 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage at Splunk.conf 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here live in the studios of Splunk's event here. We're all together broadcasting out all over the world here with Chris Diegelmeier, Chief Social Impact Officer for Splunk. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great, thanks for having me today. I love the title Chief Social Impact Officer because we're bringing in data unlocks value. We know that and it's the theme of the show. Society has really been impacted by misinformation, what context, we've seen examples of how data has been good and been bad. Yes. So there's a divide there. So this is a big part of your talk. Yes, it's a big part of me and it's gonna be even a bigger part of Splunk going forward. So as many people know, they've heard of the digital divide, right? And that was about access to information communication technologies. And it was coined 20 years ago, 2001. And we've made progress on that digital divide but now we have all that infrastructure or a lot of it. And so on top of that, we have the data divide and that's the increasing and expanding use of data and the gap between using that to solve commercial and provide commercial value in contrast to solving our social and environmental challenges. And so the important thing about it is we're early enough that with urgent action, we can try to close that gap and really make a difference in the world. Actually, let's take a study. Let's define the data divide and give some specific examples where you see it in action on the pro side and where there's some work needed. Yeah, so the definition is again, that gap between using, we have all this data being used for commercial value and a relatively weak use of data being used to solve our social and environmental challenges. And we've got four kind of key barriers that we've identified that need to be addressed, which we'll get to the questions and how we solve it. One is access. So think about it. Think of the data that Google has and where that is in access compared to probably the Department of Education in any country around the world. So access is big. Second is capacity. We need both financial resources investing in solving our social and environmental problems and we need data scientists, data stewards, great data people working to solve our social and environmental problems just as we are in the corporate sector. And then the third one is investment choices. And this one is a little bit of a be in my bonnet. And this happens mostly in the private sector. So we all know every year it's like what hits the return on investment criteria and solving social and environmental challenges often does not. Doesn't have that quite timeframe return on investment. And think about if we'd identified this data divide 20 years ago for climate because companies are doing phenomenal work now about climate, what if we had been doing that work 20 years ago around sustainability, around efficiency. And then the last piece is actionable solutions that we can replicate. So those are kind of the four barriers. And again, I think we've got a lot of potential and examples. There isn't one issue I can think of where more data isn't going to help us. You know, this is so important. I feel very strongly about this because I've seen examples where I've seen really strong people start NGOs or nonprofits or just building an app and they abandon it because they can't get there fast enough. So the idea that cloud and data accessibility can be there, you get to see some success and you can double down on it. That's the cloud way. Yes. This is something that people want to know the playbook. So, you know, where are people being successful? What can people do to take advantage of this? Yeah, so I think that's a really good important point is transitioning to the cloud. So think of the nonprofit sector. It's barely there yet. So all of us who are investors, philanthropists, we need to be supporting the nonprofit sector to be cloud enabled and cloud forward. Similarly with government. There's example after example where, whether it's health, whether it's child and human services, their data is in file cabinets. Think about that. Think of, so we need to digitize those. Then we need to data enable that so that we can see those insights that are coming out around those solutions. It's always the discussion in the industry inside the ropes and now on mainstream but getting data to the right place at the right time is a really important thing. It's a technical latency, all these things. But practically it has societal impact. Where would you rank the progress bar in terms of where we are on the digital divide? Because I can see healthcare for instance, having access to the right information or it could be something on the government side where it could be related to climate change or hey, get this involved. Where are we on this? So I would say on the digital divide which is the infrastructure piece. For most definitely high income countries, mid-income countries, we've actually made progress. And so they have that, they're all network, they're, but now they have all this data, they don't know what to do with, right? And so what we need to kind of now build on that infrastructure to solve for that data. And I'll just, a Splunk example, one of our customers, the Netherlands, in their court system, right? Using Splunk, they were able to enable real-time data to inform court decisions. So historically, the judge would ask, this has happened in COVID, where are we on bankruptcy cases, right? And historically somebody would call somebody, they'd call somebody, they'd go take the files and they'd get the information three months. Real-time, this is what's happening with bankruptcy. In real-time with COVID is gonna change those decisions that impact people's lives. So you add that on top. I mean, we have environmental examples working with net zero schools. We have it in, we worked with the healthcare coalition with MITRE to enable real-time data with a number of other companies. So I would say we're further along on the digital divide. We're at step one on the data divide. Yeah, Doug Merritt was talking earlier today about how this data plane that Splunk has evolved into this catch basin for all the data and then it becomes useful. And yeah, we're taking us through the journey now, security and it's this control plane that's enabling. I think to me, that's a real key thing here. So I have to ask, do you see in vision of future where we have data commons where citizens and could tap into the data? And the Gov 2.0 is kind of on that vision. What do you see this? What do you see? Well, I think, and I know Doug has talked about this before too, from a values standpoint of, especially with government moving to open data. And then what we have to do is we have to protect privacy, which actually Splunk is really good at doing. So you've got to take that individual data out of there. But then once you get these big data pools into these big data lakes, you'll be able to see insights that you couldn't see before. You know, it's interesting that I remember when the internet came around and how the US government is very active, it seems now that that tech policy has always been kind of like, oh yeah, we're kind of involved in DC. But now tech is so important. And with all the backlash on the Facebooks of the world of how democracy was broken, there's an opportunity. And the lawmakers and the people who make the laws are kind of lawyers. They're not really techies. So like, policy's got to change. How do we do that? Yeah, oh gosh, I could solve that one on policy change. But I want to make a comment because I think it's really important because you referenced and the situation Facebook is in is common knowledge. I give a lot of credit to Splunk as a data platform company saying, we see this data divide coming and we're going to step to the table now and do something about it. Because there's a lot of other companies that knew these challenges if they looked out three, five years and they made personal or company choices not to do something about it. So transparency is super important. Getting that out there. And being again in data and just saying, it's not all roses, right? And so being a purpose driven company is about making those decisions as a company to have an impact. So then to answer your question on policy, I would say I think it's really complicated and tricky because data moves at the speed of sound and policy moves kind of like a turtle. And so I think what we need to have happen is companies going to sometimes have to lead the way and hold themselves accountable and then work in partnership with policy to make policy changes that impact everybody. So again, we're strong advocates of open data. We can't make the government do it but we can be a voice for it in service of bridging this data divide. This data divide is a great conversation. I wish we had more time for the last minute. Just give a quick plug for what Splunk's doing specifically and how people could get involved and participate. Yeah, so I'll kind of say three things. One is at this early stage, we're kind of raising the flag to governments out there to philanthropy to nonprofits. Like we all need to be paying attention to this. We're going to be investing in more research on it because it isn't such an early stage. We've identified these barriers but we've got to go much deeper and build collaborations around the solution. So we're going to be mobilizing our partners and our customers. We have a hundred million dollar pledge where we donate our product to nonprofits and the equally important thing because I talked about, it's our talent, right? It's getting the talent to help these organizations. It's our strategic giving. So we're mobilizing all of our assets around this pledge. We have a $50 million impact fund which is around four purpose data enabled companies. So we're trying to do it across a multitude of platforms to be part of the solution. Is that investment fund deploying now or has it been making investments in companies already? Yeah, we've made three investments. Refrain AI is one about using machine learning and AI around the jobs of the future and retraining. So it was launched just a couple of years ago so we're still early in the $50 million fund so we'll be doing more of that. Sounds like a great opportunity for people out there watching enable the people to change the world. That's what Splunk's all about right now. Exactly. Chris, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Great, thank you. Okay, the data divide. We're bringing you all the data here from theCUBE live here in Splunk Studios. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. Thank you.