 Okay, we're back here live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We have a special walk-on guest, Bill Gaylord, SVP of BizDev. Used to run corporate development now, BizDev. You guys are growing. You have to hire people now for specific jobs. BizDev, big role, obviously. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. Great time last night. We had a great chat. You guys had a great party. Great people on your team, great company. Congratulations on your success. So tell us, what's it like to sit back and look at the splunkconference.conference2013? Look at the IPO under your belt, smooth sailing, growth, customer ecosystem booming. Ball's in the middle of the fairway right now. It's been an incredible ride, John. It's, you know, you have to kick yourself and feel like, am I really, is this the real deal? And particularly this year, you look at the folks we got here in the partner pavilion. It's packed, we're sold out, we're out of space. Almost up 100% from last year. And the amount of activity we're having, the growth of the ecosystem we've seen over the course of the past year, it's just been fantastic. And I think that people are really coming to the realization that this is a platform that they can build real value on. So you've seen adoption of the product across the enterprise as a true enterprise platform. And now we're seeing that viability in the marketplace as a real commercial platform. Go ahead, John, sorry. Talk about, not that Dave wants to jump in, he's got a lot of questions. Talk about- We only have five minutes. Given your experience, talk about what you've seen in your life that can compare the inflection point of growth and the market that we're at. I mean, it really is a confluence of so many mega trends in this perfect storm of innovation. Can you just, how do you describe that? Given your, you know, looking at your history. So I came out of the BI space, spent a lot of time at Hyperion. Was it Oracle in the past? And for me, this has just been an amazing experience in that I look at all the things we were trying to solve from a business intelligence perspective. And at Hyperion, we were really trying to move beyond the office of the CFO into the world of operational analytics. And the big question was always, how do you get the data? What's the data model? What's the schema? You got to build up the ETL joins and, you know, along comes Splunk. You're not constrained by that relational construct as a data store underneath it, really opens up a lot of possibilities and gives users a lot of flexibility of what they can do. So it's been pretty incredible. At the same time, the amount of data that's available. You know, it's just, I know it's kind of trite to use the term big data, but I think about it in terms of almost like a Copernican shift. You know, we used to want to take all the data, put it in a database, figure out which column the row it went in, and now it's just too much. So you got to leave it where it is. It's like my email inbox. I used to try and build folders. I can't keep up with that. So now I default to the search bar, right? And Splunk, as a real time streaming engine, search engine on top of this machine data is a very intuitive, easy way to interact with that kind of data. That's interesting, right? I mean, search is really, I mean, for a while there it was like, almost like search was this blunt instrument and all of a sudden searches like embedded into all the applications you see and DECA get taken out by Oracle. I mean, obviously an Oracle doesn't typically pay that much for companies. So search is becoming a fundamental component of applications. The other thing we've talked about Bill a lot, and I wonder if you can comment on this, it feels like we're just from a technology standpoint reaching this era of a renaissance. You're at Hyperion. Talk a little bit about, you addressed it briefly, but give us a little bit more color on sort of the difference between what a customer had to go through in that world, the old traditional BI world versus how they're applying Splunk. Well I think the big difference is just the ease of use and the time to value with the software, and that all starts with the concept of the free download, right? And I think this is where the founders were incredibly smart about how they went about this problem in that, it's the same set of bits in that free download that scale to tens, hundreds of terabytes in the data center. So before we actually get on the phone with most people, they've had the ability to download the software, get it up and running, get some value out of it, understand what they want to do, and that kind of premise of, we want people to be able to get this thing up and running without us having to touch it has been a real driving force in the success of the product. So we want to do this segment. Yeah, no. It's just, here try it. Now at some point you got to pay for the value. Yeah, it's funny. I've actually been in some meetings with some partners and we're sitting there and there's a guy looking on his laptop kind of like you, and I'm sitting with our CTO across the room and the guy's poking the guy next to him. We're like, oh no, he's downloading the software. What went wrong? And we asked him after he was playing with the software, he goes, yeah, he goes, I got it up and going. I saw some stuff I've been trying to figure out for a couple of years. So you got the proof of concept done before the sales call ends, and that exists. In many instances, yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty unique. Customers get value before they pay us a dime in a lot of instances, so. What's the biz dev cycle for you now? Pipeline must be huge. It's just to the churn through it. Yeah, biz dev, it takes on a lot of different flavors, right? We got global systems integrators that are now coming to the realization that this is a real platform that they can rapidly build these very compelling analytic apps that deliver high level value to their end customers. We got another set of partners that are actually embedding Splunk as part of their offering, and then we got a growing ecosystem of technology partners that maybe, you know, they're not, software's not their core competency, but they collect very valuable data. So for them to be able to expose that data inside Splunk makes their product all the more valuable to the end user, so. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate it. I also want to thank Dennis Gallant for waiting, because we had to kind of put the bump on someone just to kind of squeeze you in. We wanted to get you on. Well thanks for choosing me here. And wish you congratulations, and thanks for hosting us here. It's easy to do our job when you got happy customers, singing your praise, ROI pays for itself, you know, day one. You know, people love the product, congratulations. Thanks so much. Thank you, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.