 Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas for the Splunk conference. This is Silicon Angles the Cube, our flagship program where we go after the events that strike the ceiling from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm Joe, I'm Mike Gohose. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. Marcus Zim is here. He's the Vice President of Product and Solutions at Splunk. Marcus, welcome to the Cube. I got to ask you, so last night we were closing the show and I said I got to see more from Splunk out of the ecosystems. I got to see a better focus on developers. That's what I want to see. Honestly, God, it was not a set up, I get up this morning and here's this news release, News Splunk app's website launches with more than 400 apps and add-ons, so I guess in my face. Yeah, boom, there it is, right? So, we read your mind. Well, it's fantastic that you guys are doing the things that I mean, an analyst like myself says, okay, what do I want to see more of and you guys are actually skating to the puck, you're ahead of the game and I think that's what people don't really appreciate and understand about the organization is how fast you're actually moving. So talk about the announcement a little bit. Absolutely. Well see, in the keynote, there's only so much you can talk about, right? And there's so many things that are new and great about Splunk and the ecosystem is just fundamental to Splunk. I mean, think about it, what's the iPhone without the I2 in store, right? I mean, it is content, it's fundamental. We're delivering solutions to different type of segments, right? And security is growing like really fast, IT and application management on a big, big trajectory and then all the business analytics. So we need content that turns this Splunk platform that we have, this horizontal platform into a specific solution for our customers and then we need the best marketplace, the best store for people so that they can find that, they can put this together into solutions and where they see premium high-quality content, content that doesn't come from Splunk but from this entire ecosystem, I mean, that's what it's all about. That is all about the apps, right, John? We've talked about this a lot. Yeah, I mean, Marcus, one of the things we talked on the intro just this morning when we kicked it off was the use cases are so diverse with Splunk. Yeah. One of the dangers companies can get into is kind of groping and jumping on a use case where you guys have a more of an enablement strategy and that's proven by the ecosystem partners that are here at the event because you guys have a lot of leverage with your platform. You don't really know the use case and benefit until your customers put it to use whether it's, you know, so there's a variety of use cases. How does that change the strategy for the product? Does it? And what does that do for the ecosystem in terms of an enablement? What are you looking to share there? All right, okay. Well, it's a big topic. First of all, I want you to understand that, you know, we talk about ecosystem, but ecosystem is just this variety of different players, right? I mean, ecosystem frankly starts at developers within our customers. Take any large customers, there's people there that actually, you know, takes Splunk and turn it into what they want it to be, right? They embed it into other tools that they have, they might integrate it with other things. This isn't even a partner yet. This is still within the customer. Then there is people who really build content and who actually want to make money of that content. And actually with the new apps.splunk.com, then our new marketplace, we've actually put in better mechanism for people to monetize content. We believe that's actually really, really important in the next growth phase of the ecosystem. Then there is, don't forget, system integrators. System integrators who then take a lot of this content and actually put it together into solutions for our customers. We have initiatives for every single one of those target groups. Talk about the system integrators for a minute, because one of the things about indirect sales is the ability to enable people to make more services revenue. Yes. It's kind of not talked about because it's kind of not that sexy, but services revenue is the lifeblood of the channel. And what are you seeing for use cases that you guys are enabling in that integration model? What use cases? What are integrators doing with Splunk that's driving value for them? Okay. Very good. It really does fall into these three segments that I mentioned before. I mean, there is people who do a living of really helping big companies run their data centers, their IT infrastructure, and then these services, these business services that they provide. So yeah, Splunk fits into that. There is Gardner has coined the term IT operations analytics. It's a new space and system integrators are helping customers build solutions in that space. It's a security. The large system integrators understand how important security is today for their customers. And security actually borders also into fraud, fraud detection, which is a huge topic, which a incredible business value, and you need a system integrator to help you there. And then last but not least, people have business processes, and what maybe people don't fully realize yet is like if Splunk is able to kind of make an application run well, a monitor and manage it, then we can also actually manage a chain of these applications that make a business process really well. And I mean, business processes is what system integrators are all about. So we fit right into kind of how they make business. One of your features of your announcement was the new version of the REST API. And Dave and I always talk about this. The cloud has really enabled this API economy. So what have you guys seen in the evolution of the API? And you have the new cloud version out of product. What is the role of the API with Splunk? And how do you see that evolving? Well APIs are just fundamental for what's interoperability, right? So we are the platform for machine data. We're the data fabric in our customers' enterprises. So if you are a platform, you know, one of the things, you've got to be open. You have to interoperate. If you're not, you're not a platform. I mean, it's the two things. You've got to have content that people build on top of it. If you don't, then you're not a platform. And you've got to be interoperable. So the API is the key element to being interoperable. And we do that in many different ways. I mean, we have ways to bring Splunk content into, like, portal environments, like SharePoint, for example. And we talked about some of this in the keynote. We have ways with, think of the ODBC driver as a type of an API and people be able to consume data from Splunk in another tool. And then also, obviously, just to tie Splunk into a business application or business process. And that's where it gets really, really interesting. So this is an interesting topic, right? Because you guys are first to market. You make the market, basically. And then, you know, we have this conversation all the time in theCUBE, a company like you. I mean, we've talked to folks like Cloudera about this. The open-source community then comes in and says, oh, wow, OK, we can do some similar things. So you've got to embrace that, obviously. Talk about Splunk's relationship with the open-source community, your utilization of open-source software. How, you know, I always ask people on a scale of 1 to 10 how open-source friendly are you. You know, some companies are a chew and they're learning. Some companies, you know, they're all in, like, Hortonworks. Where do you guys stand? Well, we use an incredible amount of open-source in our products. They're very savvy users, adopters. I mean, we have people in our engineering staff who have been contributed to the Linux kernel. So, I mean, there is personal connections there. There is expertise in how to work with that. And then- There's respect for that community, obviously. No, absolutely, absolutely. And then, well, let's talk about Hunk, for example, because that kind of is a play together with the open-source of the future, which is the Hadoop open-source community. And we believe there's a give and take, right? We are, we're actually working with the ecosystem partners in the Hadoop environment. We're, I mean, as I told before, we respect and we bring open-source into our product. But then we also feel with Hunk, we actually really added to the open-source community. We brought some value to Hadoop that actually just, you know, will take that ecosystem to the next level. So, let's talk about some of these applications that you guys developed. You got a new website that you're launching. It's the Splunk apps website. There's 400 apps that you're launching. These obviously weren't all developed yesterday. These are apps that have developed over time that you're now consolidating onto the website, right? So it's 400 now and just last year alone and the last 12 months, 100 new were added. Now, some of the ones you're calling out, the Splunk app for VMware, the REST API modular input. You've got stuff in here from Pentaho, Datasift, social data streams and modular input. You know, talk about some of the ones that you're highlighting in this press release and what about them excite you? Excellent. Well, let's talk about classes of application. How's that? So there are ecosystem application. You mentioned Pentaho, pre-learned as mentioned in the press release and really these are applications that Splunk did not create that the ecosystem created and we're very fortunate to have this kind of vibrant ecosystem and have someone like pre-learned, you know, enhance Splunk in terms of predictive capabilities. That's huge. That's big, that actually kind of accelerates innovation. Pentaho is very similar. I mean, have like a BI player partner up with us and interconnect the two of our application platforms. Okay, so this is the ecosystem. Then we do add kind of weekly, monthly, new, what we call inputs. So if you think about Splunk, it's all about building analytics from machine data. Machine data comes from all kind of different devices and you know, there's an app for all of these different devices. If that app exists, things just get faster and time to value. I mean, you might have noticed that in the keynote. Instant value is just something we're absolutely fanatic about. This is what Splunk is all about. We want to be that different enterprise software where everything's fast, like instant gratification. So a lot of these apps like the SNMP or JMS, JMAX, they're basically there for people to just more rapidly build solutions. And then last but not least, the category VMware app. So VMware app, I'll put in the category of premium applications. VMware is actually an application we charge for. There's an extra price tag for it. We have another application enterprise security that is actually ranked by Gardner as a leader in the SIM Magic Quadrant. And it's a big deal for us. So these are not just tiny little applications. These are really fundamental big building blocks. And so with these applications, we want to be thought leaders. We want to- And you can charge for them, right? I mean- We can charge them and people- VMware customers are used to paying. Here you go, but this app is something where we collect more data than VMware does for their own monitoring tools. Yeah, and they'll talk about their monitoring tool, but you guys are like, say, adding value beyond that. Exactly, so it's like these hard ways to get the machine data, that's number one. And then also if you look at the visualizations, if you might have seen in the keynote, there's really beautiful interactive, like not just visualizations, but task flows. So these are apps that just are, think of them as a next generation of apps. Well, in VMware, sometimes very hard to decipher what's going on inside of VMware, because it's this abstracted layer and everything's just sort of blended together. So tools like this are critical. What's the business model for this market? So you didn't call it an app store. Yes. So you're not selling the app, it's not a transaction site, right? So how's it work? Your partners, they resell Splunk, or they get preferred access to Splunk, or they go to customers that have Splunk. How does that work? So a good question. And I think it shows really nicely these kind of growth stages of the ecosystem. So in stage one, what was important for us was really to get as much content into that marketplace as possible. So you do that by just having, you know, and have people consume it. So you want to make it a community-based approach, right? You want people to share their content, and you want to do it for free. So you get a critical mass there, yeah. You get the critical mass, and then you're actually getting to stage two, where now you want to pull in ecosystem partners that are really serious about building this content. And there, yeah, you want to have an ability for them to monetize their content. The new store that was announced today actually has a feature in there, we call it the directory listing, where we actually allow them, our ecosystem partners to link out to their sites with it, then they can transact. So we're not a e-commerce marketplace, but we give people now the ability to use that as a listing, just have a place where everyone comes to, and then transact at fee in their environment. You know, we're talking about VMware before, one of the models that I would ask you guys to take a look at, I don't know if you've looked at this or not, the metric that VMware used to use still does, I'm sure, but Todd Nielsen, when he was in the cubes, what was the statue on? For every dollar spent on a VMware license, it was like 10, 12, $15 were spent in the ecosystem. That's a sign of real success, reaching that critical mass, and then the second point, stage two, where you're pulling in partners that are serious that can monetize this, that gives you a lot of leverage. So that one-to-end metric is always a key indicator. I don't know how you actually track it precisely, but there's probably a way that you can reasonably estimate it. It's, this is key for us. So again, we're at this borderline between phase one and phase two. Awesome. So right now, I think, you know, our metric is to, it's in the dollars of the platform, in the years to come, it will absolutely be in what Todd tracks, you know, how much does the ecosystem get out of this? And we're actually setting very concrete signals. I think by us starting to charge for content, we're setting a signal that, yeah, you're an ecosystem partner, you can make money of that too, right? That's actually very important. We're now giving new abilities to actually, you know, logistically how to do that with this directory listing. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Mark, thanks for coming inside theCUBE. We got the hook on time, but I'll give you the final word. What should folks know about the ecosystem and the developer focus real quick? Share the focus of the soundbite and the developer. Oh, the focus, soundbite, just to wrap it up. Well, number one, this is a top priority. We totally understand that the ecosystem is just a phenomenal lever point, leverage point that we have. There are multiple initiatives as I laid out. The ecosystem is not just one party, it's many, many different parties. We have a long list of things that we do for every single one of them. And, you know, as I stated before, I think we're at the cusp of that getting really big. So I'm just super excited about the next couple of years ahead and what the ecosystem will do for Splunk. There it is, the developer focus, it got a real platform, enabling platform, very hot. We're at the Splunk Conference. This is theCUBE, we're right back with our next guest after this short break.