 Okay, we're back here live in Silicon Valley, the San Jose Convention Center. This is Hadoop Summit, hashtag is Hadoop Summit. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage. This is theCUBE. This is our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Sanjay Mehta is here. He is the vice president of product marketing at Splunk, a company that we've been covering for quite some time now all about machine data and really making some great IPO, making some good action in the marketplace. Sanjay, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Thanks, good to be back. Yeah, so you guys are on the move. You must be excited. We have a bunch of announcements today. Announce something called Hunk, tongue in cheek. So how are you doing? Give us the update on Splunk. Yeah, absolutely. So Hunk is what we announced this morning. It's a beta product from Splunk. It's a new product. It's an amalgamation of Splunk and Hadoop. And the goal of the product is to enable users, Hadoop users to interactively explore, analyze and visualize data that resides in Hadoop and do that natively. And so by combining those capabilities into a single product, the idea is that you're able to improve productivity. You're able to really provide the ability for users to understand data that is in its nature, the structure's not predetermined. It's not maybe perhaps understood. And so what we're able to do is to help people explore that data, understand it better, and the goal from there is to deliver better analytics and better insights. And I noticed that all three, the Cloudera, MapR, and Hortonworks all quoted in your press release. So the leading Hadoop distro companies they're wanting to work with you. That's right. I mean, we're really excited about being at this event. We definitely love what's happening in the community. And I think part of the reason why we announce this product is we've had over the last several years really a front row seat at looking at how organizations can get value from what is unstructured or arbitrarily structured data. And we have our flagship Splunk Enterprise product. And what that does is it gives the ability to collect massive streams of data, perform real-time exploration and analysis and turn those into charts and graphs and dashboards that can then be shared across the organization. So we've really seen the value that can be offered when you're able to share data, democratize it to different groups and communities within an organization. And so we have over 5,600 customers today. And some of those customers have said to us, look, what do we do when our data's in Hadoop? And so where we applied our thinking and our time and our innovation was in saying that how about if we were able to take the ease of use, the capabilities that we've seen value from in our customer base and provide them on top of data that resides in Hadoop. And so part of the announcements with the other distributions is because they like that strategy as well and we announce global alliance agreements with them and it helps with the software compatibility as well. It's such a simple concept, taking all this exhaust data and making sense out of it and others now are looking at their chops and we can do that too. But you talked about some of the ease of and some of the functionality. What gives you confidence that you guys can maintain your lead in the marketplace? I mean, you're a public company now but still relatively small. You've got some big whales sort of licking their chops coming after you in a way. What gives you confidence that you can continue to dominate that sector? Well, I think it's first and foremost it's about where's the value that you're providing and our focus is really on combining a set of capabilities together that promote a high level of productivity with these different kinds of users. And so it's a new product but it's based on eight years of being out there at the sharp end of really helping harness this unstructured data, machine generated data, data that has incredible value inside of it and really having that front row seat and so with that experience we're able to bring that into this new product and hopefully the goal, it's a beta product right now and hopefully the goal is that we engage with customers, we already are speaking to a number of customers and start really weeding out those great examples of where can you get value from, who are the users that can benefit and we have ideas of what those are from the customers we've met but there's going to be more that we learn on this journey. Okay, so I want to jump in because I got to ask a question. You know, I've been following you guys since you were venture funded, I think August Capital, I think did their initial raise at Series A and you guys were the first ones to really break out big data before it kind of became big data. You mean, and even the term exhaust, data exhaust has been kicked around. You guys were doing data exhaust before it was even coined. But given that, I mean the success is pretty significant. Obviously we went public and great customers and you guys are doing some great stuff. But I got to ask you about the emerging internet of things. So we were at the GE event, the industrial cloud and this is the vision. This is Splunk's kind of value proposition. There's a lot of data coming in. That's truly data exhaust. How do you guys look at that market? Is that a market for you guys, the internet of things and has that tie into your existing platform? That's a great question. I mean, it's been interesting because we've seen examples of us being pulled into those kinds of use cases. So you know, we provide this technology. We have some very core use cases for it. With Splunk Enterprise, our flagship products around IT operations, management, application management, security to look for known and unknown threats, digital intelligence and so on. But we've also now seen examples within healthcare device manufacturers. Like Bosch, for example, have a mobile healthcare device that you carry around on your person and they're using Splunk to be able to monitor, to look at the entire supply chain of that device. So your product fits there? Absolutely. So it fits there. Is it a retrofit or just it works there? It works for that kind of data. It's a good fit in terms of the kind of data that gets generated from those types of devices. Other examples might include manufacturing and also industrial sensors that may exist in buildings where we can look at power consumption. We have organizations using Splunk to monitor power consumption from the room to the floor to the entire building. A recent example that our CEO used at one of our events recently was around a customer in Japan who puts data from elevators. They lease out elevators in buildings and they put data that they collect from elevators into Splunk. And the reason they do that is not perhaps to understand efficiency of elevators but it's to understand the use of them because that's an economic indicator for when companies may be about to give up a lease for a floor or give up a lease for a building or they can even zoom out from there and look at an entire region of the city or an entire city. And so it's fascinating to explore and see all these different kinds of internet of things and industrial internet kinds of use cases. How does Hunk fit into that too? I mean, your announcement here fit into all of it. Yeah, so I mean, the role of Hunk, the new product and its goal is really to enable organizations that are deploying Hadoop and to enable them to get more value out of those deployments. So, you know, we've seen that Hadoop has been, you know, there's been incredible interest in it. It's getting traction in its deployments. People are now standing it up. They're putting data in. They're being successful putting data in. And so the challenge becomes how do you get value out of that data? And so there's lots of approaches you can take. You can write MapReduce code. You can implement SQL on Hadoop type approaches. First generation BI on Hadoop type approaches. What we think we can bring is we have a history and a heritage around really enabling users and organizations to very easily understand data, turn that understanding into analytics, turn the analytics into visualizations and package them up in ways that are accessible to many different groups within the organization. And so we want to bring that experience to those organizations that have Hadoop deployed. So talk about the conference coming up. You guys have your big dot conference coming up. What's the plans there? You're in the product. So you see the road maps. You know, I don't have to disclose anything, but what can people expect at your big user conference? Yeah, we've been doubling every year. You know, it's our third one. It's going to be really exciting. We have over a hundred sessions, many of them with customers. What we really like to focus on at Splunk and something that even today we've got a session this afternoon is we like to talk about customer examples because it's great talking about technology, which is obviously why we're all here, but it's even better when you can see the use of that technology in the enterprise, in the organization in question. And so at our users conference, there's going to be many customers that are going to be talking about what are the architectural patterns that work for them in big data, for example. How are they optimizing their use of technology to answer new questions in the business, to answer them faster than they've ever done before, to democratize that data to the people that actually need it so that they're not channeling requests through a small group of people with rare skill sets that they're empowered to look at data and analyze it themselves. Obviously with that, you need to be able to provide all the security and all the controls, all that stuff. And so this conference really addresses the whole spectrum of use cases, the technology itself. I'm sure we'll have some exciting announcements at that event as well. The tagline is your data, no limits, which is a great slogan because that speaks to the analytics play that you guys are making. So you have the background on the acquisition of data and ingestion and management. It's the analytics is the killer app. That seems to be the killer app. This morning we heard in the keynote that machine data is one of the fastest growing segments of big data and it happens to be also one of the most valuable because it contains a trace, a categorical record of all activity and behavior of users, of devices, of sensors, of equipment as you alluded to earlier on. And it's incredibly valuable. In fact, a lot of a business's critical data is in the machine data. And so us having seen that firsthand, I think what it enables us to do at a conference like this is to really empower the audience, the customers to look at ways of using the data, perhaps in a way that's not conventional for them. They might be sitting in one part of the organization and they're able to hopefully see through meeting customers, through seeing examples that they can knock on the door of the group next to them or group across the hallway and show that the data that they're collecting and they're using, this operational data can be valuable to multiple groups within the organization. And so that's really what we're all about. It's our mission statement is to make data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone. And all the technology we focus on, the HUNC announcement today, it's really all about shifting the problem away from storage and the low level tooling and raising it to the users, the kinds of analytics that they want to do and giving them the ability to really understand and look at that data. Okay, so my last question is John talked about .conf. The customers that are using your product, how are they evolving? You know, we were at .conf last year, we heard a lot of IT guys passionate about how they're using it. Where do you guys see that going over time? So what we see is actually the role of that user shifting over time. So they're less using data to keep things running or to be in order to monitor existing systems and infrastructure and to help them run faster, better, more securely. Those are very, very important use cases. But we also see that they are able or providing intelligence insights and visibility into this data for new communities within the organization. So one of the things I've seen a lot of over the last few years is a change in culture where instead of them being asked, can you do this or can you provide us some information that we think might be interesting or can you help us answer this question? With a view that it's going to take perhaps six months to build a reporting subsystem and model and all of that, the Splunk user is able to turn that type of question around in minutes and hours. And what that means is that the person asking the question asks different questions because they can. They don't have to wait for a system to be built which may take many, many months to build. And so that shifts the culture because the user becomes more of an enabler of information. They're delivering intelligence and they're doing it quickly. And it's an intelligence from operational data. So it really supplements business intelligence. It's operational intelligence. Right, and so as this new platform evolves, it just opens up new markets for you guys. Expand your TAM, Splunk, Hot Company. A lot of people don't understand it. When you read the Bulls versus the Bears, it's like, ah, I don't really get this thing, but guys continue to grow like crazy, adding innovations, developing new partnerships. So Sanjay, good luck, hopefully we'll see you in town. Keep the performance, keep the revenue coming and I think Wall Street will soon kind of come to the realization that it's very disruptive, very profitable business opportunity. And again, the early adopters can see the value. Others are going to scratch their head and saying, where's the value? It's going to hit them right over the head and the performance will ultimately be the dictator of what happens. So Splunk, great company, great to watch these guys grow, go public, they've been on theCUBE since Strada. Thanks for coming on, we appreciate it. This is theCUBE. We are here at a Hadoop Summit Live in Silicon Valley. This is Silicon Angle, we'll keep you on exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.