 Live from the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walls. And welcome back live in Orlando, theCUBE here on the show floor of dot com 2016, Splunk's annual affair and what a great, great event. This has been now for a couple of days running and they'll be here tomorrow as well. We'll be done streaming though this afternoon. Steve Hatch is with us, by the way, I'm John Walls along with John Furrier. Steve Hatch is the manager at Cox Automotive and Steve, nice to have you on theCUBE. Glad you could be here with us. Thank you for having me. Hate, shouldn't say a Cubs fan living in Atlanta, but I'll leave that for another day. First off, tell us about Cox Automotive. You know, the breadth of services and what are you guys doing at a Splunk conference? Well, Cox Automotive represents the ecosystem of a car from a dealer side or a consumer side from when the manufacturer produces the car and all the different services that a dealer would leverage up until that car is sold and then all the functions that a consumer will use, whether it's insurance and ownership of a car, parts and services, and once they decide to sell or trade that car back to a dealer, it goes right back through the life cycle again, eventually salvage and recycle. All right, and now Splunk, what's the connection there? So imagine all those different functions that are currently not being aware of what the other does. How one can impact the other? By way of Splunk, log analytics, business analytics, you can take that data by way of marketing that would then influence specific traffic on your websites. Those websites turn into transactions, which then produces something that can be either purchased or sold that would deplete someone's inventory and then that provider can then fulfill it automatically because they're already aware. And you're integrating 37 or almost 30 entities. That is correct. A major coordination issue. Yes, sir. Right, good. So the question on Splunk is that we've been hearing is that it simplifies life, right? And one of the goals, first of all, that's always been Splunk's, you know, value proposition kind of emotionally, but there's some technical reasons for that. But the additions that they've done with IT intelligence, IT SI, for instance, has been pretty spectacular in terms of the upgrades. At least they say so, but we've heard that same thing. Have you been leveraging some of those things? What do you see in the evolution of Splunk products and how has it helped you? Well, initially it was a matter of putting all of this data into one centralized location. And the way that we've leveraged Splunk is by way of Splunk Cloud. Splunk Cloud allows us to not have to worry about so many of the on-premise challenges of firewalls and different data centers and different security policies where everyone has an internet pipe, send all that data to a common place, and from there now we can search and index against that data. So you don't have to stand up anything. That's correct. As infrastructure. That is correct. And they just do their magic. They do their magic on top of AWS, which we all know is in the cloud web service space. And from there I can do more work on the establishing of partnerships, the evangelizing of Splunk across the board. You're doing a better job, right? Exactly, right? Remedial tasks, like buttons and configuring stuff. Okay, Robert Herchovic, who was just on from the Shark Tank, his guest, advises clients, first collect the data. So you guys have consolidated around Splunk, right? So that's your collection mechanism in the cloud. Yes, sir. What's next? What did you do after that? Well, I mean, so you have to get out there and sell it. You have to establish partnerships. Then you have to ingest all that data. Ingesting the data on boarding your users is just one aspect of it. Where we're going now is getting the value out of it because over time, the CTO who signed this deal, where's that value? Great, you have terabytes and terabytes of data. Where's my return on investment? My ROI, right? So, give me my value. And that's my job is to make sure I provide that for him. And so are they asking that up front? Because what's the value that they currently have? Well, currently right now, it's given us the scenario. So before the ultimate value, the users that were onboarded are now starting to understand that we have this one single plane of glass to look for events. I don't have to have access to all servers because a lot of times platform teams are very protective of issuing specific rights to specific groups to access the servers to look at config files or applications. It's a crown jewel for the network. You don't want to go in tampering with just to get access to data. That's right. So they send the offload of critical resource, move data dump it into Splunk. Correct. You have free access to this wrangling environment. You munch the data, you wrangle it. And then you then come back and say, here's value. Well, and so, and even before, we're talking about some of the monetary values. Teams can now, by way of Splunk Cloud, have access to all data buckets if you will indexes. So if you're an application team that knows you have a dependency on someone else's technology, I have direct access to correlate those events. And now I can escalate to the group and say, guess what? I'm having an issue and I know where it is. It's like air traffic control. Yes. You're like landing planes, moving cargo, moving passengers. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of logistics. But imagine not having to wake up everybody to fix a problem. I can call this person and this person only that have any influence on the issue and resolve it. You've got to pull the fire alarm and wake everyone up. You just basically go right to the person. That's correct. And get the job done. And it's transparent, so that person who's the source of it can't deny it because he knows it's in Splunk too. Can you give us an example of how, because you've got, I think I said, you've got so many arms going on out there, but maybe an example of where Splunk has increased your efficiency or productivity or something that you couldn't do before, then now because of that, you're able to realize some real gain. So currently right now with ITSI that we're leveraging for our, Manheim is the company, SamaCast is the application that represents the digital representation of our physical auctions. Manheim has 80 plus auctions across the United States. Each auction has X-Mata lanes, some of as many as 32 lanes that run in parallel to auction off cars between dealers. All of those cars are SamaCast-ed. So users can bid online against people that are physically in the lanes that can actually kick the tires. So imagine if one of those lanes goes down, how do I decipher what the scenario is? Is it one lane, is it multiple lanes? Is it the provider itself that provides the internet service that streams the traffic back? Am I going to inundate my network operations team with all these alerts and then they have to sit there and put the pieces together to understand where it is? Or do I make sense of it by way of intelligence to then allow the tool to make a better decision so they can be more informed and take action and go on to the next event? So on the future environment that you have, what's the vision north, what's your north star? As you continue to transform your job, now you're in a good position to add value. You got the air traffic controller and you're getting value that way. What's next? I mean, what else do you see that? Where's the headroom, security? What things are you looking for down the road? Obviously, security. Next is the business analytics that can go directly into business, specifically marketing the sales. Allow them to leverage this tool, which is not only geared towards the technical, so they can leverage pivot tables by way of data models so they can build out their own dashboards and templates to actually get value out of Splunk without ever having any kind of technical discipline. So, and also it's a matter of making sure that Splunk can be possibly that platform that allows our architects to now go back and get everyone's standard on key performance indicators, KPIs, to allow all business units to now have services that are aligned. The more we are aligned as a company, as an enterprise, we can get that much more value out of Splunk. So, go ahead. There's always things in the pipeline, right? You're always looking at what's the next, greatest, best, or most important step. So for you, knowing that you've got the Splunk tools and you've got the Splunk team obviously working with you, what's the challenge in front of you? They say, this is our next nut, we have to crack. This is the next that we have to crack. The next biggest nut right now is just automation of our onboarding so that we can focus in on other initiatives and ventures. Our users right now are very demanding of this service because they love it, they've heard about it, they've come to these conferences. So by way of self-service, we're allowing them to onboard themselves with very little intervention for my team. That way we can now focus in on getting that value for our leaders. So the more automation, everybody wins there. That's correct. Steve, my final question for you, what advice would you have for other Splunk customers or potential people that are evaluating Splunk? What problem are they facing that Splunk is the solution and give them some color on why life's been improved and why Splunk's a good solution? Splunk from being a prior site reliability manager, Splunk gives you that visibility, the correlation and the platform that all would basically take advantage of and benefit from. It's a matter of having a tool that brings insight into data or events you've never even anticipated. The ability to harness the data, get value out of the data, turn that into, quickly into an event and a report and alert in a dashboard that is transparent for everyone to see, it's endless. There are no bounds. The bounds are your imagination. And it's not my job to interpret the need of my customers. I provide the platform, allow them to then put their spin on what they want, what value they want out of their data. I just make sure I maintain the platform for them. And we kind of heard at the keynote this morning. Imagination, right? That's the key word. Yes, sir. There are a lot of buzzwords going on, talking about imagination, just trying to apply that to how you're doing your business down the road. Steve, thanks for the time. I appreciate it. Pleasure to meet you, good luck down the road. Sounds like you're in pretty good hands with Splunk. It's making it work for Cox Automotive. I got a great team, yes, sir. Good deal, thank you. Steve Hatch for Cox Automotive. Back live from Orlando, here on theCUBE in just a moment.