 The virtualization app plays as virtualization really has forced these conversations in the data center that weren't happening before, right? You had the server guys on one side, the storage guys on one side, applications guys on one side, and they didn't wanna talk to each other or do anything. But now with virtualization, they're forced to not only talk to each other, like I need a virtual machine and I don't know where it's running and can you please tell me what's going on. But they're also forced to talk to their neighbors, the people who are sharing those resources with them. And this is the reason why there is so much demand for an app for virtualization is because the data that will help you get visibility into what's happening with my virtual machine, who's taking all the resources on the server is really hard to get at and Splunk can get at that data and visualize it in a way that's not been possible before. So Matt, tell us a little bit about your role at Discovery and what you're doing and then maybe kind of let's explore the challenges that we were facing around what Lena's been talking about around big data in your infrastructure. So I'm in the Global Operations Center at Discovery. So my primary role is operations and what we're using Splunk for is primarily operations but also we're using it for a lot of compliance data. And we've been doing that for some time and we found Splunk very effective in that role. So we've heard some stories about how Splunk customers kind of started off downloading the free application kind of expanding from there. How did you kind of come to work with Splunk? I mean, was there a key challenge you had to overcome and you just weren't able to do so with your current technology or what's really brought you to Splunk? Well, you know, the neat thing about Splunk is it's really a game changer in technology. I mean, prior to that, the only thing that really was around was GRIP. And you know, there are some other smaller solutions but Splunk, the engine itself is really where the power comes in and the ability just to feed it that text data and get at it any way that you want to is what really makes it powerful. And then, you know, since they've expanded it and started building these apps on top of it, that just makes it even more so useful for us. Very cool. Good, that's good. What kind of compliance data, again, is from the layman sitting outside, I'm thinking Shark Week, I'm thinking Dirty Jobs, I'm thinking all kinds of fun stuff. What kind of compliance stuff do you have to be concerned about and why do you need something to really keep on top of that? Right, so, you know, we adhere to ITIL standards and we've got a lot of SOX compliance data, a lot of it's security data and things like that where we've got to make sure, you know, people aren't accessing machines that shouldn't be, people have certain roles there and, you know, they can't get into certain systems and that all just needs to be tracked and accounted for and Splunk makes it really easy to grab that data in there from all of our disparate systems around, generate custom reports and push it up to the top where everybody's looking for. And was there any, is it just a better tool to do something you haven't been able to do before or have you had any kind of aha moments where, you know, you've really seen something that you weren't expecting or to get down another path or, you know, kind of demonstrated the other value in that data that maybe nobody knew was there before? Well, you know, it is another app but it's the best app for what its purpose is in addition to that. I mean, we have definitely had a lot of aha moments in terms of what I'm doing with it and in terms of operations. I do a lot of automation and Splunk is perfect for that because I can not only pull the data in, I can report on it, it's got all the amazing dashboards but in addition to that, I can complete the workflow and I can have it automatically create tickets in our ticketing system and really bring our entire IT group together in terms of being able to facilitate the beginning to end process with Splunk. Can you contrast that to what you were doing previously? I mean, was that a very manual process? Or were you just not able to do a lot of it at all? Yeah, a lot of custom programming. I mean, certainly a lot of it I wasn't able to do and, you know, we were struggling to do with various systems and doing things manually and stuff like that. So, you know, that's why I say Splunk was certainly a game changer and the fact that we're able to go in there and just, you know, do it completely differently now in a better way. Cool. So, you know, we're here at the show and there's one of the themes really is around the community here and kind of customers learning from customers. So just would love to get your impressions of the community that's being built up around Splunk. I mean, in the big data world overall, we're seeing community play a very important role whether it's the Hadoop community or other big data technologies but certainly here at Splunk, they're very focused on kind of building up a community and helping, allowing customers to help each other. So what are your thoughts on that and what is your take? You mentioned kind of the vibe here but as you've come to interact with some of your fellow Splunk users, what kind of information have you learned and what role does the community play and how are you going to be using Splunk? Well, you know, they have a Splunk community on their website, obviously. And I've just noticed in general, I mean, the people here, they're really helpful. Everybody is here to basically share their experiences with Splunk and give people other ideas of what they're doing and how they're doing things a little bit differently. And the neat thing about Splunk being as generalized as it is, is that everybody kind of can do things in a different way with it. And so coming together like this allows us to share that. And I've noticed that, you know, there's a lot of really neat things that people are doing and there's a lot of things that we can learn from sharing with other people here. And to follow up with you, Lina, on that same topic, because, you know, your solution's a marketing person. You've got road maps. You've got new features and functionality that you want to roll out. But at the same time, you've got this active community that's building apps and you want to encourage that. You know, how are you managing and how much is that community of kind of app development part of your process and part of your roadmap? So they're a very active part of our process and roadmap. In fact, later on today, we have sessions on, you know, tell us what you want to build and tell us what you want us to build. That's sort of dialogue with our customers. But even in the absence of that, if you just walk around the show floor over here, you'll see a number of partners who've already sort of taken matters into their own hands and say and have identified market needs. People need XYZ with Splunk. And they've gone ahead and developed those apps already and they're showcasing some of the apps here. It's been a fantastic eye-opener for us to see how much, how active our community has been, not just in terms of customers, but in terms of partners building their businesses on Splunk. And then does that kind of push your needle when you're prioritizing more towards kind of platform-y type of stuff for enablement versus more kind of solution feature functionality? Absolutely, absolutely. It does, it sort of helps us, you know, focus on the things that are really hairy and we can't expect partners to deliver and focus on making enabling technologies available for partners to take advantage of best practices, the right kind of APIs and SDKs, the right kind of hooks basically into Splunk. And a lot of these have been delivered already so and that's why you're seeing so many new solutions here at the Solutions Exchange. It's really been a consistent theme as we've had these interviews with people from Splunk that everybody likes going after these big hairy problems. So I think we may have your new title now. It may be the Queen of the Big Hairy Problem. Maybe not, I don't know, that might not work. I don't want to make that one. We wait every day, but it is great that you guys continue to focus on these really big challenges and the enthusiasm around attacking big challenges seems to keep everybody pretty excited and then we've got folks that are using it and doing stuff they couldn't do before and or extending the application for these very special purposes. Yeah, could we dig in a little bit more on the Splunk storm? So you've now deployed, make it available in the cloud basically, as I understand it, for developers who are building applications from scratch either on Amazon and Google's Compute Engine or other cloud environments. What kind of led you to that conclusion that you needed to really get out into that cloud environment? So what we identified pretty early on at least a year or more ago was that there is this big transformational shift going on in the industry with people moving to the cloud. And other than the hype associated with cloud, there are actually people who are using tremendous amounts of cloud services. They're just not in the formal, like purchasing processes that exist in most big organizations. These are typically development or engineering organizations that are part of bigger organizations or even much smaller organizations who are just looking at the cloud as a great way to go off and bring the applications to market, right? It's, they don't have to wait for infrastructure anymore. They don't have to wait for some guy and purchasing to approve their PO anymore. They can just go off, get the service, use as much as they want, pay for only what they've used and sort of deliver applications in a very agile fashion. And for these kind of people, to ask them to download a piece of software and install it and manage it and maintain it is a hard thing. They typically don't even have data centers. They run almost exclusively in the cloud. And so we wanted two things. One is we wanted to make the whole thing easy for them. We wanted to make it available as a service, meaning someone can just go log in, send their data, start using it without having to download, install, maintain software, scale it really easily. So when they want to index additional amounts of data, just move a slider and you get more capacity provision to you. And the third thing is that we wanted to make it, you know, fit in with their model of purchasing. So it is, Splunkstorm has a different pricing model. It is paid monthly. You subscribe to a plan and you pay on a monthly basis and that fits in really nicely with this notion of disposable infrastructure that a lot of our Splunkstorm customers have. And do you anticipate Splunkstorm customers at some point, you know, maybe as they start their projects in the cloud but bring those back in the house at some point and how will Splunk help support them in that transition? We absolutely anticipate that a lot of these smaller companies will grow to be bigger companies. A lot of the smaller projects will grow to be bigger projects because if anything, the cloud is meant for scale and people are going to do this, you know, large scale stuff in the cloud. We're also noticing that once you get to a particular scale in the cloud, then it becomes more cost effective for people to just bring it in house. And the idea behind Splunkstorm is if you're in the cloud, you can get the facility of Splunk, the flexibility, the fabulous search language available to you in the cloud. If you want to bring it in house, Splunk Enterprise is there to support you as well. Yeah. What's your deployment, Matt? We've got our own physical deployment. Physical deployment. Yeah. We've got a lot of systems around the globe and pretty much every region. And so we just found that that works out best for us to have the servers at our facilities. So looking ahead, you know, obviously Splunk is growing, they're working on new apps all the time. What is kind of on your roadmap and maybe all companies have to grow and keep expanding. What would you like to see Splunk maybe expand into different areas or their particular use cases you're interested in? What's kind of on your roadmap, your challenges that you're hoping to tackle with Splunk's help? Well, you know, I'm going to continue to use Splunk in operations, you know, predominantly. And so that's where I'm hoping that they have the majority of the growth. Apps like the VMware app are extremely helpful for us and allowing us to get to that data that we really have a hard time getting to. And so the more that Splunk rules out apps like that, the more useful Splunk will be to us. But you know, we're also developing a lot of custom apps and things like that as well because we've got our own applications that we need to facilitate. So, you know, we're going to continue to go down the operations road and see, you know, how far we can get as far as like getting all the data in there and being able to automate as much as possible. Okay, great. All right guys, well I think we're just about out of time. Thank you so much for joining us in theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Love getting the insights of a practitioner and Lina as well, release some really interesting insights about the product direction at Splunk. So thank you so much. Absolutely, and so you're watching theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE's premier TV broadcast. We go to events like .com 2012 here in Las Vegas and bring you the top tech trends and execs and customers to share their knowledge with you. So we will be right back with some more guests. We've got a full day of coverage ahead, so please stay with us.