 Live from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Splunk.com 2015. Brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Rick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for Splunk.com for 2015. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events that extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Jeff Rick. Our next guest is Rob Charlton, Cloud DevOps Architect at Virtue Corporation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. It's nice to be here. The first thing you got to do is show everyone in the camera the phone. Okay. So this is your camera here. Should hold it up a little bit higher. Okay. So Virtue is a British manufacturer and retailer of handmade luxury mobile phones. So this is the Virtue Aster that we launched last year. So these phones are all made in the UK on-site in Hampshire. Each one made by a single craftsman. So the craftsman signs inside the back of the phone. The name of the person who made this phone there. So some of our customers who buy multiple phones, they ask that the same craftsman makes each one of those. So these are handmade luxury phones, luxury item. I got my eye watch. It's a sports edition, but the eye watch is going for a gold version. So this is a luxury handmade crafted phone. That's right. So it's made from luxury materials like grade five titanium on the sides, sapphire crystal on the display. You might find on a luxury watch. So the only thing that's going to scratch that display is diamonds. So don't put it in a bag full of diamonds. Other than that, you're fine. Yeah, don't scratch with that. So a great display, android phone, the material showing the camera over here. Beautiful. And on the back, that's a hand-stitched leather from one of Europe's oldest tanneries in there as well. Wow. That's beautiful. Awesome. So luxury phones, handmade. So that's for the wealthy smartphone user. Yeah, so we sell to high net worth individuals all around the world. So we have stores around the world. There's a shop in the mall at the Wynn Hotel here in Vegas. But we sell in China, Russia, Europe, South America, North America, everywhere. Is there a link? Just on the website to get information. If you go to virtue.com, you can find all the information there. So I just order directly or I go to a retailer? How do I get the order in? So you can order online at virtue.com. You can also go to the retailer. So if you pop into one of our stores, you can see the whole range of phones in there. And it's quite impressive when you go in to see the different variants they have. And how long has the company been around? How big is the company? So we were founded in 1998. So we've been going quite a long time. We made our first phone, the Signature, in 2002. And so we used to be part of Nokia at the time. We were a wholly insensitive of Nokia. But we were acquired by a private equity firm in 2012. And since then, we focused on luxury Android smartphones. So what do you call it? A smartphone? Well, luxury is not a smartphone. It's not like any other phone. It's a luxury phone. Yeah, or a super phone. Something even beyond that smartphone. Well, I mean, you're not a marketing guy, but you were going to talk with DevOps and you're doing a great job showing off the phone. I'm sure the writers on SiliconANGLE are going to love that. We cover the phones. We'd love to cover the Android and iPhones. So I'm sure the writers jump on that story. But DevOps, so now that's your job. That's right, yeah. Cloud DevOps, something that we cover very passionately. We love DevOps. A lot of IT ops here at this show, not a lot of dev. Yes. We also heard from one of the security guys that a lot of the security problems are bad code. Bad developers, if you will. Bad code. So how are you looking at Splunk in the DevOps framework? What are you working on and share with, how is DevOps constructed with a Splunk backdrop? So we looked at it from two aspects and I did a talk yesterday showing some of that. So we're using DevOps tools to deploy Splunk. So we use a tool called Ansible. Similar to tools like Puppet and Chef. And we use that to deploy our Splunk cluster. So yesterday I did a demonstration of totally destroying a Splunk cluster, starting from scratch. And we used Ansible to rebuild all the machines and put Splunk back onto that cluster. So that's important if you're working in a cloud environment that you can spin up environments to test with and in production whenever you need. So many developers you guys have. What's the IT ops look like? What's the developers look like in your team? So it's a small team. The software team is about 30 people, split between evenly split between people who work on the low level driver software to make the modem and the camera work. And people who write Android applications. So we have a suite of our own applications on the phone. And then my team which looks after the backend infrastructure, the services. So the phone comes with a range of exclusive services. There's a Ruby key on the side there. You get put in touch with a 24 seven lifestyle manager who will arrange whatever you want. Called our concierge service. Right, right. And we run the backend infrastructure for that. And so it's like your own version of iCloud. Spodos go there too. You guys have a cloud? Is it like iCloud or? We don't really do kind of storage services. We have done with some of our other phones. We're more looking at lifestyle services. So we have another one called Virtue Life where we push special offers and deals to your phone. Things that you can only get access to if you're a Virtue customer. But your small team's doing hardware design OS. You're working on top of the Android. You're doing your own applications. So you guys are putting a lot of stuff into that. Yeah, we're not all really custom developed. We're not Samsung or Apple. We don't have thousands of engineers to throw at the problem. So we have to work very smart rather than just throwing lots of bodies which is part of the reason why we employed Splunk to help us. So the way we use Splunk is when we're running up to releasing one of the phones we're making weekly releases of the phone software. And what we want to track is how reliable is that software. We used to use a mixture of gut feel, instinct and experience to decide, okay, now the software's ready to launch. But in 2013 we started employing Splunk Enterprise to come up with a metric so we could do true data led decision making. So what we do is we install a little agent running on all of the phones that are being tested. So we have several hundred testers all around the world testing these phones. The metric cell, the agent sends device health metrics up to our Splunk cluster. So things like how long has the phone been on for? What's the battery health like? Have there been any crashes? And then the Splunk Enterprise cluster eats all of that data and we can then analyze it. And we use two main features in Splunk. We use Splunk Alerts. So we have an alert running constantly, scanning through that metric data coming from our field of handsets. And that'll tell us if there's been any crashes. So if there's been a crash, we get an email sent out to our crash analysis team saying this phone has crashed. And they can go and chase you down if you're one of the testers, say, hey, your phone crashed this morning, what were you doing? And they can take logs from the phone at that point. So we have to talk about DevOps and big data because data is a big part of it. So how do you look at the data? How do you make the data agile? Do you look at open data, sharing data? Are you sharing with other companies? Android Oste is a development environment for the phone. How is, how do you deal with that kind of concept? So we only use the data internally and this is a small pool of data from several hundred handsets so this isn't really big data but we use Splunk's ability to crunch and analyze that data and play with it. So we take data from several different sources, we've got handset data, we've got data from backend server logs. And the good thing about Splunk is we can throw all of that data into the melting pot and use Splunk's query language to slice it and dice it and see what we can learn from that. Do you deal with production as well? Cause obviously people are spending $7,000 on a phone. I would imagine their expectation of service significantly different than, you know, buying whatever's on sale at Best Buy. So are you also doing it as you do the testing with the production as well? I think that's something we'd want to look at in the future but at the moment it's a small team as you heard so we're really focused on this driving the quality up before we launch it. Before we launch it, okay. All right, so I got to ask you your take of the show and also people's reaction to the phone. So two questions, two separate questions. That's fine. So the first one, this is my very first Splunk Conf and I'm absolutely loving it. It's an amazing event with really, really high energy, lots of new product announcements and everybody is really excited. You can see Splunk doesn't have customers, they've got a fan base and yeah, really, really enjoying it. And I've been talking to a lot of people showing them the phone and people are absolutely blown away. I think blown away by just the concept. Get it before you leave. Of a luxury phone and then to actually see it and hold it, they really love the idea. And this is called the Concierge service, what is that called, Ruby? That's a Ruby key. Ruby key. And yeah, it gets super. Put in touch with the Concierge. And they'll make travel arrangements for you. They have people on the ground in all the major cities around the world and they know what's going on. So if you've not been to Vegas before, you land, they'll tell you, well you need to go to this club, we can help get you in, we'll get you a table at this restaurant even though it's fully booked, they can do that sort of thing for you. It's like having your own personal assistant. And how about like you said, the screen only scratched with a diamond, that kind of quality? That's right, yeah. And how about like durability dropping it and it seems solid. Whoops, I just dropped it. There was the test. It just cracked my iPhone screen. The spoke alerts are going off left and right. That's how tough it is. So, so, how, oh, hold on, ready? How durable is it on drops? So they're really durable. So the, the titanium on the side is there to protect the screen. So these phones, you don't need to put it in a case. I mean, it'll be a real shame, you buy a beautiful device, have to put it in a case. You never need to put this in a case. And we do extensive testing, drop testing, bake testing, all of this kind of thing to make sure that these phones last a long time. When you spend $7,000, $10,000 on a phone, you're not going to replace it year on year. They won't, our customers expect these things to last. And they have, I mean, customers use these phones for 10 years or more. I'll see any, any carrier when you travel from country to country, no problems, put the chips in, things. That's right. We're not affiliated to any operators. So you just put in whatever sim that you have. All right. Well, Rob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Great to see the sexy toys come on. We'd love to talk to DevOps and Consumer in one, in one interview. It's awesome. So certainly we'll get this up on SiliconANGLE immediately. And how about demo units for us, hosts at theCUBE? Do we, we should actually sponsored by, thanks so much for joining. Thank you very much for having me. Pleasure. We'll be back with more live coverage here at Splunk Conference after this short break.