 From Burlingame, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Sumo Logic Illuminate 2019, brought to you by Sumo Logic. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Sumo Logic Illuminate at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. About 800 people, 900 people, packed house in the keynote earlier this afternoon. Really interesting space, and we're excited to have our next guest kind of on the cutting edge of the IoT space on the consumer side. And he's Robert Parker, the CTO of Samsung SmartThings. Robert, great to see you. Hi, great to be here. Absolutely, so before we get into kind of the depth of the conversation, a little bit of a background on SmartThings. I was doing some research, getting ready for this and the fact that it started as a Kickstarter a long time ago, not that long ago, and now is part of Samsung, a global electronics giant. What a fun adventure. Absolutely, I think it's been one of these things where it's great to be something where it's community driven to begin with. So Kickstarter was a big part of our launch and we were one of the biggest Kickstarter launches at the time, really powered by our community around the website and early users. We got a lot of interest in IoT and then moved on to the next stage of the vision which is sort of encompassing all devices. And so that meant we have more than 2000 different Samsung devices on the platform now which really allow devices to talk to each other in ways that are really exciting. And that breath has been really great thing to be part of. Right, it's really funny. We went to the Samsung Developer Conference a couple of years ago and it was funny to see the living room guys fighting with the kitchen guys as to where, you know, what was the center? Is it the TV or is it the refrigerator? Or is it the washing machine for that bit? And Samsung's really got a foot in all those places. Absolutely, and this is one of the things that the SmartThing platform has really enabled Samsung to transition across is then it's no longer a conversation with the washing machine person or the dryer. All the devices are part of the SmartThings Cloud. The SmartThing Cloud is the one way that you can talk to Samsung devices. And it's an open ecosystem. So it's not just Samsung devices. We're, you know, equally comfortable with manufacturers, any manufacturer bringing those devices because home is a multi-vendor environment. You are not going to have all of your home from any one vendor. Right. And that's been one of the exciting parts of the vision is the open ecosystem has been something that's been part of SmartThings' story forever. To really immoralize that in a platform for Samsung has been a great transition. Right. So we're here at SumoLogic Luminate and in preparing for this, I saw an interview with you. You made a really interesting comment. You said that we are a pervasive user of SumoLogic. I think you said 90% of the team are using SumoLogic. It's fascinating to me because I think a lot of companies are chasing innovation. I think one of the ways to get innovation is you enable more people to have more access to more data and the tools to actually operate that data so that they can do their jobs and find cool ways to make improvements that aren't necessarily coming from the top down. It sounds like you guys have addressed that philosophy wholeheartedly. So we absolutely have addressed it wholeheartedly. I think there's a lot of luck involved and I wanted to sort of describe it as that one of the things that worked well for us is people were excited to use Sumo more and more. They were more excited to see what they could do with the tool, what insights they could get. And so you'd see your neighbor looking at it and they'd look at a dashboard and they'd say, hey, can I do a little bit of that? And so much so, in the last year, we've seen a lot of unplanned value come out. So a third of the value we got out of the SumoLogic in the past year was unplanned. It was things people didn't process, they didn't know they would improve, that really just came from this groundswell from what I would call the community. And I think that's where you get, that unlocks a lot of the potential. Because you really can't do things from sort of the planned high level. You really need people actively engaged and doing stuff you wouldn't expect. That's great. So I want to talk a little bit about security. Security is a big topic here. It's a topic everywhere we go. And now with connected devices and connected keys and connected doorbells, it seems like, oh, here we go again. And there's this constant talk that security's got to be baked in throughout the entire process. How are you guys dealing with security? It's obviously got to be right at the top of mind in terms of priorities while you're still connecting the sprinklers and the thermostat and everything else. Security and privacy are both critical. And I'd link in privacy, even though you didn't ask about it, because as you think about devices like cameras and things like this, privacy is top of mind. Also in terms of regulation like GDPR. And so because of that, we're really looking at both cases that the challenge for both security and privacy is it really cuts through your whole organization and every process. And by the way, every process for every partner at the organization has because we can have something that could be exploited from sort of an attack through a customer service representative. That can be a person in the customer service organization. It can be how someone socially engineered that. And so what we've really needed is this kind of continuous intelligence that can span all of these processes because in something like security, you're as good as your weakest process. And that doesn't mean that we don't focus on all the things that you talked about. We're industry leading from a device perspective to have hardware baked in keys and do things in the manufacturing process that lead to something that could be as secure as anything. But that's really the secret of using a lot of the continuous intelligence tools like Sumo, is that all of these could-bees aren't enough. You have to bring it together by having the intelligence that spans those processes to make sure that all of them are elevated because at the end of the day, a security attack is going to attack your weakest thing, not your strongest thing. Right. So one of the other topics here that's talked about is this exponential growth of data. And you guys are part of the problem because now we got sensors and light switches and all these other things that are kicking off data that before we weren't monitoring. And so from an execution point of view at the company when you've got so much data that you need to turn into information and then actionable insight, you said Sumo's got some unique characteristics that allow you guys to get more leverage out of that platform. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit more. And I'd like to reframe the data discussion a little bit because a lot of people look at it as a problem. And I want to really talk about the opportunity side. So part of that goes to our story where we started off at Kickstarter with a few thousand users. We have over 50 million active users now. 50 million. 50 million. Our Android application, the Google Play Store have been downloaded around 200 million times. So it gives you some idea of that size and scope. So the data is an opportunity. There's an opportunity to build a customer base to excite people and to manage the processes that do that. And what's great now is that the availability of this data means that you can do it in more ways than you ever could before. The problem is you need a tool that brings this together to be able to do that and doing that well is difficult. Difficult both on the teams and difficult because of the size scope and complexity of the systems because of the data that you mentioned. But the reason you want to do it is so that you can cross the chasm in terms of this opportunity. And more and more companies are now have this opportunity under front of them. One of the things that's been really exciting about the cloud is it sort of democratized the entry point. But that wasn't good enough just because you could get in the game with three people. It's like making a, you can make an application in a mobile application store either on Google's or on Apple's really easily. That gets you in there. What you really need to do is manage the intelligence that goes from that. And for us, it's been really exciting to be able to take our decisions and make them data driven. And we can do that by this explosion of data because it is there. And the data is good. And I think we see kind of data as an asset. It hasn't really hit balance sheets officially yet. But I think you see it in the valuations of companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon, right? Who obviously have these crazy giant multiples of their revenue. One, because they're growing, but two, because they have so much data. So the market's kind of valuing that data without explicitly calling it out as aligned on the balance sheet. That said, not all data has the same value. Not all data needs to be treated the same. And so really opens up an opportunity to how do you tear it? So you don't want to spend a ton of money on a piece of data in a big, fat stream that somebody leaves open on Amazon accidentally. Suddenly have a big bill and that maybe wasn't the most valuable. So. I'd actually doubled down on what you said because for a typical company, one of the things that's also been true of the mega scale companies that you pointed out with is there's a lot of uniformity in their data. So I've come to Amazon, they have customer orders and they've got orders at this massive scale. A typical company doesn't look like that. They have, their data spread is more fragmented, smaller scale. And so because of that, they want to make different decisions. And this is the same thing that has already happened in the storage area. People are really comfortable with storage that they're going to have in either a disaster recovery or long-term storage. And they want a very low cost footprint around that. They've got their hot data and they're much more willing to have that data managed differently and at a higher cost rate because it's much more valuable. We're looking for tools that span that, not just in storage, but in the ingestion, in the management, in the querying of that data. Because like you said, for most businesses, a lot of data is infrequently looked at or looked at in response to a situation. So I'll never know which 10% of the data will be looked at. It'll be based on, oh, I got audited or some other business event that happens. And so this is one of the key things that businesses are not struggling with. One of them is that, hey, they want to adopt these practices to become more modernized. But the second one is to really be able to tier the data because they couldn't treat all the data as if it's hot data. Just like they already figured that out for storage. Right, it's pretty interesting because it's been going on for storage forever. We really saw it, I think, with the rise of flash, which was super high quality, but super expensive in the early days that's coming down and then at the other and we had the glacier storage and the cold storage just put it away. I want to get your last answer, Robert. As you look forward, I can't believe we're already in the middle of September of 2019. It's fascinating to me the time flies so fast. But as you look forward, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so? How are you guys kind of moving the ball down the field? So one of the things that we're looking at was the data problem that you were talking about, of really looking at our infrequent data and being able to manage that effectively. Both from the types of insights that we can get from that. So a lot of this starts to be better usage of machine learning, pattern recognition, AI, and so that we can, you know, the ideal situation for us in that type of data is it got touched once, it got looked at once, and then we could understand how to action it later, that deferred action, and then how to trigger that deferred action, as well as the tiering that we sort of talked about that all data is not- Created equally. Created equally. And so both those things are happening just to put some numbers on this. Why is that, you know, we have 150 terabytes or so of data that is somewhat interesting to our business generated on a daily basis. And- 150 terabytes a day. 150 terabytes a day. That's interesting. That's good stuff. And that's, and out of that, I'd say 10 terabytes is kind of really actionable. As that gives you an idea. The other part is how that's grown, where a year ago we would have been at maybe 60 terabytes of what I would have called this interesting data, and maybe five terabytes of, you know, immediately actionable. And so that's where, you know, this is following that, where that's exponentially growing, and it's a big number. So that's what we really think about. So you're scared? Because those curves get steep. It's the same way we look at it as a huge opportunity. So what will happen is either people will create value out of that for customers, in which case actually the opportunity, because it's at such a scale, it will be great for everyone. Or number two, you know, it just becomes noise. And so it isn't really something to get scared of, because worst case is it became noise to you. We really want to be, one of those people were getting value out of it, and see sort of the business growth, and the consumer value growth out of that. I'm pretty optimistic that we'll be able to do it, because we really, you know, if I look back three, four years, we've just been able to figure out a way, and I think it will continue to do that. All right, well Robert, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and sharing the story. It's a great story. Thank you, appreciate being here. All right, he's Robert, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, where it's Sumo Logic Illuminate 2019. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.