 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, coverage.conf18, brought to you by Splunk. Welcome back to Conf 2018. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're going to start the day. We're going to talk to some customers. We love that. John Morris here is the MIS program director at UConn, the Huskies. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. And he's joined by Ryan O'Connor, who's the senior advisory engineer at Splunk. He's got the cool hat on. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Great to have you. Thank you. Thank you for having us. So kind of a cool setting this morning. This is Stu's first Conf. And I said, you know, when you see this, it's kind of crazy. We're all shaking our phones. We had the horse race this morning. We won. So that was kind of fun. Team Orange. Yeah, Team Orange. Team Orange as well. Which is great. You're on Team Orange? I'm on Team Orange, yeah. So we're in the media section. And the media guys are like sitting on their hands, but Stu and I were getting into it. So good job. I think it's good. Nice, MVPs. So John, let's start with you. So I always love to start with the customer perspective. Maybe describe your role and we'll get into it. Sure. So as you mentioned, I'm the director of our undergrad program, MIS, Management Information Systems, Business Technology. We're in the School of Business under the Operations and Information Management Department. The acronym, OPIM. Okay, cool. And then Sir Ryan, tell us about your role, explain the hat. Absolutely, yeah. I'm an honorary member of the Splunk Trust now. I recently joined Splunk about a month ago, back in August. And yeah, outside of my full-time job working at Splunk, I'm also an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut. So I helped John in teaching and that's kind of my role and where our worlds sort of meet. So John, we were, Stu and I were talking about the sort of evolution of Splunk, a company that was just, okay, log file analysis, kind of on-prem, perpetual license model, and it's really evolved and it's permeating throughout many organizations, but maybe you could take us through sort of the early days, and then you con for a while. What was life like before Splunk? What prompted you to start playing around with Splunk and where have you taken it? What's your journey look like? Sure. So about three years ago, we started looking at it through kind of an educational lens. Started to think of how could we tie it into the curriculum. We started talking to a lot of the recruiters and companies that many of our students go into saying what skill sets are you looking for and Splunk was definitely one of those. So, academia takes a while to change the curriculum, make that pendulum swing, so how can we get this into students' hands as quickly as possible and also make it applicable. So we developed this initiative in our department called OPIM Innovate, which was all based around bringing emerging technology skills to students outside of the general curriculum. We built an innovation space, a research lab, and really focused in bringing students in classes and incorporating it that way. We started kind of slowly different parts of some early classes about three years ago, different data analytics, predictive analytics courses, and then that really built into, we did a few workshops with our Innovate initiative, which Ryan taught, and then from there it kind of exploded. We started doing projects and our latest one was with the Splunk mobile team. Okay, and you guys got some hard news around mobile today, right? Maybe take us through that. Absolutely. You want to? Sure, yeah, I'll take that. So we teach a course on IoT, industrial IoT, at the University of Connecticut, and so we heard about the mobile projects and basically they were doing a beta of the mobile application. So we partnered with them this summer and they came in, we have a Splunk enterprise license through Splunk for Good, so we're able to actually ingest Splunk data, and so as part of that course, we can ingest IoT data and use Splunk mobile to visualize it. Ryan, maybe you could explain to our audience that might not know Splunk for Good. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. So Splunk for Good is a great initiative. They offer a Splunk pledge license, they call it, to higher education institutions and research initiatives, so we're able to have a 10 gig license for free that we can run our own Splunk enterprise, we can have students actually get hands-on experience with it, and in addition to that, they also get free training so they can take Splunk fundamentals one and two and actually come out of school with hands-on experience and certifications when they go into the job market, so. John, we talk so much about the important role of data and the tools change a lot. We talk about the next generation of jobs, you're right at that intersection, maybe you can give, what are the students, what are they looking for, what are the people that are looking for them, hoping that they come out of school with? Yeah, it's, you have two different types of students, I would say, those that know what they're looking for and those that don't, that really have the curiosity, they want to learn, and so we try to build this initiative around both. Those that maybe they're afraid of the technology and the skills, so how do we bring them in, how do we make a very immersive environment, kind of have that aha moment quickly, so we have a series of services around that, we have what's called TechKits, the students come in, they're able to do something applicable right away and it sparks an interest, and then we also kind of developed another path for those that were more interested in doing projects, so they had that higher level skill set, but we also wanted to cultivate an environment where they could learn more, so a lot of it is being able to scaffold the learning environment based off of the different student coming in. So it's interesting, my son's a junior in college at GW and he's very excited, he's playing around with data, he says, I'm learning R, I'm learning Tableau, am I great? What about Splunk? And he says, what's that? Yup, yeah, then no, exactly. It's a little off-center from some of the more traditional visualization tools, for example, so it's interesting and impressive that you guys, sort of identified that need and actually brought it to students. How did that all, what was it, an epiphany or was it demand from the students? How'd that come about? It was a combination of a lot of things. We were lucky, Ryan and I have known each other for a long time as the director of the program, trying to figure out what classes we should bring in, how to build out the curriculum, and we have our core classes, but then we have kind of the liberty to build out special topics, things that we think are relevant, up and coming. We can try it out once if it's good, maybe teach it a few more times, maybe it becomes a permanent class, and that's kind of where we were able to pull Ryan in and he had been doing consulting for Splunk for a number of years, and so I think this is an important skill set. Is it something that you could help bring to the students? Sure, yeah, yeah, I mean, one of the big courses we looked at was a data analytics course, and we were already teaching with a separate piece of software, not going to name names, but essentially I looked at it one for one, like what key benefits does this piece of software have, what are the students trying to get out of it, and then just compared it one for one to Splunk, like could Splunk actually give them the same learning components and all that, and it could, and with the Splunk for good license and all that stuff, we could give them the hands-on experience and augment our teaching with that free training, so when they come out of school, they have something tangible, they can say, I have this, and so that kind of snowballed. Once that course worked, then we could integrate it into multiple other courses. So you were able to essentially replicate the value to the students of the legacy software, but also have a sort of modern platform. Exactly, exactly, yep, yeah, you nailed it. And that was, what, was like a, if Doug was talking about making jokes about MDM and codifying business processes and... Yeah, it was a little bit more of an antiquated piece of software, essentially, you know, and I mean, it was nice, it did a great job, but there wasn't, when we were talking to recruiters and stuff, it wasn't a piece of software that recruiters were actually looking at. So we said, we were hearing Splunk over and over again, so why not just bring it into the classroom and give them that? So in the keynote this morning, started to give a vision, I believe they call it Splunk Next and mobile, things like augmented reality are fitting in, you know, how do you look at things like this? What, how's the mobile going to impact you, especially, I would think? Yeah, so when we kind of came up with our initiative, we identified five tracks that both skill sets we believe the students needed and that, and companies were kind of looking for. A lot of that was, our students would go into internships and say, hey, you know, the skills that we're learning, you know, they're asking us to do all this other work in AWS and drones and VR. So as, again, as part of this, it was identifying, let's start small five tracks. So we started with 3D printing, virtual reality, microcontrollers, IoT, and then analytics kind of tying that all together. So we had already been building an environment to try and incorporate that, and when we kind of started working with the Splunk mobile team, there was all these different components that we wanted to not only tie into the class, but tied into the larger initiative. So the goal of the class is not to just get these students the skills and interesting, interested in it, but to spread that awareness. The augmented part is just kind of another feature, is the next piece that we're looking in to build activities, and it just, it had this great synergy of coming in at the right time, saying, hey, look at this sensor that we built, and now you can look at data in an AR. It's a really powerful thing to most people. Yeah, they showed that screenshot of AR during the keynote, and one of the challenges that we have at the farm, so we're teaching, this is the latest course that we're talking about on an industrial IoT. One of the challenges we have at that farm is we don't have a desk, we don't have a laptop, but we do have a phone in our pocket, and we can put a QR code or an NFC tag anywhere inside that facility. So we can actually have, we have students go around and they can put an iPhone up to a sensor or scan a QR code and see actual live, real-time data of what those sensors are doing, which is, it's an invaluable tool inside the classroom in an environment like that, for sure. So it's just been able to do things we never would have been able to do before. I want to ask you about, come back to mobile. Yeah. Because you're saying it was something that people have wanted for a long time. It took a while. Presumably it's not trivial to take all this data and present it in a format in mobile that's simple number one, and number two is, a lot of Splunk users are, they're at the command center, right? They're on the grid. So maybe that worked to your advantage a little bit in that you look at how quickly mobile apps become obsolete. So is that why it took so long? Because it was so complicated, and you had a user profile that was largely stationary? Yeah. And how has that changed? Yeah, honestly, I'm not sure on the full history of the mobile app. I know there previously was a new mobile app, and there was an old mobile app, and this new one, though, is- Have you used it? The new one? Yes. Oh, so when we're talking about augmented reality, that might be, we may not have been clear on that. Augmented reality is actually part of the mobile app. It is part of the mobile app. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And multiple features to it. And then, in addition, we have, the Apple TV app is in our lab. We have a dashboard displayed on a monitor, so not only can we teach this class and have students setting up sensors and all this, but we can live display it for everyone to come in and look at all the time. And we know that it's a secure connection to our backend. People walk into the lab, and the first thing they see is this live dashboard, Splunk data from the Apple TV, based off of the project we've been working on. What's that? Well, that's a live feed from a farm five miles off campus, giving us all these data points. And it's just a talking point. People are like, wow, how did you do that? And it kind of, it goes from there. Yeah, and the farm managers are actively looking at it too, so they can see when the doors are open and closed to the facility, if the temperature gets too high, all these metrics are actually used by the farm manager. That was the important part to actually solve a business problem for them. We built a proof of concept for the class, so the students could see it. And then the students are kind of replicating another final project in the class. The class is still ongoing, but where they have to build out a sensor for plants to, so it's kind of the same type of sensor kit, but it's, they're more stationary plant systems. And then they have to figure out how to take that data, put it into Splunk and make sense of it. So there's all these different components. And you get, for the students, you get the glam factor. You can put it in a fishbowl, have the Apple TV up there, and it's all these different things. Good recruiting tool. Exactly, and that's, I mean, part of it, when we started to think about our initiative, it was recruitment. How do we get students beyond that fear of technology, especially kind of coming into a business school? But it really went well beyond that. We aligned it with the launch of our analytics minor, which was open to anyone. So now we're getting students from outside the school of business, liberal arts students, just creating very diverse teams. Even in the class itself, we have engineers, business, psychology student, history student, that are all looking to understand data and platforms to be able to make decisions. So there's essentially one Splunk class today, instead of a Splunk 101? This semester there's a couple classes that are actually using Splunk inside the classroom. And I mean, it depends on the semester, how many we have going on that are, actually there's three this semester. Sorry, I misspoke there. We have another professor as well who's also utilizing it. So yeah, we have three classes that are essentially relying on Splunk to teach different components or, you know. Is it, help us understand it. Is it part of, almost exclusively part of the analytics, you know, curriculum, or is it sort of permeate into other MIS and computer science or? Right now it's within our kind of MIS purview, trying to, you know, build all their partners within the university. And the classes, they're not, it's not solely on Splunk. Splunk is a component of the tool. So it's like, for example, the particular industrial IoT course, it is understanding microcontrollers, understanding aquaponics and sustainability, understanding how to look at data, clean data, and then using Splunk as a tool to help bring that all together. Awesome. It's kind of the backbone, you know? Love it. And then, I mean, in addition to, I just wanted to mention that, we've had students already go out into the field, which is great, and come back and tell us, hey, we went out to a job, and we mentioned that we knew Splunk, and we were, you know, a shoe in, for certain things. Once it goes up on their LinkedIn profile, it's start getting. Yeah, I mean, again, I would think it's right up there with, I mean, even more so. I mean, everybody's, in our day it was SPSS, now it's R, Tableau obviously, for the Viz, everybody's kind of playing around with it. But Splunk is a very, you know, specific capability that not everybody has, except every IT department on the planet. Right. Exactly. Coming out of school with that. When you dig a little bit deeper, you find that out. Yeah. Cool. Well, great work, guys. Thank you very much. Really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE, and it was great to meet you. All right, we appreciate it. Thank you. All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody, Stu and I will be right back after this. This is day one of .conf18 from Splunk. This is theCUBE.