 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf, 19 brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for Splunk.conf. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We have two great guests here, Tim Woodbury, Director of State and Local Affairs for Splunk and Charlie Crocker, CEO of Zone Haven. A very innovative startup doing some incredible things with Splunk Ventures Financing, some early financing around really tech for good. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be here. So Charlie, first explain what you guys are doing real quick because I think this is a great example of what I've been seeing now for two years now, but now in the past year, a renaissance of entrepreneurial activity around mission-driven tech for good, where entrepreneurs are using the cloud and SaaS models and platforms like Splunk to stand up mission value. Mission value, I like the term. Explain what you're doing. So, simply put, we're building an evacuation, planning and support tool. So, right now there are more and stronger fires happening over the last five years. We've had more than half of California's most destructive wildfires happen just in the last five years. So it's mission critical that we figure this out now. These fires are so big, the goal is really just to get people out of harm's way and that's a difficult job to figure out at three o'clock in the morning with a map on the hood of a pickup truck. And so we're building the zone. There's no ways for fire. There's no ways for fire. Ways has got public safety. I know, but people know ways, but the thing is is that yesterday I was watching on TV in Pacific Palisades, California, a airdrop of water on the canyon right before a house and I see the people running. Right. They're like running for their lives. They are. This is serious business. Exactly. You guys are trying to provide a system. We're trying to, what we've built are a set of zones, the ability for the fire department, law enforcement and OES to work on customizing hyper-local evacuation plans, hyper-local down to the neighborhood level and then we're scaling that statewide. So how do you make sure that this fire department and these three law enforcement groups are coordinated before and how do they have the conversation with the community before the event happens? If we can save five minutes at the time the event happens, we're going to save lives. So this is really about making efficiency around the first responders on the scene from leveraging data, which maps are there? Maps, data, dynamic data, telemetry data, where the fire's going to go, simulations for how the fire could potentially grow, who needs to get out of harm's way first, what's that going to do to the traffic and road network? Talk about the Origination Story. Then we'll get to this blog involvement. The Origination Story is you're sitting around, you're talking to friends in the business. We have colleagues and friends that are in the business and many of them from the Silicon Valley, these guys are innovative leaders in fire and they've got a lot of really good ideas on how to make their jobs better. They don't have a tech team, they don't have a tech arm. So we literally said, look, we'll come in and we'll make work what your vision is and that started to expand and now we've started to move from these smaller jurisdictions to much larger jurisdictions. Data is driving the future, that's a tagline I'm reading, I've seen the new branding, by the way, the new branding is very strong, by the way, I love it. Thank you. So this is an example of data-driven value that a constituency fire professionals, that's all they think about is how to make people safe and get in harm's way to try to solve the fires. They don't have tech teams, they don't have a data center, they don't have like, we take them to boot up a consulting to come in, do a waterfall, have a meeting, and by that time it's just like a fatigue, they can't just do that. They can't stand up. How did you guys get involved in this? It's data-driven obviously, what's the story? Yeah, when we say data everything, we really mean it. It's really, you know, it's a personal story for me. I am on the government affairs team here at Splug, so I manage our relationships with governors and mayors and these are the issues that they care about, right? When the city's burning down, the mayor cares about that, the governor, this is, you know, one of the governor in California's major initiatives is trying to find solutions on wildfires. You know, I met Charlie, my hometown of Rinda, California, our fire chief in that town was one of sort of the outside advisors working with Charlie on this idea and I met him at a house party where the fire chief was telling me to trim my trees back and shrubs back and then I was at a conference three days later, that same fire chief, Dave Winnaker, was on a panel with like folks from a super computer lab and NASA and MIT. I was like, ah, you know, my fire chief's still the smartest guy in that panel. I got to meet this guy. A few weeks later, we were literally in the field doing these proof of concepts with sensors and data, super savvy folks, some of the other folks from Cal Fire there, you know, Jonathan Cox who was with us today here at Conf and you know, we've just been collaborating the whole time and seeing, you know, that Splunk can really put some fire power behind these guys and we just see like, look, they've got the trust of these customers and we need to make sure this idea happens. It's a great idea and it's going to save lives. It's crazy. We did a test burn where we run a small burn on a day where we were very confident it won't grow, put the sensors out, right next to a school in Irinda, it was his kid's school. Yeah, I have a kindergarten or anything that goes to that school. So it's slightly- It's personal for you. Very personal. I could be, I could be said that this is just me protecting my own but it is something that I think will save lives around the world. Well, I think first of all, there's huge human safety issues on both sides. Fire safety, put in the arms way, those professionals go out all day long, put their lives at risk to save other human beings. And so that's critical. But if you look at California, there's other impacts. There's cost impact, rolling blackouts because they can't instrument the lines properly just because of the red flag warnings of wind. I mean, I could be, that's disruptive to business, that's disruptive to safety. So PG&E's not doing us any favors either. So it sounds so easy, just fix it. It sounds easy, yeah. Well, I think with PG&E it's interesting. We do need to prevent wildfires in really any way that we can. But like you said, if we can bring more data to the problem, maybe we can have the blackouts be smaller. They don't necessarily have to be as big. There's certainly no lack of motivation to find solutions to this issue. There are lives on the line, there's billions of dollars on the line that these types of solutions don't have and are part of what is going to fix it. But there are many very large stakeholders that need these solutions very quickly. Well, you know, the doers out there making it happen are the people on the front lines and the people they're trying to protect are our citizens. And this sounds like a great example of tech for good where you guys are doing entrepreneurial effort with people who need it. If there's a business model that's not for free, you're not a non-profit, you're going to get paid. There's a business model behind it. There is a business model behind it and I think the value proposition is only beginning to be understood, right? There are so many missions in so many different ways. Wildfires are massive. You can come at them from satellite, you can come at them from on the ground. We are working with the people on the ground who need to get people out of harm's way. We're focusing on making their jobs easier so they're safer and they can get people out more quickly. You know, guys in the tech business we always talk and we go to these events. We're replatforming our business. Digital transformation, you know, all the buzzwords. This is actually an acute example of what I would call replatforming life because you're taking a real life example. Fire, you know, California fire and forest they're out in the trees trimming. I mean, this is all real life. This isn't like, you know, some digital website. Well, we sort of, I mean, I've been in the data business for more time than I can remember and we've got the tools. Tools like Splunk, tools like Amazon Web Services. We've got the data. There's satellites all over. We've got smart people and machine learning. We need to start applying that to do good, right? It exists. We do not need to go invent new technology right now in order to solve this problem. Charlie, I'm really inspired by your position and your posture. I want you to spend more time with talking about that feature because you're an entrepreneur. You're not just a tech for good social justice warrior. You're an experienced data entrepreneur applying it to as a social good project. So it's not like you just wait, I'm going to change the world. You're actually doing it. There's a path for other entrepreneurs to make money to do good things fast. Talk about the journey because with cloud computing, it's not like a 10 year horizon. There's a path for immediate benefit. So I mean, in terms of creating a profitable venture, we're a young company. We feel like we have a good direction. We feel like there is a market for this. And we also feel like there's public-private partnerships here as well. I think that we can take the same solutions that we have here and apply them to campuses. You could apply it to a biotech campus, a university campus. You could apply it to a military base, right? There's insurance could be involved in this because insurance risk. People are losing insurance in their homes as well. So there's a lot of different angles that we can take for this exact same- What's the expression, data to everything? Yeah, everything. This is an example of taking data and applying it to some use case. A very specific use case. School evacuation. Exactly. Neighborhood evacuation and really building the community fabric so that people take care of each other and can get out together. Where are the vulnerable populations in that zone? Who's going to go respond to those if the fire department can't come in, right? How are we going to get those people out? Love the vision. You guys are awesome for putting some cash in there. Splunk Ventures, congratulations. Talk about the product. Where are you guys at using Splunk? You're putting data sensors out there. You're leveraging existing data, both. Take us through some of the nuts and bolts of what's going on in the product. So part of it is building out some data sets. So there are some data sets that don't exist, but the government and the counties and the private sector have built out a huge corpus of data around where the buildings are, where the people are, where the cell phones are, where the traffic is. So we're able to leverage that information as we have it today. The technology, we're using the Amazon stack. It's easy for us to spin up databases. It's easy for us to build out and expand as we grow. And then with Splunk, we're able to have a place for all this real-time data to land and for us to be able to build APIs to pull it out very simply. You know, it's having a conversation with Teresa Carlson who runs Amazon Web Services Public Sector. Variety of these things are, projects are popping up, tech for good, that's for profit, it helps people. And the whole idea of time to value with the cloud and Splunk's platform of leveraging diverse data, making data real to whether it's real-time, time series data or using a fabric search or accelerated processing capabilities is that you can get the value quicker. So if you got an idea, you don't even wait two years to gestate whether it was a hit or not. You can iterate now. So this idea of the startup agile startup is now being applied to these public Sector-like things, so it's everything. Yeah, you're spot on in the unique element of Splunk with some of these data sources. We don't necessarily know which ones are going to be the right ones. We're talking about satellite data, sensor data. Some of this on part of it is we're building an outdoor smoke alarm, right? No one's ever done that before. So the core nature of Splunk's technology being able to easily try to see if that is the right data source is critical to giving people the bandwidth to go try to make this happen. I mean, you guys are a great example at Zone Haven, Charlie and your team of what I call a reconfiguration of the value creation of startups. You don't need to have full stack developer. You got half the stack in Amazon. The domain expertise in the intellectual property has flipped around from being software and this intellectual mode to domain-specific intellectual property. You took the idea of firefighters and you're implementing their idea into your domain expertise using scale and data to create a viable business. The other thing I want to throw in there though and this is something that people often forget. A big part of our investment is going to be in user experience. This thing needs to be usable by the masses. It cannot be a complicated solution. UX is the new software. Data is the new code, but anyone can start a company if they have an innovative idea. You don't have to have a unique algorithm. It could be a use case to solve a problem. Whether it's fire. And if you have a unique algorithm you can put it on Splunk's platform or Amazon's platform and scale it. This is going to change, I think, the economic landscape of what I call tech for good now but it's entrepreneurship redefined. You guys are a great working example of that. Congratulations on the vision. Thank you. That to you and your team. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, it's great to be here. This is a great example of what's going on with data for everything. Of course, this is theCUBE. We're here for everything. We go to all the events, talk to the smartest people and get the data and share that with you here in Las Vegas for .conf. 10 years of the conference, our seventh year. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.