 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf 19, brought to you by Splunk. Hey, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunks.conf. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. This is Splunk's 10th year user conference. It's theCUBE's seventh year. We've been riding on the same wave with Splunk over the years and just watching the phenomenal growth and changes at the level of data and scale we've been covering. Remember I said from day one, data at the center of this, not just log files, it's now gone beyond that. We're here with Carrie Palin, the CMO Chief Marketing Officer for Splunk. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. So the folks that know us know about Splunk, notice the color changes in the background. The popping, pink, burning, yellow, orange underneath, new branding. You're new to Splunk, story, career, and technology. This is exciting. The portfolio, the news is phenomenal. Good news flow, very relevant, right on mark. Data is now creating value. And data is like software. It's enabling value Splunk's software and solution, platform has done that. And there's new ground to take. But you're now setting the agenda for the brand and the company. Tell us. I mean, it's a marketer's dream. What can I say? It's, you know, I joined nine months ago and when I was interviewing for the role, I remember Doug Merritt saying to me, hey, you know, we might be the only $2 billion enterprise software company that nobody's ever heard of. He said, I want to go solve for that, right? Like the folks who know Splunk and our customers, they love us. Our product is awesome and our culture is awesome. But the world doesn't know about us yet and we haven't invested there. So I want to go take the brand to the next level and I want the world to understand what data use cases are out there that are so broad and so vast. And we believe that every problem ultimately can be solved through data or almost every problem. And we wanted to set the stage for that with this new brand campaign. You know, just on a personal note and following the journey of Splunk, a scrappy startup goes public and growth mode. So when you're a growth mode, it's hard to kind of lay down foundational things like branding and whatnot. Totally. But now Splunk's a leader. We did a poll within our community and for cloud and on-premise security, Splunk's the number one supplier for not just laws but workloads and then now cloud security is kicking in. So the relationship to Amazon, Google, Cloud Platform and Azure are a critical part. So Splunk is now the leader. So leaders have to do things like make sure that their brand's good. This is what you do. Take us behind the scenes of the branding. The things you chose and data for everything. Yeah, the little small new ones, data to everything. Data to everything. And the reason behind that was we believe you can bring and we can enable our customers to bring data to every question, every decision and every action to create meaningful outcomes. And the use cases are vast and enormous. We talked about some of them before the show started but helping look global law enforcement get ahead of human trafficking through Splunk and Splunking what's going on across all sorts of data sources, right? Helping Zone Haven, which is our first investment from Splunk Ventures, which startup that's actually helping firefighters figure out burn patterns with wildfires but also when temperatures and humidity change where sensors are, they can alert firefighters 30 to 45 minutes earlier than they would usually do that. And then they can also help influence evacuation patterns. I mean, it's remarkable what folks are doing with data today and it's really at the core of solving some of the world's biggest issues. Yeah, it's hard to tell a story for a company that solves so many use cases. Yes. Because depending on who you talk to, that's the company. This is what we should be talking about. Yeah, but we do this over here. So when you're horizontally creating this kind of value, it's hard to kind of brand that because you get a lot of opinions. It is. Because you're doing a lot of different things. It's not like one vertical. That's right. So this is the challenge that most B2B markers will fall into the trap. We do this because we have a lot of customers in this one segment but you guys are hitting so much more. How did you deal with that? We had a lot of talks about it. A lot of discussions, a lot of debate and I love diversity of thought. It usually drives the right outcomes but we had a lot of, this was not an easy answer. If it had been, it would have been done years ago. And we really talked about setting the stage for where, you know, I love the Wayne Gretzky quote about skate to where the puck is going and that's what he always did and that's why he was so good. We believe there will ultimately be a data platform of platforms and we believe Splunk is that platform, right? And so that's where the industry's going. We wanted to cast a net that would take us there so that this is the beginning of a brand evolution for us and not a total rebrand but it's setting the stage for a category creation that we believe is coming in the industry. I think you guys are smart and I think my observation would be looking at some of our 10 years of reporting and sharing stuff on digital is that all the conversations around data's impacting the real world. You see Mark Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill having the answer to the data debacles he had. You're seeing cyber security attacks, national security, ransomware taking down cities and towns. This is a real impact, forest fire. It's just erupting, rolling blackout. So technology is impacting real world lives. This is really new to tech. I mean, usually behind the scenes, coding, but not anymore, we're in the front lines of real society, global challenge. Data's at the forefront and it's really exciting. It's also frightening, right? Because we believe data presents the greatest opportunity for humanity but also some of the greatest threats and so hence our ability to really dig in on data security. It's important to do that while we're actually also surfacing data to solve real world issues. You've been in the industry for a while when you came to Splunk. What was the couple things that surprised you? You had some thoughts going in, you knew about Splunk. Yes. What are some of the things that surprised you when you got here? Oh, I mean, in such a good way, a few things. Well, here's the story. Three days into being at Splunk, my dad got very ill and I wasted him to Austin for heart surgery and he actually didn't make it. And so it's been a rough year to say the least and the way that Splunk's culture, I knew about it before I came but the way that this company treated me like I had been here 10 years when I'd really only been an employee three days was something I'll never forget and it's special. And so I believe that companies are successful if they are smart and healthy and Splunk has the healthy in droves and not just the compassion and the empathy but a very transparent culture. We debate things, we talk about things, we support each other, we are accountable and I believe that's a big part of why we've grown so fast because our culture is incredibly healthy and very collaborative as a team. Well, I'm sorry for your loss. Thank you. You mentioned culture. Community is a big part of Splunk. Yes. In talking to some of the folks that Splunk over the years, there's no, how do I say this? There's no shortage of opinions. They're happy to volunteer and good communities are robust. Yes. Diversity of thought, action. Very actionable communities. How do you look at that? Because that could be a force multiplier for the brand. How are you going to tie in data to everything with the community? How are you going to harness that energy? Yeah, so it's coming and the reality is data to everything is actually a setup to tell the stories of everyone who is using data today. And so the community is going to be one of the first places we go to surface some of those amazing stories. And some of the things you see here at the show are actually showcasing that. In the keynote today we heard from Zone Haven and Portia and so many others around their use cases, but the community is where it all begins and that's the lifeblood of our sort of splunkiness and something that we don't take for granted one second. Talk about the Barack Obama and your interactions with him and his interest in Splunk. Yeah. So we had our big rebrand reveal last month. We had an event and it was for C-suite type of folks. It was a very intimate event and we wanted somebody to keynote that and headline that really brought to life the whole notion that you can bring data to everything. And President Obama was the first POTUS that actually used data in his campaign strategy. He's very open about that. He's the first president to appoint a chief data scientist to the White House. He's actually exceptionally geeky and very data-driven and so when we asked him to come and headline this he actually was really excited about it and in great fashion his communications team was really strict on curating the questions that we had for him and he was so cute he showed up to the event and he said, look, I'm so thrilled to be here. I love what you guys are doing and you can ask me anything. It was just like ready to go and he was so wonderful and teed up this notion of bringing data to everything so brilliantly. And he can be ad-lib all the time. He's very colorful as well as personality. He's kind of nerdy. And he was very open and open gov too. One of the things that I remember when big data really started rolling into the scene around 2009, 2010, you saw that opening up data registries from cities and towns actually created innovation from healthcare, medical supplies, democracy. So this has been a big part of them. Huge. You guys are doing some things out here I see in the exhibits where you're using the data, you're doing demos. How do you see you guys helping society with that? Because to think of it to the next level, you've got some great use cases. The public sector is a big part of some news here. FedRAMP is one little technicality but you've got some certification. But government's modernizing now. So post Obama, you're seeing modernization of procurement, role of cloud. Certainly cyber security, Amazon with the CIA, Jedi Department of Defense, role of data in military and public sector. Education, this is going to be a disruptive enabler. 100%. Your thoughts on the public impact? I mean, look, there's, you know, Doug touched on this a little bit this morning. The reality in our press conference, but the reality is if you do it right, opening up data sets to communities of people that can do better together and you can get this collective momentum going. For instance, in healthcare, I mean, I'm a little bit of a healthcare nerd and I don't know if you've watched the PBS special on the Mayo Clinic. It's spectacular, but one of the reasons the Mayo has been amazing for years is because their doctors all work off the same systems in every discipline in that facility and they can learn more holistically about a patient. And I think about the impact that data could have if we could open up those data sets across every health provider for one person or the same illness with every major institution across the U.S., collaborating and sharing and what we could actually do to make real impact and strides against some of the diseases that are really crippling society today. So I think about the good that we can do with data if we open up those data sets and do it in a way that it's safe, it's remarkable the progress we can make. You know, one of the machine learning has been a big success story. Machine learning toolkit, customers are raving about it. Opening up the data creates better machine learning. Yeah. Better AI creates better business value. That's right. That's that part of how you guys see things rolling out? Sure. As a marketer, we use AI today. It's really more machine learning. It's pattern recognition. But we use, you know, my last stint as a CMO, the last company I was at, we use an AI bot to augment our sales headcount for following up on leads and to look like a human being. I mean, same thing for Splunk. I mean, the more we can see pattern recognition, proffer up insights, the better off we are to help out our customers. And so Tim Telly's team is driving that hard and fast into our innovation curve with everything that we do. Innovation culture, big time here, right? Huge. Huge. And one of the reasons I came to Splunk is when I interviewed with Tim and I said, hey, how are you doing on recruiting engineers in the valley? We all know that that is liquid gold. And he said that he had hired 370-odd engineers in less than a year and from really big brands like Airbnb. And I thought, all right, there's some really cool innovation going on here. If some of the best engineers in the valley really want to come work here and they want to work for a great leader. And Tim and his team are that. So .com is 10 years now this year. Yeah. Airbnb Conference 7 has been riding the wave together. It's been fun. Your first, as a senior executive. Yes. Your thoughts on this community, this event, share your thoughts. I mean, I'm blown away. And this is a team sport. I'm so proud of the events team, the creative team, the sales teams. Everybody who's come together to make this event so spectacular, it's just sort of mind-numbing that a company of our size can put on such an experience for our user community. But I'm also thrilled with the engagement. We have over 300 sessions this week and most of them are user and customer use case driven. And the stories they are telling are magnificent. They're doing this all with Splunk. So it's pretty special. And the ecosystem and the app showcases pretty hot here. You're seeing real applications. People write the code on top of Splunk. Yes. I'm sorry, I don't use this word often. I'm 48, but it's rad and it's so cool. Kerry, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Absolutely. Final thoughts for the people who aren't here at the event watching on camera. How would you encapsulate .conf this year? What's the top story that needs to be told? I mean, look, the reality is that we are bringing data to way more than just security and IT ops, which has been our core use cases forever and they will continue to be. But folks that are not incredibly data literate through Splunk bringing data to everything and solving some big gnarly issues in the world. And it's pretty exciting stuff, so check us out. All right, thank you. Gnarly, rad, cool, hey, yeah. I need a surfboard. Kerry, thanks for coming on. I appreciate theCUBE's coverage here at thetenth.conf. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, bringing you all the action here in Las Vegas, three days of CUBE wall-to-wall coverage. We'll be back with more after this short break.