 Well, hi everybody, John Walls here, continuing our coverage on theCUBE of Splunk.com 21. And, you know, we talk a lot about data these days of companies and enterprise all the way down to small business and the importance of data, data security, data protection. But the public sector also has those very same concerns and some unique worries as well. And with me to talk about the public sector and its data transformation and of course what's going on in that space is Jeremy Riesi, who is the group vice president of the public sector at Splunk. Jeremy, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Thanks for making time for me, John. You bet, glad to have you. Well, let's just, first off, let's just paint the picture for those watching who are kind of focused on the private sector a little bit. Just share with some general thoughts about the public sector and what's going on in terms of its digital transformation and what kind of concerns or I guess challenges you think there are broadly speaking first in the public sector realm. Thanks, John. There's quite a bit of transformation going on right now in our government. And just like in industry, we've seen the pandemic as a catalyst for a lot of that transformation. You may have seen that Splunk recently released a report on the state of data innovation. And what we found is that a lot of good things are happening, but the government still has a lot of work to do. And so there were pockets of excellence that we saw in the last 18 months where agencies really responded to things like the requirement for vaccinations and the requirement for monitoring health status in general. And we saw tremendous speed in rolling out things like telehealth across the Veterans Affairs Administration. But we also saw in our report that there were many agencies that haven't yet been able to modernize in the way that they want. And one of the inhibitors to that, frankly, John, is their ability to adopt software as a service. And so we've seen a lot of things happening in the last year that moved agency customers towards software as a service, but there's work yet to go. So, and why is that? So when you talk about SAS, is it bureaucratic red tape? Is it regulatory issues? Or is it just about, this is a large, huge institution that makes independent decisions? HHS might make decisions separate from state, separate from DOT, and that it's fragmented. I mean, what are those challenges? Sure, well, I think there are two sides of it, John. I think that our government is inherently designed to move cautiously and to move in such a way that we don't make mistakes. You use the word bureaucratic. I'm not a huge fan of that word, but I understand the sentiment. I think that there are layers to any decision that any part of the government makes, and certainly that's a part of inhibiting speed. But I think the other part of it is our acquisition rules and regulations. And I think we've seen a number of positive changes made, not only in the last administration, but even in this current administration that are helping our government agencies to take advantage of software as a service, but there's still work to do there as well. We've seen the rise of things like other transactional authorities, OTAs. We've seen the establishment of an agile procurement office inside the General Services Administration, GSA, but other parts have heritage systems, systems that are working really well, and you don't wanna change something that's not broken just for the sake of changing it. You wanna change it in such a way that you really do transform and deliver new capabilities. Yeah, and I guess it's a matter of obviously of developing expertise and maybe confidence too, right? Because this is a new world, a new tech world, if you will, here in the 21st century, and maybe I misused the word bureaucratic, and I know you said you don't like it, but there's a certain kind of institutional energy or whatever you wanna call it that kind of prohibits fast changes. And is cautious and is conservative because I mean, these are big dollar decisions and they're important decisions too based on security. So I mean, how do you wrap your arms around that from a Splunk perspective to deal with the government at large when they have those kinds of, I guess, considerations? Certainly. Well, the beauty of where we find ourselves today is that data is incredibly powerful and there's more data available to our agency customers or to any company than ever before. So Splunk is inherently a data platform. We allow our customers be the agency customers or be the industry customers to ask questions of data that they collect from any source, be it structured data or unstructured data. Using Splunk, a customer can say, what's happening, why is it happening, where is it happening? And that's incredibly powerful. And I think in this current age where the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how we deliver services and citizen services specifically, having a data platform is incredibly powerful because the way that we're answering questions today is different than the way we answered questions last year. And it may be very different the way we have to ask questions a year from now. And that's really what Splunk is delivering to our customers is that flexibility to be able to ask any question of any data set and to ask those questions in the context of today, not just the context that they knew yesterday. Yeah, and you mentioned the pandemic, what has that impact been? Obviously the need of, I think about vaccination of disease monitoring, of outbreak monitoring, of emergency care, ICU units, all these things. Critically important to the government's role right now and continue to be. So what kind of impact has the pandemic had in terms of their modernization plans? I'm guessing some of these had to be put on hold, right? Because you've got an emergency and so you can't conduct business as usual. Sure, so it's caused a shift in priorities as you know, John. And then it's also caused us to rethink what has to be done in person and what could be done remotely. And when we think about what can be done remotely, we're seeing a proliferation of devices. We're seeing a proliferation of the level of network access that is enabled and supported. And with that, we see new security concerns, right? We are seeing a really intriguing rise of thought around authentication and making sure that the right person is coming in from the right device using the right applications at the right time. That is incredibly challenging for our agency customers and they have to think about what's happening in ways that they didn't have to last year. Let's talk about certification a little bit. And I know you announced FedRAMP a couple of years ago and now you've come up with a new iteration, if you will. I hear about that. So walk me through that a little bit in our audience as well. And then just talk about the value of certification. Why does that really matter? What's the importance of that? Thanks, John. We did recently announce that we've received a provisional authority to operate in IL-5, impact level five. And that's incredibly exciting. I've never worked for a software company that had IL-5 FedRAMP certification previously. And I think it demonstrates Splunk's commitment to this market, the public sector market. We are absolutely committed to delivering our software in any environment and any level of classification that our customers need. And that allows them to rest assured that they can decide anything they want to about their data without worrying about the sanctity of that data itself or the platform that they're using to process that data. That's incredibly exciting, I hope. You mentioned the current administration just a little bit ago, the Biden administration, new executive orders focusing in on use of, or I guess taking appropriate measures to protect your data from a cybersecurity perspective. What exactly has that done to change the approach the government is taking now to protecting data and then how have you adapted to that executive order to provide the right services for governments looking to make sure they meet those standards and that criteria? Well, it's an exciting time. As you point out on May 12th, President Biden signed an executive order on improving the nation's cybersecurity. So from the highest levels, we're seeing the government sort of set a baseline for what makes sense. And they went further in a memo just released on August 27th by releasing what they call an enterprise logging maturity model. And it has four levels and it indicates what sorts of data agencies should be storing from and in their systems and for how long they should be storing it. And that's incredibly exciting because a lot of agencies are using Splunk to make sense of that data. And so this gives them sort of a baseline for what data do they need to collect? How long do they need to keep it collected for? What questions do they need to ask of it? And as a result, we're making some offers to our customers about how they use Splunk, how they take advantage of our cloud-based storage within our product, how they take advantage of our services in mapping their data strategy to this enterprise logging maturity model. And it represents a great opportunity to sort of take a step forward in cybersecurity for these agency customers. Yeah, I'm kind of curious here, I mean, I came from the wireless space and we had active dialogue with the government in terms of communications, emergency communications and also in services to rural areas, that kind of thing. But sometimes that collaboration didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked, frankly. And so maybe lessons have been learned from that in terms of how the private sector melds with the public sector and works with the policy makers in that respect. How would you characterize just overall the relationship, the public-private sector relationship in terms of the sharing of resources and of information and collaboration? Well, at the federal government level, there's always been pretty incredible collaboration between industry and government. But I think we at Splunk have been engaged through organizations like the Alliance for Digital Innovation, the US Chamber of Commerce, ACT-IAC, the American Council for Technology and the Industry Advisory Council. And we're seeing a rise actually in university partnerships as well, particularly at the state level where let's say local governments are saying, hey, we don't have the capacity to do some of these things that we now know we need to do. And we know that some of those things could be done in collaboration with our university partners and with our state partners. And that's exciting. I think that it is an era where everyone realizes there are new threats. There are threats that are hard to handle in a silo and that the more we collaborate, whether it's government industry collaboration or whether it's cross-government collaboration or whether it's cross-industry collaboration, the better. And the more effectively we'll solve some of these problems that face us as a nation. Well, you make a great point too, because it is about pulling resources at some point and everybody pulling together in order to combat what has become a certainly vexing challenge to say the least. Jeremy, thanks for the time. I appreciate it and I wish you all the success down the road. Thanks for having me, John. You bet. Jeremy Ricci joining us talking about the public sector and Splunk's just exemplary work in that respect. You're watching theCUBE. Our coverage continues here at dot-comf 21.