 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back, everyone, live here in San Francisco for SiliconANGLES theCUBE's exclusive two days of coverage for Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create, building on their three-year-old successful DevNet program, which is Cisco Core Developer Program, now foraying out into the world of cloud-native, developers, open source, great move for Cisco, our next guest is with Sam Ali Ahmad, lead solutions architect with Splunk. Good to see you. Good to see you too, John. You're Peter Burris, of course, my co-host. So Splunk being here is an important thing because you guys have been riding the wave for cloud. Certainly your relationship with Amazon Web Services is well known, very successful. Splunk as a company went public, well known. You guys really, really hit a niche around big data in how cloud has helped you guys accelerate your business. So you've been transformed, but continuing to grow. So you're riding that wave, but now Cisco's on the wave. Cisco has been involved in the wave, but from a relationship to them, oh yeah, we're the networking guys, we're going to come in and help Docker with this, we're going to come in and help Splunk with this. So they've been kind of a helper, not the main player. This is a new way to get back in and be really enabled for the cloud world. What's your reaction to this move by Cisco? I mean, we have a great partnership with Cisco for many years, and I think Splunk plays a good, as you said, we're a good player there. We integrate well, I mean, all the initiative Cisco's involved with, we have integrations with Cisco on many levels, different technology. And also Splunk, the uniqueness of Splunk is that you need to bring, you need visibility to everything. And Splunk is that platform where you have access to all that data throughout all, it's called a machine data. So you have access to all that data, not only application data, not only network data. You need to look at everything these days, especially when there's attacks. We heard them recently, of course, everybody heard about the wanna cry. And to detect the attack, you need to look at everything because you can someone bring in a laptop behind the firewall even, and they can be infected already. And then if you don't have access to see what they're doing, not just from a network perspective, like what apps in the cloud they're accessing, what other files on the locally. So because you have access to all that data in Splunk, you should be able to get better visibility. And you guys have a unique position in the sense that you're close, again, to the machine logs and data. We had Amanda on from Cisco, who was in her tribe as a developer. She's not necessarily a network engineer, but she's brought on that mojo in from the developer community. When she was first day in the job, they were doing some Python, some REST API stuff, basic one-on-one stuff. But she didn't want to do an app that was showing, hey, how many Twitter files do I have? She had to go in and look at the devices. So now the opportunity with IoT is that to Cisco to make exposed the network for programmability and extend it. How are they going to do that? I mean, you're closest to those guys in your relationship, but that's what everyone wants. They want the infrastructure to go, that's DevOps. Right, yeah, they want the edge to come to them. They want data to be more accessible to all the users. And then, so Cisco is on that path, definitely on that path to get more infrastructure visibility in the data center and networks. So they're definitely on that path of doing that, so. What, well, let me build on this. So if we think about the various components associated with some of the things that Splunk does, a leader in the application of machine and AI and big data related technologies to solving business problems. The algorithms for doing this have been around for a long time. The hard work couldn't do it, so you had to write really tight software to do it and you were one of the first companies out there to really do that. And then it was, we'll point all that at sources of data that you can apply these technologies to create better business value. And there were two places where people did it. Web logs for marketing, online marketing, and IT. Since IT technology throws off an enormous amount of data. So as I think about it, the relationship with Cisco is especially interesting because Cisco is going to be one of those companies that encourages people to create new sources of data. And a lot of it, IoT and other places, and bring it back to companies and technologies that have a proven track record for generating value out of that data. So talk a bit about how Splunk intends to, going back to what John said, riding that wave. The algorithms are here, the hardware can do it. Now we got to get access to more of the data. And here comes Cisco being really serious about moving a lot of data around it. What do you think? I mean, we like when people bring in a lot of data into Splunk. We also have been focusing a lot on the personas on the, we call the Sherlock, the data Sherlock, right? So that unique personas where they need to look at how do I make sense of my data? Not only just about bringing data, but how do I make sense of that data? What are the solutions? What are the use cases I need to have better impact on the business? So we actually helping solve real kind of business use cases. This morning Yelp had a webinar about how they use Splunk driving all the web infrastructure for Yelp, the Yelp backend for all the, all their- This is still in the IT? Yeah. This is not Yelp's marketing group. This is still in the IT. But they are correlating that with other business use cases. So where do you see some of these use cases popping up? Now that Pisco is helping to create those new sources and get people to, you know, culturing people to the idea that these are sources of value, business value. Where do you see some of the new use cases? There's a lot of use cases now coming up around business analytics, around IoT as you just mentioned, and an added element of machine learning across different data sources. So if I want to look at not just performance of one service, let's say my elevator, I want to see how that's going to affect other areas of my business, too. So you're able to see not only the power of correlating that data, but also be able to apply machine learning on that data. So there's a lot of use cases around business analytics. Security's always there, because security, you know, as you know, the attack vectors are getting complex, every few months or so. So you need always to chase that and you need to look at all the data, the behaviors in that data to get better predictability, to get better prevention detection. So Splunk is emerging as a great software company for a lot of IT pros, but that still is more in the opposite. How is this conference and the likelihood of the notion that developers are increasingly going to be part of that use case, utilizing data and data related services to better understand operations, but find new ways of creating value out of the capabilities provided by that. What's the developer angle here for Splunk? A great question. We actually are focusing a lot on developer, developer tools, you know, so now Splunk being a platform, I always say Splunk is a full feature platform for machine data and big data. So it's open in the sense that you can developers will develop their own content on Splunk. They can extend what we have. So an example of that is the RISA project called Mexico Contaro. So that's a project full that's looking at internet usage and coverage in Mexico, in Mexico City and across all the cities. And this was using Splunk to end Milwaukee APIs and bringing all that data together and network data to try to give exposure to the kind of like government analytics. And that's a neat case because not necessarily only IT, but also helping, you know, all the goods out there, you know. So Cisco, Milwaukee and other sources plus Splunk to be able to get deep visibility into a number of ways that, you know, a very complex system like Mexico City, which is how the complex as you get actually operates. Yes, that's one, yeah. Talk about the Splunk direction now because everyone's been questioning about the public offering. You guys know putting numbers out there, active communities, not that you guys aren't being transparent, but you got to go to the next level of growth. And obviously Cisco's coming into the cloud native world. We see the cloud native compute foundation really with great support at Linux Foundation. New open source stuff's going on all the time. How is Splunk looking at the future right now? What's next? And obviously security, we heard that at .conf last year, but you guys have really a good position with the data. You have good account names and you've got great blue chip customers. What's next? What product solution look like for you guys? What's the new architecture? What's the new plan? I think more listening, you know, looking at all the scale and cloud and listen to the customers, making the data onboarding easier, making it more scalable, covering more use cases that we're talking about. You know, innovate in a lot of areas around machine learning, all that to cover more than use cases. So we're definitely heading moving forward to go the next step beyond. So let's take another example. So DevOps, right? Everyone loves the DevOps. It's not like, you can't buy DevOps, you just got to do it, right? So that's pretty clear. You can't just write an agile manifesto and say we're DevOps. You got to have a vision. Maybe you write a manifesto just to get the people motivated, but put the right people in place, let the things organically develop. So the question is, what is an ideal architecture and what is the best practice from your standpoint where you've seen examples of people who have transformed this DevOps world where they really got the ball rolling, got some change happening and then scaled it. And you gives a kind of a pattern that you've seen customers. I have not seen a lot of that, but definitely there's transformation happening. It's not easy to move into that DevOps switch. You cannot do it overnight. So you need as much as possible tools that would actually give you exposure. How am I doing, right? Am I pushing my code as speed as expected to be? Do I have bugs addressed early on? So that kind of exposure, you need a system that would give you, that basically do analyze on that data too. And then with Splunk, we have a story on DevOps. DevOps and application exposure monitoring. And what you need to think about Splunk is that you don't only look at what's inside the application, which was, you know, AMPs they do application management. We actually look at everything. So we look outside the black box, not only inside the app, we look at outside too. So we're going to give you exposure of your whole DevOps process, from the beginning and the whole condition integration. So I see Splunk helping organizations moving into that kind of new process. There's an interesting relationship between tools and process or tools and skills. So John, you'll probably laugh at this. Many years ago, I found myself sitting in the room with the CEO of a very, very large pharmaceutical, Nina, a group of other consultants. And he said, the discussion was, are we going to buy SAP or not? And he, after two hours of people arguing about it, he finally said, screw it, we're doing it. I'm sick and tired of these process arguments. We're just going to do what SAP says in the process. There's a relationship between the practices suggested by Splunk and the types of things that a business actually does in a DevOps sense. What is this? How is Splunk changing the notion of DevOps and how is now as Splunk extends itself, how is DevOps and new practice, new ways of thinking, altering the way that Splunk delivers capability? I mean, we always listen to our customers. And then we actually been looking at addressing use cases around DevOps from a persona aspect, right? Like, as a DevOps engineer, I won't be able to address these kind of issues. And we listen to that and we try to address those, not only just by a tool, but also by looking at best practices around that. And sometimes we manifest those through apps. So Splunk can actually, you can publish an app as a developer. If you're not happy as a customer, you can modify, take one of our existing free apps and then modify them to your own process. So we're not kind of specific rigid to a certain way. And I know DevOps and Azure Award is not even like religion, you're not supposed to follow, you're supposed to be flexible in certain areas and even implementing DevOps comes in an agile way too. But it's still pedagogical. And John, respect there's your manifesto for DevOps, right? Is your choice of tools and how they come together and the degree to which they're integrated kind of a priority. Well, you got eight minutes until you have to go up on stage and do your talk here. We're live in San Francisco. What are you going to be speaking about when you hit the stage in eight minutes? You have seven minutes to explain. I love it a pitch. So I'll be focusing a lot on the integrations that we have very Cisco products. So we have, with Splunk, you're able to bring in a lot of the API, data through API integrations. So I'm going to show how easy that process is to bring that data if you have an API like Meraki or ACI or ICE. And also I'll be focusing more on how the data you can do it from the cloud, easy. Without having an agent involved, without having any software that you need to install to collect that data. And we'll be talking more about the Mexico-Connectado case and then do some fun live demos also. Cisco's got good APIs. People might not know that, but they are API'd up pretty well on the equipment and their gear and the platform. Just commentary on that, your reaction to share for people who are not familiar with Cisco in terms of their enablement of getting data out. They have, Cisco has a lot of good APIs capabilities around sharing that data. The openness of it has been great and made it easy for us, even for our customers to bring that data, the API, that data into Splunk. So it's a matter of a few minutes right now to point to that API and bring that data into Splunk. And yeah, that's what's going on. I'm Ali Ahmad, going on stage in seven minutes. You got it all done. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. I know you got your big speech here to the Pack House inaugural event here. Cisco's DevNet Create. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. More live coverage here in San Francisco. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burr. Stay with us as we get down to wrapping up day two. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Planning.