 And welcome back everybody. This is the Cube, SiliconANGLE's premier TV production where we go out to the tech events, the top tech events. It's to separate the signal from the noise. We bring on the smartest guests at the shows to really provide you with the information on the enterprise IT trends and technologies that you're interested in. My name is Jeff Kelly. I'm with Wikibon.org and we're here of course at .com 2012 which is Splunk's annual user conference. I'm joined by Jeff Frick, my colleague and co-host on the Cube from SiliconANGLE. Thank you Jeff. And we are joined by two guests this segment. We've got Lena Joshi, who's the senior director of Solutions Marketing at Splunk, a very busy woman with all the different new releases that are coming out. And a little bit title challenge, I think you have to get one of those funny Splunk titles. We've got to work on that for you. Like the super coolest gal or I don't know, we've seen some great Splunk titles here. And also we're joined by Matt Culver. He's an IT guy with Discover Communications and I'm sure he's happy that it's not shark week this week so he could actually take some time off. He's going to tell us a little bit about what really happens on the front line in his world and how Splunk has helped him out. So welcome both of you to the Cube. Thanks Jeff. Is the show going well for you so far? Absolutely. Loving it. Loving it. So what's been kind of the biggest surprise that you've seen Matt in some of the sessions that you've sat in? Well you know I mean I would say the biggest surprise wouldn't even have been in the sessions so much so it's just having all the employees around here and accessible and able to communicate with them about Splunk and ask questions and be involved. That's great. Yeah I think that the community aspect on a show like this that's still relatively new, relatively young as we've seen with all of our guests is still a lot of communication and information sharing and best practices sharing and everyone actually is talking about it. It's not just a vendor fest which is great. And Josh what about you? You've got a ton of product releases that have come out recently. Probably the biggest one with the cloud offering. Splunk Storm, yes. This is Splunk being available as a service for application developers in the cloud and we've seen a really good traction so far and we continue to get a lot of interest. The app that is catching everybody's attention here at dot-con is actually the Splunk app for VMware. It was GA a few months ago and we're showing off some really really cool stuff with the app here. Lots of interest from customers and virtualization since it's one of the biggest trends of the last decade and knowing what Splunk can do with all that virtualization data is super exciting to a lot of people. Can you talk a little bit about Splunk's overall strategy when it comes to applications and what role that plays in Splunk trying to expand and become as we heard from Gottfried Sullivan yesterday the kind of an enterprise data platform versus a point solution. So what role did the big data apps play and then maybe if you could dig into the VMware app a little bit I know we have a large number of our viewing audience as interested in virtualization and especially where it converges with big data and how that interacts. Absolutely. So one of the things that we've really brought out to the forefront this year is this notion of a connected data center and how Splunk enables it. You may have many different technologies in your data center interacting with each other and our goal is to make the data from all of those technologies available in one place. Now this is not a new idea. It's just Splunk is uniquely positioned to deliver on this idea. When you think about the problem right it's lots of different technologies providing data and a variety of formats in in you know these these different types of data that mean different things. Being able to aggregate it and index it analyze it harnesses is a big data challenge and you can't use a traditional technology to harness all that. So that's what uniquely positions Splunk. You think about the types of data the volume variety and velocity of data that's coming from all of the technologies in your data center. That's a big data challenge and you need a solution like Splunk to really bring it all together. Now what where the virtualization app plays is 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 want to talk to each other or do anything. But now the 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. What who's taking all the resources on a 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 you were facing around what we've been talking about around big data in your infrastructure. So I'm in the global operations center 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 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 and 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? 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 grep. 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. 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 its 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 which 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 it. 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 on 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 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 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 what how was that a very manual process or were you just not able to do a lot of it. Yeah a lot of 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 does your take you mentioned kind of the vibe here but as you've come to interact with some of your fellow Splunk users what's kind of information have you learned and what role does the community play and how you're 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 the fault with you Eileen on that same topic because you know you're your solutions a marketing person you've got roadmaps 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 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 have 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 will develop 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. Right and then does that does that kind of push your needle when you're prioritizing more towards kind of platformy type of stuff to 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 at the solutions exchange. Yeah 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 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 know everything but but it is 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 they're using it and doing stuff they couldn't do before and or extending the application for these very special purposes. Yeah could could we dig in a little bit more on the Splunk Storm so you've you've now deployed us make it available in the cloud basically for as I understand it for developers who are building applications from scratch either on Amazon and Google's compute engine or other cloud cloud environments what kind of led you to that conclusion that you needed to really get out into that cloud environment. So there is what we 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 with you know cloud and 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 is a great way to go off and bring the applications to market right it's it's they don't have to wait for infrastructure anymore they don't have to wait for some some guy in 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 add I mean they're to ask them to download a piece of software and install it and manage and maintain it is is a 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 the 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 this flunk storm has a different pricing model it is pay monthly you subscribe to a plan and you pay on a monthly basis and and that fits in really nicely with this notion of disposable infrastructure that a lot of our first flunk storm customers have and do you anticipate Splunk storm customers at some point you know maybe as they're starting their projects in the cloud but bringing those back in the house at some point and how will Splunk help support them in that transition we 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 and and 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 Splunk storm is if you're in the cloud you can get the facility of Splunk the 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 appointment yeah we've got a we've got a lot of systems around the globe and you know and pretty much every region and so we just found that that works out best for us to to have the servers at our facilities so looking at looking ahead you know obviously Splunk is growing they're working on you know new apps all the time what is kind of on your roadmap and maybe you know all companies have to grow and keep keep expanding what would you like to see Splunk maybe expand into different areas are there 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 the operations you know predominantly 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 and see you know how far we can get as far as like getting all the data in there and 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 thank you we really appreciate it love getting the insights of a practitioner and and we know as well release some really interesting insights about the product direction at Splunk so thank you for the opportunity absolutely and so you're watching to cube this is silicon angles premiere tv broadcast we go to events like dot 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