 Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of .com, Splunk's annual conference. It's virtual this year, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, and a very special guest, Sean, Vice President of Products and Technology, CUBE alumni, Sean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and chatting with us. Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here. It's been a while since we chatted. You were at AWS now. It's Splunk heading up the entire Products and Technology Group here, which we've been covering Splunk since 2012. So we kind of know a lot about what's going on and followed your career. Your keynote, we kind of went into this cloud vision is hitting Splunk with the data, because the cloud scale, which you know a lot about, and data is now taking Splunk to a whole nother level. And that's the big theme. You got observability, multi-cloud, and security. Security's been there for a while. Mm-hmm. What's your assessment? Yeah, I mean, you and I have talked a number of times before, and what I found is that there's a lot of companies through this pandemic that, you know, some are thriving and some are not. And the ones that are really thriving, they have this strong data foundation. Like, when you talk to them, they're not stuck. Like, when they talk about scaling or adding capacity or building new customer experiences, they can't. Their data platform allows that to happen, but the ones that are stuck, you know, they just can't, they can't get to the data. They can't ask those questions that they'd otherwise, you know, love to. So that's, you know, I think Splunk is right in the middle of that, and that's the fun part of it. Yeah, you've got the strong foundation one. The interesting about Splunk is, every inflection point in the industry over the past decade, you see Splunk do something new, operationalize data, do something new, operationalize it. We saw security, I think, around 2015, come on the radar at .conf. And then, since then, a whole nother level of data. You got Edge. You have now cyber security even more advanced than ever before. And then enterprise is just trying to develop modern applications. So you have this whole rapid scale of CICD pipelining modern applications, and the role of data isn't just storing it, managing it. It's like making it addressable. This is like the new current phenomenon of cloud. Yeah, I mean, I like the way you just put it. It really, you know, making data addressable, we put it in terms of like, turn data into doing. So, you know, if you have data that you're storing it, that's one thing. And you don't want to leave data behind because you don't know what question you may want to ask and when, but to your point, making it addressable is if you and I decided, hey, we want to build a new customer experience or we're thinking about doing this thing and we're going to have a million questions to ask. That data is going to help you be to know whether what you're trying to do if your customers is right or wrong. So it is, it's remarkable to see how many customers are in pursuit of really turning data into doing. So I've got to ask you, we had the Formula One team on here, McLaren, Zach Brown, I got a little selfie with the drivers. That's kind of cool, my son loved it. But that's an IoT application in my mind. First, the coolness of the sport is awesome, but like the car going in real time, you know, driving in advance with data. So it's an IoT, it's got IoT. Then you got just the blocking and tackling data warehouse in the cloud. And then you got companies who are trying to transform with data. So I have to ask you as customers out there look at Splunk and they look at the next level of their architecture with multi-cloud coming around the corner, how should they be thinking about data? Get the foundation with Splunk. What's the next chapter in your mind? Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of customers that I meet they're in multiple clouds. They're not just in one. It means they've got data in Amazon or Google or Azure. A lot of them still have data on-prem. You know, but when I talk to customers, they don't say things to me like, hey, I'm in different clouds, I'm on-prem. Can you make sure I have different observability and security experiences for each one? They don't. They really at the end of the day, they're like, look, I need a consistent observability experience, consistent security, regardless of where my data is. So what that means to Splunk is, you know, wherever your data is, we're going to be, Splunk will just work. That's kind of as, you know, it's how we think about it. Speaking of it, I had dinner at Orlando the other night. And it was, I hadn't met Orlando before, but man, what an awesome, awesome person. We were just kind of hanging out, talking about data. And I, this is the kind of stuff you wouldn't normally get. I asked him like, hey, if you could, if technology could do anything to help you win Formula One races, what would it be? A totally open-ended question. And I wasn't sure how he was going to answer it, but he didn't pause this guy, like you talk about, you think of these scenarios. He's very quickly, he's like, oh man, if we had data, it could help me do this and this and this and this, because in his business, a millisecond can be the difference between winning or losing a race. And for some, you're like, oh, that can't be, but for him, that's how his mind works. So it's crazy to see how excited he was to use tech to get to data, ask questions that can ultimately help him win races. Well, it's the number one thing, pitting at the right time or tires, what was he, what did he come up with? There he is. Yeah. You know, I can't, unfortunately, I don't want to put you in the spot, I wouldn't even, you know, this is like, you know, I wouldn't, that would put him in a bad spot, but I will tell you though, I mean, this guy is, and that whole team is really about using data to win races. Well, you know, I was joking with these guys when they came on, because, you know, I'm a big fan, obviously with the Netflix special, Driving to Survives, the name of the title, they become hugely popular to a new fan base, mostly techies. I said, hey, you're driving the advantage with data, kind of my little comeback to that. But that's really kind of a real, encapsulates a real world scenario. I mean, with their team, 1,000 people working on McLaren, you have the driver in the car, you have the car itself with all this instrumentation, that kind of encapsulates the enterprise experience right now. They don't have the right app doing the right thing with customers. It could be the difference between, you know, having a successful digital transformation or not. Oh yeah. So it's kind of like parallel. I mean, and I know that's kind of the tie-in with the sponsorship, but that's the real world now. It is, and I mean, if you think about it, there's two drivers per car, 10 teams, there's so many races, there's a tremendous amount of money that they're all spending. But you know, when your season is really composed of a certain number of races and you got millions of people tuning in, you're right, there's hundreds of people working behind the scenes. Could you imagine if they didn't use data and you're trying to race in Formula One against the best drivers and the best engineers in the world? I just, you know, it goes to, you're right. It is, it's a perfect example of them transforming as any other enterprise, basically using data to get an advantage. And you know, just before we move on to the next topic, the eSports thing is fascinating as well, because now they're taking this metaverse kind of vibe where they're moving people on the eSports with having the shadow competition. It's a very interesting kind of bringing the fan base in, but there's probably going to be a lot of data involved in that as well. Maybe identifying the next driver, you know. Who knows? Totally. Good stuff. Sean, you're in charge of the process of technology, so I have to ask you, as customers look at all the different solutions out there, I also have a multi-cloud check. You guys have a good vision on that, like that. Observability, I mean, that's the fashion right now. Let's talk about observability. That, there's so many companies out there doing quote, observability. How should customers think about what that means in context to the decision that they make? Everyone's coming into the CSO or the CIO saying, I'm your observability solution. Yeah, I mean, first, you know, what is observability? I always like to just sort of map it back to things that we might understand. So back in the day, monitoring really was connect to a machine. It has a monolith app. You know this. And you just try to debug this one thing. That's not the world we live in today. Today, when you're building apps in the cloud, you have hundreds of these services behind the scenes. Like no one person can actually comprehend all of it. So now all of a sudden tools become, they really matter. And what I would say is from a Splunk perspective, when we talk to customers, it's not like one person there or one team is quote, you know, working and making the whole system work. Oftentimes you have different teams like network teams, app teams, security teams, and they all kind of need to work together in one way, shape or another. But this is why, you know, when we build our systems, it's off of shared data. So that, you know, if I'm an operator, you're an app developer, and if I need to work with you, at least I can share something with you in context. So we, while there are individual tools to do certain things, our mental model is that they all do work together. That's super, super important for any observability thing you're looking at. You just want to make sure that you can see things end-to-end. Otherwise you can get in trouble, quick. You know, I'd love to get your perspective being new to Splunk as you come in, not new to the industry, obviously the experience that in the cloud has been well documented, certainly on theCUBE. What's it like there? Because as you come in, it's not a utility anymore. It's the platform, and it's getting bigger and growing. So you have probably a lot of things going on. So you walk in and you say, okay, let me see the price of technology. Were you blown away? What was your reaction? Can you share some color around? What was it like when you opened up the doors of the kingdom of the product? Yeah, well, I mean, these t-shirts are real, man. And there's like ponies running around. Splunkers love to have fun. And, you know, before I came to Splunk, the one thing I noticed, anytime I asked about Splunk, they were fired up. Like they were really, really excited about the tech. But when I got into it, the truth is, you know, you don't know what you don't know until you see it, but I was just stunned to then sort of connect the dot, like, wow, Splunk is in the core data plane of tens of thousands of enterprises all over the world. Like the data plane for all their architecture and applications. So with that becomes a great responsibility as you could imagine. But it is not just a tool. It is something that customers like, I don't know, the University of Illinois, you know, with COVID they'll track 3.2 million saliva tests just for contract tracing. And behind the scenes, they're using Splunk for a real thing or we've talked about F1 or you think of Slack, like we're all kind of using Slack these days. Slack is using Splunk to make sure that their environment of slackers and everything, it's all secure. So it's those stories that go on and on are just incredible when you learn that. I was talking to Theresa Carlson yesterday and we were talking about the growth opportunity and I was speculating that, you know, in my opinion, my opinion, it's still an angle on the cube is that Splunk's at this new inflection point, another elbow, another kick up, growth. The way it's positioned, if you look at kind of where it's been and kind of where it's going with security now as a platform with the enterprises, how do you describe that growth in your mind? Because obviously there's markets changing, edge, real time, all these things are happening. Where's the growth going to be for Splunk? Yeah, I think it's in the cloud. I mean, if you think of Splunk, I think the company is about 18, 19 years old. So it's history is in almost 20 years of on-premise software. In some sense, you might go, hey, is that a liability but the reality is it's a strength because we're already part of these enterprise infrastructures and application stacks. And then when you now move that group to the cloud and then you got all others coming to the cloud, that's where they're, I mean, it is just the tip of what is happening. So, you know, if I'm a customer and I move to the cloud and the cloud, it's like, I don't have to really scale or size anything. Like it just works. And to me, it's just an endpoint and I load data. So in that context, the number of new use cases that customers are able to get after is actually pretty awesome but really at the end of the day, it's cloud growth. Well, great to have you on. I know you got to go. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. One final question. What's your vision for the next year or two? What's your to-do items? What's the message to the marketplace? You know, I'm thrilled to be here but at the end of the day, you know, my message to the marketplaces, we're all excited to work with our customers to really help them have that strong foundation so they can turn data into doing and actually pull off these digital transformations. One final, final question. For the companies that get the cloud scale combined with putting data into action for the value, what's the result going to be? Is it going to be more competitive advantage? Is it more agility? What do you see happening when you combine the cloud scale with a great data plane? Yeah, I think at the end of the day, these companies would tell you that they can move faster than ever before. They're more competitive. They have confidence that their environment's secure. They can build new customer experiences. And when you put all of that together, honestly, that is what these digital transformations are all about. Great to be in the product and technology business these days, isn't it? Thought of fun. That's awesome. A lot of action. Yeah, exactly. Sean, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Yeah, you bet. Good to be here. Mr.Cube coverage here. Here at the live studio for Splunk Studios for their virtual event. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier, host. Thanks for watching.