 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering.conf 2017, brought to you by Splunk. Welcome back here on theCUBE. We continue our coverage at .conf 2017. I'm here at the Splunk event with about 7,000 plus Splunkers. Dave Vellante, John Walls, I like that Splunkers. You a Splunker? I'm not sure I'm a qualified. I'm learning how to become one. I'm really qualified to be a Splunker, I don't think. I think we're kind of in the cheap seats of Splunkism. Right now, but there's certainly a definite vibe and I think this is whole feeling of positivity amongst their community, right? That you get a sense of that here. Hot company, data centers booming. It's all happening. So we are in the Water Washington Convention Center day two of the convention. We're joined now by Stephen Hunt, who's the CIO of an organization called Team Rubicon. And Stephen, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Good to have you, sir. Thank you for having me. And CTO too, correct? Yes, that's right. And CTO. First off, let's talk about Team Rubicon. Veterans-based organization that you team up with disaster emergency responders, first responders, to come into crisis management times of disasters. I'm sure extremely busy right now. Gave birth to this organization back in 2010 after the Haiti earthquakes. So tell us a little bit more about your mission and what you're doing now. I assume you're up to your ears in all kinds of work, unfortunately. Yeah, so just speaking to our mission, our purpose is to leverage the skills of military vets and first responders in disaster. The capacity and skills that vets bring after active duty in the services is a remarkable resource that we've learned to tap to help people in need around the world. This is one of our, or this is our busiest time right now. We're responding in the greater Houston area, in Florida, the Florida Keys, British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Turks, Caicos. And it's just incredible what we're able to do in aiding people from the point of search and rescue to recovery and resilience. There's a broad spectrum of activities that our people engage in to make that all happen and across a diversity of locations. And it's been truly remarkable and challenging in ways that we never imagined right now. And I should add that you're a veteran yourself, paratrooper, 82nd Airborne, reservist, but also have an engineering background, MIT Lincoln Laboratories for 20-some-plus years. So you've got this interesting combination of experiences that have brought you in to a company that is also a beneficiary of the Splunk for Good program and part of the Splunk Pledge program. So you bring a pretty interesting portfolio to the job here, Stephen. That's a bit unusual. I do understand how a lot of the world works, not because I'm the smartest person in the room, I have a bit of a head start. There's a lot of experience there. And so bringing my engineering skills to the field, as well as to the business office and how we operate, and working with companies like Splunk, you know, I can see pretty quickly what's hard, what's easy. I understand that Splunk needs our requirements in order to deliver a product that's meaningful to us in our mission. So tying that all together is a bit unusual for an NGO to have someone like me around. I got involved simply to help people. When they told me at some point that we were going to build a business to help people, I said, I didn't come here to build a business. And it took me a little while to get oriented around the fact that as we expand the brand, as we bring it around the globe, it takes a strong business model and a strong technical model in how we project humanitarian aid in austere settings. In order to scale, I mean, right? Absolutely. So tell us more about the organization, how large is the organization? Where do you get the resources? How is it funded? So we're almost 100% privately funded, so corporations, foundations, individual donors from across the country and across the world. We have about 60,000 members and these are volunteers in globally. So how in the world do you do that? Well, it turns out we grew up at about the same time the cloud industry grew up. We've been around seven years and I would like to say that I'm some kind of genius and I said, well, we should follow the cloud. It was a judgment call and it was what we could manage. Today we have about 35 to 40 cloud software products that drive everything from donor management, volunteer management, how we deal with our beneficiaries, as well as our employees. And it's not just about product and mission, it's about protection and seeing through what's happening at the company at scale. We have about anywhere from 800 to 1500 people sign up to join, to become a part of Team Rubicon every week. Every week. And we couldn't do that without scale, without cloud technology. It's been truly remarkable. And the volunteers are all veterans, is that right? They were about 75 to 80% military vets, first responders and others. And so... Okay, and so they just, they make time to take time off from work or whatever it is and go volunteer. They'll get permission from whomever, their employers, their wives, husbands. So in the payment that we provide is a renewed sense of purpose. When you take off the uniform, there's a certain amount, a certain part of your identity that goes on the hanger and people don't see in you that's missing. And we give that back. And through service, and being around like-minded individuals, it's just amazing when we bring all of our people together and they align to work to this common mission. So in the, take recent examples in Florida and Houston, are they predominantly people that are proximate to those areas? Are you having to fly people in? How does that all work? We literally have people coming in from all over the world. So generally the way we run operations to keep them cost effective is we look first within 450 miles of an affected area and bring in people of close proximity. If there's need greater than that, then we expand the scope of the distance, if you will, logistically of where we bring folks in. We're all the way now to bringing in people from Australia, Norway, Canada, as well as the UK and they're working alongside each other seamlessly and that's really due to our standards in training. You can imagine when we scale, it's not just the technology, but it's how you use it in the field and in the business environment in the office. Go ahead, Dave. I'm sorry, this is so fascinating. Are they responsible for figuring out where they sleep, where they eat? I mean, how does that all work? Are you guys provide support there? No, yeah, we set that up. In the early days, we kind of took care of it ourselves. We reached into our own pockets and small groups went around the planet and helped people. It was kind of a club. Now it's a whole different story. And when we're bringing in 500 people a day, we need to know how they're fed, this safety, security, and protection, not just physically, but also emotionally. We want to make sure that we're really looking after people before, during, and after they deploy and help people. So we put them up and typically it's not the rits. You know, it might be a cut in a warehouse somewhere, but I've stayed at hotels with Team Rubicon members and maybe sometimes ate in a room. My old job wasn't like that. And all these guys are fighting to see who's going to sleep on the floor. I mean, it's a really interesting, you know. Yeah, very different dynamic, I'm sure. All right, so you talk about these global operations that you're expanding to what four or five countries you mentioned with thoughts of going larger. I know communications, huge part of that. You have a partnership now with a prominent satellite firm, you know, in Marsat. And how is that coming to benefit your operations and where does Splunk then come into play with that global communications opportunity? In Marsat and Splunk have been truly remarkable in impacting and working toward greater impact in how, you know, we deliver aid around the globe and make a couple of very clear points and deliver a metric here. We're running maybe 15 simultaneous operations distributed across all those areas I just discussed earlier. And historically, in all the time that I've been with Team Rubicon, we've always had outages when it comes to communicating whether our staff in these austere settings, you know, we have to, life safety is everything. That's right, the most important thing on my list is the welfare of the people I'm looking after and our beneficiaries, you know, our employees, volunteers and our beneficiaries. When we can't communicate if something goes wrong, it's a problem. In Marsat has set us up with communications gear in such a way that even though we're running all these operations that are most challenging time, I haven't had one complaint about not being able to communicate. And what Splunk is doing is integrating with the in Marsat backend to provide us the status of all of that equipment. And so from a perspective of where are they all located? What is the status of the, you know, the data usage to make sure that somebody doesn't get arbitrarily shut off, you know, that strategic view of what's happening across the globe and this was something that we've negotiated or in Marsat asked us to do and Splunk is stepping up to take care of that for us so that we can ensure life safety and coordination happens seamlessly. Just one more point about this. If you can communicate with everyone every day, your planning team isn't sitting idle, wondering what it needs to do next. So this tertiary effect has really driven our planning team to perform in a way that guides material and resources that I didn't really think about, but it's quite remarkable. So you, oh please, I thought you were finished, I apologize. No, no, it's okay, it's okay. So, I am excited, you can tell. It's fantastic. So the tech, let's get into the tech side of this. You've got SaaS apps, you've got logistics, you've got comms, you've got analytics stuff, you've got planning, you've got collaboration and probably a hundred other things that I haven't mentioned. Maybe talk about, you put your CTO hat on. Oh, no, absolutely. So one of the things I say to our people, the technology is important, but people are more important. So how we work with technology, it's adoption as a CIO is critical. I didn't need to say that. And when we're provided quality top tier software technologies to support education and training, as I mentioned, volunteer management, information management and security, and they're adopted naturally and they take off like a fire on a dry day, it means Splunk and other companies have produced a great product. And we've seen this time and again with our ecosystem. So that's a general statement about the cloud. Technologies, many companies have just done an exceptional job at building products that our people can work with. So I don't really complain too much about adoption across the board or struggle with it, I should say. So Google, Microsoft, Splunk, Cornerstone On Demand, Salamander, Everbridge, Palantir. To be careful, it's like naming kids, right? You're going to leave somebody out, right? Yeah, it's okay. You've got so many of these great benefactors. Yeah, they're used to it, but we work with all in and our new COO came in. I worked at, I apologize, I worked, I was a CIO CTO of Team Rubicon USA for about three years and I just moved over to Team Rubicon Global to help orchestrate our global footprint. And we've set up licensing and a model for where instances of software are located to meet legal, the legal regulatory framework for doing business internationally. And but the COO of USA, and I'm so proud of you what USA is doing right now, it's just blowing up. I mean, what they're accomplishing as the largest Team Rubicon entity, but he looked at me and he said, Steve, we're going to get rid of some of these software products. And I said, well, tell me what you don't want to do and I'll delete it. Happy to. And instead the number has gone up by 10, right? You know, since that conversation. So there's some great challenges with, and great opportunities, but as you know, when, you know, as your capacity increases, you know, with the, you know, working with data and information, your risk also goes up. So we've worked hard at impacting the behaviors of all of our people. It doesn't happen in a month or two months, it takes years. So that everyone is security minded in making good decisions about how we work with information and data. You know, whether it's a collective view provided by a product like Splunk, which gives us this global view of information. You know, if we have people working in a dangerous area and all of a sudden we know where all of our people are, we just don't post that up on the open internet, right? And that's a bad idea. Just to give you a simple example. Sure. Down to, you know, with the TII of our members and employees. And we're very, you know, we're becoming very good at that. And for an NGO, that's unusual. And, you know, we're going to be driving an independent security audit fairly soon to push it even further with the board of directors and executives. So the business team can make decisions about what we do technically based on, you know, liability and business model, right? For how we work. But, you know, for me, it's the highest priority is protection of everyone. Well, it is a wonderful organization. And we sincerely, Dave and I both thank you. Thank you for your service. Past, present and future tense for your service. Absolutely. Team Rubicon, they will accept contributions, both time and treasure. So visit the website, Team Rubicon and see what you might be able to do to lend help to the cause. Great cause that it is. Thank you, Stephen. Back with more from .com 2017 here in DC, right after this.