 Welcome everybody. I'm Jeff Kelly from Wikibon and we are here live from Las Vegas, the Cosmopolitan Hotel at .conf 2012, Splunk's annual user conference. Splunk, of course, a big data company focusing on machine-generated data. The Cube is, of course, our flagship video production here at SiliconANGLE, covering all the top tech events, tech shows, and all the top enterprise tech trends. As I mentioned, I'm Jeff Kelly. I'm a big data analyst with wikibon.org and I'm one of your co-hosts today. I'm joined by my other co-host, Jeff Rick. Thank you, Jeff. We're excited to be here. This is my first time with the Cube, so it's a terrific opportunity. The theme here at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas is the data journey. So we're hoping to go on that journey today with a lot of speakers. We've got a great lineup set up for you. We hope you'll join us all day. We're going to be here all day and all day tomorrow. And at the same time, we invite you to participate in the conversation. It is a journey. The hashtag for the event is hashtag data journey. And, of course, you can always use hashtag the Cube. So we're really excited, Jeff. And I can't wait. They just wrapped up the keynote. People are streaming out. And we will get ready with our first guest in probably just a few minutes. Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be a really good show. We've got, among others, CEO Godry Sullivan will be on with us, CMO. Steve Sommer will join us as well. But I think it's important at the outset to kind of talk a little bit about why we're here and why this is so important. So if you're interested in big data and you haven't heard of Splunk, you really need to. Splunk is a company that is getting a lot of attention today on Wall Street and for good reason. Big data is kind of a turning point, I think, in kind of the IT industry, where in the past, we've collected lots of data from your internal IT infrastructure and other devices. But a lot of times, that data just sat there. In some cases, it was even a liability because you have to secure it. There were compliance issues and things like that. What Splunk does is kind of turn that paradigm upside down and turns all that machine-generated data into an actual source of value. It's all about ingesting massive amounts of machine-generated data, turning it into insights, and then turning those insights into actions. Actually, finding ways to improve efficiency, be it operational or otherwise, finding new lines of business even. And of course, Splunk is always talking about their customers kind of coming up with new use cases for their applications, which is really what Big Data is all about, kind of answering questions you didn't even know to ask in the first place. Right. No, it's pretty exciting. What I'm most excited to see is how this big data thing with the technology like Splunk is now moving out of the data center. It's moving beyond just keeping track of my machines or machines going down or their issues I have to pay attention and really starting to drive that data and then that insight to business users and people actually making business decisions and making better business decisions. I think that's pretty fascinating. The other thing is that this machine data concept, which again, I think was more of a data center thing before, but now, you know, we're all walking around with these things and the growth of mobile and the fact that we're now all generating a ton of machine data. To me, that's the most exciting and I'm really thrilled to learn about some of the new customer examples. The other just fascinating paradigm that we continue to see now is where companies build whole communities around their applications. It's no longer in a silo and they've got a fantastic vendor form here in app development. Supporting app development is one of the four key tenets, which I'm sure Gottfried will go over when we get him here. But the fact that it's no longer just about your application and how your application can deliver to the customer are really a platform play. And the fact that now they can actually, as you said, take this data that always existed, go from the log files now into the application data and some other sources of data and then pull it all together, correlate it. Where is the real meaning coming from the disparate, potentially, kind of non sequitur data that now you can bring together and start to see some insight. So I think we're going to have some exciting conversations here. I'm really excited to learn about some of the customer examples and move beyond the from the keynote speaker to, you know, the people making better decisions to get into what exactly are the better decisions they're making? How do you get a big data output that's that's manageable and easy to take action on in something like an iPad or an Android device? So it should be, it should be a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to it. Like I said, this is the cube. We're here at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. It's Splunk Conf 2012. We'll be here all day. We'll be here tomorrow. And we've got a terrific lineup set up for you. We invite you to join us on siliconangle.tv for live streaming. Obviously, you're probably already there. And again, join the conversation. The hashtag is Data Journey for the show and the cube. Excellent. So yeah, so I mentioned earlier at the top of the show that, you know, Splunk is enjoying some major success right now. So really, Splunk is the only what I would call a big data pure play that's gone public so far. You know, we've done a pretty ground baking report over at Wikibon where we size the big data market. We put it just at about 5 billion at the end of as of the end of 2011. We project that growing to around $50 billion by 2017. Frankly, I think that's probably a little bit low, but that's our projections at this point. And we also kind of size the market by vendor and of all those vendors, really, the only big data pure play that's gone public that is really, you know, breaking out from a more of a mainstream appeal is Splunk. So yeah, just just kind of go over some numbers. I mean, they they went public in April, raised $230 million. Very successful IPO as opposed to some of the other maybe consumer type big data IPOs such as Facebook, most notoriously. So some of their numbers are just remarkable from the quarter that just ended revenue up 71 percent year over year hit $45 million, license revenue up 61% again year over year. And this is really astounding couple couple data points here. 19 straight quarters that Splunk has had double digit revenue growth. So I think that takes us back to 2007. My math is right. And this is another interesting point. 98 orders of $100,000 or more in the quarter that just ended, which they also added 400 new customers think about a total of 4400. So clearly, they're kind of firing on all cylinder right now. Yeah, they absolutely are. And I think one of the messages in the analyst call was how they have kind of a land and expand strategy with their customer base. And really, I think, you know, what, what, we'll explore this with them or what is the killer app that gets people in the door? Is it, you know, still kind of the data center stuff? And where do customers go next? What takes them as they as they see now the potential of being able to extract the value of all this data? Where do they go next? And how do they leap frog from one application to another within the same enterprise? Yeah, that's, that's really, really interesting point to make. Because, you know, when we talk about big data analytics, really, you're not doing big data analytics, unless you're really matching up multiple data sources that you mentioned earlier might not really think you're there any real correlations. But when you start to match them up and do the analytics, you can find some really interesting insights, which again, can kind of drive your business. So Splunk, as you said, you know, they're going into these environments, customer environments, typically, to kind of as an IT troubleshooting type tool, right? Customers want to understand how their IT infrastructure is performing. They want to find bottlenecks, they want to find performance issues and fix those quicker than they could in the past. And Splunk helps them do that. But they're also expanding, finding new use cases. There was a really interesting use case they mentioned in the keynote today that CEO, Godfrey Sullivan mentioned about a Japanese company that wants to take all the data they're collecting from the elevators in their building to understand this is a residential or commercial, I should say, real estate firm. They want to understand how that relates to occupancy rates and potential renewing leases, things like that. So, you know, ideas that Splunk never had, but their customers are coming up with these really interesting ideas and things they can do with the software. So it's really very interesting. On the news front, we should probably point out there's a couple of news announcements recently from Splunk. Recently released Splunk Storm, which is Splunk's move into the cloud. This is a cloud-based version of Splunk, really into developers. So that's really interesting, kind of focused more on the developer community here. So as I mentioned, they're expanding beyond the IT infrastructure, where they kind of really often start out and moving into new types of use cases, specifically around building web applications, helping developers kind of maintain the performance levels you need, especially with a new application you're trying to get off the ground. So some very interesting stuff. Yeah, they've got some fun things going on here, too, which maybe you didn't think about before in the big data space, but they've got a game room going on, where I don't remember which games, we'll have to find out which games they're playing. But as people are playing the game, they've got a live feed into Splunk, with all the data that's coming out of that game as these people are playing it, and to see how the systems can very quickly take that data, analyze that data and give feedback as to what's going on and how to improve the process. So I think we're going to have a great show. Again, it's SplunkConf 2012, here at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. We're at the Cube. We're going to give you the wall-to-wall coverage that you want. For those of you that couldn't make it, we're here to help you out. We'll get you the information. We'll get you the right people. We'll ask the right questions. And again, we invite you to participate on this journey, the data journey, the Splunk data journey. Right. It feels kind of like Christopher Columbus. So hashtag data journey, hashtag data journey, or hashtag the Cube as always. So I think we how much longer do we have to do our first guest, Jeff? Well, we've got a few minutes. We're going to have on Chief Marketing Officer, Steve Summers, going to join us first, followed by CEO himself, Godfrey Sullivan. So stay tuned with us. We'll be right back after a short break.