 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at Splunk.com 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor Splunk. Here are your hosts, Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick. Everyone, this is Jeff Frick. You're watching The Cube. We're live at the Splunk.com 2014 conference, the fifth annual Splunk user conference at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It's our third year bringing The Cube here. We love coming to this show because we're going to talk to more practitioners than probably any other show that we do all year. Joining us next segment, I'm my co-host Jeff Kelly. Thanks, Jeff. I'm Jeff Kelly from Wikibon. So we're joined by Aaron Vulkerson. He's the founder and CEO of a company called MindTouch. Aaron, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for having me, guys. So Aaron, tell us a little bit about MindTouch. We were talking a little bit before we went on air, but for our audience who may not be familiar with you guys, what is it you do? Yeah, happy to. Always happy to talk about MindTouch. So MindTouch provides a self-service customer success platform that our buyers capture their product information, their customer support documentation, and then deliver it out to their customers and their support agents. We analyze the behaviors of their users and agents and optimize the organization of the content and then deliver back to our buyers, customer insights that help them to close their customers faster and make their customers more successful. Okay, so customer success platform. Could you maybe add a little color? Maybe walk us through a typical use case. Sure. Let's say you're blackboard.com or Salesforce or SAP. You've got all of this content floating around your organization, whether it's your customer support knowledge base or your product documentation, training materials. So what our buyers do is centralize all of that help content, if you want to call it that, or what we call customer success content into a central place that then wires up into your in-product help system, provides a web experience for getting your customers ramped up quickly on your product, turns them into product experts, brand advocates. And in the background, MindTouch is analyzing everybody's behavior, optimizing the content to be more effective, and then providing insights to our buyers so that they can close customers faster and make their customers more successful. So helping them get the most value from all that great content that they've created. Right. A lot of that content was floating around as PDFs and files that when people go to the Google and start looking for vendor selection in a particular vertical, they're not going to find it. So just by converting it into a web-native environment in MindTouch, it also tends to double their organic site traffic. Typically within the first two quarters of launching MindTouch, their organic site traffic increases by 50% by the end of the year, doubles. And these are prospective buyers that are going online and looking to make a purchasing decision because we already know that 57% of buyers make up their mind before they ever talk to the vendor. So MindTouch helps with that. Great. So talk a little bit about Splunk and how they're helping you do that. So you mentioned you're helping, you're doing the analytics to actually feed that back into your customer base and give them advice on better ways they can use their content. Well, we store a lot of user event data, but we're not presenting that information. And then we also do optimization, right, but we're not an analytics system. We're more of a content platform, right? But what Splunk does for us is we were a Splunk enterprise customer for a couple of years. And then at the beginning of this year, we moved to Splunk Cloud. And when we went through the process of evaluating for vendors in the marketplace, my team went out and looked at about eight or nine different vendors. This is everybody from open source solutions to Sumo Logic, Labrado, all these other vendors in the space. And we went through a three month period of a bake off and proof of concept. And Splunk Cloud was the clear winner. And I'll get into some of those details in a second. The key things that we saw, well, I should mention that Splunk Cloud actually delivers information to our entire company. You go into our cafe at our office and there's Splunk on the wall, right? Our customers are accessing information from Splunk about their usage of our product so they can see how people are accessing information from MindTouch across all of the channels. So really Splunk impacts every single department in our company. So you're not only using it internally, you're exposing it to your customers as well. Yeah, that's correct. It's a critical asset for our customer success account management team. We can spot trends and then move quickly to get our customers ramped up more quickly on our product. And then of course, we're a cloud-based, we're SaaS, right? We ship code every week and when we push out a release every week, we maintain 100% uptime just like Splunk Cloud does. And what Splunk Cloud allows us to do is to stay in front of any bottlenecks or problems that we have with our own product shipping the code. Yeah, so well, let's go. I do want to ask why you made this shift from the enterprise on-premise version to the cloud version, but let's even go back further than that. When you first came to, you mentioned kind of evaluating all the vendors in the market when you look to the cloud solution, but let's go back even further to when you initially started using Splunk. How did that come about? And maybe if you could walk us through a kind of a for and after scenario. Well, I'm not going to be able to get into all of the details since my role is not cloud ops or DevOps, but I'll tell you that my cloud ops and DevOps team was using Splunk Enterprise for a couple of years before we moved to cloud. What we were looking for as a solution was something that we could provide real-time monitoring, real-time monitoring for our customers, our customer success team, our product team to make decisions about how to develop the product and the product roadmap. And then first and foremost, and this was the really immediate need was, hey, we've got to make sure that we've got a system in place that can allow us to spot trends as we ship code every single week to our almost 1,000 customers on the cloud. Interesting, though, is you did a fresh eval on Splunk cloud as opposed to just looking at the cloud as an alternative delivery for consuming the application. We don't want to have to maintain servers, you know, we're not, if, like we talk about it, we're not going to do it if it's not something we can be best in the world at and maintaining infrastructure and servers isn't something I'm interested in being best in the world at. But it implies, though, a significant increase in the applications and the use of the tool is because you could have easily just done what you were doing before without running through a vendor review processor or POC and just flip that into a cloud delivery model. So clearly why, you know, what was the driver behind the expanded use that forced you to go through the vendor evaluation process? Yeah, great question. So we were approaching it with fresh eyes, right? We said, OK, look, we've got these requirements. One of those requirements was that we have a vendor that's cloud-based, right? And at that time, when we first began the valuation, Splunk Cloud, I think, was just announced, right? So this was the Q1 of this year of 2014. So it was just announced, I believe, if I remember correctly. So we said, look, we're not going to, this is so critical, we're going to be living with this for probably the next five years and we're going to be building out critical, strategic parts of our business based on this asset. So we wanted to make the right decision. So that's why we went out, we sourced, the total list was 10, we shortlisted about five or six, we did some POCs with about four or five of those five or six. And like I said, it was a big winner. A lot of the things that we ran into was a lack of reliability, lack of guaranteed uptime. Another key thing that we saw was a lot of the vendors couldn't even handle the scale of content that we were pushing into them. They weren't slow, they weren't performant. Another key thing during the evaluation process was the Splunk team. During the sale cycle, after the sale cycle, everybody here at Conf knows this, they're incredible, they're fanatical about customer success, just like MindTouch is. So they were really helpful in making sure we got the information we needed and we're able to get up and running quickly. Now what role did the licensing structure of a cloud product versus an on-premise product? I mean, I'm not sure what your license model was like on-premise, but I know that Splunk is moving from the perpetual license model to a hybrid where it's also perpetual and subscription. Certainly when you're in the cloud, that's one of the benefits is that subscription model. What role did that play in terms of your decision-making to go to the cloud? I don't think that the subscription, you know, the operational expense was as much a consideration as that we didn't operationally have to maintain the infrastructure, right? That was the bigger consideration in it. But as far as what we saw on the landscape among all of the products that we saw out there, it was very competitively priced. That was one of the key things that we did see during the evaluation process. Now, we've heard from a number of Splunk customers over the last couple of days about the use of Splunk and how it, kind of comparing it to the old world of the EW space, the BI space, and we saw God Preselovan talk about this in the keynote yesterday, kind of comparing the old with the new. How is that, we're seeing, not just Splunk, other tools in the so-called big data area start to encroach upon that traditional data warehouse environment in that market. How is that playing out in your organization? You know, we've got a big data store that we're storing all these user events from our customers and their customers, customers, that's awkward to say, that we need to be able to provide a way to analyze for our buyers. And it's certainly obviously a pretty important trend taking place. The thing I've noticed about the landscape is people tend to be very highly specialized in specific use cases. Obviously that's where Splunk started. But, you know, these guys are clearly the leaders and their vision, as you've seen at the show, the keynote is really, it's leading the way, it's paving the way. And you see them really making some big moves into providing more decision-making tools and business intelligence and moving out of just the pure IT management space and log processing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's clear they have, Splunk has big ambitions. They don't want to be just that, you know, with log data analysis company. They are looking to be more of a, I think the way they put it, analytics everywhere. They want to be that analytics layer. And so Splunk may not necessarily want to, that doesn't necessarily talk about it, but it seems to me that they're going to increasingly encroach on the more traditional BI space. I think that's, there's no doubt about that. I mean, there's, within mind touch, that's precisely how we're using them as well. You know, we're using them for both business intelligence as well as DevOps, CloudOps management, helping us to ship code, right? I mean, I look at reports from Splunk as the CEO, our product team, our product visions based on information that we pull out of Splunk data and reports. So absolutely, that's clearly what the future is for this company and already they're doing that. I think that it's probably being, you know, perhaps as of this event, things are going to be changing, but it's probably been under-reported and how effective their tool is for providing decision making inside the C-suite. Yeah, because you know, again, you think of the log analysis as kind of the sweet spot, but clearly they're expanding that to other areas. And you know, people ask me the question, is Splunk a tools company or a platform company? I think it's clearly the latter at this point. Yes. So talk a little bit about, you know, one of the areas that we've heard about here at the show was the application development of customers of Splunk. So they're doing their own kind of application development. So you've got applications Splunk builds on this platform, but you've also got their customers doing their own kind of custom application development. Is that something you guys do or do you use kind of the applications that Splunk offers themselves? And how do you view that? Is that an important, was that an important criteria when you were looking at the tools out there? Yeah, it was. We wanted to minimize how much customization we had to do on the product, but there was some custom application development that was required because of course, we're a SaaS company and we had to fit our product into the framework that Splunk provide, but it was the easiest offering for us to do that with. Some of the key things that we've seen is we fired up Splunk Cloud and started tuning our performance back in, you know, what was it, March-ish somewhere around there. And our baseline response time for our application was about 250 milliseconds, which is pretty darn good, right? Since then, with the help of Splunk, we've actually gotten that down to 50 milliseconds baseline response, so screaming fast. And Splunk was a critical asset in helping us to achieve that. So it's interesting, you said you're not in the DevOps side in terms of writing the code, but you're using, it's almost like a DevOps methodology in terms of the feedback loop in this constant monitoring feedback. I wonder if you could talk about, you know, he said you've got a dashboard, you're watching it. How the ability to push that information down within your people has enabled them to do their jobs better and to deliver a better service to your customer. We talked a little bit earlier, you know, going from, you know, kind of break fix to proactive to predictive and kind of moving down this journey of really getting ahead of the curve on the data. Yeah, yeah. You've really nailed what our focus is, is moving from that reactive break fix support to being proactive customer success. And you'll see a lot of announcements from MindTouch around predictive coming out in the coming weeks and next year too. But to your point, I think the most interesting thing is how our buyers use the data and reports from Splunk. Because what they're able to do is to track what we call a help request. A help request is a unique unit of measurement delivered to a customer agent. So everything we do tries to be consistently value based for our buyers, right? So we want to demonstrate that value. Splunk helps us do that. Not only can our customers track each help request, that they're delivering to their users, but you can track it by the channel that they're delivering it. So is it the website for the web-based success center? Is it the in-product application help system that MindTouch is powering? Is it inside the case management, the contact center, the chat? And then they can make decisions, you can drill into that and make decisions specific about what are the kinds of content that they're accessing in those channels, by channel, and they make better decisions about, well look, this persona, that persona, here's how we make changes to give them a better experience. Right, and I wonder if you can tell any stories about some of your customers and some of the 10X impacts that they found in delivering their services by using this. Surprises had no idea either something we thought was really valuable and was not versus something that we had no idea was delivering such value. What if you could share a couple of stories? Sure, I can think of one particular manufacturer that's a 200-year-old company that didn't realize how quickly their consumer base was becoming young, right? Was becoming digital. So they had specific beliefs about, well, you know, look, our customers, they're more print guys, right? And what they learned with the help of MindTouch and Splunk was that's not true at all. They were previously way behind the curve in delivering the kind of content that their user base was expecting in a digital format. Another key thing that we've seen internally at MindTouch is we've tripled our customer base and maintained the same head count in our DevOps and CloudOps. So we've tripled our customer base, we've actually more than 20X increased the load on our infrastructure and we're still shipping code every week and our DevOps and CloudOps team has stayed the same. And that's Splunk. And on that story, what was the trigger? The consumption of the digital assets, the not consumption of the PDFs, I mean what? Yeah, so going back to the customer example, they could actually track, is it coming in through the contact center, by people picking up the phone? Is it coming in through the various websites? Another key thing that we've been able to do is actually accurately track deflection for our buyers. And this is another example with this customer. Oh look, our customers are more print people, they're not gonna access information online, they prefer to be on the phone. And with the help of Splunk, we've been able to show actually your customers are showing a specific preference to these channels online. And by the way, here's how we've saved you money by helping you to prevent them from having to call in. So Aaron, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the culture in your organization around making data-driven decisions. Sounds like, I mean, it's pretty central to your core value proposition. But that's not the case for all enterprises. But I wonder from your perspective as CEO, how important is kind of having that top-down mandate that the CEO is on board with, look, we need to be more data-driven to spur your workforce, your employees, to really focus their decision-making around data? Yeah, I think everything we do at MindTouch, we do conscientiously having the ability to review a lot of information and actually do an impact study. And here's what our expected ROI is. You know, we're a SaaS company and there's certain metrics that we monitor as a SaaS company. I know that, look, if I spend any dollar, I wanna see that come back in my pipe in six months or 12 months, depending upon the investment. But everything from marketing to how we manage our customer success or account management, it's entirely data-driven. One key way that I can think of is when it comes to how we invest in our product, we can see where people are, which aspects of our product are customer-based and their users are putting on our product, and that informs all of our product roadmap decisions. So across the board, we're able to take a deep look into how our buyers and their users are accessing our application and our platform across the channels and then, hey, look, here's where we need to make investments to improve things. And you mentioned that you haven't had to expand headcount from the application developers, but when you are doing new hiring, how important is that their data IQ, if you will, when you're hiring, whether it's developers or anybody else in your organization, that they have that kind of mindset? Yeah, I mean, we've certainly been hiring a lot of developers, and we are actively, but the DevOps, the CloudOps team, these guys, before Splunk, they were basically looking at the matrix, right? And I'm like, I don't even know how you guys are keeping this infrastructure running because they're literally looking at just things going through on the screen. And with Splunk, they've always been data-driven, but they can just be a lot smarter with where they apply their time, right? And then, as far as the individual software engineers, look, what we care about them is being inspired, passionate, and innovating. It's the product managers that we expect to be really focused on being data-driven. So let's talk about what you'd like to see from Splunk. Sounds like they're adding a lot of value to your organization, but if we're here next year talking to you, what are some of the things you hope to hear from Splunk that they've worked on over the 12 months, leading up to some areas that are important to you to see Splunk invest in from a development perspective? Yeah, I mean, I can't think anything off the top of my head. I really like their vision and roadmap around driving more toward business intelligence and business decision-making platform. That's important to me, the individual features and things, that's up to the team that's actually building things on Splunk for them to be able to answer that question. Well, and something just struck me, you mentioned earlier how important it was that the Splunk team was really very responsive to your requests, to working with you as you were doing your evaluation. So that's really hands-on customer service, essentially. But we know Splunk's growing tremendously. They're adding, I think they added 500 new customers last quarter. As they grow, no, this is not unique to Splunk, but any software company, as they grow, is going to have a challenge remaining in that customer focus. How do you, what advice would you have to Splunk in terms of maintaining that focus? And do you have any concerns that that might be an area where they might lose a little bit of focus? Yeah, I think that it's pretty clear that MindTouch is no Coca-Cola, right? But the level of proactive customer success that they've provided our company is impressive. During the sales cycle, you kind of expect that, although they went above and beyond during the sales cycle as well. But post-sale, that's when a lot of companies just really fall off. They don't understand that software as a service isn't about hosting the application. It's about making the customer successful, right? And Splunk's fanatical about that. MindTouch is fanatical about that. I don't see that going away. I think it's really baked into their DNA. You know, I was, this is my first comp, right? And I noticed that they have these vivuzolas. Did you see these? I did not. So when you go to register, they have these vivuzolas where people who are long-time Splunkers, they have like cowbells and clackers and vivuzolas. They play for these guys. It's clear this company's got it baked into their DNA that they are passionate about their customers. I don't see that changing. Well, Aaron, thanks for stopping by. Some great stories that really support the messages that we're hearing over and over in the keynotes and in a lot of these interviews. You know, you've got to be a data-driven organization. Don't be afraid of it. Embrace it. Push it down to all levels of the organization. Embrace it in your own application development so that you're focusing on the stuff that's really focused on customer outcomes. And I love that quote you just gave us. You know, SaaS is about making customers successful. It's not a delivery methodology. So, terrific. Thanks for stopping by. Sounds like a great story. I'm Jeff Frick. I'm here with Jeff Kelly. We're at the fifth annual Splunk.conf 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be back with our next segment after this short break.