 Live from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Splunk.com 2015. Brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Rick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for Splunk.com 2015 at the MGM Grand Conference Center. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Jeff Rick. Our next guest is Joe Noga, Vice President of Technology, Komodo Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. We were just talking hockey before we came on. Of course, you're a Blackhawks fan, located in Chicago. I'm a Bruins fan, and Game 7 was a heartbreak for us a couple of years ago. I'm sure it was, I'm sure it was. One of the best games ever, actually, you know what? I'm sure we all have a story to tell about that one. Welcome to theCUBE. So, what do you guys do? Tell about your company, and then we can talk about Splunk. Sure, absolutely. Komodo Cloud is a data center cloud solutions provider. We have multiple services, infrastructure as a service, backup as a service, as well as analytics as a service, primarily focused around the Splunk initiative. We also have traditional consulting capabilities, as well as a small line card of professional, a small line card of products as well. So, what's, tell about the cloud market. You're in the middle of it right now. We cover, we'll be at Amazon re-invent a couple of weeks. We cover all the different cloud events, DevOps, huge migration to the cloud, workloads, you know, a lot of criticism about security and privacy, but that's not stopping anyone. What's your view on this? What's some data that you can share with what's going on in the trenches? Sure, absolutely, you're absolutely right. Companies are not stopping or slowing down for any of the myths that you might hear about cloud consumption. So, we have been working with multiple companies in the Midwest and in the East Coast, moving their workloads to the cloud, to infrastructure, to high availability data centers which can span across the entire United States in multiple geographical locations. We haven't come across any major issues or major problems with any kind of security breaches or any other type of issues with performance or with accessing their data. Actually, we've been actually seeing that security is actually better in the cloud service providers because they actually have to do all that scale to figure out the security. You have multi-tenancy pretty much table stakes now, but are you seeing the same thing? Absolutely, 100%. Same thing, the SLAs that are required by the data center providers and the certifications that they hold most definitely meet or exceed a lot of the standards that you'll find on to on-premise infrastructure. What's hybrid cloud mean to you? Is there an actual product called hybrid cloud or is that just the engineered outcome of distributed computing? Exactly right, that's just the engineered outcome of distributed computing. Hybrid cloud allows you to take some of the workload, move it into the cloud, or keep some of the workload on site while maintaining a seamless transparency between the user interface. Splunk does a great job of their hybrid cloud initiative with their cloud and their on-premise solutions. You think they got that right? I think they did, most definitely. When I was working with them a few months ago and did a cloud deployment for a customer of mine in the West Coast, while I was going through the setup, they covered every base, secured every port, everything was done top notch. Great job. Yeah, and the growth is significant. They're seeing the numbers, the orders are going, we just had Mark Olson on. He's talking about some of the performance. It's amazing, I've been working with Splunk since 2011 and especially when you see the amount of people at Conf and at the partner kickoffs, it's been just growing and doubling each size each year. So it's definitely a key indicator that Splunk's doing something right. So what are some of the things you splunked for? You're here obviously at the conference. Yeah. I've been with them for four years. So we have it inside of Commoda Cloud. I'm responsible for sales, for development and for delivery of Splunk. So I have a team that'll go out and do pre-sales and also we'll do the deployment and delivery of it. But personally, a couple of my customers are here today, a large financial institution in the Chicago land area. I was using Splunk for their business analytics initiative. Okay. Where they're tracking financial transactions throughout the bank to make sure that the cash flow and that the money is being moved appropriately and timely. Okay. So you're reselling Splunk and you're also a services provider that wraps around to help the customers with their best practices. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, all of our engineers are certified. I was the first person in our company to become a Splunk certified architect as well as a sales engineer. So talk a little bit about kind of the land and expand opportunity because we keep hearing, you know, Splunk's core was obviously machine logs and trying to find problems in complex and really boring streams and streams of data. But, you know, people are Splunking this packet of data and that set of data and that set of data. From your experience with your customers, how do you see that kind of migrating through their infrastructure as they start to kind of see what they can do with this tool? It's explosive. It's explosive and it's not just Splunk's marketing. It's true. When I landed at this financial institution, they were using Splunk just for log aggregation of typical security. And then they were faced with this challenge of trying to track the money movement through the bank. And it's all machine data. It's being generated by a computer. Why not tap into it? So with a couple changes to some of the applications and message queues, we were able to sink in and grab some of that data and provide financial insight into how the money moves through the bank. Was there any kind of a-ha's that came out of that that you can share? Yeah, absolutely. A couple times, the business had a hard time tracking the transactions a customer would call up, say, I was supposed to receive a $2 million money movement. Can you tell me where it's at? They would call the operation center and it would take them 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes to track down the logs and parse through them and find them. That same scenario, that same use case happens now. 30 seconds, they had their answer. So we greatly improved customer performance or customer satisfaction with this solution. That's value right there. I mean, you got to look at that. That's ROI. It's in the ROI. It's in the ROI. But that's odd to me that for a transaction that big, it would still take them that long to track it down. I guess we think of things maybe as being more automated than they are, or is it just the reporting and getting the right information to the right people at the right time? It's actually a little bit of both and plus a third component in there. The systems that move this data is relatively old. So pulling that data, pulling that information natively by logging into a terminal session is kind of cumbersome. So by utilizing Splunk, we were able to cut that down to a matter of seconds. And what other industries are you seeing some success beyond the financial services? Absolutely. Believe it or not, the legal industry is going to be the next big one. And what I've been seeing one of my other customers is a rather large law firm in Chicago and they're going to start to utilize Splunk outside of the traditional use cases of enterprise security and risk management and move more towards the validation of billing hours to make sure that the lawyers are properly recording their time, recording their entries and making sure that the customers get billed appropriately. And what data set do they use to Splunk to find out that, you know, where's that log? Because this is now people, you know, internet of things, people are things too. So that's not necessarily machine generated data or is there auxiliary data that they can tap into, phone calls, et cetera, to kind of know how it happened. Yeah, there's all of it. The phone systems, whether the lawyers away from his desk on a soft phone, on a cell phone, that data is all logged with Splunk via call data records. We could take that data and correlate it with the logging in and logging out of the document management systems. Those are all tied together with case numbers. So we have the ability to correlate the case numbers and accurately bill, or accurately bill the customers appropriately. Is it more for billing or more for audit internally? It's a little bit for both. It's definitely a little bit for both. So we do have the ability to go back and trace and audit the actions that each individual lawyer took. So what's the biggest surprise on this show this year for you? Or observational data point? Two, I actually have two. One the size, amazing. So much bigger than last year, as well as just the number of vendors and the number of support and number of applications that you see around us. And the second one is the development or the release of 6.3. Two times the speed, they get more performance compute out of the application. It's a great development and enterprise security 4.0 coming out is going to be huge for many companies as well. What's your take on the analytics? It's ITSI. ITSI, I still need a little more working with it, but I think to help customers make sure that they reach their indicators, it's huge. The ability to take a Vizio or a picture and place it on the glass table and put your metrics around it is amazing. Do you think Splunk is, I mean they're obviously moving up the food chains. They start out kind of doing log files, job no one wants to do. They do it great, they win that. And they just got such huge growth and they've just done an amazing job with the software. But now they're at the top of the food chain now, analytics. IOT, you're talking about the things you were just mentioning as a use case. These are game changing off the chart ROI, no justification needed kind of product. When you have that kind of value proposition, the world's your oyster. So how far up the value chain or the value activity chain can they go? I mean, where's your vision of Splunk? I think you're going to start seeing more in the business analytics and the business intelligence realm from Splunk as well as the internet of things. And we have a perfect example here at Conf with the Mustang here, where they would track the car around the racetrack. You're going to start seeing more. You're going to see biometrics being tracked on people. We have our smartphones that have the indicators built into them where we can watch how many steps we've taken. On the last three days here at Conf, we've walked well over a hundred thousand steps. If you think about the history of business in the world, since mankind, this is the first time you could actually measure everything. So I think that's causing a really mind blowing experience for business executives. Especially if you're at the seed level, you remember when you had no cell phone, hit pagers before that, no computers. So now literally everything can be measured. That's just mind boggling. So now that's uncomfortable for some people. Advertising, 50% of the money's wasted, just don't know what you have. Now you do. Manufacturing, internet of things. So this is going to be a massive sea change. Yeah, absolutely. There's no hiding anymore. We uncover multiple things in the matter of minutes when we're splunking an environment and we find an issue or if we find something going on with the network, we'll quickly uncover it. And sometimes, unfortunately, when you're working with a customer, you have to call their baby ugly to make sure the solution and make sure you're helping the business. Sometimes that's clearing the fog and then looking at, oh my God, we're exposed. So that's good business for you, right? I mean, that's your wheelhouse. I mean, you must be like, you guys must be very lined up around the corner. We are, and one of the problems that we're seeing in the industry right now is since Splunk has at its peak and it's taken a couple of years to get there, we're having a hard time finding qualified individuals to deploy and implement. So it's been an in-house initiative for us to cultivate and seed the market. That's a good point. Talent, we talked to Gido about this, keeping talent, his sides are, never mind funding someone in security, in big data, in DevOps. In Chicago. I mean, good luck with that, right? I mean, it's difficult. Even in San Francisco, it's one case, but even all over the world. So how does one acquire the skills? It takes a long time and effort. There's no shortcut to it. Unfortunately, with Splunk, you can, fortunately, Splunk's very quick with finding data and analyzing it. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to teach that experience. And you just have to go through the training, the boot camps, the online courses, and put the time in, get the seat time. And it's the quickest way and the best way to a successful individual. If you had to describe the ninja or the whatever, badass developer or ops guy for Splunk, what would that look like? What would it mean, guy or gal? I should be specific on that, since women in tech is one of our best channels. But seriously, what is that ideal use case? I mean, that's a lot of different use cases, but is it full stack developers? Is it more creatives and analysts? Is it dev, is it ops, all of the above? Right, I think it depends on the use case. If you have a person that's security mindset, they'll be great for working on enterprise security and working on incident response teams. So their mindset is all the products, the peripheral products such as Enqualis or Symantec, they're great for that point solution. On the other side, if you're working with a business analyst or working with a person in BI, someone who understands the traditional data warehousing. So to answer your question, Splunk Ninja, it's a person that wears many hats, that can understand multiple technologies, but also knows how to derive answers. Joe, final question for you. What are you trying to do this year? What's your goals? Excellent, our goals is to build our Splunk practice even larger and hopefully one day be a keynote speaker for splunk.com, maybe Splunk 2016. That's a tall order. That sure is. They have good keynotes here. They're electrifying. Okay, this is theCUBE. We'll be back with more. Thanks so much for sharing your insight on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Thank you. We'll be right back with more after this short break live at .com 2015. This is theCUBE at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. We're live, we'll be right back.