 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering .conf 2017, brought to you by Splunk. Well welcome inside the Walter Washington Convention Center here at Splunk .conf 2017. Washington, D.C., the nation's capital rolling out its red carpet. For Splunk, first time ever, the show's been here and certainly I know from the 7,000 plus who are here, so far it's big thumbs up. John Walls at Dave Vellante and we're joined as well by Brian Goldfarb who is the Chief Marketing Officer of Splunk and Brian, good to see you this morning, sir. Great to be here, thanks for having me. Yeah, just David are talking about the vibe here. It's always so positive, right? When in a time you're around a Splunk event. But coming here, Washington, you've got great attendance. I mean, your take so far on what you're feeling and what you're seeing. It's been unbelievable. We're so blessed with customers and users that really love our products and helping each other and bringing them all together creates an environment that's unlike anything I've ever seen in my entire career and I've been in this industry for a long time. I've done a lot of shows. There's electricity, there's information sharing, the conversation and you kind of see it everywhere you go. Well, I mean, you came from the biggest of all shows, right, with Salesforce, but whole different vibe here. I mean, really intimate, I was saying off camera, this is our seventh year here with theCUBE and we were following Splunk pre-IPO. Now you're a 1.2 plus billion dollar company, so you have to change in a lot of ways, but you're trying to keep that culture of intimacy. How do you do that as a CMO and as an organization? I mean, ultimately that's the biggest challenge is when you grow from a show that's 500 people to a show that's over 7,000, how do you keep the roots about what makes it great? And intimacy is exactly the right word. How do you capture that? How do you make that real? And for us, there's a couple of things. One is just information sharing. It's intimate when people are talking to other people about the great use cases and things they've done with our products, because Splunk lets you do anything. And so, when customer A says, oh, I do it this way and customer B sees that, it's incredible and you see that through the sessions. We talked about this before, like so much user-generated content. The second thing is all of these cool kind of off the beaten path activities. We have a thing called Boss of the Sock and Boss of the Knock, which are curated games, effectively. Big, massive multiplayer games where everyone gets in the room. It started yesterday evening at 7.30 p.m. It wrapped just after midnight and you walked in and people were glued to their screens, trying to win. It's captured the flag style. It was unbelievable. And things like that help us keep it intimate. Well, there's a culture of fun too, saying we were talking about at the open. You know, the T-shirts take the S-H out of I-T. Metrics, you know, getting rid of metrics. I mean, really, a lot of fun going on. People dropping ping pong balls and the one that they liked the best. So you've maintained, you know, that flavor, which is fantastic. So what do you see as sort of the next wave of Splunk? I mean, what should we as an audience be thinking about and watching for Splunk? I mean, for me, this is the best comp ever. This is our eighth one. It's the biggest one. It's the best one. We've been able to land so many great partners. We have 71 partners here telling their stories. We have all the different customer sessions. We just completed the keynote, which I think was absolutely fantastic. The office space parody was, I think, bring the house down funny. And I think that's the beginning of the future, right? How do we take all the wonderful things that we see our customers doing and bring them to life in more inspirational and more personal ways? Yeah, I'll give you one really great example. We talked about GEN, the Global Emancipation Network, and they're working to help, you know, help human trafficking and human slavery as much as they possibly can, which is a very large problem. And we were able to work with them and help them through our Splunk for Good efforts to give them access to software which has contributed to the work that they're doing. And we're just honored to have been a part of that. And they're here on site and we told their story in the keynote. And I can, as example, after example, after example of the good we're doing for the world, in addition to the work we're doing for companies, I think that's where we're moving forward, right? How do you keep those things in lockstep so you're actually contributing to the betterment of our global society at the same time making our users lives better? You know, I think an example, at least, that really struck me when I was listening to the keynote, so when you talk about the boss of the SOC event, you talk about your community and the spirit you're trying to create and continue to perpetuate was that the winning team was thrown together, right at the last minute. And these were people from disparate parts, different communities, different sectors, if you will, and yet they bound together, they came up with a game plan, they win, and so now you've created a subculture as part of the greater community, but that seems to be kind of the embodiment of your philosophy is no boundaries, no limits, and let's see how big we can make our tribe, if you will. I think tribe is another great word, community. You know, it's a skill set. You want a language you can communicate with each other. You try to use Splunk and all of a sudden you have a common language and a common bond, and team last minute, which won boss of the knock, like you can't plan for those kinds of things, right? People came together with a common understanding of how to accomplish a task, formed instantaneous camaraderie, and then we're able to solve difficult problems, and if you bridge that to a conversation about business, right, we're all trying to solve problems. Technology, they say, is hard. We all know it's the culture and the people that's the most difficult thing to do, and if we can be something that provides technology that helps drive culture change and people change, that's critical in transformation, and that's one of the things that, you know, I'm only going to Splunk 10 months that I've seen we can do with our customers, and that's pretty incredible. It's a key part of your messaging. You know, I wanted to make an observation. When we followed Splunk early on, during the ascendancy of the so-called big data memes, Splunk never really talked about big data. You just sort of did it. You know, you solved problems. Now that big data has sort of passed A, actually, you guys talk about big data. It's very interesting to me. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. You know, lots of people like to throw out buzzwords. Industry terminology. We try really hard to avoid really getting into it, like digital transformation being one of the weavers that no one's ever say that, because it doesn't help anyone, right? At the end of the day, you have to find the problems that our customers have, build solutions to help them solve that, and it turns out when big data was the hype, that wasn't the problem that customers have. But with the explosion of data over the last decade, that continues to grow, we are actually now seeing true big data-style problems. And that's why in the keynote, we talked about scale and how today's scale and tomorrow's scale is just table stakes, because you have to continue to grow to meet that. And so as the machine data company, right? Really trying to make sure people can get value out of this machine data, and turn those, that data into answers, and get the insights they need to take action, that's the future. And with big data, because it's no longer buzzy, there's all, there's new buzzwords we can avoid. It just is. It just is. Everyone has a ton of data. I think the point you're making about digital transformation is interesting. We do over a hundred of these a year, and the vast majority of digital transformation with no meat on the bone. And to us, a digital business is one that leverages its data. So when you think about the evolution of Splunk, it's all about leveraging data. And we're seeing, do you envision a Splunk where Splunk actually becomes that development platform for applications, which has been the nirvana of so-called big data for years? It appears that Splunk is becoming just that. I think that's part of our long-term strategy, and that the beginnings of that already exist. Splunk base has over 1200 apps that extend the Splunk platform already, and those apps do anything from make it easier to ingest data from different data sources, to visualize data through interesting dashboards, to customize searches. A great example, ransomware, we talked about it in the keynote, super hot topic in the industry, something that's affecting the world at large, and something we want to make sure we're helping people deal with. We launched a new product called Splunk Insights for ransomware, which is just an app built on top of Splunk that gives you better dashboarding, better searching, and better licensing for customers to get in, and the paper user gets started really fast and solve that particular problem, and we see that as really, really critical as we evolve our strategy to address these transformative types of things and the application ecosystem that comes with them. Well, we saw this in the demos, another buzzword, of course, machine learning, but we saw an application of machine learning to dramatically simplify the number of events that I have to look through as a security professional and map those to actual problems that I can solve. So, again, another application, practical application of Splunk at play. Meet on the bone, right, you said it. At the end of the day, this is a user conference, and our users use the product every day, and if we're not giving them real value, they're going to let us know. We put tons of energy into that. How about the ecosystem? The message to the ecosystem, what is the message to those guys? What are the sort of swim lanes that you guys will develop applications versus their opportunities? I think that's emerging. I think we're still learning how to work with our ecosystem. We're so blessed with an amazing ecosystem, right? A huge community of participants. We talked about the Splunk Trust, this core group of 42 people. We inducted 14 new ones today who really embody everything that is so great about our company and our customers and what they do for their constituents, and they are helping us think through, where can you build and how do you build and who should build and getting that real-time feedback? And all of the partners that are here, right, are adding value, and that's our goal, create the platform so that we can solve everyone's machine data challenges at scale so they can provide better answers and ultimately more value to their company. So getting a little personal then, you mentioned First Show. First Show. You, coming into this. So you inherit this seven-year machine, right? Growing, expanding, and so your perspective coming into that. What have you brought, you think, you've seen as an outsider who's now an insider and maybe leveraged the culture that was being created to take us to where we are here this year here in DC? And one of the main reasons I came to Splunk was my extremely positive impression of the product and the brand and the customer community around it. My entire history at Microsoft and Google, Cloud Platform, and Salesforce was predicated on customers who love the products. You can't create that, right? You earn that through amazing work and amazing technology and being able to walk in here at Splunk and already have that was the gift that really got me excited. And so you're talking about coming in and what you already have. I got handed the best thing ever, hundreds of thousands, millions of users that are excited about our product. And so what I wanted to bring was not a lot of change in the culture, it's more how do you maintain that intimacy? How do you keep what makes Splunk Splunk and then do that on a grander scale? And I think if you look at .conf this year, this embodies the vision that I've had with my team and with the company on how to bring .conf, sorry, bring Splunk to life in a massive way. And this is, you can see around us and all the activity going on. It's pretty amazing. How about the choice of the district? Love the venue, love being in DC always, East Coast guys, this is your backyard. It's a home game for me, yeah. I just love that. 20 minutes away, I love it. So obviously a lot of government clients, they don't go to Vegas or can't go to Vegas. It's a strong community here, very advanced. Talk about that choice. Yeah, very thoughtful choice. We do a lot of business with the federal government. We do a lot of business with state and local officials. Do a lot of business with education universities. And so we thought coming to DC was the perfect place to really embrace the public sector in America, but also an amazing venue. The weather's cooperated for the most part. All the things you would want. And what we've seen with the program is we've had more public sector attendance, which is great to be able to give them more skills. The work we do with veterans, we talked about giving free training to our service men and women and the veteran service men and women, which is super important to us as a company. That was a big honor to be able to do it here in DC, kind of a no-brainer for us. And also seeing how the rest of the community has come. It's a lot of West Coast American folks, people from 65 countries from all over the world that have all descended here and it's been really, really incredible. So it's been really good for us. And as we think through next venues and future years, I think there's a lot of really exciting things to come. But being in DC is an honor for the company and it's been great to see the turnout. Hey, my last question. Several years ago, Gartner came up with the stats that CMO is going to spend more than the CIO on technology. I don't know if that ever came to fruition, but it was an interesting, you know, prediction. As a CMO, somebody who's obviously using data from marketing at a data company, what's the state of that? What's your philosophy around data, the intersection of data and marketing? Yeah, I've read those Gartner articles too. The chief marketing technology officer. You know, and my background is deeply technical. I was an engineer by training. And so our CIO Declan and I have an incredibly tight relationship and I actually think that's the future. Marketing is data. And that's the big change that's happening in the marketing landscape. But there's old school marketing, advertising, things like that that makes sense and maybe be to see kind of opportunities. But if you're in a business to business universe, working with larger enterprises and governments, like we are at Splunk, there's a new age of marketing that's evolved over the last decade that is predicated with operational data that helps you make better decisions, invest more, make more personalized engagements, right? This doesn't have to be throw a big thing and hope someone sees it. I can engage with you and you in a personal and intimate way, which aligns incredibly well with our culture and who we want to be. And so I agree, you know, it doesn't matter how you calculate the dollars or the spend or the budget, but technology is an enormous driver of modern marketing and being at a data company makes it incredibly easy. I Splunk everything. We have dashboards, you come by my office and we have a wall of TVs with Splunk dashboard showing our social status and we're using LinkedIn Elevate and we see what's coming out of Salesforce data on sales and pipeline, all the different things. So we have this real-time operational dashboard that Splunk is giving us from the business side. I love that answer. It's not an either or with marketing and IT, it's an and. It has to be. Yep. Well, you just put such a sharp point on that pencil right now, as you said, with metrics, you have all the data you need, continuous success, we wish you all that. Thank you. Good job getting the plane off the ground here today and happy landing for the rest of the week. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. Thank you for joining us for your seventh year and look forward to your eighth. All right. Thanks for having us. Absolutely, thanks, Brian. All right. Brian Goldfarb, the CMO at Splunk. We're back with more here on the queue from washingtondc.com, 2017, right after this.