 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at Splunk.conf 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor Splunk. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is The Cube. We are live in Las Vegas for the Splunk conference.conf 2014. Hashtag Splunk.conf. You want to go to crowdchat.net slash Come join the conversation. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle Medium. I'm here with Jeff Kelly, my co-host, number one analyst and big data with keep on. And our next guest is Garrett Zorigian with Polycom. Welcome, welcome to The Cube. Thanks John. So you hail from Boulder, Denver. That's a lot of news coming out of Boulder over these days. Great tech center there. A great place to live. Indeed, yeah. So, I just want to say, love visiting. Really, really feel good when I leave that place. So, you're at Polycom, you're using Splunk. I really like your use case. And I think you haven't spoken here at the conference yet, but we'll get a little teaser out. You guys have been using Splunk in data specifically to really help expand your business. You're in the unified communication space which is changing dramatically. It was, you know, the voice business. And now with integrated medias, it's really amazing explosion of change. So, share with the folks out there the story of how you guys have used Splunk to really create value for Polycom. About three years ago, Polycom brought on the halo division of HP as an acquisition. At that time, it was a one-service business. Since then, we've expanded it to half a dozen or so different services over different types of technology. And Splunk has really allowed us to expand our service capabilities across all of those different services through the use of its analytics engine, but not only through analytics, but being able to alert different scenarios that are happening proactively, right? So, I got a, I'm one of these things in them. I'm on this big kick of, you know, riffing on like, and just exploiting the trend of data drives value. And real time's awesome, right? So, you know, this is what I think a lot of folks telling the same about the Splunk to the world, the tableaus, is that this new model that they have, this really, their platform, generates a lot of values. So, you essentially can go get data and essentially instrument the market you're trying to figure out. That's essentially what you guys have done. How long did it take? What was some of, take us through the play-by-play if you will. Well, we started with Splunk as a break fix tool. We manage 48,000 different devices and across about 40 different customers. And essentially what we're doing is providing a 24-7 service that allows our customers to be hands off with our video technology. And in order to do that, we need to be able to see what's happening across all of those different environments. Splunk has allowed us to build from just doing break fix analysis to doing proactive analysis, to doing predictive operational performance. And that allows us to see before our customers even know what's going on, that we have an issue coming up and we need to take care of it. That is then taken, analyzed. We do what we need to do in order to fix the situation. It gets fixed. The customer never even knows that there was a problem. That's a huge selling point for us in terms of our managed services business. And using Splunk to go from a 40% proactive detection rate up to a 67% proactive detection rate in under a year has been an incredible value for us. And how does that translate to benefits to the bottom line? Are you seeing, it's interesting you mentioned, the customer might not even know there was a problem that you kind of cut off in the past. But if the customer doesn't know it, how do they know they're getting the value? So how do you communicate what you're doing to customers and how is that translating all the proactive work you're doing associated with Splunk and helping your customers? How is that translating in terms of upsells or driving a new business, improve customer satisfaction, those kind of metrics? First and foremost, we've been able to reduce, we're a service level agreement business, right? We have SLAs, if we don't meet those SLAs, we pay out, right? We've reduced those SLAs in under a year by 30%. And that's been a huge value. So that's millions of dollars right there alone. And then you start talking about just the value of what we can share with our customers in terms of uptime in their video environment, in terms of proactive detection, in terms of being able to resolve remotely the issues that they're seeing. All of those things that Splunk, along with some other tools we're using, have been able to, we've been able to get there for our customers, which means increased customer retention, increased sales. It's been profitable across the board phase. Well, so the technology is one thing, but the culture and the willingness to take a more data-driven approach is quite another. We talk to a lot of enterprise customers and they sometimes struggle with getting the buy-in from either the executive level or even just among the departmental level in terms of making these more data-driven decisions. What was that journey like for you and your organization to actually kind of start looking at data as an asset that you can be more proactive, you can be more analytical in the way you make your decision-making? The sale to the executives really came from a page out of Splunk's book. Literally, there's an Exploring Splunk there. They talk about asking the right questions, right? And we talk about the difference between structured data and unstructured data and how unstructured data or structured data, you have to ask the questions ahead of time, whereas with the way Splunk is doing it, we ask the questions afterwards. So I went to our executive team and said, if you could ask questions of all of our devices out there, all of Polycom's devices, what would those questions be? What would R&D ask? What would marketing ask? What would services ask? And how valuable are the answers to those questions? And being able to layer the different types of data that we bring in from all of our platforms and endpoint devices, from mobile devices, that has really opened the eyes and the checkbooks so that we can expand what we're doing not only within managed services, but within our services team for global support and as well as our IT division. We'll talk about that a little bit more. So we know that part of Splunk's strategy has always been to kind of land and expand. So traditionally in their customers, they land and maybe the IT department, maybe doing some security analysis or some log data analysis, and then they expand to other departments within that organization. And I think in their last quarter, they referenced a number around two thirds of their upsell came from horizontal expansion. Is that happening in your organization? And walk us through, how does that actually happen? Is it the guy from marketing coming over and kind of peeking around the corner and say, what are you guys doing over there? How does it actually happen on the ground in a customer like yourself? You're right, it's a grassroots expansion. I started when I was managing our global tier four team utilizing Splunk to do just pure break fix analysis. When I came over to the managed services team, we started with the same thing. And then we started seeing that, well, you know what? We can see these things happening in our logs before the actual event occurs. So why don't we take a look at how we get more proactive detection when you start building on that? Then I'm traveling to the East Coast and talking to one of our service operations center. I sit down and talk with a technician and show her Splunk. And she's downloading logs, she's grepping those logs, she's sweating over trying to do the analysis. Show her Splunk, how quickly she can find what the problem was, and boom, it starts spreading like that through the organization. Same thing with IT. We came in through the security organization. On the managed service team, we had a security guru that went over to IT. When he went over to IT, he brought his knowledge of Splunk that we were using over to the IT world. And they've started expanding on what they're doing. We're going to be now expanding very soon here into the Splunk cloud. And IT services and managed services are all going to be coming into that with us. Another interesting point, because we heard in the keynote this morning, a few areas where Splunk is focusing their investment. One is around the mobile application developer experience. Cloud is another one now. And God, we saw it in the CEO mentioned that we really want to deliver analytics for everybody, wherever your data may reside. What's your take on Splunk's strategy of going from kind of a little bit of a niche back in 2008, kind of a machine data analysis application provider to more of a general purpose platform for multiple types of data sources within an organization? Do you think that's the right approach for Splunk, and just kind of what's your critical take on how they're developing? Well, I think it's right on. I think they're addressing in 6.2 the challenges that we've actually experienced in going through this. In my presentation tomorrow, I talk about how when you start with break fix analysis, that's kind of in a data mining operation, that's the sandstone. You break through that stuff really quickly, and you get value quickly. And then I akin the next level of getting from predictive proactive analytics into predictive and real-time business performance as the granite. That's where you really just have to keep pounding and pounding away with your data analysts, finding where those signatures are, finding the correlations. When Devani starts talking about pattern detection, built in, you know, native in Splunk, it just makes me smile because we're spending so much time doing exactly that, trying to find those patterns ahead of time, trying to break through that granite and then reiterating that cycle. Having that just one feature out of all the others they announced is going to be great for us. So as you see Splunk kind of continue to add value on the analytic side of the equation, that's where you're seeing a lot of, but that's where you'd like to see them kind of continue to put a lot of their investment. It sounds like. What are some of the other things that you're looking for from Splunk going forward? Obviously, they're a fast-growing company, and they're putting all their revenue really back into the company in development. So what are some of the things beyond kind of the analytics? Are there other areas that you'd like to see Splunk start to invest more in or develop more? You know, the analytics is key for us. And if I had to come up with anything, I would just say for us, it's we're ready to grow rapidly with Splunk and looking at the pricing model, different ways of doing, allowing us to expand that way. I think it's great right now. It's even better with the cloud, but we want to go from gigabytes of data to terabytes of data and having a vision for that and knowing what our cost structure is going to be so that we can work on total cost of ownership on these different things is going to be a big help for us. So as you grow and so you're expanding, we hear about, we cover the so-called big data space here at Wikibon and theCUBE, and we hear about, obviously it's about volume and velocity of data and variety of data, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm curious to get your take as a practitioner. How do you see these new approaches, Splunk being, I think, part of this new modern approach to data analysis? How is it impacting the more traditional world of enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence? Again, we saw on the keynote kind of the compared side-by-side, got myself in the CEO, kind of the old model of the eye. You've got to, you mentioned earlier, you've got to know the questions in advance when you're modeling those scenarios, it takes time, it's expensive, versus this new more agile approach. How is that manifesting stuff in your organization? Is there tension between kind of some of the newer things you're doing with Splunk and maybe some of the other more modern approaches? And the EDW, what's your take on how that's gonna kind of play out, and what the relationship is gonna be like between the two? Well, for us at Polycom, I really see the need to build more native integration into our applications so that we can tie into what Splunk is doing on a more, of a serviceability level. And having, you know, that our development teams really behind what the vision is around serviceability as a company, and really growing on the foundation that Polycom has laid down in servicing its customers by being able to build into our development cycles a partnership with Splunk, right? Where by we can easily deploy all the different devices and what Splunk gives us now through that unstructured data approach is the ability to take all of our different devices and put that data on top of itself and correlate the different pieces of data to understand what's going on in our customers' environment. And that is a process that, like I mentioned, we go through break fix proactive detection until we get to operational performance and that's been hard for us. We're spending a lot of time in terms of our data analytics team going through that. The easier that becomes for us, the better we'll be at servicing our customers. And that's going to come for me from not only from what Splunk is doing, like I mentioned, the pattern detection, but also what we need to do at Polycom in terms of developing so that our data coming out is more usable. So I got to ask you our final questions. I appreciate you coming on with Ty for time, but if you had to share some of your best practices in secret sauce of working with Splunk with other folks out there, what's the experience like? Give the taste of how easy it is to work with them and give them some letter grade. Take us through the checklist. Doing good here, doing here, needs improvement. How would you rate the Splunk experience and share your successes and best practices? So far, so great. A minus B plus, I mean, a lot. I mean, if you get new businesses out of it, you got to give them an A plus on that. I give nothing less than an A plus. What we went through over the last year to get where we are has been made a lot easier because of the partnership we've had with Splunk. The accessibility to the team at Splunk. Brian Gilmore has been an incredible asset for us to have and bouncing ideas off of. But it did come to a point where that first start, when we first started with Splunk, and we were building the platform, we were building the architecture of it all, that was great. We had people from Splunk come in, they helped us out with that. We built a really solid infrastructure to utilize Splunk on. The hard part for us is pushing through the correlation analytics, right? Layering all that data and understanding, because it's our stuff, it's our machines, right? It's our devices. And only Polycom really truly understands what's going on there. So Splunk can't help us. However, 6.2 pattern detection, that makes a huge difference. That reduces our workload tremendously. Well, I got to say, love Splunk, love their products and what they're doing. But I think the key thing that you bring to the table as a use case in my opinion is in changing businesses, you see Unified Communication certainly as changing and transforming. Or folks in other companies that realize that, hey, getting real-time data, using your own data to really get and put business, identify business opportunities, new business opportunities, not just existing. So it's existing and new. So that's the real IT focus right now. Okay, fix and break, all this break, fix stuff, fix existing stuff and do more. And then identify new opportunities. And I think the value for that is in the data. So you guys have really showcased a great example. Appreciate it. We're here inside theCUBE live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back after this short break.