 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin and Dustin Kirkland here live, day three of theCUBE's continuous coverage of Google Cloud Next. Dustin and I are pleased to welcome Splunk back to theCUBE. Gretchen O'Hare is here, the VP Vice President, rather, Worldwide Partners and Alliances at Splunk. Gretchen, great to have you on the program. Thank you so much. I'm so thrilled to be here. So we've been covering Splunk for a long time. Talk about what's going on and the key value that Splunk is delivering to its customers, and then we'll kind of dig into the partnership. Absolutely. Well, I think first and foremost, what you're seeing now today is we are living in a digital world. And in that digital world, we have to think about how do we build digital resilience within our enterprises today? That's something that is not only at every individual level, it's a boardroom discussion, quite frankly. And so when you think about digital resilience, how do you make sure that you have your SecOps, DevOps, IT engineering, really shoring up to make sure that your business and processes are well-secured, and that's really what Splunk is about. It's pretty exciting to see the momentum, essentially, that is becoming at the forefront of what is needed for business. Right, and the collaboration between those groups that you mentioned is also critical. How has Splunk a facilitator of that, of getting these groups to not just come together and talk, but actually work together to be successful and deliver secure solutions? It's such a great, great question because in the past, those have been somewhat siloed organizations, whether it is an organization that is looking at rolling out the next application, or really quite managing your sock environment. And now for the first time, I think we're seeing the blend or blur, essentially, of these organizations coming together because we have to secure the entire enterprise. And that means not going back and forth between what is a security breach and what actually might be within the application, but a unified way to do security and observability. And I think you're going to see more and more of that. That's where Splunk comes in, really bringing that end-to-end opportunity and solution with best of breed knowledge, in securing observability to our customers. Yeah, in terms of verticals that maybe are well-suited to Splunk and its solution set, can you share with us just a little bit of where that focus is right now? Absolutely, I think verticals is one area where Splunk continues to go deeper. And this is where Google Cloud and Splunk really come together, because Google is so deep in certain industries and Splunk also is right along there, in particular, to financial services and in retail. So when you think about financial services, you think about things like fraud, compliance, risk, big areas, again, for the business, where when we come together with Google Cloud and with Splunk, we certainly can deliver on financial services. And of course, retail. Retail is a big area of focus for both of us. And so we're working together to bring a set of white papers and basically guidance on how to build a more resilient store. And that can be a physical to a digital world. Case in point, we have a great customer together that is a large fast food chain. And really leveraging the power of AI and our Splunk observability on Google Cloud to be able to bring more innovation into the mobile ordering, digital menus, and just quite frankly, a better experience around digital transformation for the customers and the operations. Yeah, that's what customers want. Absolutely. And how much of that is reusable? I've got to think, you've got one excellent customer use case, but is that something that you're able to roll out and stamp out very efficiently? If you think about making sure that you're bringing the best experience to your customers and also securing what that environment looks like, absolutely, you could think about any retailer in any store, both on-prem and a physical location and digital, those worlds are blending. So not only is this use case great for the customer we have, but we have the opportunity to really service that together across that whole retail industry. Share with us, here we are at Google Cloud next day three, lots of people, 20,000 folks or so, lots of great, the Google Cloud ecosystem, obviously Splunk is a big part of that as well. Vibrant. Talk about some of the importance of the Google relationship, Google Cloud relationship with Splunk. And what are some of the things that you're going to be doing together in 2023 and as we go into 2024, which is not too far away? It really isn't. Well, I think first of all, thank you for having us back. We have formalized our partnership and have been three years strong on really building a strong partnership both on the innovation front and also on our go-to market. And we're not stopping, we have a lot more to do. And the thing that I think is really valuable for our customers is that our engineering teams have really come together to look at, hey, how do we deliver the best experience on Google Cloud? But one step further, what is going to be the next thing that is going to sort of lead us there? And so of course you can't escape the topic of AI and that's the topic of course here at the conference. And that's one of the areas that we're continuing to look at which is how do we continue to build the best AI experience for our customers? What does that look like? What do you think that looks like? I know it'll vary by industry, but... It'll vary by industry. And I think first and foremost, it's going to be how do you start to take some, how does automation and that AI sort of take some of the work out of the guessing when you're looking at securing out your infrastructure and you're looking at some of the monitoring that we're doing today. Moving forward though, I think it's important that not only can we look at some of the innovation that Google Cloud has announced, certainly at the conference, but every customer is talking about AI in some way. Gen AI is the topic that essentially is inescapable. So one, we have to make sure that we're building an announced splunk for AI, that we're building sort of that best capability, but realize that there's still going to be a human factor involved. And I think that's a really good important fact for customers is they understand what is going to be their AI strategy and how do they take the best of Reed Splunk into that moving forward. So I think that'll be like the big piece, which is both the intelligence and the automation and the learning from the models that we're creating, but at the same time, making sure we don't ever remove the human element so that we can make sure that we're building that digital resilience. And in terms of customer demand, what are those customers demanding out of AI and that human element from Splunk's solutions? Yeah, I mean, I think just at the very top level, every customer's trying to look at what is their AI strategy? What can they get from it? And I think we're going to learn more, quite frankly, as we continue to move forward and those Gen AI models continue to evolve. But essentially what they want to be able to do is reduce their costs, save some time essentially, and actually have smarter and more insightful decision-making from the Splunk solution. And so that is really what we're focused on. That's really what everyone is expecting. You talk about customer demand, all of us as customers, consumers, in our business lives, in our daily lives. We expect to have this real-time experience. We expect to have what we're looking for, whether it's going to a fast food retailer we want and the experience that's catered to us. We want it to be relevant, it needs to be personal. Same thing whether I'm on a large e-commerce site and I'm shopping for something, I have this expectation. I can get whatever I want tomorrow. So leveraging AI to help fuel that something I think needs more awareness because there's a lot of fear out there. At the same time, there's a lot of value and to both of your points, it's AI plus humans going forward. And I think that's the meta point of all of that, right? Which is there's just been a lot of discussion around it but with that discussion is fear, it's responsible and ethical AI, how do we think about the models of the future? And when you're securing and building out digital resiliency in your enterprise, leaving that to a complete unknown can be a definitely scary thing. I think there's fear around that. So it's really important, not only that we build in that human component but that we also are looking very closely at the responsible and ethical AI component of it so that we're building the best experience and it can be used across the enterprise. And one of the things specifically to that point is that Splunk manages most of the Fortune 500. We have some of the largest logos in the world. And so we have to take our responsibility very seriously on what that AI model is going to deliver and we're definitely doing that. So Gretchen, I'll bring us back to Google Cloud here. Can you say just a little bit more about the relationship with Google Cloud? So like I said, basically we're continuing to build out our capabilities on Google Cloud. We have a very strong observability solution that helps with our ability for application, web, dev ops. We're continuing to expand on our security as well. And so the important thing is it's our engineering that's coming together, our field and sales are coming together so that we can delight the customers because at the end of the day, as you mentioned, it's all about what the customers need and what they're asking for and we're here to deliver and being partners with Google and Google Cloud helps us realize that value. And how are customers influential in that partnership? How have you worked with certain key logos to help really define, refine and mature the partnership? They are, this is where that trifecta of the customer, Google Cloud and Splunk all come together because our customers, our mutual customers that are all across the globe, Fortune 500 together are giving us very precise things that they want to see and that they want the need on their roadmap and we're taking and we're listening and we're taking that to heart and working with the partnership to deliver upon those capabilities. Any fun stories, feedback that you've heard from the conference so far in the three days we've been here? I just think the big fun or most amazing thing is just what is everyone doing with AI? And you hear about all of the models, the new models that was announced with Vertex AI, just lots of opportunity I think and now it's how do we make sure that we're very thoughtful on how we do it but it is pretty funny because you can talk to your parents all the way to a high school student and everybody is talking about GenAI. It is definitely the top talk of the town. It is, but there's so much, I think there's so much fear out there in the mass media. I think a lot of us in technology have responsibilities to help raise the education and awareness for all of the good things that have been going on with AI for a while. It's not new, but we're seeing it. We talked about this in a wrap on Monday. Why now? I think you're making an excellent point. AI is not new. In fact, AI has been an ongoing piece of work that we've been working on for a very long time. In fact, Splunk has been one of the originators of using AI and our predictive analytics from the very beginning. And so we're certainly not new to AI. Google is certainly not new to AI. To your point, it's getting a lot of coverage, a lot of interesting new use cases. We just have to come together as a tech industry and make sure that we have a good strong point of view on making sure that we are building that responsible AI out for our customers. Definitely. What are some of the things that we can be looking out for in terms of Splunk's future direction, the partnership, anything exciting in particular that we should be focusing on? Well, I think you mentioned industry. And I think that is where we can continue to bring very interesting and relevant use cases to the industry. And while Splunk has a trifecta, essentially, with the top magic quadrant, with the Gardner, Forrester, IDC, both in our SIM and observability, I think more importantly, it's like, how do we take the horizontal solutions of which we bring and really drive relevant use cases and industry-specific business outcomes? And that's what we're focusing on together as a partnership, and we're going to continue to deliver there. And the industries, we talked about retail. Any industries in particular that are early adopters are really in need of this technology? Well, I think for beyond retail, certainly financial services is just at the top of that list. One that Google Cloud has been on top of for a very long time as well as Splunk. But when you think about all of the use cases around the financial services, and you introduce this AI modeling in the financial services area, it becomes really important more than ever for us to really deliver on what is the next set of road map for that particular area. And you're seeing that as a driver for new adjacent verticals that you can approach? Absolutely. You start with that. You go into things like obviously banking insurance, all part of the financial services market. But you can go into the gaming side as well, and as well as areas like healthcare. So lots of opportunity, certainly no lack of industry, but the point really is really focusing on the use cases, on the industries that we can deliver the most value and make sure that we're delivering on what the customer is wanting. It's all about delivering on customer values, business outcomes. Last question, Gretchen, how would you summarize the GoCloud Next 23? 20,000 people, AI is the word of the day, but what are your kind of summarizations of what you've seen? I think my summary is innovation. I think it's a year of innovation. It's really exciting to see the announcements come out. It's really exciting to see the physical presence and people coming back together quite frankly, the opportunity for incredible business conversations and partnership up conversations. And so I would just summarize as innovation, the thriving ecosystem that you're certainly seeing here at theCUBE, and an opportunity really to help secure a digital resilience world with our customers. Excellent, and Splunk is certainly a key partner in that thriving ecosystem. Gretchen, we thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE, giving us the lowdown of what's new with Splunk, Google and Google Cloud Platform. We'll keep our eyes on the space. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Our pleasure for having you. For our guests and for Dustin Kirkland, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, day three of our coverage of Google Cloud Next 23 continues in just a minute.