 Well, hi everybody, I'm John Walls here and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Splunk.conf 21. And we've talked a lot about data, obviously, and a number of partnerships and the point of resources that it's going on in this space. And certainly a very valuable partnership that Splunk has right now is one with Intel. And with me to talk a little bit more about that is Rick Echivarria, who is the vice president of sales and the marketing group at Intel. Rick, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. It's good to see you, John, and thanks for having us. You bet. No, glad to have you as part of the.conf coverage as well. Well, first off, let's just for folks at home who would like to learn more about this relationship, the Splunk Intel partnership. If you would give us the 30,000 foot picture of it right now in terms of how it began and how it's evolved to the point where it resides today. Yeah, sure glad to do that. Splunk has had for many years position as one of the world's best security information and event management platform. So just like many customers in the cybersecurity space, they're probably trying to retire their technical debt. And one of the areas of important focus is the SIM space, right? The SIM segment within cybersecurity. And so the initial engagement between Intel and Splunk started with the information security group at Intel looking to again retire the technical debt, bring next generation SIM technology. And that started the engagement with Splunk. Again, to go solve the cybersecurity challenges. One of the things that we quickly learned is that those Splunk offers a great platform from a SIM point of view. As you know, the cybersecurity segment, the surface area of attack, the number of attacks they can continue to increase. And we quickly realized that this needed to be a collaboration in order for us to be able to work together to optimize our infrastructure. So it could scale, it could be performant, it could be reliable to protect Intel's business. And as we started to work with Splunk, we realized, hey, this is a great opportunity, Intel's benefiting from it. Why don't we start working together and create a reference architecture so that our joint customers also benefit from the collaboration that we have in the cybersecurity space as we were building the Intel cybersecurity infrastructure platform. So that was really the beginning of the collaboration that we're going to describe here in a little bit more detail. Right, so you had this good working relationship and said, hey, why don't we get together, let's get the band together and see what we can do for our joint clients down the road, right? So what about those benefits then? Because you've got this almost as force multiplier of Intel's experience and then what Splunk has been able to do in the data analytics world. What kind of values are being derived, do you think, with that partnership? Well, obviously we feel much better about our cybersecurity posture. And what's sort of interesting, John, is that we realized that we were, what started out as a conversation on SIM, it really turned out to be an opportunity for us to look at Splunk as a data platform. And in the technology world, you sometimes hear people talk about the horizontal capabilities and the vertical usages and really the security, the SIM technology really became one of several, sorry about the noise in the background, one became a vertical application. And then we realized, hey, we can apply this platform to some other usages. And in addition to that, when you think about cybersecurity and what we use to SIM, that tends to be part of your core systems in IT. We started to explore what can we do with, what could we do with other data types for other different types of applications. And so what we decided to do is, we would go explore usages of this data at the edge of the network and really started to move into much more of that operational technology space when we realized that Splunk could really, that we could integrate, that we can ingest other types of data. And that started a second collaboration around our open Vino technology and our AI capabilities at the edge with the ingestion and the machine learning capabilities of Splunk so that we can take things like visual data and start creating dashboards for example, managing the flow of people, especially in a COVID environment. So an understanding utilization of spaces. So it really started with SIM, it's moved to the edge and now we realize that there's a continuum in this data platform that we can build other usages around. You know what was that learning curve like when you went out to the edge? Cause a lot of people are talking about it, right? And there was a lot of banter about this is where we have to be. But you guys put your money where your mouth was, right? And you went out, you explored that frontier. And so what was that like and I guess maybe kind of being early in, what advantage do you think that has given you as that process has matured a little bit? Well, it's really interesting, John, because what really accelerated our engagement with Splunk in that space was the pandemic. And we had in 2020 Intel announced the its pandemic response technology initiative where we decided we were going to invest $50 million in accelerating technologies and solutions and partnerships to go solve some of the biggest challenges that a pandemic was presenting to the world at large. And one of those areas was around companies trying to figure out how to manage spaces, how to manage the number of people that are in a particular space and social distancing and things of that nature. And we ended up engaging with Splunk in this collaboration again to start looking at visual data, right? Integrating that with our OpenVINO platform. And again, their machine learning and algorithms and start then creating what you would call more operational technology types of application based on visual data. Now this will have other applications that can be used for security usages. It could be used for, again, social distancing, the utilization of assets. But the pandemic and that program that Intel launched is really what became the catalyst for collaboration with Splunk that allowed us to expand into space. Brian, you've done a tremendous amount of work in the healthcare space. I mean, especially the last year and a half with the pandemic. Can you give just a couple of examples of that, maybe the variety of uses or the variety of processes that you've had an influence in because I think it's pretty impressive. Yeah, we, there's quite a bit of breadth in the types of solutions we've deployed as part of the pandemic response. John, you can think of some of the, I wouldn't call these things basic things but you think about telehealth and improving the telehealth experience all the way to creating privacy aware, or sorry, solutions for privacy-sensitive usages where you're doing things like getting multiple institutions to share their data with the right privacy, which, you know, going back to secure but in privacy with the right protections for that data but being allowing organization A and organization B partner together, use data, create algorithms that both organizations benefit from. And an example of that is work we've done around X-ray and using X-rays to detect COVID on certain populations. So we've gone from those, you know, data protection, algorithm development type of solutions to work that we've done in telehealth. So, and a lot of other solutions in between. Obviously in the high performance space we've invested in high performance computing for to help the researchers find cures for the, you know, current pandemic and then looking at future pandemic. So it's been quite a breath of solutions and it's really a testament also to the breath of Intel's portfolio and partnerships to be able to enable so much in such a short amount of time. Oh, I totally agree. I mean, I was just reading a little bit about it, about that work and you talk about the breadth of that, the breadth and the depth of that is certainly impressive. So just in general, we'll just put healthcare in this big lump of customers. So what do you think the value proposition of your partnership with Splunk is in terms of providing, you know, ultimate value to your customers because you deal with so many different sectors. But if you could, you know, just give me a summary from your perspective, this is what we do. This is why this power works. Yeah. Well, customers talk about transformate, you know, there's a lot of conversation around transformation, right? Before the pandemic and through the pandemic, but there's a lot of talk about companies wanting to transform and, you know, in order to be able to transform, one of the key elements of that is to be able to capture the right data and then turn that data into the right outcomes. And that is something that requires obviously the capabilities and the ability to capture, to ingest, to analyze the data and to do that on an infrastructure that is going to scale with your business that is going to be reliable and that is going to be, to give you the flexibility for the types of solutions that you're wanting to deploy. And that's really what this plunk collaboration with Intel is going to do. It's just a great example, John, of this strategy that our CEO, Pat Gelsinger, recently talked about the importance of software to our business. This plunk collaboration is right in the center of that. They have capabilities in SIM, in IT, observability, in many other areas in this whole world is turning data into outcomes, into results. But that has to be done on an infrastructure that again will scale with your business just like what's the case with Intel and our cybersecurity platform, right? We need to collaborate to make sure that this was going to scale with the demands of our business and that requires close integration of hardware and software. The other point that I will make is that what started out as a collaboration between Intel and Splunk, it's also expanding to other partners in the ecosystem. So I like to touch a little bit on a work stream that we have ongoing between Intel Splunk, HPE and Deloitte. And why is that important? It's because as customers are deploying solutions, they're going to be deploying applications and they're going to have data in multiple environments, on-premise, across multiple clouds. And we have to give these customers the ability to gather the data from multiple sources and that's part of the effort that we're developing with HPE and Deloitte to allow people to gather data, perform their analytics regardless of where their data is and be able to deploy the Splunk platform across these multiple environments, whether it's going to be on-prem or it's going to be in a pure cloud environment or it's going to be in a hybrid with multiple clouds. We want to give our customers the most flexibility that we can and that's where that collaboration with Deloitte and HPE is going to come into play. Right, and you understand Splunk, right? You get the workload. I mean, it's totally, there's great familiarity there which is of great value to that customer base because you can apply that. So obviously you're giving this like multiple thumbs up about the partnership. What excites you the most about going forward? Because as you know, it's all about where are we going from here? It's not where we've been. So in terms of where you're going together in that partnership, what excites you about that? Well, first of all, we're excited because it's just a great example of the value that we can deliver to customers when you really understand their pain points and then have the capability to integrate solutions that encompass software and hardware together. So I think that the fact that we've been able to do the work on that core sim space where we now have a reference architecture that shows how you could really scale and deliver that Splunk solution for your cybersecurity needs and a scalable and reliable and with high level of security, of course. And the fact that we then also been able to co-develop fairly quickly solutions for the edge allows customers now to have that data platform that can scale and can access a lot of different data types from the edge to the cloud. That is really unique. I think it provides a lot of flexibility and it's applicable to a lot of vertical industry segments and a lot of customers. Right, and be attractive to a lot of customers. And that's for sure. Rick, Edge of Aria, we appreciate the time. Always good to see you and we certainly appreciate your joining us here on theCUBE to talk about .conf21 and your relationship with the folks at Splunk. Yeah, thank you, John. You've been talking about Intel, Splunk, good partnership, long-time partnership that has great plans going forward. We continue our coverage here of .conf21. You're watching theCUBE.