 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering .conf18, brought to you by Splunk. Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. We're here with theCUBE covering Splunk .conf18. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Chris Crocco is here. He's the lead solutions engineer at Viasat. Great to see you. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. You're very welcome. So let's start with Viasat. Tell us what you guys do and what your role is all about. So Viasat is a global communications and technology company, primarily focused on satellite based technologies, anything from government services to commercial aviation and residential service. And what does a lead solutions engineer do? My primary role is to help us kind of transition from a traditional operations state into more of a DevOps environment, including monitoring, alerting, orchestration and remediation. Oh, we love this conversation, don't we? Okay, so the basic question is, and I know it's hard, but it's subjective. It's kind of, if you think about the maturity of your organization in the context of DevOps, you know, on a scale of one to five, five being nirvana. So let's assume you're not at five because it never ends, right? You're constantly evolving. Where would you say you are? Are you just getting started? Are you more like a four, four and a half? What do you think? That's a good question. I would say we're probably three on our way to four. We've had a lot of growing pains. We've had a lot of learning opportunities. The processes of DevOps are getting pretty well entrenched and right now we're working on making sure that the culture kind of sticks with the DevOps. That's critical, right? I mean, that's really where the rubber meets the road is, you know, that organizational and political, you know, without getting into the dirt of it, give us what it looked like before and, you know, where you are today. Sure, so prior to our shift to DevOps, which was mainly motivated by our latest spacecraft, ISAT2, we had a very traditional operational model where we had everything funneled through a network operations center. We had a technical operations team and if they weren't able to triage and remediate issues, they kicked it over the fence to engineers and developers who would then throw something back. And there wasn't a lot of communication between the two organizations. So when we did find recurring problems, recurring issues in our network and in our environment, it took a long time to get those resolved and we had to have a large volume of staff there just to kind of put out the fires. With the transition of DevOps, one of the things that we've been focusing on is making sure that our development teams, our engineering teams understand the customer experience and how it's impacted by what they do and decentralizing that operations structure. So all of the triage work goes to the people who actually work on those services. So it's a pretty big paradigm shift but it's also helping us solve customer problems faster and get better education about what the customer experience is to the people who actually make it better. And roughly what was the timeframe that it took to go from that really waterfall model to the structure of the app today? We've been going for about two or three years now in this transition. Like I said, the first year or so was kind of bumpy and we've really kind of ramped up over the past year in terms of the amount of teams that are practicing DevOps, the amount of teams that are in an agile and scrum model. So overall, two to three years to get to where we are today. So the problem with the traditional model is time to deployment is slower. That means time to value is slower, a lot of rework. Here, you take it, now you take it, hey, it worked when I gave it to you, a lot of back and forth and not a lot of communication, creates frustration, not a lot of collaboration and teamwork, now you're working through that now. How large is the team? My team is five people, we have 4,500 people roughly at Visat as a whole. And I believe roughly 2,000 of them are in an engineering or technical role. Okay, and so, but in the previous model, you had developers and you had operations folks, is that right? And your five were sort of split over those or was it a much, much larger sort of corpus of folks? It was a very large distribution of people. It was very engineering and developer centric. We still had a core operations team of 60 to 100 people based in our Denver office. We're keeping our headcount relatively the same with respect to our operations and we're growing a lot in terms of those DevOps teams. So as those teams continue to grow, we're adding more operational resources to them and kind of inserting a lot of that knowledge into other parts of the world. You're doing a lot more with the same. Are you come from the ops side or the dev side? I come from the ops side. I actually started my career with Visat in our knock in Denver. From there, I transitioned into a ops analyst role and then we created the solutions engineering team and I took the lead on that. Kitchen, can you tell us how Splunk plays into your DevOps? Did you start using it in the knock and kind of go from there? We did, actually. Splunk started out as just a tool for us to see how many modems were offline in the knock. It was up on the video wall and we would see spikes and know that there was a problem. And as we've made this transition to DevOps, a lot of teams that were using other solutions, other open source and homegrown solutions were kind of organically pivoting to Splunk because it was a lot easier for them to use for alerting dashboards, deep data analysis. A lot of the things they need to do their job effectively. So as we've grown as a company, as we've grown in this organizational model, Splunk has kind of grown along with that in terms of use case. And that growth is predominantly in IT operations and security, correct? Well, it's actually pretty interesting. It's kind of all over the board in our organizations. Started in IT operations and security, but we have people in our marketing department using it to make sales and campaign decisions. We have executive leadership looking at it to see the performance of our spacecraft. We have exploratory research being done with it in terms of what's effective and what's not for our new spacecraft that will be coming out, the Viset 3 constellation. So it's really all over the board in the organization. This is interesting Stu, you're not the first customer who's told us that no, it's not just confined to IT, it's actually seeping through the organization. Despite the fact that we heard a bunch of announcements today, I don't know if you saw the keynotes, taking, making it simpler for lines of business folks to actually utilize Splunk. So given that a lot of your teams in the business are actually using it already, what do you think these announcements will do for it? Maybe you haven't had time to evaluate it, but essentially it's making it easier for business people, simplifying it. Yeah, you know, all of the announcements in the keynotes over the past two days have been really, really exciting. Everything that I was hoping for got checked off the list. So I think one of the big things that's going to allow us to do is get our customer facing teams and our customer care organizations more involved with the tool and getting them the information that they need to better serve customers that are calling in and potentially even prevent the situations that customers have to call in for in the first place. So giving them a lot of account information quickly, giving them the ability to access information that is PCI and PII compliant, but still allowing them to get the data they need to service an individual customer. All of those things I think are really going to be impacted by the announcements in this conf. So you were in the keynote yesterday. I was. Were you shaking the phone? I was, yeah. Which group were you? We were Orange Group. We were Orange too. We were sitting in the media section and all the media guys were sitting on their hands, but we had a lot of devs and ops guys shaking with us. It's like when you do the wave at Fenway Park, when it gets behind home plate, everybody just kind of sits down, but we were plugging hard. All right Chris, what else has excited you about Conf 18? It's cool stuff that you've seen, some innovations, things you've learned. Well I'm really excited about the app or infrastructure. That's something that we've been trying to get for ITSI for a long time now in terms of entity level monitoring and any entity level thresholding, and I think that's going to complement our business really, really well. The advancements that they're doing with the metric store, specifically with things like Syslog, are really, really exciting. I think that that's going to allow us to accelerate our data and make it more performant. The S3 compliant storage is absolutely fantastic. And it comes in black now and that's really, really fantastic. Oh right, dark mode, you mentioned the ITSI. Have you used the VictorOps pieces before or is that something you're looking at? We haven't looked at VictorOps as of yet. We're an ex-matter's customer right now, so we've been using their integration that they built out and is on SplunkBase. But VictorOps, it's going to be interesting to see how that organization changes now that it's part of the Splunk. So dark mode actually, it's one of those things that it really got such a loud ovation. It was funny, I was actually talking to a couple of Splunkers there, like we want that dark mode t-shirt, which I think you have to be a user and you need to sign up for some research thing that they're doing and they're giving out the black shirt that has gray text on it. Why does that resonate with you, the dark mode? Well, it was actually what they talked about in the keynote. If you have it up on a video wall, which we have in various parts of our company, or if you're sitting in a dark office, something like that, looking at a really white screen for a long period of time, it's not easy on your eyes, it's hard to look at it for a long period of time. And generally speaking, a lot of our presentation layers go towards that visual format. So I think this is going to allow us to make it much more appealing to the people who are putting this up on screens in front of people. So your responsibility extends out into the field, I presume, right? The data that's in the field, is that true? Okay, so I'm interested in your reaction to the Industrial IoT announcements. How you see, or if you see your organization taking advantage of that? Well, we're a very vertically integrated company, so we actually manufacture a lot of the devices that we use, and that we provide to our customers. I think a lot of our manufacturing capabilities would really benefit from that. Anything from building antennas for a ground segment that actually talked to the spacecraft, to the modems that we put in people's houses. That entire fabrication process, I think, would benefit a lot. I really loved the AR presentation that they did, where they were actually showing the overlay of metrics on a manufacturing line. I think that's something that would be fantastic for us, particularly if we're sending somebody to an antenna or a ground station to replace a piece of equipment. We can overlay those metrics, we can overlay all of that, and we can use the industrial analytics piece of that to actually show which piece of hardware is most affected, and how best to replace that. So, a lot of opportunities there for our company. So, I wonder if you could help us understand what's, from your perspective, on Splunk's to-do list. We're going to have Doug Meridon a little later. If you had Doug right here, and he said, Chris, what can we do to make your life better? What would you tell him? You know, I think a couple of the things that would make it better, and it looks like they're heading in this direction, is streaming in and streaming out. You know, it's very, streaming in is of course important. That's where a lot of your data lives. But you also have to be able to send that out to Kafka, to Kinesis, to other places, so other people can consume the output of what Splunk is doing. So, I think that would be a really, really important thing for us to socialize the benefit of Splunk. And then vertically integrating the incident management chain. Looks like something that's on their roadmap, and I'd be interested to see what the roadmap looks like in terms of pulling in Phantom, pulling in VictorOps, pulling in some of these other technologies that are now in the Splunk umbrella, to really make that end-to-end process of detecting, directing, and remediating issues a lot more efficient. Okay, and do you see at some point that the machine will actually do, the machine intelligence will do a lot of that remediation, or do you see the human still heavily involved? Well, I think one of the important things is for a lot of these remediation things, we shouldn't have a human involved, right? Particularly things that are well-known issues. Human beings are expensive, and human beings are important. And there are a lot more important things that they can be doing with their time than putting out fires. So if we can have machines doing that for them, freeze them up to do a lot more cool stuff. Right. All right, Chris, well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate your insights. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Orlando, Splunk Conf 18. We're right back.