 And welcome back everybody. This is the Q, SiliconANGLE's premiere video production, where we go out to the top tech events to bring you the latest news on trends in enterprise IT. We're here of course at .conf 2012 Splunk's annual user conference in Las Vegas, we're at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. My name is Jeff Kelly with wikibon.org, and I'm joined with my co-host Jeff Frick from SiliconANGLE. Thank you Jeff. Welcome back everyone. We are really excited to have Gido Schroeder with us, the VP of products for Splunk. He's been a really busy guy here not only the last few days at the conference, but also obviously getting these products up to snuff and getting ready for the show. Gido, welcome to the Q. He tells us he was out early this morning hiking with the team, doing some good team building. Good morning Jeff. We're glad you made it back. Good morning Jeff. No rattlesnake bites or any other mudslides. No, we are doing well so no harm. That's one of the great things at Splunk, this team building. We want to do something together and one of the things I really enjoy being with this group. Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up because we looked up your LinkedIn page, you were at SAP for a long time, 10 years plus and now you're at a new place, a new company, a new industry space. So how's that been? It must be exciting. Yeah, absolutely. I've been in the US now for 12 years. I actually came to Palo Alto, end of 99, was supposed to be initially just for one year as a kind of fellowship with SAP, and then we appended a year and appended a year. I was often thinking maybe join a typical Silicon Valley startup type of company and I passed on a couple of opportunities and I've been for 15 years at SAP and I thought maybe it's almost too late to get anywhere else. So when I got to know then Godfrey and Eric earlier this year, it took me a little while to get my arms around what Splunk is really doing and completely understand the opportunity, but once I saw it, I thought this is really something I want to do and then I made a decision and I don't regret it. So I'm with the company now for half a year and it has been a blast. It's a great team. I enjoy Godfrey's leadership and the rest of the management team. It's a fantastic crew and also the team that Eric inherited me. So you saw yesterday during the keynote that we did a kind of handover of the torch from Eric to myself and I appreciate the trust that they are giving me and you've heard what we are up to. We want to grow the company quite a bit and it's going very well. I mean in the moment, the company is growing 60, 70 percent revenue year over year and I think they wanted to have a guy who has seen a large company before and operated at a larger scale and that's what I did at SAP. I had a global organization distributed over seven countries, more than 800 people and I think that's certainly a valuable background and experience that can I bring now to Splunk. Interesting, so I'm eager to get your take as a newcomer to Splunk and having spent a long time at SAP and kind of in that enterprise software world, how do you see Splunk, is Splunk disrupting and not just Splunk, but big data in general Splunk specifically, is it disrupting the traditional business intelligence data warehouse industry and so how? Because it seems like it is certainly big data is a different approach, it's more flexible, it's more extensible versus a little more structured world of the enterprise data warehouse we're used to and coming from SAP with their business optics portfolio, I thought you might have an interesting perspective. Yeah, you know it's kind of interesting. I mean I didn't stumble across Splunk in my past life at all and if you study the BI quadrants or forest highways, I don't think you would see Splunk showing up in any of the BI coverage. I don't think the market sees us really in that space right now. We are seen in some other areas like enterprise security for example, and IT operations, application management and Splunk is certainly very different. I mean one of the things I found very differentiating from what most of the BI companies are doing is that we don't have this notion of a big modeling effort when you start to use a tool. I mean most of the BI companies they're required to define some sort of schema, a cube and structure of the data and that is a notion I think that Splunk really doesn't have. I mean typically what we do when we come into a customer we identify what data is interesting for the customer, we suck it into our system and then you can answer pretty much whatever question you have after it but it doesn't require this big modeling effort. So that's one big differentiating area. The other I would say key difference is the viral nature of the product and that's something I you know probably a lot of the big guys like SAP and IBM with Cognos and whoever has a large BI portfolio would like to get to is a small product that is easy to download, easy to implement and with a very small footprint and I think this is really something that Splunk got absolutely right. So if you go to our website and that's where most of the customers actually start, right? They download our free product and start in a small department with a project and then at some point in time they understand it and see other use cases and grow it and I think that is really relatively easy possible with Splunk but not with many of the other enterprise products that you find out in the market. Yeah it seems to be an increasingly successful way to go to market to have that way for customers to do trial. We did some work with Atlassian in the past and they have a similar thing where you can it's not free it's $10 that goes to charity which is a brilliant twist on the theme but you get in you try it people learn it and they do get this viral nature as more and more people get exposed to the application use the application and it's actually something that the founders did very deliberately so I sat down with Rob Das and Eric some time ago and they told me all the whole story say how they started and I mean it's kind of interesting what they did I mean first of all they really took some time off to understand what is an interesting problem to solve I mean they had a couple of startups that they did before which didn't go that well and then I think they sit down you know what we really want to go after something that you could make money with yeah and that solves a really tangible problem and I think they spent a couple of months to just interview companies and then they heard hey wow yeah there's there's really one you know kind of reoccurring recurring pattern once they spoke to all these different companies that they have really a hard time to understand you know what is the information that is hidden in those logs and other data sources that companies have in their IT infrastructure and it just turned out to be damned hard for those companies to get really to that information yeah that was one thing and the other thing I believe they realized is that they wanted to change the way how this stuff is sold yeah I think they had an experience how enterprise software is sold yeah it was a long sales cycle and a sales executive yeah that needs to build relationships and whatever right and I think they wanted to do it just in a different way you know let let's a customer or people at the customer do the selling themselves yeah and that's how it typically works today so a customer starts they download the product get started with free and then they scale up at some point in time and they actually do the selling for us yeah which I think makes it a lot easier yeah yeah we had the target guys on the cube earlier and that's exactly what happened with them one of them had a little project downloaded Splunk solve the solve the project and what they said they've only been using Splunk since November it's already taken off and they've got initiative after initiative after initiative planned out that they want to they want to come up with the product and you know I think one of the other things yeah that that probably Rob and Eric and the early crew got right it's a we're looking from the very beginning at very concrete use cases yeah and we're very close to the customer and for my past experience I would say that that is really the way how you can innovate the best sit down with a customer understand the problem and then co-innovate with the customers and I think that that's really what the company did for a long time and we try to continue to do every year on the customer understand the specific problem and a lot of the things that you see now coming also into course Plunk in the core product I think are all driven really by what our customers are telling us so I'm interested to hear about how from a product perspective yeah you know the idea that Splunk often starts off in the in the data center and then moves to other use cases in particular customer circumstances what kind of pressure does that put on the product team to to keep the product flexible enough to expand to use cases that you've never really thought of before and that your customers are coming up with you know I mean I spoke also yesterday in the keynote about it I think was Splunk growing up now I think we become a lot more aware and this is really happening when you look at how our customers are using the product I think we become more and more really a platform yeah that addresses a broad range of use cases and yesterday in the keynote I showed a little diagram I mean either you call it virtual circle of platform or fly wheel and you know I think there are a couple of principles that we need to go after and look at to make this a solid foundation and a viable platform yeah so I spoke about reuse and that's what we are doing now for a while that we take the same architecture the same stack and use it across this large spectrum of different use cases yeah whether it's application management IT operations enterprise security PCI compliance web analytics and what have you and I think this reuse principle allows us really I would say to focus on making this optimizing this platform yeah optimizing the elements of the platform the index the search the visualization and I think this wouldn't happen if we would build off build one of type of solutions and applications all the time so I think that is very important then I think we learned a lesson about the product needs to be more modular yeah because we can do everything customers find you know different things that they want to do with it and and that's where we started now to open it up right yeah so we make the product more modular and one big push I mean we are talking a lot about this during the conference is our developer interfaces yeah that we have added to it and one one of the things that I liked very much about Splunk from a I would say architectural perspective yeah is that they kept it very clean the design in terms of having a rest API between the core engine and the consumption so all the UIs that are built on the engine are sitting on this rest API and what we have done now with the the SDKs that we kind of just put a language specific wrapper on top of the rest API that was already there yeah and so we have now a number of SDKs available for Java JavaScript Python there is one in PHP that is in the makings and we will add to that yeah to just make it very easy to consume for developers in whatever programming language environment they are sitting that's another example yeah of I would say how this experience of growing now growing up you know drives I would say new things that we are doing in the architecture open it up for consumption by developers making it more modular we are also going after more I would say interoperability and integration with the different applications because I mean if you look at what our customers are doing you know when they start to get bigger these things don't exist in a in a silo yeah they don't do just you know IT operations but it's all connected yeah they need to look for the infrastructure they need to look for the applications they also need to go after enterprise security and you have seen yesterday in the keynote some examples yeah Will Hayes spoke about it how these things are kind of all connected together and I think now as a platform yeah we can do this right and that's really exciting yeah too I would say makes us much much bigger and get a lot more impact really interesting story about you know having the real discrete use cases and having a really easy way to try and buy and use but at the same time architecting for a platform play for down the road when the big you know as Dan said the data fabric trying to be the data fabric for the enterprise and being able to parallel track those and then of course just it seems to be the what everyone wants to do now is then to extend your capability through a community with the partner apps and enable them to extend into ways that you guys and your team haven't even thought of or you know very specialized use case or whatever you know I mean one interesting thing and you can hear Godfrey Salew and our CEO talk a lot about that maybe the biggest problem we have at Splunk right now is to decide what we are not doing yeah because there are so many ideas and customers come come to us and I think that that's also part of my role now to do a proper prioritization exercise with the team and say okay with our capabilities that we have right now these are the things that we are going after for the next year it's a pretty agile shop I mean this is also something I like I mean we are not making you know grand two years three-year plans sure we have a strategy and also a long-term strategy but we execute in a fairly agile way so pick the top things from the backlog and then execute very well and I mean this is also impressive you know how the team is actually executing so it's a very well run shop you know that produces a lot of I would say rock solid software every every year and you have seen the pipeline here it's a conference right I mean for for the size of the company and and the engineering organization you know I'm proud and I was also impressed when I came in about the magnitude here of what the team is doing so enterprise scale big data story we do a lot of visualization we have this broad spectrum of applications here which is really rich in a lot of different areas that require also quite a bit of domain skill and then we you know just launched two weeks ago our cloud-based product storm right so there's a lot of stuff going on for for the size of the company I think we need to make sure that we are not trying to swallow too much right well you spoke of priorities so maybe you could curate clue audience into what those priorities are for you for the next six 12 months and what are the real I guess what are the real challenges for Splunk over the next year and where the priorities you're focused on so what's going on right now I would say are two big things number one is continuing our scalability and performance story I mean you heard a couple of announcements here during the conference so index clustering which I think gets us really to the next level in terms of resiliency and then we have also you know some of these acceleration features report acceleration we spoke about and that story will continue we have a couple of I would say follow-ons to these stories in the next release which will come next year so you know there is a tradition that Splunk to name our releases after ponies this one we just chipped was the ace release I don't know if you have ever heard the story but no what is the story of the pony I think it's worth because I keep saying ponies all over the place there were ponies at the party last night there was like virtual ponies in 2012 teleporting from I don't know where they were teleporting from it became the mascot and you know I'm not the historian of the company and I'm not sure if I tell it completely correctly but as far as I recall you know Eric wanted to do and and he has a very generous soul and always cares about people yeah he wanted to do something good and ask one of the developers hey what can I do for you I think the crew has worked very hard and he said you know can you get me a something pony yeah and a week later he actually brought a big mascot pony into the office and it kind of became the mascot of the of the company and you know now the releases are named after after these ponies I think it must be something for children attire so there there is ace the next one is be what is it bubbles bubbles the next one is bubbles and after that comes cupcake well it's what's funny I think actually it was a lot it was a much well thought out plan to get you to join them because if anyone's ever been sap in Palo Alto there's more ponies and horses around that office building that I think there are anywhere else in the peninsula off of page mill road but it's been great we're here with Gita Schroeder the senior vice president of products force Blanc thank you really a lot for your insights it's it's it's really fun to hear your enthusiasm having been in a big mature ERP company and to come into a startup environment be so enthused and be you know but still back in the enterprise changing the world and changing the way a lot of people are doing their business oh I don't regret the move yeah and Splunk is hiring so if anybody else wants to join us we will probably hire into engineering next year about 50 people you know in the Bay Area and I can tell you it's a it's a fun place it's interesting stuff we are working on yeah and a fantastic team to join so if you're ever contemplating you know also making a move checkouts Blanc I think it's a it's an excellent place thanks well he's not enthusiastic is he I mean come on so here we are we're gonna sign off now we've got another guest lined up we back in just a few minutes we're again we're at the Splunk conf 2012 in beautiful Las Vegas the cosmopolitan hotel we'll see you in just a few minutes