 Okay, hello everybody. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, distract a signal from the noise. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage of the Splunk conference. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host this day. Next two days, Dave Vellante for wall-to-wall coverage of Splunk conference. Hashtag Splunk Conference, Dave. Back in Vegas, John. In Vegas. We're on a tear. We may do 35 Cube events this year, and what an exciting opportunity to be on the ground and talking to the most amazing companies and thought leaders and people. Making all this happen. We are living in probably one of those explosive inflection points in the technology history. Since the computer revolution on the PC, we're seeing things like big data, converged infrastructure, up and down the stack, the mobile apps, cloud mobile and social. We're doing a crowd chat while we're here inside the Cube about Hadoop World coming up and also talking about Splunk. We are living in a really, really interesting time, Dave, and Splunk is here to celebrate their massive success and exploding opportunity to move from a company that started over almost 10 years ago as machine data log files to essentially changing the game on business, using the cloud, mobile and social. Pretty impressive. We're here for two days live coverage in Las Vegas. This is the Splunk conference. We're going to talk to a lot of the folks and they had their keynote this morning. So Dave, I got to ask you were inside the keynote. What's your takeaway? Give us a little taste and color of what happened in the keynote and what's some of the takeaways. Well, John, of course, this is our second year at the splunk.com. The hashtag here of course is pound splunk.com. And the Cube was privileged enough to be here last year. You and I are doing the show this year. We got a full team here. Since we were at .com last year, John Splunk went public. They are smoking hot. I've predicted there'll be a $300 million company this fiscal year. Wall Street's got them a little less. You know, they're guiding the street at around 275, 280, but I think they'll hit 300. They're growing at 50% per year. They've got a $6.4 billion market cap. They got $300 million in cash. And as they say, they recently went public. So they're doing very, very well. To me, John, before I answer your question, this company reminds me a lot of Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Tableau. Not in terms of what they do, but why they do it. The spirit of these companies. They are in the business. They have passionate customers. They're solving new problems. They're growing like crazy. They are the hot new kids on the block. So this morning, we heard Gottfried Sullivan, who's the CEO, chairman, and president of Splunk, sort of lay out their progress and tee up the capabilities and the products that really Splunk is all about. As you mentioned, Splunk is all about taking machine data and log data and making sense out of it. So it started as a company to help people do troubleshooting. A lot of use cases, certainly within IT, within Telco, helping solve network problems. Increasingly, they're moving toward monitoring and alerting, and then really now going more toward real-time analytics. So here's a company, again, LightTab Low, Light ServiceNow that started with a foothold with a very narrow use case, is now expanding with other applications, really in the backs of very passionate customers. Yeah, Dave, one of the things that was impressive to me on the keynote, and also here at the show, was the vibe and the excitement. It's relatively a small show, but it's growing like crazy, and what's different is that they have an ecosystem partnership model now that is exploding. If you look on the floor here, you can't see it, but I will tell you that the picture here looks really amazing. You have big name sponsors here, Arista Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, tons of companies in the ecosystem. The ecosystem partners here are absolutely supporting Splunk. Splunk, on their side of the table, is doing extremely well in customer acquisition. They have proven the value proposition that big data analytics, specifically machine data, is really, really at the center of what most businesses are starting to get their arms around. So you got machine to machine data, as we say, data exhaust. This is a key value proposition for clients and their customers. So you got Splunk running the table on the corporate side, on the company side, their acquisition of new sales, they're adding more people. On the ecosystem side, Dave, very impressive set of partners here showing their support and really excited for what Splunk brings to the table. Well, I think that's key, John. Well, Splunk has 6,000 customers, about 40% of the Fortune 500. To me, the ecosystem is really critical. Last quarter, Splunk told us that about 45% of its sales went through the channel. I think that number is going to explode over the next five years. I've predicted that it's going to be upwards of 60 to 70%. The reason I feel that way, John, is because the direct sales model doesn't scale the way it used to. Splunk has a combination of inside sales and outside sales people, and I think that the ecosystem and the channel, that's really how Splunk is going to be able to take its horizontal platform and attack vertical markets. That, to me, is a key capability that Splunk will tap and has to tap in order for it to continue to grow. Now, the other thing I wanted to talk about is a lot of people say, why Splunk? We travel all over the world. We hear people talk about Splunk all the time, say the competitors say we have the Splunk killer. Oh, we can do that too. What practitioners tell us, John, is that Splunk does very well with complex, multi-structured data. Coming from a lot of different data sources. If you got a single data source, like a refrigerator throwing off data, maybe Splunk's not the best platform. It's really where there's a lot of complexity and a lot of diversity where Splunk shines. So you're seeing them a lot in financial services, you see them a lot in telco, a lot of security applications, online travel systems, and the like. And really moving from a one product company to really a multi-product company with its platform, John. You know, Dave, we've been talking about the job growth, I think the marketplace gardener predicts that, you know, four million new jobs are going to be created. I want to ask you a question. Do you think that Splunk represents a new job opportunity, or do you see them shifting from the IT practitioner moving into more of the data science role, or both? Is it a hybrid? What's your take on that? Well, Splunk, like a number of the companies that we follow, John, are going after the holy grail of big data. What I mean by that is they're trying to make big data really simple for not just data scientists, not just IT people who can read log files, not just data analysts and power users, but for the masses. And that to me is the big opportunity here, John. The old line decision support companies, the old BI companies, failed to deliver on that vision even though they've promised it for decades. On the other vector, you've got Excel. And Excel just doesn't cut it for a lot of applications. It just doesn't have the power and the simplicity. So companies like Splunk and Tableau, I mentioned service now before, they're going after the line of business user to the extent that they can tap that, the market opportunity is enormous. And that's really where I see, John, the big opportunity. So Dave, I got to ask you about some of the real-time search capabilities. You're seeing Splunk being used for analytics. Can you elaborate on some of the demos and hackathons that they did on stage? Yeah, so basically what we saw today was Splunk overlaid on top of Hadoop clusters. For example, we saw some demos where we saw a very diverse data set and very fast ability to search. What happened when with some diversity and being able to cut the data in a variety of different ways? We had the chief strategy officer who used to run development up against one of the lead product managers and the product manager was consistently outperforming in terms of her searches, the chief strategy officer, doing searches in really a matter of seconds, relatively complex searches. And so now there are some open source projects going on out there, Elastic Search is one, Log Stashes is another one that's come up. These are companies that are laying search on top of Lucene. Lucene is something I know, John, you're very familiar with. We've talked about it a lot here in theCUBE. So there's open source activities and it can be very interesting to see how Splunk opens up. My prediction is they will continue to open up. They're an open platform with open APIs and they like the open source mojo. One of the things that's really impressive about Splunk is again, they moved a 10 year journey, they went public, now they're a public company. People are excited, Dave, generally here. And the thing that I get excited about is when you see entrepreneurs go to the next level, get venture capitals, August capital and puts the original capital with seven Rosen funds. Really, really great opportunity. They absolutely had a great run, great successful entrepreneurial venture. This is the Splunk conference. We're here for two full days. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're at our next guest topic for this short break. We'll write back, keep watching wall to wall coverage for two days. This is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE Wikibon's exclusive coverage of Splunk Conference 2013.conference 2013. Be right back. theCUBE is a live mobile studio. When you bring it to events and we say we extract the signal from the noise, what we do is we get the absolute best guests that are at those events, we bring them inside theCUBE and we talk to them, we have a conversation. We really want to make it fun, exciting, but more importantly, extract the data from the guests and extract that metadata and share it with the world so people can use that information to better themselves, better their companies. More importantly, connect with other people to do more business, to define more about the technology. And for us, this is the future. I watch many of the theCUBE interviews when you're handling other events. Oh, good. It's both the combination of enjoyable and insightful. And what I like is the interactive banter back and forth, plus the fact that when I think about some of the conversations we have, they're not only deep, they're not only rich, but the audience themselves will really come to benefit from those conversations. When organizations bring theCUBE to an event, it just brings a whole new dimension. It adds a texture of not only independence, but also explodes content from their community into a much, much broader community. We tend to reach about 10 times the audience that's live at an event. So we're a big data-driven organization. We have a data science team that allows us to see not only what's trending broadly with the public, but what's trending in very specific areas in our specialty in tech. That allows us to vector our analysis and relevance from our research and journalist team into everything that we do as a media company. And really the benefit of theCUBE is a place for conversations for people to connect with each other and to learn about things. And it's a revolution in media. We look at the technology and the people behind it as tech athletes, those are the folks making the companies, making the technology, really creating the new value in this modern era. And it's fun, it's exciting, and more importantly, it's very social. theCUBE does an excellent job of taking this very, very broad platform and format and giving visibility to a very broad audience on each of the different key aspects of the technology. And it's a great environment for the broader community who couldn't be here today, have visibility into what we're doing, what each of the tracks are, and what are the sort of the core trends that are associated inside of theCUBE and given a very balanced view from multiple dimensions around. And I think that's invaluable for the community. We always know that your view is right until you hear a different perspective. So you're always interested in, give me some neutral perspective, help me see it from a different light, and maybe ask a hard question or two that I might not have considered. You know, in that sense, that independent voice that's always ability to have a sort of independent, audited sort of perspective right of the world. It's always just good. So these guys bring an incredible wealth of knowledge from their own careers. They've been into a lot of different things in the industry and they're independent.