 Live from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering splunk.com 2015. Brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and George Gilbert. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas, with Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the sizzling noise. I'm John Furrier. I'm the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm John McCos, George Gilbert, chief analyst for our big data practice at wikibon.com. Go to wikibon.com, check out all the latest, greatest research at SiliconAngles.com for the blog posts, all the videos on SiliconAngles.tv. Our next guest is Tom Pike, IT manager at Crossroads Foundation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having us. Great to see you. We're here live with Splunk.comference in Vegas. So, talk about what your company does. We'll talk about some of the Splunk activity. Sure, so Crossroads is a nonprofit located in Hong Kong. And essentially we try and connect those who are in need with those who have resources. And we do that in four different ways. The first way in which we do it is we collect a lot of the superseded goods that are in Hong Kong itself. We refurbish them and then we give them away to those in need, both locally in Hong Kong and internationally. We also support a number of nonprofit organizations by providing the material resources they need to do their job better. The second service that we offer is a, we try and form partnerships between companies and nonprofit organizations. And we do this in the hope that these partnerships will be ongoing and likely changing. The third thing we do is we seek out producers from developing nations who are creating ethically sourced products. And we try and connect those with buyers on a global market. Our hope and reason for doing that is we want to provide a pathway for these communities that these products are sourced from to lift themselves out of poverty. And finally, we offer educational activities. We try and do actually much more than education. We try and motivate people into action. Action to help world needs, both as an individual, as a company and as a community. So talk about Splunk event here. What's it like here? What are you doing here? What's activities? What sessions? What's going on in your mind as you look out of the Splunk conference here? What's resonating with you? What's some of the things that are jumping out at you? We primarily use Splunk for infrastructure management. And it is very, for us it's very advantageous to come to an event like this and see what the rest of the industry is doing. It's great to come out and see what other companies are doing, different ways in which they are using Splunk. And if there are ways in which we can apply that back to our own work. In the hope that we can become more effective in the work that we are doing. So talk about the non-profit. I'm sure your IT budget is like a billion dollars, right? I mean, you know. I wish it was a billion dollars. Yeah, but you have to do a lot more with less and you have to be very efficient. I'll say, you know, making a profit. That doesn't mean you're rolling in the cash. Operationally, take us through what your life's like and what is Splunk doing for you guys because this is everyone's challenge with your non-profit to, you know, from the non-profit to the for-profit boardroom. Sure, Splunk is really one of our cornerstone technologies. For instance, in 2014, we shipped the equivalent of about 184 20-foot shipping containers to over 1500 recipients in 24 different countries. And that really requires fairly extensive infrastructure for that process to work. We have our inventory management systems. We have our shipment application systems and all these sort of, these different supporting tools that support our infrastructure. Splunk, again, is really one of those key technologies that allows us to really stretch our human resources. Crossroads itself is entirely staffed by volunteers. We have 61 full-time staff and none of them are paid from the director's downwards. The actual IT staff only consists of three people. We have a CTO, we have a developer and myself, I'm the CIS admin for the entire organization. So I personally am looking after the infrastructure of the entire organization. And Splunk is really one of those key tools that allows us to manage what we have in a way which allows us to do the work that we do. Can you give an example? Well, we have 160 desktops, 1200 network ports. It really is on paper. It's not the sort of thing that one person should be able to manage. We also manage infrastructure for offices in the US, the UK and Australia. And Splunk is really that tool that allows us really to stretch and to become much, much more effective in the work that we do. So what do you think about the announcements today? Actually, some of those are really very exciting. We, at Crossroads, we are continuously looking to innovate. If you look around the globe, there is just massive world needs. At the moment, at the end of 2014, there was 19 million refugees in the world. Four million refugees in the Syrian crisis alone. And we try and help out in these particular crises along with other works. And really, we need to innovate to continue to do the work that we do and to help these people in these different regions. One of the things we were particularly excited about seeing from the product launches today was we are undergoing a process in Hong Kong right now to streamline the way in which we do goods donation. Hong Kong has one of the highest smart phone penetrations in the world. I think it's only second to Singapore at the moment. And so we are really looking to make goods donation process mobile. The second thing that we are looking to do is really to leverage crowd sourcing. We have, in a given year, we have between 6,000 to 7,000 community volunteers come and help us do the work that we do. And we want to be able to offer them opportunities to help whilst they're not physically on our side. And so what this means is we are asking some of those volunteers who have been trained to help us in this goods donation process through their mobile device. This means that we are really radically, we are seeing a radical change in our device profile. We are going from devices that we fully manage and fully own to ones, you know, we are going BYOD. And so we, some of the products that we saw announced today, where we can look at user behavior, we can see, you know, some of this threat analysis is actually something which is, something we are actually quite excited about and seeing whether we can apply that in this particular new program. So what do you think about the big data and machine learning aspects of operational data? You see that impacting you? We see some aspects of that. We realize that the amount of data that we collect on a particular day is probably small when compared to most organizations out there. We index about 11 to 15 gigabytes a day. We have, however, been able to use some of the data that we have collected in the past for business intelligence. Like an example of this was many years ago before we had implemented a CRM within our organization. We were, as I mentioned, we have a partnership service where we try and match corporates and nonprofits. And we really see the benefit of reaching out to corporate organizations to help us help others in need and to help other nonprofits help others in need. And so one day the CTO came to me and he said, look, how can we leverage the data that we have in our systems to be able to understand how we are interacting with our partners? And so one of the ways in which we did that was we, we looked at our exchange transport logs. We looked at the domains of the different groups that we have been working with. And then we were able to see who were our, which organizations we were most talking with and we were most interacting with. And through that we could allocate our resources internally to best meet the needs that we had for time. So I'm curious about the mobile part since that's now, that's sort of the de facto device or interacting with services, you know, as opposed to a web experience. Besides understanding sort of just like the device ID, perhaps in a way that you couldn't do with an anonymous sort of web browser, what does it tell you about your services that can feed back into improving them? Improving the experience, improving the outcomes, that sort of thing. Sure, I think any process which allows us to make the process of goods donation better is one that will have very productive gains for us. One of the reasons we actually embarked on this process was that it was difficult for our end users to do certain things and it was a process that took time. So within the goods donation process, we want to maximize the benefit to donors but also to our recipients. And one of the reasons we're launching into this particular project was because of that and we certainly will be looking at the analytics to see where we can be continually improving this particular service. Okay, and so on the back end, are you, I mean, you said you're in the sort of tens of gigabytes per day but no matter what the amount is, are you resource, anyone could be resource constrained. Do you find this helps you either use your resources more efficiently or does it help you pinpoint service problems more quickly so that they're more preventable instead of fixable? I think you've actually hit two points on the head that we really use Splunk for. I mean, as I mentioned, we are very grateful to the people of Plunk for the many hundreds and thousands of hours of volunteerism that they give us. Actually last year we had our one millionth hour of volunteering and we actually have an internal system that allows us to track each volunteer as they come onto our site. We do that for a couple of reasons, for things like the fire roster. But as we had, as the number of entries in that system grew, the system was slowing dramatically and what our developer did was he actually, he dove into Splunk and we're a rail shop and he looked at which of the controllers were slow and he was able to pinpoint one through looking at the Splunk blocks. He improved that one controller and we saw a 35 times increase in the speed of that particular application. So we can use Splunk to very precisely pinpoint performance problems and for us, that is actually something which is quite critical because our resource constraints are typically people. We have one full time developer and so we were very effectively able to allocate his resources to fix a very real problem for us. The second thing which you mentioned there was actual resource allocation. That crossroads ourselves, as I mentioned, we receive a lot of superseded items from Hong Kong and that includes most of our IT infrastructure. So almost all of our servers are donated from businesses and individuals in Hong Kong. And so I think like most organizations we have some projects where the resource requirements are seasonal, some will grow, some will decrease. And one of the things that we have done with Splunk in the past was look at how resources were allocated across all of our different IT infrastructure and see what were underutilized and what was being overutilized. And we're then able to reallocate resources to maximize the benefit. Okay, hey Tom, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. I'll give you the final word here. Share with the folks that aren't here at the event that are watching. What's it like here? What's the vibe? What's the flavor of this show? I think it is actually a conference which is very exciting. There's a lot of great products which are being announced here and I think for us we see a lot of value in those particular products, so thank you. Craig, we are here live in Las Vegas for Splunk.com. We'll be more after this short break. More guests, day one coverage, two days. Live is theCUBE, we'll be right back.