 Welcome back, everybody. This is the Cube, SiliconANGLE's premier TV production. We go out to the top tech events to bring you the news and insights. We talk to the smartest people at the shows to separate the signal from the noise. My name is Jeff Kelly with wikibon.org. I'm joined by Jeff Frick, my co-host from SiliconANGLE. Thank you, Jeff. We're back for another segment. Welcome, everyone. We are joined now with Stefan Vitorek. He's got a tough name to pronounce. I'm sure you guys can all read it on the screen. Welcome to the Cube, all the way from Sao Paulo, Brazil. That's right. That's great. It's one of my favorite places to go visit. I've only got to go a couple of times, but I've got to get back down there again. You should. We had some very interesting events down there, including Splunk events. We had already two Splunk live events down there, and they were very successful. Terrific. So Stefan is with a company called Silverlink Technologies. He's a CEO, and Silverlink is a service provider that has cell software but provides services and has some other interesting things. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your solutions and how you're integrating Splunk into your offerings? Sure thing. So Silverlink has been in the market for over 10 years now. We have a strong focus on the service providing portion of the business. We also resell software, but usually what we do is we sell this software by providing extra services alongside. So in the specific case of Splunk, we learned about Splunk back in 2008 at an RSA meeting down in San Francisco. Found the product to be amazing, started using it in-house in the beginning, and then we noticed that that would make a huge difference for our clients as well. So we've been officially working with Splunk since 2009, and so far we have been very, very successful at getting clients from all different verticals down in Brazil. So what we do is we provide services that go from the pre-sales aspects of the delivery going through the design of the solution, architecting the solution, actually implementing it, and then supporting it afterwards. We also have a strong focus on training and that's something that we understand that's very important for our market. There's both a cultural aspect of that that helps us through training to educate our clients on what's going on all around the world, what are the offerings that we have right now, what are the challenges they might face in the near future. So Brazil is a very fast growing market, so we get a lot of new projects coming in all the time and Splunk is helping us leverage that and helping us attend our clients in the best way possible. It's great to have a services provider on because especially in the big data world, it seems like services is really going to play a very important role because it's really a new class of technology. It's not really an evolution of a previous type of technology. I think there's a lot of knowledge that needs to be gained on the enterprise side from understanding what big data can do, the use cases, and of course there's cultural issues involved internally when you go from a more structured kind of data warehouse world to a big data world where you're more flexible and agile. Wikibon.org, we did a market sizing study and we pegged the market about $5 billion for the big data in general but services were a large chunk of that, about 44% of the market and we think that might even grow larger because of the importance of services. So as a service provider, could you maybe talk a little bit about your perspective about the role that services plays in big data, Splunk specifically, but big data in general, there's obviously the Hadoop landscape and the other analytic databases out there and myriad visualization tools, etc. But what are some of the key things as a service provider you feel like need to be kind of brought to the enterprise? Sure thing. So the first thing is that, especially when we talk about Splunk, Splunk has a unique approach and it has a unique solution and something that really caught our eye is how easy it is to implement it. So the whole concept of going to the site, downloading it, actually we present webcasts all the time or we do this inside the customer side just to show them how easy it is and we can literally have it all running, up and running in like five minutes. But that's just the beginning of it. I mean, once the client does that, if they do that by themselves, if they have no support at all, they will be able to install, they will understand how the product works, they will gather some data and get some information out of that, but that's pretty much about it. Then they're going to get stuck because one of the toughest questions that we ask our clients is where is your data? And they think they know, but by the time you start asking them specific questions, so where is your sales data sitting at? Oh, it's in this server, so where is this other data? Then someone brings up, oh, but we have a backup copy or we have a replication in some off-site or whatever it is and that's when things start getting kind of weird around the meeting. So it is a very important portion of services involves finding out what does the client really want and what does the client really have. Because amazingly enough, they do not know. So in most of our cases, whenever we present Splunk, I always say that it's hard to make Splunk sound simple enough but not too simple because otherwise they would just say, oh, it's another log management solution and I'm just going to replace something else that I have and that's not the idea. So when you start telling them about the options you have, the other problem is that you cannot let them go way over their heads because otherwise they're going to start having what we call the aha moment where they say, well, I got it. I can use this for that and the other and the other and they might get lost. So an important portion of the consulting services we provide is helping the client understand where the data is, where is the data that they actually need in order to provide the reports or the graphs that they actually need for their business and help them focus on that at the beginning. Once you've got that up and running, it's really easy to start growing from there but if you try to embrace everything at once, everyone is going to get lost and mad, because it's like we're not moving, we're not going anywhere. So we have this strong focus on educating the client and there is an important point there where you have to educate them enough so that they understand what the product or the solution might do for them so that then they can tell you, okay, so this is what I want and then we can model the solution, arrange things, develop what needs to be developed and deliver that to the client in a timely fashion and attaining to the business needs. That's interesting. So you actually want to gait the aha moment for a little while. That's a pretty interesting twist on usual sales. Usually you want them to get the aha so they're all hot to go and ready to buy. I mean, when you're talking about small business that really know what they want, it's okay. I mean, they can just go to the site, download it, get the right app, bam, it's working. Then they just need some fine tanning. We can provide them with all the support. We are available for that. So we can just help them with getting it on by themselves, provide them with all the official training. We are good at that. But when you're talking about larger enterprises, the thing is that first, they don't have one person, let alone an entire team, available to deal with Splank. Actually, we have a very interesting project going on right now with one of the most prominent business schools in Brazil. They also provide a lot of economic consulting services. This is our first case where the client came over to us and said, I need someone that can handle this. I want the knowledge manager that you told me about, and I need you guys to bring him in here. I don't want to allocate anyone I already have. Bring a specialist, get him in here, leave him here for one year, and let him do the tweaking, let him do the fine tanning. And that's excellent, because usually you don't see that. Usually what you see is you are getting their teams ready to work with the product, and after a while, there are changes in the team, or someone moves to another area in the company, and there you are providing training again. What is the typical lead? Because I looked at your website, you have a tremendous group of customers, a lot of large enterprises. So if Spunk is the answer, what is usually the lead question at the beginning of your engagement? What problem are they trying to solve? So usually there is a lack of understanding about some aspect of the infrastructure. It usually starts by that. It usually starts with a technical question. So we have, for example, a client which is the largest call center in Brazil. Actually they are one of the largest worldwide. And their question was regarding their automatic response system. So when you call them and there is, oh, press one for this, press two for that, they had those logs, but they didn't know exactly what to do with them. So they were supervising everything manually. So someone would just pick up the phone and check out how the call was going. And we went in and we started logging that and we started developing some dashboards for them so they could actually understand how well their business was doing as far as answering calls and getting people satisfied, getting their client satisfied. But then you get other companies that begin with a very technical issue that apparently has nothing to do with the business. In the case of the call center, obviously that's the main portion of their business. But then there are others where you go in and they want to look just at how their servers are doing, am I spending too much on hardware and all that. And what we try to do is to figure out, okay, so what's going to be the real impact in your business side? And how is this going to help you return the investment that you are doing right now, right? So you're paying for software, paying for service, how is this going to pay off? So the thing is we act on very different verticals. So we have things, we have from manufacturers, we have this call center that I mentioned, we got several financial institutions, we even got the stocks exchange in Brazil as our client. And each one of them comes in with a different request. But the thing that you hear the most is what are other companies doing? So most of the time they understand the value of the solution, they understand the value of the product, they understand the value of their data, but they're not really sure what should they be gathering from that. Where is the value in the data that they already have? So they're learning a lot from the community, it sounds like, from their peers and you mentioned you've had some events already in Brazil. So talk about the community effect, I mean we're here at .com 2012 and there's clearly, I mean there's a thousand plus people here, I think customers from 30 countries or more. I mean clearly, and they're all very enthused, I mean we haven't really even spoken to anybody with really any complaints, we've been digging, but we can't find any. So what's this community effects? How does that impact not just, you know, Splunk in terms of their business, but what you're seeing end users actually accomplish? Right, so one of the first things you hear when you go to a client and you try to present a new solution like Splunk is, I mean, the company's new, the product is even newer, and it's been in Brazil for only a few years. So one of the first questions is, okay, who are your clients? And we get, like you said, a pretty good list already. So we go on and we provide them with the names of the clients that have allowed us to do so. And then the second question is, what are they using it for? So they want to hear about these examples. More often than not, they will ask if it's possible to talk to one of these customers. So they want to validate the solution, not from the sales guy, not from the technical guy, they want to validate it from someone that has the same pains and the same objectives as they do. So even if it's not from the same industry or the same vertical, they would like to talk to someone else. So that's why the events are so important. We already had two Splunk Lives in Brazil. We had several workshops for different verticals or different companies. And the best thing about these Splunk Lives is always when we bring the clients and we have them presenting the cases. In our first Splunk Live, we had one of the most important ISPs in Brazil present their case, and they actually did an amazing job. They were presenting it in real time. So they were accessing their actual environment. The guy was navigating to Splunk. He found something going bad with one of their DNS servers. He started drilling down on the data, found out a line of code that was missing there, called the guy from his cell phone and told him, fix that. And by the time the guy said, I'm done, we could see the graph going green. So that does it. I mean, there's nothing better than having someone purchase your product or purchase your services, showcase an actual case in real time in front of your eyes. It's not a sales guy again. It's not someone doing a demo with fake data or anything like that. It was a real deal. It was a guy actually going inside their data, finding something wrong, using Splunk, telling the guy, fix it, and validating that it was fixed because he was still looking at the same dashboard. Wow, that's really powerful stuff. And it is great these shows that are newer technology companies. The benefit is, is that the shows everyone does want to learn. And it's so new that everyone does want to share information. And it just hasn't kind of devolved into just a pure kind of vendor show. And then the fact that you've got these shows like Comp 2012 that are really sponsored by a company, but it's really about the community of that company, the customers, the partners, and then more and more kind of the app developers for people extending the product outside of what the core is, which is interesting and kind of a fun environment to be a part of. I noticed, again, looking at your website, you've got something called One Click Knock, which looks like, again, it's a combination, I would presume, of services and software and some technology. I wonder if you could share a little bit about what that is and how that implementation is helping you with your go-to market. Great, yeah, that's right. The One Click Knock is actually an app that we have developed on top of Splunk. And the main objective there is to make it easier for Brazilian companies and Brazilian users to understand the product. And one of the most important barriers that we have to go through is the language, obviously. So the idea of the One Click Knock is that we deliver an app that is totally written in Portuguese, so the clients are more comfortable with using it. We have in there both apps that we have developed for our own clients, but we also have apps that have been made available by the community or by Splunk itself that we have also translated and added in there. So whenever we come into a client and we find out what they want, what we do is we try to get it all inside the One Click Knock so they have a single point of contact with a single user interface. And from there, they can navigate through all the solutions. So in there, you will find in some cases, for example, PCI solutions. We have several companies in Brazil that have been able to get their PCI compliance certificates by using Splunk. One of them is a client of ours who is one of the most important digital payment companies in Brazil. They were struggling with their current solution and we were able to exchange that for Splunk in less than two months and have them certified in PCI. We also have inside the One Click Knock solutions for our partner companies such as Cisco, F5, VMware. There are companies that we work with in Brazil. They actually provide our services and our products to their own channel, to their clients. For example, there's a product from Cisco called Cisco Mars. It reached the end of life recently and Cisco was looking for something to substitute that. So what we did is we developed it inside One Click Knock specifically for Cisco Mars and we have delivered that in a few customers already in Brazil. So the whole concept behind the One Click Knock is to simplify the product. So once again, when we're talking about Splunk, we want to make it simple enough but not too simple and keep it from getting too complicated at least in the beginning. Once you get your clients up and running, it's amazing the kind of things they will come up with. During one setup that we were focusing mainly on servers, we were looking at 2,000 something servers for our client. So it was a pretty big setup. We were just looking at infrastructure and their custom applications and suddenly someone from their voice over IP department comes up and says, I got a huge problem and I heard about what you guys are doing. Is it possible to send my logs in there and see what we can get? And in like five minutes, we helped the guy pinpoint a problem that had been bugging him for two weeks. So again, that's the kind of thing that makes it even more interesting and each time more exciting to work with such a technology. There are some questions that otherwise would take so much longer and would take so much manpower to answer. And again, if you had to do that again, you would have to go through the entire process once again. Instead, with Splunk, once you answer the question the first time, it's there. You can ask it as many times as you want. Very interesting. I mean, this is a really good example. I think of a service provider really taking what is a really solid technology and really customizing it even further for your clients, whether it's domain-specific, region-specific, whatever it might be. Fantastic. So thank you so much for coming on theCUBE today. I really appreciate it. You're watching theCUBE at .com 2012. That's Splunk's annual user conference. We're live here in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. I'm Jeff Kelly with wikibon.org and I'm with my co-host Jeff Frick from Silicon Angle. Yes, thanks very much, Stefan. That was terrific. And again, striding that fine line between being enthusiastic, not enthusiastic, easy but not too easy. Powerful but not too powerful and really delivering to the customer what they need right then and then you can expand afterwards. We've got, again, an exciting lineup. We'll be taking a short break and we'll be back to bring you some more insight from Splunk.com.12.