look for funny arbitrage opportunity I kind of screwed things up in the market your channel partner conflict you have to kind of manage all these things but but the reality is people want to buy the way they want to buy and you have to give them the options that they expect to be there and I think that's really the big change is the expectation is there that you have those different types no one's successful in isolation any more any belief that one vendor and one product is the solution to all ills is policy and so you know there's two views there one is what are you doing from a technology innovation perspective and that's for us very clearly focused on making sure Splunk and all the software you already have work better together the sum of the parts should be greater right right and then from a marketing perspective it's recognizing you know how you can go to market how you can sell with all the partner in the ecosystem right this isn't a competitive conversation it's how do we make customers successful and so Splunk and salesforce is better because I can look at my Salesforce data I can use Splunk I can drive my organization that's what we're doing inside the house and we see customers starting to do it right Splunk in Hadoop it's not about the Hadoop ecosystem per se being separate those that that data Lake coupled with our software is a better solution and so it's Punk with all these different technologies together being more effective is critical right and it's exactly what you said customers have what they have they've made the investments that they've made they have great reasons for all those things and I want to augment their success with ourself right right it's such an exciting time to be to be in marketing especially in the movie space so give the last word Brian for we cut out here Spong kampf 2019 is good what are you just knock off 18 18 is coming up so what can we expect how many people what what should people be making sure they get registered and get them glad it's not 2019 yet yes I have like 15 months and so we're not starting the planning on that we are calm 18 it's our amazing user conference you are there in 2012 we're gonna have almost 10,000 people there it's in Orlando Florida October 1st to October 4th it's it's really it's an amazing experience it really focused on celebrating our amazing user community now demonstrating all the way innovations and then bringing them together to share share ideas which i think is really for me as someone who's only been a spunk for almost two years so exciting every one of our customers is using our software at Splunk in innovative ways and what we're seeing more and more is it's expanding outside of just IT insecurity and so as our customers talk to each other share ideas share use cases we see the lightbulb moments the aha moments if you will going off and that part is incredible right well we'll be there again so yeah we're looking forward to it all right Brian well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day on a Friday to it to stop by thanks for having me it's awesome a pleasure he's brian i'm jeff you're watching the cube we're in palo alto studios thanks for watching see you next time [Music] you