 Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Splunk.com virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in the Splunks studios in Silicon Valley. We're all the execs are here. It's basically a Splunk studio. It's everyone's here telling the stories. We also got some remote guests coming in, customers, partners and other Splunk execs. We've got Katie Bianchi, Senior Vice President of Customer Success. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank, great to see you. Thanks John, great to be here. Yeah, I love the customer success stories because at the end of the day, customers vote with their wallet and when basically like solutions, they'll use this customer examples and customer testimonials. There's one thing that I've learned covering Splunk over the past decade and done in many.coms is you guys have very happy customers and over the years have continued to have great customer success organically. Now at the high end on the enterprise, now with cloud scale, a lot's changing, a lot's growing. The world is going completely cloud. And again, data's at the center of the value as it always was more than important than ever. So what's new with the customers? What are some of the successful ones that you're seeing? What's new in your world? Yeah, thanks for asking John. I think we've been talking about how things have been changing over the past 18 months. And if I oversimplify our customer obsession means that everything we do is designed to make sure we're helping customers get the most out of their investment with Splunk every single day. So we do this across our global team and our partner ecosystem who are providing both the right adoption and technical services. And we're architecting and deploying thousands of Splunk environments to help our customers get to ongoing value. But in the world that we're living in today, I talked to so many customers who are doing amazing things with Splunk but dealing with really tough challenges, right? So through the pandemic, everyone's dealing with more complexity, more change and a velocity that we have never seen before. And on top of all this, shifting to a fully digital business model, there's whole new challenges to effectively monitoring infrastructure and applications and maintaining security posture. With this too, customers that I'm talking to are also having to figure out ways to do a lot more with less. I think we all know it's an incredibly competitive talent market out there. So our customers are relying on Splunk and customer success more and more to make it easier and faster to get to value, to investigate, to monitor, to detect and to remediate. So that pace and all of that change of what's happening means that we have to continually check ourselves to be that right strategic partners that can move at the pace of our customers because customers are counting on us to provide right services at the right time for every stage of their journey with us. You know, Katie, great point, great insight there. I want to ask you because that Splunk has always had this kind of in their DNA because when Splunk started, it was always something new and it wasn't, it was a new thing, net new thing not seen before. Now, as the world continues, you guys continue to do that. You bring something new to the market, you operationalize, you bring value to customers, then it happens again and again and again. But now more than ever, the data roles of cloud and customer applications is new for customers. So you have a diverse customer base. I know you're obsessed with customer service, but how do you, how do you, I'm a customer success, how do you deal with the fact that sometimes things are so new? And there may not be a benchmark there and you can't go with the proven form and sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. How do you solve its new to me problem that customers want, this new thing? Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of what we see today is that the power of Splunk as a data platform to bring in complex data allows customers to do many different things, whether it's infrastructure monitoring, whether it's security use cases or whether it's application performance. And all of that is new for our customers. So oftentimes, like you said, we grew up having customers use us for single use case when we're bringing this much data into the platform and they see what can be unlocked through the value of Splunk. What we have to make sure that they can do is most seamlessly move from use case and value point. So that means from a CS perspective, we have to continually make sure that we're doing what customers are asking us to do, which is having the right services that deliver the right outcomes that are as prescriptive as possible and that we're doing that across the domain of all of our entire portfolio. So we spend a lot of time making sure that our technical services are scaling to the needs of customers, but also everything that we do around success, planning and adoption and use case guidance and best practices, as well as our education and enablement are as prescriptive as possible for customers, whether they are new to Splunk or whether they are scaling Splunk across multiple use cases and multiple areas of their business. Yeah, certainly a lot of not a multi-vendor, multi-vendor activities, modern application development. Secure is a big part of it. So I have to ask you, given all that, what are the top things, top three things, for instance, that your customers are asking from you guys from a CS perspective, customer success perspective? Yeah, great question. So I think over, I think what we hear the most frequently is give me a more seamless buying experience with services that are really easy to consume and speed my time to value. Second, and I just mentioned this, is I need services that aren't just task-based to work. I need services that deliver the outcome that I need for the business problem or business opportunity that I am trying to solve for. So make sure that your portfolio lines up with our outcomes. And I think third is all about more prescriptive guidance. The world is hard, the world is complex, data is only getting more complex while the opportunity is big. Our role is all about prescription and making it as easy as possible. So I have to ask you the question that I'm observing and many people are in the industry as well is that Splunk is changing as a company. Everyone knows the vibe of Splunk is very cool, very chill, very organic, big community vibe, good customer success, everything's going great. You continue to knock it out of the park over the years but now you're a mature company, now scale is coming in. Your customers are getting bigger and bigger. You have existing customers, you're getting new customers. You have new offerings. There's a whole nother Splunk coming, another level. Yeah, absolutely. How do you view that from a customer's perspective? And can you share your reaction to that? Yeah, I think it's an honor to be part of a company that has such a strong culture and has such great partnership with our customers. And it really is all because of who our customers are and I think who our people are internally. But I think growing and scaling and making sure that we are able to deliver the right services at scale is a critical component of what we have to do to help customers along this journey. So the role of, I keep saying this, but the role of customer success is to make the complex easy. And we do that by making sure that we as an organization have the right data, the right prescription, the right way to serve our customers and the right coverage model, no matter where customers are on the journey or who they are and getting the most prescription to them at the right time. And that's quite frankly how we scale, but also what our customers are asking for. They're asking for more modularized content and they're asking us for more ways that they can drive best practices and use case guidance from right within the product. And those are things that we are working on to help continue to scale out what we're able to do. That's a great point. Team the complexity, make it simple and enable them to be successful. I think data does that. You guys are offering that platform, which is a great business model, by the way, if you could provide those kind of value. That's always a winning formula. Make things easy, reduce the steps it takes to do things and make it fast and simple. I have to ask you, because you mentioned earlier at the top of this interview about digital business. You know, we're here, Splunk canceled the conference, now it's virtual. We were coming in remotely here on site at the studio. They, you know, they have a virtual studio. They're now in the media business, which is a data business. You know, you guys are now doing TV with a cubist here. Everyone is realizing with the pandemic that digital business now is standard. You're seeing the impact of the instrumentation you mentioned. So as the digital business transformation is accelerated here in this time, not for everybody. It's going to change how customers are behaving. What have you, what have you observed with the pandemic? Because it's kind of, the pandemic has cleared the runway a little bit for people to do this properly because you can see what's not working, right? So what's your thoughts on this whole digital business? Everyone's connected and data's at the center of it. What's your thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think, you know, what we have seen over the last 12 to 18 months with this acceleration to a digital business model is that things, and the other dynamics going on are that things are only getting more complex, right? So as long customers can come to Splunk Cloud because we know it reduces like complexity in their moves because we are that data platform that allows them to search, investigate and monitor across cloud, across multi-cloud and across hybrid environments, but that's complex. Over the last year, we've seen customers get to much quicker value in Splunk Cloud, right? They're going through large complex transformation. One of the easiest things you can do is shed the amount of time and money you're spending managing, monitoring your infrastructure. So coming to Splunk Cloud helps accelerate time to value for them in that way. But let's make no mistake, that is really complex. And so part of what we are doing is ramping up our level of focus on those modernization services for customers. So customers who are choosing to come to Splunk Cloud for those benefits, we are there from planning and cutover and beyond with more prescriptive tools, more automation and how we move data, more resources and more experts to get customers to Splunk Cloud more seamlessly. And that for us from a modernization perspective is one thing that we are hearing clearly customers asking for specific in the space so they can take more advantage and move more quickly. You know, one of the trends that we're reporting on, and I'll get to the headline on SiliconANGLE in a minute or what's reporting on this event is there's more surface area, there's more data, there's more tools and tools are important for helping people automate. But at the same time, if you have more tools and you have more blind spots or silos. So when you get into this world of architecture, customers are struggling that we talk to around trying to find the ideal equation of okay balancing architecture, platform and tools, that's equilibrium if you will by getting access to the data. What's your reaction to that? Because this becomes one of those decisions where I think Splunk shines where you can kind of have the best of a platform. At the same time, use tooling where relevant to accelerate whether it's automation or other jobs versus buying tools or everything. Yeah, and so I think part of the thing that we continue to see is with the proliferation of data and data sources and a different degree of complexity in tooling the decisions around what's important and what's not important become much more complex for customers and much more difficult for customers to make. So we're changing a lot on the product and pricing side to sort of facilitate that piece. But I think when you're talking about how do I get the most value immediately, what we do across our go-to-market organization is make sure that we're partnering with customers to say, what are the outcomes that you want and need as a priority from an infrastructure monitoring for an application performance or security perspective? And then how do we make sure that we're prioritizing your maturity journey very prescriptively to say, here are the use cases that are most material, here are the data sources that are most material and here's a success plan that helps you get deployed to your priorities. So you can start the journey with us and build on that as we go. So again, it's really about how do we make the complex really easy through higher degrees of prescription but really making sure that we're doing our job and tying the prescription to what our customers need most when they need it. That's a great segue on my next question. In fact, my final question is, because the headline on siliconangle.com that we're reporting for this event is, I'll read it to you. Splunk doubles downs on multi-cloud data access, observability and security at its annual summit. Okay, so balancing the Sheninu toy in the North Star direction vision to practical prescriptive customer journeys is always a balance because you want to talk to customers about the future multi-cloud obviously, observability super important and honestly it's security got to be built in. Okay, we all know that. Back to the mainstream customer. You're in the customer success. So you want to show them the North Star, show them the headroom, whatever metaphor you want to use but at the same time, they're dealing with problems and things that they're trying to solve right now. What's your thoughts on customer success, knowing that there's a lot of cool new things coming? Yeah, I think our job, like I said, I'll start and I'm the same sort of start and end the same way. Our job at the end of the day is to help customers get the most out of their current investment with Splunk. And that is all about working on what that maturity journey looks like, prioritizing outcomes that our customers care about and starting that journey. So there's foundational work that needs to be done aligned to priorities. That's where we start. And then if we're doing what we need to be doing, creating those prescriptive plans and those success plans, then all of how we deliver to that value is prioritized through what customers need the most when they need it. And that is our role. And then we believe that by doing that and moving as quickly as we can with customers to get to that value, then we're enabling them to continue on that journey for all the new stuff that's out there that they can explore and get more value from. Yeah, it's always good to have that North Star and that Chinese new toy, new technology. So I have to ask you a final, final question since I have you here. What have you learned during the pandemic that you could share with other practitioners that are watching or maybe watching this as they look at the best practice? Because we've seen a lot of evidence where some people have fallen to the side or failed, weren't prepared. People who were in the cloud experimenting got that tailwind and survived and thrived. Some were refactoring, new business were emerging. So you kind of see a pattern. Is there anything that you've noticed on your end that you could share with, how to lean into something new so you don't be left out in the cold if the wave comes or new trend comes that they need to take advantage of, like data at the edge or cloud scale. What are some of the things you've observed and learned? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think for me, my personal learning through the pandemic has been like we always need to be looking around corners and planning specifically for our customers and thinking for them in terms of what problems that they will have. And we have to anticipate that so that we can pivot and create the right services that help them leverage to do what they need. So very early on, even very early on in the pandemic, our professional services team flipped within a two week period to doing fully remote and virtual deployments because we knew we couldn't stop time to value. Given the shift to remote work, our customers were relying on us to deploy so that they could monitor infrastructure and monitor work from home usage. And I think along with that, as we started to see through the back half digital transformations really pick up and customers moved to cloud, we've been working across the last really 12 to 15 months to really start to plan around what does it take to create the right services and the right capability, not just within Splunk, but within our partner ecosystem to effectively move customers to Splunk cloud and help them navigate a hybrid multi-cloud world with much more speed. And so for me, those are the two things that we really leaned into hard because we were always looking around corners and saying what's next for our customers based on what we're seeing happen in the external environment. Great insight, Katie. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. That's awesome. And I think, you know, customers are seeing success formulas and the new ones are emerging and you guys are going to the next level. It's always fun to talk about the future and today at the same time. So great to have you on. And certainly at the end of the day, the customers are the ones who are deploying and creating the innovation with software and data. So thanks for sharing. Yeah, thanks, John. Really, really happy to spend the time. There's nothing I like to do more than talk about our customers and to all of our customers. Huge thank you to you for your partnership and all you're doing to continue to power the world with data. It's always good to have a lot of customers to tell the story for you, but I appreciate you coming on. Congratulations on your success. It's theCUBE. We are here live in the studio of Splunk Studios for their virtual event with the remote interview. We're talking all the people in the industry we can. We're bringing them in. We're doing the interviews here in person as well. It's a hybrid event. I'm John Furrier theCUBE. Thanks for watching.