 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Splunk.conf 19, brought to you by Splunk. Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's live CUBE coverage in Las Vegas at Splunk.conf 2019. This is their annual customer conference where they unleash all the new technologies, announce all the new things. Everyone's here. It's the 10th anniversary of Splunk.conf, theCUBE's seventh year. We've been covering Splunk. We've been quite the journey from scrappy startup, going public, growth phase, now market leader, and obviously that's coming to success from the products and the engineering, and of course the people in the field that serve customers. And we're here with Susan St. Ledger, who's the president of Worldwide Field Operations. Thanks for coming back. Good to see you. Thank you, John. It's exciting to be here. And the keynote, bringing data to every outcome is really the theme. You seem to got a spring to your step here. You're excited this year. What an amazing, successful show because you got a platform, but the proof is out there. You got an ecosystem, and you got people building apps on top of it. It's kind of all coming together this year. It sure is. It sure is. It's just, it's a huge leap forward. And I think so much of it is the vision of data to everything. And if you think about it, we talk about we want to bring data to every question, every problem, and every action. And the biggest thing you're going to see that you did see in the show is it's no longer just about the Splunk index. We're going to help you get value out of data wherever it lives. And you had some big news on acquisition front, single FX, big chunk of change for that company, private and hot category, observability, which really teases out that next 20 mile stair in the marketplace, which is cloud native. That's right. And cloud services, which comes together in the platform with logging, all kind of coming together. Yeah, it's so exciting. We looked hard at that entire market and signal FX was definitely the right answer. They operated a scale similar to us. They know how to operate at that scale. And so they're going to be able to serve our customers well. And our view of the world is it's going to be hybrid for a very long time, but they serve that new cloud native world better than anybody else. It's when you do monitoring the cloud native world, it's really interesting to think about it's all made up of microservices, right? So thousands of microservices, hundreds, thousands of microservices. And so in traditional monitoring, it's always you're trying to monitor things that you know could go wrong. In a microservice landscape, you don't know everything that could possibly go wrong. And so it's a level of complexity that's just very different. And so it's all about instrumenting so that when something does go wrong, you can solve it. You guys have a very loyal base, customer base, and that's a good, again, testament to the success. But the product has changed and the value proposition's emerging even further with data. That's a big theme, data to everywhere, everything. And security has come up on the radar a few years ago here at the show. But this almost is a full blown security show at this point because security's such center of everything, you can't ignore it, it's become a centerpiece of everything. The data, the access to the diversity, how has that impacted the field? Because you're not, I mean, I guess you're a security company enabler. You solve security problems, data's a big part of it. How is that shaping your operations? So I think the thing to understand is correct, we're not just a security company, but we are number one in the security magic quadrant, we're number one in both IDC and Gartner. And so that's important. But what happens is all of the data that you collect for security can also be used for all these other use cases. So generally speaking, whatever you're collecting for security is also valuable for IT operations and it's also valuable for many other use cases. So I'll give you an example. Domino's, which is a great customer of ours, they've gone 65% of their orders now come in digitally. And so they monitor the entire end-to-end customer experience, but they monitor it not only from an IT operations perspective, that same data that they use for IT operations also tells them what's being ordered, what special orders are being made, and they use that data for promotions. Based upon volume and traffic and timing, they actually create promotions. So now you're talking about the same data that you collected for security and IT operations, you can actually use for promotions, which is marketing. There's a lot of operating leverage in data. And you're getting at this. The old model was, here's a database, make a query, get a report, little time problem there. But now you have, well, that other data's over there and another database, who runs that data? So the world has certainly changed. It's now data needs to be addressable. This seems to be a big theme here and undercurrent. I know data to everywhere is kind of the global theme, but they're about diverse data feeds AI. And addressability allows for application access. Correct. So we look at the entire data landscape and say we want to help you get data, evaluate of your data wherever it lives. And it's right now, we've changed to the point where we are operating on data in motion, which is with data stream processor, which is hugely beneficial. You mentioned AI, ML, we actually do something so unique from an ML perspective because we're actually doing the ML on the live streaming. So so much more valuable than doing it in batch mode. And so the ability to create those ML models by working on live data is super powerful. That's a good announcement today. You guys had the data processor, you have the search fabric. Data fabric search. So real time and acceleration are themes there. I want to get your thoughts on your new pricing options. Yes. Why now, what's that mean for customers? So if we want to bring data to everything, we have to allow them to actually get all the data, right? So we needed to give them more flexible models and more alternative models. So for some people, the NGS model is very comfortable, but what they want it was more flexibility. So if you look at our new trans pricing and our predictable pricing, there's a couple of things that we've done with it. Number one is from 125 gig all the way up to unlimited, we'll show you your predictable pricing. So you don't have to guess, well, if I move from 20 terabytes to 50, what's that going to cost me? We're going to tell you and you're going to know. And so that's one. The second thing is you don't have to land on the exact ingest. So before if you bought a terabyte, you got a terabyte, right? Now there's a tranche from one to two terabytes. There's a tranche from two to five terabytes. And so it gives the customer flexibility so that they don't have to worry about it coming back to buy more right away. So that's kind of like a cloud model buy as you go, variable pricing. Exactly. I want to get your thoughts on some of the sales motions and positioning that you guys have out in the field, vis-a-vis the industry. We've seen a lot of success and say observability, for instance, we're talking to Rick and Kartik about this. Yes. You guys are an enterprise software, cloud and on-premises provider. You have enterprise sales motion. Yes. But there's a lot of other competition out there that sell to the SMB, they're like tools. What's the difference between an offering that might look like Splunk, but maybe targeting the SMB, small means-sized business, and one that needs to be full-blown enterprise? Yeah, so I think the first and foremost, most of the offerings that we see land in SMB, they have scale issues over time, right? And so what we look at it and say is, and they're mostly point products, right? So you can clutter up your environment with a bunch of point products, doing all these different things and try and stitch them together, or you can go with the Splunk platform, so which allows you to perform all of those same operations, whether it be IT, security, or data analytics in general. But it really is, it's about having the platform. And so you guys want to reduce the steps it takes to implement, or what's the value? I guess here's the thing, what's the pitch? So I'm an enterprise, I'm like, okay, I have, you know, tech debt, I got a lot of potential things going on, I got to reach the platform, I need to make my data work for me, I need the data be everywhere, IoT, enterprise, cloud, what's the Splunk pitch? So our pitches, we're bringing data to everything, and first and foremost, it's important to understand why, because we believe at the heart of every problem is a data problem, and we're not just talking IT and security. As you know, you saw so many examples, I think you talked to Zonehaven earlier this week, right? Wildfires is a data problem. New York Presbyterian is using us for opioid crisis, right? That's a data problem. So if everything's a data problem, what you want is a platform that can operate against that data and remove the barriers between data and action, and that's really what we're focused on. You mentioned Zonehaven, that was part of Splunk Ventures Fund. You guys have a social impact fund. Yes. What's the motivation behind that? Is it just for social good? Is there a business reason behind it, or both? What's the story? Yeah, so we actually have two social focuses. One is Splunk for good, and that is non-profit. What we announced a couple of weeks ago that we reiterated yesterday was the Splunk Social Impact Fund, so Splunk Ventures Social Impact Fund, and this is to invest in for-profit companies that are using data for social good. And the whole reason is that we look at it and so we say we're a platform, and if you're a platform, you want to build out the ecosystem, right? And so the Splunk Innovation Fund, Splunk Ventures Innovation Fund, is to invest in new technology focused on that brings value out of data. And on the other side, it's the Splunk Social Impact to get companies that are taking data and creating social good. So Splunk for good is a Splunk employees or a separate non-profit entity? It's not a separate non-profit entity, but it is what we invest in. Okay, oh, investing in non-profit. Investing in non-profit. Okay, and then social backs for profit. Yeah, exactly, like when we talked about the Global Emancipation Network, right? Which uses Splunk to fight human trafficking. That's on the non-profit side. So take me through this. This is a really hot area. We've been covering tech for good because a lot of what we're always talking about now is tech for bad, Mark Zuckerberg's testifying in front of Congress this morning. Kind of weird to watch that actually, but there's a lot of good use cases of tech. Tech can be shaped for good. A lot of companies are starting and getting off the ground for good things. But they're kind of like SMBs, but they want the Splunk benefit. How do they engage with Splunk? If I'm going to do a social impact thing, say Cube for good, I got all this tech, how do I engage Splunk? I want it, but I don't know what to do. Do I have access to tools? How do I buy or engage with Splunk? Yeah, so part of Splunk Ventures is making sure it's not just money, right? It's money, it's access to talent, it's access to our product, and it's help with actually thinking through what they're trying to achieve. So it really is the entire focus. It's not just about the tech. The other thing I would say is you saw that we put out a Splunk Investigate and you also saw us talk about Splunk Businessflow and Mission Control. Those are now all built on a native SaaS platform. And so the ability for our ecosystem now to go build on a native SaaS platform is going to be incredibly powerful. So you're expecting more accelerated opportunities at four pages? Absolutely. All right, what's your favorite customer success stories? I know it's hard to pick your favorites, like picking a favorite child. Maybe put them into categories. Mostly ambitious, class clown, class favorite. I mean, what's the ones you would call really strong case studies? So I hit on a couple of them. I love our Domino story. The other one that I love that I touched on but I want to expand on, because I think it's an amazing story, is New York Presbyterian. And using, they use Splunk for traditional security, for private patient privacy. They also use it for medical devices, but here's the thing. They use it for to help the opioid crisis. And you're like, how is opioid crisis a data problem? What they do is they actually correlate all the data that. So the doctors that are prescribing the opioids, who they're prescribing them to. The number of prescriptions being filled in their pharmacy and then the inventory of opioids, because they actually have sensors on all the cabinets where they get the opioids. They correlate all the data and they make sure that if they understand if opioids are being stolen from the hospital. Because what people don't understand is that the opioid, a big part of the opioid crisis starts with hospitals because they have such a big volume of opioids. And so that to me is just, I guess I love it because it's a great customer success story, but it's also, again, it's so much like doing good. It's such a big problem. Yeah, a lot of deaths. I got to ask you around your favorite moments here at .conf and your lot of conversations. In your customer conversations this year, let's do a little splunk of the cube right now. Take the patterns, all the data, your meetings. What's the top patterns that are emerging? What are some of the top conversation themes that just keep popping up with customers specifically? I think the biggest thing is that they have seen more innovation unleashed this year than they have ever seen in one year from Splunk. The other thing is that we've gone far outside of our traditional Splunk index, right? And that the portfolio has grown so much and that we're allowing them to operate and get value out of the data wherever it lives. So data in motion and then you saw in data fabric search will let you query not only the Splunk indices but also HDFS and S3 buckets and more buckets to count. So more sinks, if you will. So really what we're trying to do is say we're just going to be your data platform to help you get value. Susan, you're a great leader at Splunk. Congratulations on your success. Again, they continue to grow. Every year Splunk defies the critics. Now you're a market leader. The culture is a big part of this. What is your plans this year to take it to the next level? You're president of field, worldwide field operations, obviously global business landscape. What are some of your goals and objectives in culture? In the culture? Yeah. So thank you, John, first of all, for your comments. And we are so committed to our culture. I think as you grow so quickly, it takes a real effort to stay focused on culture. We have an incredible diversity and inclusion program and it's a business imperative for us. And every single leader has diversity and inclusion focuses and targets. And so I think that's a huge part of our culture. And the reason I say that, John, I don't know if you've ever heard about our million data points. Did anybody ever talk about that? Yeah, they've been talking about all week. So we always talk about, in different settings, we'll share a couple of our million data points. What we want to make sure as a culture is that we have our employees showing up with their authentic self. And because you do your best work when you can show up as your authentic self. And so we have people share a handful of their million data points at all different times throughout the year to get to know each other as individuals, as human beings. And really understand what matters to each other. And I love that million data points culture. And I love that we truly live it. And again, it's about authenticity. And so I think that's what makes us incredibly special. And inclusion helps that trust and that collaboration. Yes, and I'll also just add to that. We're very proud of the fact that we made the fortune list this year for best places to work for women. So it shows that our focus, we started revealing our metrics just about two years ago and we've had significant improvement. We believe that what you focus on, what you measure is what you improve. So we started measuring it and improving it. And this year we made the list for fortune. That's what's true for women. That's called walking the talk. It is called walking the talk. Congratulations. Thank you, we're very excited about it. Awesome, and global expansion, I'm assuming is on the radar as well. Always, always. Especially at this point, we're ready to double down in some of the tier one markets globally for sure. Susan St. Ledger, president of worldwide field operations here inside theCUBE. We're day two. Splunk.com, the 10th anniversary of their customer conference. Our seventh year covering Splunk. Amazing ride. They continue to ride the big wave. This is theCUBE, bringing you all the data and insights here. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.