 Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of .com, Splunks.com virtual event, their annual summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've been covering .com since 2012, usually a physical event in person this year. It's virtual. I'm here at Claire Hawken who's the CMO of Splunks. She's been here three and a half years, your first year as CMO. And you got to go virtual from physical. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you very much, John. Great. So I got to ask you, I mean, this has been the most impressive virtual event. You've taken over the hotel here in Silicon Valley, your entire, the entire teams here. It feels like there's a dynamic of like the teamwork. You can kind of feel the vibes. It's almost like a little VIP Splunk event, but you're broadcasting it to the world. Tell us what's happening. It's been, I think for everyone a year where we really hope to be back to having a hybrid event, so having a big virtual component, but running .com as we had before from Las Vegas, which wasn't possible. So what we thought in the last six weeks is that we would actually bring the Splunks studio to a physical location. So we've been live all of this week from California where we're sitting today and really thought through bringing the best of that programming to our amazing audience of 26,000 people. So we're sitting here in the studio. We have a whole live stage and we've activated the best of .com to bring as many Splunkers as we can and as many external guests to make it feel as real and as vibrant as possible. So I have to say, I'm very impressed that since 2012 and watching the culture evolve, Splunk has always been that next big thing and then the next big thing again. It seems to be the theme as data becomes so bigger and more important even than ever. There's a new Splunk emerging. Another kind of next big thing. This kind of says the pattern Splunk, do something big, that's new, operationalize it, do something new again. This is a theme, big part of this culture. Can you share more about how you see this evolving? Sure, and I think that's what makes Splunk such a great place to be. And I think it attracts people who like to continually challenge, reinvent. And I think we've spent a lot of time this year building out our portfolio, going through this cloud transformation. It just gives you a whole new landscape of how you unlock that power of data and how our customers use it. So we've had a lot of fun always building on top of that, building our partnerships, what customers do and really having fun with it. I think one of the best things about Splunkers, we do have this incredibly fun and playful brand and as data just becomes something that is more and more powerful, it's really relatable and we have fun with activating that and storytelling. And you have new manager, Teresa Carlson came in from Amazon Web Services. You have a lot more messaging, kind of building on previous messaging. How are you handling and looking at the aperture of that's growing from a messaging standpoint? You have a partner verse, which is rebranded of your solution, of your ecosystem. Kind of a lot of action going on in your world. What's the update? It keeps us busy and I think at one end, the number of people that are using Splunk inside any customer base is just growing. So you have different kinds of users and this year we're really working hard on how to partner and position Splunk with developers. But at the top end of that, the value of data and the idea of having a data foundation is something that's incredibly compelling for CTOs. So working really hard about looking at Splunk and data from that perspective as well as the individual uses across some areas like security and observability. You know, one of the things I wanted to ask you is I was thinking about this when I was driving in this morning. Splunk has a lot of customers and you keep your customers and you have a lot of customers that organically came into the Splunk through the product leadership and just great product. And then as security became more important, Splunk kind of takes that territory down. Now mainstream enterprise with the platform are leaning into Splunk solutions and now you got an ecosystem. So it's just becoming bigger and bigger. It just seems that the scale of the Splunk is growing radically bigger than it was. Is that happening? And what's your take on that? I think that's definitely a thing, John. So I think that the power of the ecosystem is amazing. We have customers, partners as you've seen and everything just joins up. So we're seeing more and more dot joining through data and we're just seeing this incredible velocity in terms of what's possible and how we can co-build with our partners and do more and more with our customers. So Splunk moves incredibly quickly. And I think if anything, we're just gaining velocity which is fun and also really challenging. Cloud scale and certainly during the pandemic you guys had a tailwind on the business side. Talk about the journey that you've had with Splunk as in your career and also for the customers. How are they reacting and what can they expect as Splunk continues to evolve? I think we're working really hard to make sure that Splunk is easier to use. Everything gets every more integrated. And I think our goal and our vision is you just, you just capture your data and you can apply it to any use case using Splunk and to make it sort of easier to see that data in action. And one of the things I love from today was the dashboard studio. They're just these beautiful visualizations that really are inspiring around how data is working in your organization. And for me I've been a Splunker for three and a half years and I just think there is just so much to do and there's so much of our story ahead of us and so much potential. So just really enjoying working with customers on the next data frontier really. You have the Jedi Knight from Star Wars speaking. We do. You had the F1 car racing, Lando was here. Kind of the young Jedi, the old Jedi. Kind of the generations are coming together. You're seeing kind of that old IT world which relied on Splunk and now you have this new developer, real time shifting left with security, DevOps now going mainstream. You kind of have the confluences of these cultures coming together. It's not really clashing. How are you handling that? How do you see that and what Splunk kind of doing? Because I can see the themes. Am I right or am I going to? No, no. One of the stories from this morning that really struck me is we have Cal Poly and we work with Cal Poly on their security and they actually have their students using Splunk and they run their whole security environment. And at the very top end, you have Walmart, the Fortune one just using Splunk at a massive incredible scale. And I think that's the power of data. I mean data is something that everyone should and can be able to use and that's what we're really seeing is unlocking the ability to bring all of your data in service of what you're trying to do, which is fun and it just keeps growing. We had Zach Brown on the CEO of F1, McLaren team, racing team here on theCUBE earlier. And it was interesting because I was like, driving the advantage with data, kind of cliche, but they're using data very specifically, highly competitive. It almost kind of feels like a cloud kind of scale model because they've got thousands of people working on the team, they're on the track, they're competing, they're using data, they've got to be agile, they've got to be fast, real time, kind of sounds like the current enterprises these days. Absolutely, and I think what's interesting about McLaren that the thing I love is they have hundreds of terabytes of data, moving it just at incredible speed through Splunk Enterprise, but it all goes back to their mission control in the UK and there are 32 people that look at all that data and I think it's got a half second delay and they make all the decisions for the car on the track. And that I think is a great lesson to any enterprise is you have to bring all that data together and you have to look at it and take decisions centrally for the benefit of your whole team. And I think McLaren is a really good example of when you do that, it pays dividends and the team has had a really, really great season. Well, I want to say congratulations for pulling off a great virtual event. I know you had your physical event on track and literally canceled in the last minute because of the pandemic, the Delta virus, but it was amazing, made for digital TV kind of event. Absolutely. And this is the future of media. Absolutely, and it's a lot of fun and I think I'm really proud. We have done all of this with our in-house team, the brand, the experiences that you see, which is really fantastic and it's given us a lot of ideas for sort of, digital media and how we storytell and really connect our 20,000 customers, our 230,000 community members and keep everyone connected through digital. So this has been a lot of fun and a really nice moment for us this week. You know, it's interesting. I was saying to the team here on one of our breaks is that when you have this kind of agility with media to tell your own story directly, you're almost telling more stories there before and there's a lot to tell. You have a lot of successful customers, the new partners. What's the coolest story that you've seen? What would you share that you think is your favorite if you could pick one or a few of them? What are your top stories that you see happening? So I've talked about Cal Poly, which I love because it's students and the scale of Walmart, but there are so many stories and I think the ones that I love most are the data heroes. We talk about the data heroes a lot at Splunk and the people that are able to harness that data and to take action on that data and make something amazing happen and we just see that time and time again across all kinds of organizations where data heroes are surfacing those insights, those red flags if you like and helping organizations stay one step ahead and Conf is really a celebration of that. I think that's why we do this every year and we really celebrate those data heroes. So across the program, probably too many to mention, but in every industry and at every scale, people are making things happen with data and that's an incredibly exciting place to be. You've got a lot of great customers to use as references, but I have to ask you as you go forward this year in marketing, what are your plans to take on this new dynamic? You've got hybrid events, you've got the community is always popular and thriving with Splunk, large-scale enterprises, global system integrators, doing business deals with you guys. As you guys are continuing to grow and grow and grow, what's the strategy? How do you keep the Splunk coolness going? Because you guys are growing so fast, that's your job is to keep things on track. What's your strategy? I think I look at that and just we put the customer at the heart of that and we think who are the personas? Who are the people that use Splunk? What's their experience? What are they trying to do? What are those challenges? And we design those moments to help them move forward faster and so that I think is just a really good North Star. It's really unifying and our partners and customers and every Splunker gets really behind that. So stay focused on that. Well, Cliff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Congratulations for a great event and thanks for having theCUBE. We love coming and sharing our media partnership with you. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much. And next year is your 10th year, John. So we look forward to celebrating that as well. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming on. Okay, there's theCUBE coverage here, live in the Splunk Studios. We're a virtual event, but it's turning it to be a hybrid event. It's like a VIP event. A lot of great stories. Check them out online. They'll be recycling through so much digital content. This is truly a great digital event. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.