 The Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida. It's The Cube, covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walls. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live in Orlando, Florida for The Cube, SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Splunk.com. I'm John Furrier. I'm my co-host, John Walls. Well, John, good to see you. Good to be here at Splunk. We're joined by Tom Gerhard, who is a technical fellow at Price Line, who is new to the Splunk family. We'll get into that in just a little bit, but Tom, thanks for joining us. Good to see you. Thank you. It's great to be here. All right, 16 years strong now. You're going to Price Line, a lot of transformation over that period of time. So before we jump into data, whatever, just tell us and walk us through what you've seen, the good, the bad, the ugly at Price Line and where you are now, again, from the data standpoint. Price Line's been an exciting company the whole time. We were a leader in the online travel space and innovator there with the name your own price model. We adopted retail, transparent pricing products a few years after we launched. And that's become the mainstay. PriceLine.com has grown into the Price Line Group, which now has businesses worldwide, Booking.com, Agata.com, OpenTable, rentalcars.com and Kayakall. Familiar brand names to people in different parts of the world. So it's been exciting to be part of that journey. So you were just telling us before it went on the air. Last Thursday, you officially joined the Splunk family, if you will. What led to that? What were your considerations? What are you turning to them for? And what do you hope to get out of that relationship? Well, since we turned our first server on in 1997 or 1998, we've accrued a number of different logging platforms, monitoring platforms, alerting systems. And we realized that we'd gotten to a point where we had all this data in fractured silos and couldn't really see a holistic picture of what was going on in the operation. We felt pretty good about our operational processes. Things run pretty smoothly. We're highly available. All of that looks great. But our time to detect problems and time to repair weren't quite where we wanted them. We wanted to go from good to great. And we thought we needed to upper game on the whole monitoring, alerting, and analysis. We also felt like there was a lot of opportunity. We were leaving on the table at business transactions alongside of operational data. Tom, talk about, first of all, price line is one of those success stories. Came out of the dot com and then the bubble burst. We all know that history for the young folks. Millennials were probably still in grade school during that time. We still have the scar tissue to prove it. But you guys were riding the wave of the web scale generation. And really what I'm pointing out here is that as you got on that dot com internet 1.0, boom, you guys rode that wave of scale at a massive level. So it's kind of like changing the engine out of the airplane cruising at 35,000 feet. Take us through how hard that problem is because it's not trivial to just swap out monitoring. And also at the same time, you're adding more services. You went global and now you have all kinds of inbound APIs. You have some sort of services oriented out kind of architecture. Lay out the problem statement of as you're growing. Because this is a problem that enterprises have today. You can't just rip and replace, land their business and start all over again. They got to take what they have and bring in a new fresh perspective. Yeah, so just to scope the discussion, I'm part of the priceline.com brand within the price line group. So we'll be talking today about what's happening in some of the other brands at price line. But you're right, we've been changing the engine and changing the chassis over the entire life of the company. Our technical stack today, there's no resemblance to what we launched with. So things have been changing and evolving over the years. So much things have happened out of that. We've actually, a lot of our logging data today goes through Kafka. So it's delivered into our existing platforms through Kafka. So when we started a Splunk proof of concept a few months ago, it was actually very easy for us to tap a feed from Kafka and deliver it into Splunk and start to explore it with real data. When the Splunk sales team came in at the beginning of our proof of concept, we were actually ingesting data the first day they were on site. So you're up and running quickly, just plug it in. Yeah. Pretty much ingest. Plugged it in. Without disrupting, was there a disruption? It was the same? No disruption to any of the existing platforms. So we were able to go ahead and do that and start to explore what Splunk could do for us. And we had looked at a couple of different open source stacks and including some that we were already using and we decided at the end that we'd give Splunk a try. What impact do you hope that this has for you guys? What's the other side of the end zone here when you cross the finished line or get into the end zone and what's Splunk? Obviously getting up and running, getting at the data, exploring it. What's the outcome that you guys are looking for? Well, the outcome for any company should be revenue. And we think that by improving our time to detect problems or time to repair when problems do occur, that we'll be reducing outage time. Outages are always money. Our store is open 24 seven. And so there is no acceptable downtime in our business. But beyond that, we think we're going to make life better for people that are supporting our systems. When things go wrong, we should be able to get to the root cause faster and... So what products are you buying from Splunk? So what products? Mind sharing? The immediate share? Sure, we're launching with on-premises enterprise. We'll be implementing ITSI and security, enterprise security. I love ITSI, I mean it takes the IT service management concept to a whole other level. What kind of intelligence are you guys looking for at a Splunk? Everyone's talking about machine learning, AI. You want some intelligence, so what do you hope the work will be doing for you? What are some of the things specifically that you hope that will come out of the intelligence piece of the software? Well as you can imagine, our operation is fairly complex. We deal with suppliers, travel suppliers, thousands of hotels, dozens, probably hundreds of airlines, dozens of rental car companies. So we have a lot of inputs that are external, way up to the customer experience on our website who ends, there's a lot going on. Relationships aren't always clear because they're complicated. So we're hoping we can use ITSI to surface some of that complexity and simplify it and start to see rather than monitoring individual components that we can be really monitoring our system as a whole. So is security a primary or kind of a secondary benefit off the ITSI? I'd say almost equal. We actually had a separate initiative, our security team was interested in Splunk. Kill two birds with one stone here, right? Yeah, yeah, and it really turned into that. You got the PriceLine.com shirt on, you talked about PriceLine Group. So how big of a deployment are we talking about here in terms of where Splunk's reaching into your organizations across the board? And then also what kind of data are we talking about in terms of volume, in terms of increases that you've seen maybe in the last two, three years that have caused you to, you know, your eyes to roll a little bit and find a better way to corral it. So within the PriceLine.com brand, several terabytes a day, thought we did some pretty good estimating before we did our purchase. The line that's formed outside of my door since we actually signed the contract is... Like people just saying, hey, I want more? Everybody wants to get their application on Splunk and they want it yesterday. So you're like the mayor of PriceLine.com, you know? Man, take a ticket, wait for the line. Yeah, and one of our big challenges right now is to figure out how we can keep that line moving as quickly as possible. So people are jazzed up, I mean, people see this and they're pretty pumped up. We've got our security team, several of them are actually here. Our network team, they're excited. Our application teams, our business analytics folks, everybody's really interested in getting on Splunk. And he's across the board. I mean, so you're talking about multiple brands here, right? Not just just, you know, dot-com. Within PriceLine.com. Within PriceLine.com. Right, right, right, right, right. I mean, our multiple organizations. Our different product lines, rental cars, airlines, hotels. And you just flipped that big switch. What kind of headache is that to enforce that kind of a massive transformation? Big change. Yeah, so first production feed, we actually started delivering some alerts to our knock from that feed the next day. So as they're getting comfortable with Splunk as one of their in-training sessions to bring all of the application developers and stuff worth onto the platform. Some of the things announced this morning in 6.5 that look like that will get easier for us. So looking forward to how quickly we can pull that switch as well. Tom, I want you to take a minute to end the segment. I'm going to share with the folks watching potentially could utilize it. And how it's changed PriceLine.com. I think how it's changed right now is yet to be seen. It has created a lot of unification across all of those teams that I mentioned. Some of the things we've learned and those things add up to what we're also looking most forward to is not just getting better at the things we've already known. Thanks so much for sharing your story, PriceLine.com. Congratulations on your success. Lines forming outside your door. You're super popular. You're trending inside the company, as we would say. Congratulations. Thank you. Great to hear the story of Splunk. Another happy customer. I love to come to this conference. A lot of great stories. And certainly, this is the disruptive enabler getting at the data, seamless integration and adjusting and putting the data to work. It's the cube bringing you the data.