 at Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walls. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Orlando, Florida for Splunk.com 2016. This is Splunk's seventh annual user conference. It's bigger every year. This is theCUBE, we get bigger every year. We're bringing the high-energy, caffeinated approach. I'm John Furrier with John Walls. We are going to go fast, speed of service, the Dunkin' Donuts, John Walls. Yes, I did the ice cream on the cake with the ice cream on the donut in this case. We have Matt Kraft with us, the Director of Software Development at Dunkin' Donuts. Matt, thanks for joining us here. Thanks, it's wonderful to be here at the conference today. So why are you here? Yeah, what about Dunkin' Donuts and Splunk? What are the two of you, what are you working on? Okay, so the thing that really keeps me motivated, keeps me excited is dealing with consumer-facing applications, and Dunkin' just got to launch a really exciting new mobile application that allows our customers to order online, and that really helps with the speed of service message that we try to have for our customers. That mobile ordering is something that we had to have a high degree of reliability on. We need to know what our customers are doing and know how to make it work really well for them, and Splunk is a key enabler in making sure that we can do that. You're speaking Thursday, right, here? Yes. What's your talk going to be on? So I'm speaking, co-presenting with Brian Nash, and we're going to be talking about the business analytic side of Splunk and how you can use Splunk to look at data to understand more about how your business operates, in this case specifically of what our consumer interaction is. As a setup for the mobile culture, which is going to be fascinating, you guys just launched in July, Dunkin' Donuts, I'm a huge fan, just disclosure on that area, originally in Boston area, love it, a lot of memories, good end-band. So... Dad! Well, hungover, he's... Well, yeah, that's it. Yeah, but we got to... I mean, you're like going for that... At least you have a solution. It wasn't college, we're trying to... They didn't have Facebook and YouTube back then, so there's no evidence of my college experience. But before we get there, you're not just like woke up one day and did mobile. You guys have a big Splunk operation with Dunkin' Donuts. Talk about how you got to the mobile, what's the current environment like? So our journey was actually somewhat typical but accelerated of what a lot of Splunk customers do. We were trying to understand how we could make sure our environment was more stable and more reliable, deal with outages, deal with those types of problems. So we brought Splunk in because myself and a few others had previous experience with the product. And we quickly pointed that at our mobile digital environment and said, where can we go find the problems that are causing our customers grief? And that was our initial look into it. We were able to make headway very quickly with that installation where we were indexing our typical application server logs. What ended up happening then was once we got past that, we started saying, wow, look at all this other data that's here that we can do something with, that we can try to understand that customer behavior at a more deeper level, something beyond just the core, are we up and how well are we performing, Stan? So you were Splunking your data in the company and now the mobile app comes and I say, hey, why not just plug this in here? Yeah, so with the mobile application, we're driving more and more of those transactions through our services back in. And what we found is that in that back in, there's a lot of data that helps us understand our customer behavior. How often they're using the app, what ways they're using the app, what are pain points for them? Talk about the mobile app real quick. I'm just going to download it real quick while you're talking about it. Why is the mobile app, what's the main purpose of the mobile app? Yeah, the mobile app, which we just launched in July, it's very exciting. The traditional purpose for it was for loyalty and for payment. So that you could allow our customers to pay with a gift card or to accumulate points when they're part of our loyalty program. It's very, very popular. And like you said, in Boston, in the Northeast, it's almost a lifestyle product for people. Then ordering is what came out in July. That's when we released the brand new mobile app and we enabled that to do ordering of coffee and donuts for people who are really trying to have that very fast to be in service. So let me get this right. I go to my app and say, I need a cup of coffee. And what happens? It goes to the local, my local Dug and Donuts. Do I set like my pharmacy if I got to pick up my prescriptions? Like, do I mark a place? Like, is it like Uber? Do I, can I pick any place? You can pick any Dunkin' Donuts you want. And when you get to the Dunkin', you can have to tell it, I'm going to come walk in the store and pick up the order or I'm going to come through the drive-through. And at that point, the staff in stores already made your order. So if you've ever been to a busy Dunkin' Donuts in New York or in Boston, you can sometimes see that the line can be out the door. Well, this is an opportunity for people who want to go. The fast track. Yeah, right in, get the fast track, get their coffee and be on their way. It really is all about speed. Have you guys changed the store configurations to handle this or is it just, it's the counter? Well, in store, so in store, every store has a unique kind of footprint and platform depending on where they're at. But in every store, it's called on-the-go ordering. And there is an on-the-go pickup lane where customers can go straight to that at the end of the line and get their donuts or their coffee already made for them. Is there an authentication to have to show my app or they just say, hey, I'll take Joe's coffee? Well, because of that. Yeah, there is a receipt that prints out with your order that they can use to match that up with the name of the customer versus the person coming up to pick up the order. Oh, I just show my mobile app, so I show that and say, that's me. So were you, you said there was a lot of data that you didn't use before? You just had a discarding, right? Or didn't really realize the value? Right, initially, much like a lot of people, we were just looking for things like Java errors. What kind of things are going wrong in the application server? And that was where we were really focused and then we wanted to clean those up and make those go away. Make sure our platform was configured correctly. And while that stuff is critically important in providing stable environment, right alongside with that data, we had information about what customers are doing with the application and how often they're using certain features. Such as, yeah, right? That data, you didn't put it in the product. Yeah, we weren't really looking at that before. We were more concerned about the actual operational data. And for that matter, the other problem with that consumer data is there's so much of it, we couldn't get to it very easily prior to bringing Splunk in. It was data that was there, but very hard to search. You almost had, we had to do pinpoint searches to go look for us. Was that an app limitation? Or what was the limitation for the not getting the data out? It was volume. So there was so much data out there. You had to go after very specific customers. I had to go after your data to go find what went wrong with your transaction. You had to go dumpster diving, basically, for data. That takes a lot of time. Yeah, I like to tell the story where the engineers on my team used to be frequently get requests from the customer care to go looking for that data to try and solve problems. And we've driven that down from where, we've moved that work off of my team and onto other teams who can self-service with Splunk. So they can go look for that data on their own. And that way, my engineers have to deal with far fewer requests than before. So a huge efficiency on both sides, right? They request tying up a critical resource. Right. Huge. And then proactively, we look at that data and we're able to even get in front of when we have problems to be predictive about what do we need to be doing with this system or how is the upcoming event going to impact us? All right, gotta ask, what's the biggest, coolest thing you've seen with the app that surprised you? Or didn't surprise you? What's, what share story? So there's a number of things, but it never, it never surprises me about how dedicated our customers are and how frequently they come back to using our application. We can, within the app, we're able to see very predictable patterns of consumer behavior during our peak morning rush. And you understand exactly when a, when rain is affecting, you know, your business or when a sporting event collides with something that you expect. So expectation maximization works in your favor. Oh, it does, yeah. I mean, this is an ideal machine learning opportunity for you. It is. Because you have a loyal base that has a similar pattern. Machine learning. Yeah, and that's an area that we're growing in. So, you know, we have, we're on our own journey there. We've got, I would say we've gotten good with using the tools. We have a lot of ground to cover yet, but there's, you know, there's no reason. We're just getting off the block of the mobile app. So you just got started. Right. Okay, so what's the biggest challenge that you had? I won't say stumbling block, speed bump. We call it a speed bump. Because this comes up a lot in mobile because in mobile first, cloud first, people say mobile first. It's really hard to be agile in mobile because the users download the app, they're going to have a first time experience. Web app, you can update all the time, push code literally every day. A little bit different in mobile, getting better. What have you learned? What was the speed bumps that you got through? So some of the speed bumps have been, we have a lot of what you would call moving targets for source data. So we partner with a lot of other teams, vendors, software development organizations to help us deliver on the products that we're trying to put it in the marketplace. And so sometimes the data that we need is not in a place where we need it to be. So we're getting more efficient, more effective in figuring out what we need to include in our solutions with Splunk and how we can get to that data. I think Splunk is a great neighbor or tool for that, but it does require us to have some thought process around how we're going to solve those problems. The good thing is now we start thinking about that in advance of making architectural solutions instead of as a by-product or an after effect. And what user pattern have you seen the most in the Dunkin' Donuts realm? Because I know how loyal the audience is for your brand. So, and you've got new stuff always coming out. So I'm sure there's a lot of A-B testing going on. What's motivating the user base these days? Well, what motivates the user base in terms of the mobile application is the really key to kind of partner tie in marketing promotions. So marketing will tie in with activities around sports teams and activities around things that are of interest to those users. And when they start giving users opportunities to make promotions of interest to them and it's very targeted to their interests, that drives very quick response. So cross-promotional opportunities. Yeah, cross-promotional is very good. People see the backdrop of the Patriots build Bellachic's press conferences. I watch them all if I can on the FL app, but this is Dunkin' Donuts, right in the back. It's a fun game to watch and see where you can spot the coffee cup. The fans see the brand, the fans see the brand. So they got to be Patriots fans, you know exactly. In a lot of major sports market, there are programs called Day When You Win. And those, when various sports teams that we partner with have a winning game, there is discounted and promotional opportunities that are to go specific to those users. And that's something that we definitely feel the impact of and see in our Splunk search results when people are bringing that activity back into us. And Patriots are three, you know, one more game without Tom Brady, and apparently- Oh, stop it. Apparently- Now you've got Garoppolo. Edelman will be a quarterback. I mean, it's a great reel on Kent State, on YouTube with him. Are you using this for internal operations too, as a personnel, staff, inventory, all that stuff so you can see trends that, or maybe ways that you need to respond better? That's a growth area. So I'm personally very focused on the marketing side of IT, but I don't really see that that would be something that wouldn't benefit. Any time where you have a lot of data that you need to aggregate it, do that correlation, I think the opportunity is there. That's just not something that I've taken the app, taken the system into in that direction yet. What about advertising? What's your thoughts on, this is kind of like they're going off the reservation in a second. I know they'd comment about doing the donuts, but in general there's a lot, we don't have any ads on our site. Why are we an entire media company with no advertising? But it's mobile advertising, you get a limited real estate, and users these days don't like the old web ads. It's like, there's a different user expectation going on. What's your thoughts on digital marketing, and how to use that space, and advertising in general? So I'll give you my personal opinion on this, because I've worked in the IT side, not the marketing side, but I do think that the targeted promotions are much more effective than blanket advertising, or it's really a combination of having that kind of course level, we talk about the things that are on television, that then bring people into a much more interpersonal experience. So I feel like as a customer of mine myself, I like it when my applications, whether it's Duncan or some other application that I'm using, tries to prevent me with an experience that's really relevant to my needs. And that's where we're driving to get better with our application so that we're being more personalized with how we connect with those customers. So I think there's an expectation going on among consumers that we're actually accommodating what they're interested in, that not something that they would never purchase, never be interested in having shown. Targeting is key, because you have the data, right? I mean, it's funny, we always talk about these big data shows, the story of Splunk is in the big data business. They took exhaust and turned it into gold, the data exhaust turned it into data gold. But I mean, if you think about it from an IT perspective, or even a business, we're living in the first time in the history of business in the world, you can actually measure everything. So it brings this Splunk environment, Splunking things to a home of the level and advertising is a one of them. The old expression is, you know, 50% of my advertising is waste, I just don't know which half. That was the old expression. Now, you can actually say, I know it works. So when you have a mobile app, Splunk Data, you can say, hey, this targeted promotion worked in Dorchester, Massachusetts, this one worked better in Canton, your hometown, or Hallmass, where my summer houses are. I mean, so, you know what I'm saying, you can really start getting into... Yeah, the geographic distribution becomes very interesting. And then I know that our marketing team does a lot of new and very interesting advertising on social media, engaging with venues and channels that may not actually relate to me personally, but when they go and do these types of advertising, we see significant interest coming from our users. So it's not just a flat advertising landscape anymore. There's any number of things that can impact how our, you know, what drives people into our systems. Here's a question for you, since you're right with the personal opinion questions. If you're a friend, we're buddies, we're in a cookout, and I'm not an IT guy, and I work in maybe financial services, not even retail banking or whatever, and I say, hey Matt, what's going on in this whole IT world? I saw this, you know, all this stuff going on, Oracle's doing the cloud now, Dell, Baud EMC, Amazon's, I never heard of them, and they're the big player, Apple's kicking ass, cars are throwing off data, virtual reality, what the hell's going on in your business? How do you answer that question? Like in the Dunkin' business? No, just in general, IT, as you, because you know, you're in the trenches. Yeah, so yeah. You're going to deal with the suppliers. Yeah, what I would tell you is that it's reinventing itself again. So the whole notion that, you know, we've kind of come through the IT bubble and everything got big and it got interesting and now we're in a steady state is definitely not the case. The technologies that we're using to deliver on consumer-scale applications are completely different than what we were dealing with five, seven years ago. And cloud is a tremendous player, and it comes easy to kind of pick on cloud and act like it's some sort of has-been thing, but it's not has-been, it's an ongoing constant evolution. Innovation. And new stuff's commending machine learning, kid. Yeah, and what we can deliver on in the cloud, you know, with cloud technology, using the scalability and the adaptability of some of those tools, platform as a service, and really some of these more technically-oriented softwares of service applications that are targeted to what our business needs to deliver are affecting what we can, they're affecting what we can do. We can make our decisions based on letting someone who's an expert in another technology accelerate what we're doing at a much faster pace. It basically takes all the, I won't say grunt work out of IT, but it takes the up-levels of capability. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time you want to build an application. You can go back and choose the best-to-breed products and use those to put together. A composite application is really, really great. The composite application is huge, I agree with you. I think that's the game changer. And as you learn, you composite and grow with that. Yeah. You know, so you don't have to, again, tear it down, build it up, tear it down, build it up. And if people leave, what would the personnel think? It's not even, it gets better. If people leave, you don't get stuck with domain expertise. Yeah. If it works out the door, big game changer. So, not going too far out on a limb, leveraging what you know, you know, where do you think if there's an area of improvement or an area that you can address in general, what do you think that is in terms of the capabilities that you've developed and what you would like to address then from what you've learned so far? Yeah, so a lot of, I mean, just in terms of, in terms of what we've built so far, I think a lot of it was trying to overcome hurdles in the past. And so a lot of things that we, a lot of what we try to do is we talk about these kind of legacy technologies that have been put into place. We're trying to get current and stay current. But going forward, it's becoming proactive and thinking about what do we need to be ready to develop at the pace and the speed of delivery of what people need a year from now, two years from now. Because the pace of evolution is accelerating, not slowing, so two years from now we'll be trying to deliver more features, more frequently, more capability, and we need to be ready for that in advance, not just keeping current. That's what we're going to be doing differently. Super exciting. I think if you're in the IT business right now, it's no longer really called IT. It's essentially tech enablement because the front lines are getting so close to the tech guys now. I mean, you're talking about your mobile app. I mean, you're on the front lines now. You're not back office. Yes. And this is a totally different world. We're living in. And so to your point, marketing and operations are core, core customers for us. We work with them on a daily basis to try and figure out what they need to do to be successful in their roles. And it's not something where we treat either one of them as even a remote afterthought. They're the ones who are working with us on a day-to-day basis. You're literally tied together. Integrally tied together. And it really drives our direction. And it's a very strong partnership that we have with those groups to deliver on what the customers are looking for. Business value is not about total cost of ownership. It's about driving the business. I love it. Love this business. Love the cloud. Love data. Love donuts. Of course, we love Dunkin' Donuts and we caffeinated up here. I could use a cup of D&D right now. You can deliver it to me. Imagine those where we are for tomorrow. Get some perks. Download the Dunkin' Donuts app. If you hit the senior area, you got to get it. Be right back with more. You get the Q-Bap too. That's coming soon. We're here live in Orlando. I'm John Furrier, John Walsh. Be right back with more action after this short break.