 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at Splunk.conf 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Splunk. Here are your hosts, Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick. Hi, welcome back. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're at Splunk.conf 2014, the fifth annual Splunk user conference. About 4,000 people are running around Splunkers, partners, customers, prospects, journalists, analysts. It's a whole community. Everyone's excited to be here and learn more about the latest from Splunk. We're The Cube. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is actually our third, splunk.conf. So we're excited to be here. It keeps growing. It outgrew the Cosmo. We're over at the MGM now and it continues to grow. It's a lot of good vibes. It's a lot of good mojo. Excited about this next segment and we're joined by my co-host, Jeff Kelly. I'm Jeff Kelly from Wikibon and we're joined by Paul Wallbank, who's a freelance writer and blogger out of Australia. I think our second or third Australian guest we've had on The Cube. We have got quite a bit. Paul, welcome to The Cube. Thank you, Jeff. Pleasure to be here. So why don't we start with, tell us what brought you to Splunk.conf. What attracted you to this show? Well, I've been writing a lot on big data, internet of things, those topics and really, companies like Splunk are really making a difference there on how businesses use that. One of the areas I arise on a lot is how businesses are developing a new economy and this is one of the tools that they need. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Wikibon, where I work, we cover big data very closely and clearly the way organizations use data now and going into the future is going to be really one of the key competitive differentiators. How you leverage your data assets, every company is a data company to some extent. Absolutely right. So yeah, talk a little bit about the vibe you're getting here and what's impressed you most with Splunk? What I've been really impressed by has been the community that they've got both amongst the users and amongst their partners as well. One of the things I'm noticing coming to a lot of these conferences is that it's that partner ecosystem that's really making a difference for a lot of these companies now. So the more partners that are there, leveraging the services they've got, that's what I think is the real key for success for a lot of these technology companies now. So talk a little bit about kind of what you've seen as you chronicle the new economy. What are some of the examples of companies that are really leveraging data to a positive effect for their organization? Well, one of the ones I've been particularly interested in over the last year or two has been GE, the way that they're doing things and really pulling in that industrial data. And again, here at Splunk, I mean this is a big emphasis on that industrial data that's coming into the systems. During the keynote yesterday, they had Coca-Cola as a good example of that. And as a global, those two global corporations with a huge amount of data coming in there and industrial partners and for Coca-Cola, the consumer market, those are good examples of really big data, deep data that you can be pulling some really good insights out of. Yeah, I mean, when you're talking about machine data, when you're talking about data coming off, aircrafts and we've had folks on from locomotive companies and I mean, that is truly big data when you think about the scale, the velocity of that data and the impact. I mean, when you talk, Jeff Imel from GE talks about just making a 1% improvement in efficiency in something like an aircraft engine can save you millions or billions of dollars. That's right. So again, I think what would be interesting to get your perspective on is coming from Australia, what is the, I guess the thinking down under about big data and how does that maybe differ from what you've seen in other parts of the world and you feel like in Australia, that's a concept that's kind of taken hold of what people really understand or is it still pretty early days? It's largely on the desk still, some of the big global companies, so particularly the mining companies and again here, lots of mention of the mining companies with their driverless trains, that sort of thing, deep data there, but Australia, it's a pretty safe place to do business at the moment. Didn't really get hit by the global crisis in 2008 so it's a little bit complacent on this, I find, whereas talking to US companies, East Asian companies, European companies, there are a lot more on board with this and probably much more ahead. Yeah, well one of the things, one of the big topics of course of this show is security and it seems like every other day there's a new security breach in the business press, whether it's J.P. Morgan or Home Depot and security strikes me as clearly one of those killer apps, if you will, for something that for a company like Splunk that can take a more analytics style approach to security than kind of that old school monitoring and reporting style. What's your take on the security challenges we're seeing out there and the role Big Data might play in addressing some of those challenges? Well I think one of the interesting things with Splunk, looking at some of the demonstrations on that, it's when we look at that target hack that the security software was alerting the SysOps that there was a problem, but because they were overwhelmed apparently with the logs, log files that were coming in, they disregarded that information, so having that information in a much more visual way, I think probably he's going to help avoid those future sort of problems there and getting that real-time thing. So in the security keynote yesterday where the statistic being thrown around is 233 days that a hacker is in your system or sorry, the bad guys are in your system, that is a real challenge. Having that visual data is going to help a lot. Yeah, I think you hit on a couple of good points there and one being the real-time capabilities and also Jeff, of course, the visualizations. Communicating that in a way that people can understand. Yeah, the other really scary stat that came out of that thing was the 100% of the breaches were done with legit credentials. I thought that was kind of popped off the screen to me. So give us a little bit of kind of the tech industry vibe right now in Australia, just kind of for an update for our audience. We know Alassian, right, they're real big, obviously in San Francisco, eventually they'll go public after they've got their big chunk of money from Excel. So that's a great success story. There's a lot of little companies we were about, like the one that was Google Maps, right? I think it was a New Zealand company, right? So give us kind of an update on what's going on and kind of the state of the union for tech industry in Australia. Well, tech industry in Australia is in an interesting position at the moment. It is getting some drive for the same reasons around the rest of the world, that there's a lot of money sloshing around these VC and seed funds. I mean, startups are always moaning that they can't get funding, but there is money out there. And these days, there's a lot of money flowing. That's right. 50 million, 30 million, 60 million. Exactly. Australia, though, is in a funny position because we've had some strange things happen with our tax laws that actually penalize the startups. So what we're seeing, like Alassian is a very good example that they're looking at an IPO down the track and they're not going to do it in Australia. They're going to do it in London. So part of the reason- In London? Yeah. Not in New York. No, well, this is an interesting thing with the Australian startups that you can split them into three different groups. The biggest group are looking at coming to the US, so coming mainly to the Bay Area. Then you've got a group that are looking at Europe and that's mainly because of the historic ties with England and that sort of thing. So they're comfortable with that. And then there's the other ones that are looking at East Asia, which are an interesting bunch. So things like social media analytics company I was looking at recently, that what they're looking at is helping out franchise chains in the Philippines and Singapore and so on. And Indonesia's got a big mobile market there. So quite a few of the Aussie startups are looking at what they can do in the Indonesian market. So that's the real focus there. And then on the big data side and the industrial internet side, like you said, G's really driving the train there and clearly the mining industry is tremendous. Part of the Australian economy really feeding the Chinese factory, if you will, right? Absolutely. With Australian natural resources. So where would you say the adoption curve is kind of relative to a lag for kind of the early leaders out here? Are they pretty close? Are we a global economy? Is there still a little bit of a lag there? I'd say there's a bit of a lag. I'd say three to five years. In fact, I was talking recently to a fairly cynical seed investor in Australia that was saying that he likes to invest in copycat businesses. So someone will come over and see what the big thing is. You know, say it's an Uber knockoff or a Groupon knockoff or whatever. And invest in an Australian knockoff of it with the idea that the market's three to five years behind so they can make out like pandits for three to five years and then when the big guys finally get ran to setting up then they sell out to them or pack up the tend and move on to something else. Does it work for them? It's a bit of a crapshoot for them. For some of them it does for others, but hell, that's early stage investing for you. So if they're three to five years behind, what's the hot topic right now? What are you writing about most? What are people commenting about most? What's in the newspapers? Well, the main things that I'm writing about is the internet of things because this is big right across the world. In fact, I was at a conference last year in Europe on the internet of things and the biggest group there were Chinese journalists and China, as you pointed out, is the big export market for Australia and the Chinese really want accountability through the supply chain. So again, that comes into the splunk side of things as well, being able to analyze that, but that is the big issue at the moment, the bigger things. And what about the security? Because obviously with China, there's some security concerns and clearly there's been history there with intellectual property laws, et cetera. How's that playing? In Australia, it's fairly relaxed on that. They don't take it as seriously as they do here. In Australia, the focus is more on stopping Aussies from pirating videos and some because this is one area that we are very much behind that we don't have a Netflix stand under, Netflix stand operate there. I should have invested in the Netflix, the Australia Netflix. Well, it's a weird thing in Australia all the rights get taken up by the free-to-wear TV stations. So the networks grab them and then don't show them. So you get something like, say, the Sopranos will get shown at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday night this week and 2 a.m. on a Thursday morning or following week and they'll put them out of order too and show them three years after they went to air in the U.S. So there's a big pirating culture in Australia for exactly this reason that you're not going to wait two years to see the walking dead or whatever it is. Who knew? So the other thing right with Australia that is unique and we had the flying doctor service on, the service, that's big, right? And actually, there's no roads still across the middle of Australia, if I understand, right? You got to go a little four-wheel drive, a little dirt. So you've got distributed populations, you've got the Southeast Coast, you've got something way over on the west side. So how is that being impacted by some of these second off changes? Well, this is where we see a lot of hope for that regional areas, because Australia, the population's pretty concentrated in that Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Southeast corner there and not a lot of people outside of it. So that's where the raw flying doctor comes in for medical services for that because you need a plane to get around these things. We didn't try to launch a national broadband network that would connect those smaller communities up to it. That's sort of fallen apart at the moment. That was a big political hot potato, right? It was a big political hot potato, isn't it? I think that was when I was there a few years back. It's still going on. In fact, I've sworn I'm never writing about it again. It irritates me that deeply. But yeah, this is the sort of thing that we're hoping that that's going to reinvigorate the regional communities and get more jobs and get more people living out there. And then what about some of the bigger companies like Splunk and GE? And their presence in Australia, is there, you know, we go to all these conferences, we're spoiled, we're in Vegas all the time, we're in Moscone all the time, there's a lot of great buzz right now. What's going on there in terms of that? Is the population being invigorated or does everybody just fly over here? It's a short flight to LAX and then hop over to Vegas. That's the relative term. I guess we're going to the moon, that's a short flight. Yeah, just a short 14 hours. Yeah, it's a tricky question because I find most of the Australian market is we didn't get hit by the global crisis. So they're pretty relaxed about things and property prices keep going up. So we're still flipping houses to each other. We're parting like it's 2007 in Australia. So what's the biggest surprise you've seen here at this show? What did you not expect? Didn't expect the level of engagement amongst the partners there. When I was originally looking at it, I was thinking it's going to be a pretty dour system operators and all that. But it's a really enthusiastic, interesting group of ecosystem of developers, applications and customers. Right, which we've seen now, you pretty much need that ecosystem. Pretty much all modern software companies have a thriving ecosystem as they move to a platform, they get other people developing applications for them and it's this aggressive fight for the developers. How do we get the developers? That's right, that Steve Ballman developer-developer-developer thing and having those open APIs is the key to success in all of this. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you the last word before we have to sign off. What should people know about what's going on in Australia? We're here, we need more tourists. Come on down, enjoy the beaches and the beer. Especially in the winter time, right? It's summer in Australia, if you forgot. Exactly right. All right, Paul. Well, thanks for stopping by The Cube. It's good to get international perspective on what's going on. My pleasure. So thanks again. So Jeff Frick here with Jeff Kelly. We're at spunk.coff2014. This is The Cube, we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, try to get you perspectives that you might not otherwise have, bring you the information, bring you the insight. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. The Cube is a live mobile studio. When you bring it to events and we say we extract the signal from the noise, what we do is we get the absolute best guests that are at those events. We bring them inside The Cube and we talk to them, we have a conversation. We really want to make it fun, exciting, but more importantly, extract the data from the guests and extract that metadata and share it with the world so people can use that information to better themselves, better their companies. More importantly, connect with other people to do more business, to define more about the technology. And for us, this is the future. I watch many of The Cube interviews when you're handling other events. And it's both the combination of enjoyable and insightful. And what I like is the interactive banter back and forth, plus the fact that when I think about some of the conversations we have, they're not only deep, they're not only rich, but the audience themselves will really come to benefit from those conversations. When organizations bring The Cube to an event, it just brings a whole new dimension. It adds a texture of not only independence, but also explodes content from their community into a much, much broader community. We tend to reach about 10 times the audience that's live at an event. So we're a big data-driven organization. We have a data science team that allows us to see not only what's trending broadly with the public, but what's trending in very specific areas in our specialty in tech. That allows us to vector our analysis and relevance from our research and journalist team into everything that we do as a media company. And really the benefit of The Cube is a place for conversations for people to connect with each other and to learn about things. And it's a revolution in media. We look at the technology and the people behind it as tech athletes, those are the folks making the companies, making the technology, really creating the new value in this modern era. And it's fun, it's exciting, and more importantly, it's very social. The Cube does an excellent job of taking a very, this very, very broad platform and format and giving visibility to a very broad audience on each of the different key aspects of the technology. And it's a great environment for the broader community who couldn't be here today, have visibility into what we're doing, what each of the tracks are, and what are the sort of the core trends that are associated inside of The Cube and given a very balanced view from multiple dimensions around. And I think that's invaluable for the community. We always know that your view is right until you hear a different perspective. So you're always interested and give me some neutral perspective and help me see it from a different light, and maybe ask a hard question or two that I might not have considered. You know, in that sense, that independent voice that's always the ability to have a sort of independent, audited sort of perspective right of the world. It's always just good. So these guys bring an incredible wealth of knowledge from their own careers. They've been into a lot of different things in the industry and they're independent. You know, they're able to bring different points of view and you know, sometimes they ask really tough questions to the kinds of questions that maybe you don't want to answer. And so, but it always gets to the heart of it and we just love having them here. It's about connecting with people. And that really is what it's all about, having the conversations in a very social, collaborative way. And that's what makes it so exciting and people are watching. I think it's extremely valuable, the independent parts, right? So they're not biased by having a sponsored kind of relationship for the specific segment. So that there is no, it essentially leads to kind of more of an unbiased conversation and also leads to kind of like the no questions we left unasked. Any question can be asked because I'm not gonna ask you the question that might look you bad or might make you look good. The value of an independent news organization at an event is that it allows our audience to have a perspective that's balanced, that it's not just, you know, the vendors talking to them, it's the community, it's analysts, it's technologists, it's customers, practitioners. So they get a full perspective that's unfiltered. Well, the thing is, you know, you need a unbiased view and even though we're in the middle of the EMC forum and the EMC event, it's clear that this team has a view across the landscape competitively beyond EMC. So for people looking in to hear from, you know, unbiased hosts like that and be able to ask the tough questions, the probing question, I think it is valuable to all the people in technology space. I want folks out there to understand the depth of technical inspection that goes on with you guys. It's deeper than, you know, most analysts we talk to, right? I mean, so we roll up our sleeves, we'll spend a half a day on hot new technology instead of the, you know, PowerPoint, Ivy League that goes on, you know, a lot of the time in our industry. So it's, you know, it's, you get a perspective from theCUBE. That is, you know, that's as good as a validation. theCUBE has been called the ESPN of tech and really our vision is to cover every event that's out there. We really truly want to be a global organization that is at every event, extracting the signal from the noise, being on the ground, giving our audience a sense of what's happening at that event, but also providing analysis and insight worldwide, literally for every event that's out there. theCUBE has been called the ESPN of tech and really our vision is to cover every event that's out there. We really truly want to be a global organization that is at every event, extracting the signal from the noise, being on the ground, giving our audience a sense of what's happening at that event, but also providing analysis and insight worldwide, literally for every event that's out there. I like the format a lot. I think it gives us, I mean, it's really rapid fire, which is kind of fun, right? We're all high energy people, so it's a great chance to just sort of get into it and get excited about it. So it was fun. It was very good, very interactive, but it's always good because this is what you face with clients all the time. They ask you tough questions. It's not only the camera, that's a difference, but I definitely enjoyed it. You know, I have been on theCUBE for a while. I think I was there the first edition and it started with being the small thing that John had the idea on and David was there and Jeff and so forth. And I think now we've turned into like an amazing production. We'll need to look for guests for our events that we cover. We want to look for people who are the thought leaders, the CEOs, the people making the news, people who are shaping the opinions of the crowd, and more importantly, people who have something to share that's valuable that we think could be added value to our audience in the crowd. John and Dave were prepared and multiple cameras, lots of lights. As far as I know, you could hear me. There weren't any breakups or like that, so who's good? It's been fun to watch it develop. It seemed like it was a table and one camera and now it's a whole production room and it's pretty important. And I think it's an important source of information now. There's a lot of people that can't make it to conferences, but they know that theCUBE's available to find out the news of the day and see the ESPN sports casters of big data. A lot of format. A lot of format. Yeah, Dave's pro and it's a great chance to come and actually talk about what's really coming new in technology. One of the things I like about theCUBE when it's fun for me is I'd like to ask the questions around other things, not necessarily the messaging of what they're trying to say. Guests have a lot of information that we want to share, so I like to go in and try to explore what's in their mind and extract that from them and share that with the audience. So sometimes I have to ask around about questions, kind of tease out some market trends. More importantly, get them off their messaging because the audience loves to hear what these people think and how they feel about things because it is a longer interview. Sometimes 15 to 20 minutes and we want to get at the action. We want to get about what's on their mind, what's inside their head and get that out into the social world. This is a fantastic way to have the conversation with guys who know what's going on, who can kind of scratch below the surface, who can respond to what's happening right now on a Twitter feed about maybe some technology that's in the marketplace and respond and have a conversation. So these guys bring an incredible wealth of knowledge from their own careers. They've been into a lot of different things in the industry and they're independent. They're able to bring different points of view and sometimes they ask really tough questions to the kinds of questions that maybe you don't want to answer. But it always gets to the heart of it and we just love having them here. I think the Q you guys always have very thoughtful questions, really insightful comments and it actually makes for a really fun discussion. The thing that I really like about theCUBE is you guys get, I mean bottom line is we can talk about high-level strategy, we can talk about execution, we can talk about competitive and market and what I like is the interactive banter back and forth plus the fact that when I think about some of the conversations we have they're not only deep, they're not only rich but the audience themselves will really come to benefit from those conversations. I mean these guys are great. I think this is a revolutionary form up till a few years ago. I've never seen this in my entire career. These guys are great interviewers. They're spot-on, they're sharp, they're funny to work with and they just ask great questions so it's a real pleasure to be on theCUBE. It's really great. What's so neat about it is it's like real-time discussions and also just being able to have people share their views simultaneously so I love it. I think it's really fun. It's a great way to get the message out and to have a dialogue. I want folks out there to understand the depth of technical inspection that goes on with you guys. It's deeper than most analysts we talk to. I mean so we roll up our sleeves, we'll spend a half a day on the hot new technology instead of the PowerPoint ivy that goes on a lot of the time in our industry so it's when you get a perspective from theCUBE that that is as good as a validation.