 Okay, welcome back everyone to the splunkconference.conference 2013 live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's The Cube. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante, Wikibon.org. Steve Solmaris here, he's the CMO of Splunk. And Steve, I got to tell you, I love it when I'm in a keynote and people are clapping and some of these keynotes are like, you know the applause sign is on this morning? We heard passionate customers, hooping and hollering. It was really fantastic. Oh thanks, it was very exciting. We have listened to our customers over the last year and we had four major announcements which really delighted the audience. So why don't we kick it off with the dot-com. We were here last year with The Cube. This is our second year. You guys have been going for a while. Tell us about, give us the overview of what's going on this year at dot-com. You know the numbers, the objectives, the messaging. Talk about it a little bit. I'd be happy to. This year we have twice as many attendees as last year. 1,850 customers and partners, about 2,100 people total. People from 44 different countries, over 1,000 different companies represented here. Very exciting group, technology partners from virtually every part of our ecosystem. Steve, so I got to ask you about the slogan, no limits, listen to your data at a big sign at the airport which I always love coming in to see that. So listen to your data, that's obviously, you know, listen to what's going on. But talk about the tagline, no limits and where did you guys come with the? Obviously big day is a great opportunity for many. Is that more for you guys internally and your customers or both? It's got a double entendre, just like our t-shirts. No limits in terms of the innovation that we're coming to market with but also we're encouraging our customers to take the innovation and apply it internally and have no limits to what they can do with their data and their organizations. You guys have transformed really radically in a great way from machine data, log files now to full on, I call it moving up to the value stack, really C level value proposition. You guys are talking about analytics, doing about the cloud, doing about mobile. This is a really, really high end value proposition. So tell us what it took to get there and how would you guys navigate those waters because you have a core base audience with your customers, your ecosystem's growing, it's a little bit of a blend. You've got super geeks on one hand and then now you have business customers. How do you balance that and how do you market and keep everything kind of stable there? There's been a major transformation of the company over the last five years, someone I've been at Splunk. Five years ago, the person using Splunk was absolutely a power user in the trenches. It was assist admins, security analysts, network managers, people like that and they knew and they loved Splunk and it helped them do the basic root cause analysis, troubleshooting, security investigations. Over the last several years, we've added a lot of powerful visualizations and dashboards. We've added real time and many other capabilities, including today, we announced capabilities that make it easy for non-technical people to do all the analytics in Splunk. So there's been a transformation from the power users to a much broader set of users and from people in the trenches running their IT architectures and infrastructure to people doing actual customer analytics, digital marketing, integrated customer views and things like that that the CEO cares for. As Dave Vellante was saying on the intro, some conferences they have the applause sign on so you know when people are applauding. Your key know is a much different. People were really, really excited. You have a huge passionate customer base and if you look at all the successful companies in the big data space, the customers are like almost part of the brand themselves. So obviously it makes your job a little bit easier but also harder because you now have hardcore fans. So talk about the dynamic and what it's like working with such a fan base like that. Well, it all comes from the software. I've actually been told Splunk is the only software company where marketing undermarkets the software. I've never heard that before. Our users clearly love the software and it all came from our founders. Our founders had run large data centers and they hated the big enterprise software. It didn't solve their problems and they committed to building software that people in the trenches would love to use. It would make their jobs better and it would make their personal lives better. And from the very beginning with the free download of valuable free software, they've created a fan following and an evangelical type of group of adopters. So what you've said in this keynote, Steve, that you got feedback from last year's keynote, can you please compress the time between good morning and getting to the products? So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what we heard today what you guys announced. I mean Splunk Enterprise, talk more about Hunk, the cloud platform, bug sense. Give us the rundown here. Yeah, we do things a little differently at Splunk. First of all, in the general session, there wasn't a single marketing person on stage. That's intentional. It was all people in the products organization, developers, product managers. We also felt we had a lot of content and we didn't need to do a lot of introductory commentary about it. I've been to a lot of key notes where for the first hour is just general industry knowledge. Today we had four major messages. The brand new release of Splunk 6, which delivers fast analytics for anyone. We developed a great strategy around cloud. We're offering Splunk Enterprise as a cloud-based service providing the full power of Splunk as a cloud service and enabling you to do hybrid views of on-prem and cloud. We discussed the recent acquisition we did last week of bug sense, which is a really cool mobile analytics application tool set which will integrate into Splunk. And then the fourth major piece, we introduced Hunk, which is in beta still. And Hunk applies all the powerful exploration, visualization and analytics in Splunk. It applies it to massive data at rest inside Hadoop. So let's unpack some of those. So let's talk about Enterprise Splunk, version six, right? So what really is new there? We're talking about more robust capabilities, better security, more enterprise-like qualities. Talk about that a little bit. Splunk comes with a really powerful ability to do virtually any type of analytics. It's called the search processing language and you can do very simple searches with very little skill. To do more complicated analytics, you need to be a bit more of an expert. What we've added now are fundamental data models and pivots all built on top of high-performance analytics stores which enable non-technical people who don't know the search language to do what is in effect seven, eight, nine lines of code, basically drag and drop to do the kind of analytics and visualizations they want to do and do it extremely quickly. So now I got to ask you, so pivots is a marketing word we heard this morning. It was a Devani who said, the internal name is pivotsizzle or something, or pivotizzle? Pivotal, yeah, yeah. So that's good. Okay, now let's talk about cloud a little bit. So you've had Storm, but Storm is really targeted toward the development community. So what's new about the cloud announcement that you guys are making here? So, yeah, last year we announced Splunk Storm, targeted specifically for cloud-based developers. We've had very good market traction, both with free users and paid users, but we started seeing a lot of demand from our customers and prospects for a full production solution, something that could scale to terabytes of data per day, something that offered the full API, the full performance, the full customization, the full app ecosystem that Splunk Enterprise offers. And that was the big news today, offering Splunk Enterprise as a cloud service for any companies that want to use Splunk, but don't want to run it on-prem themselves. And then, of course, BugSense, a recent acquisition, it's all about mobile, give us a few words on that. So we have a lot of customers using Splunk for mobile app management. Companies like ADP are doing tremendous troubleshooting and app analytics where they're getting views of what's going on primarily from the server side. BugSense is one of the leaders in looking at mobile device data, being able to take the data directly from your handset, your smartphone, and correlating it with all the other data that's part of your mobile application and infrastructure management problem. So now we can do comprehensive end-to-end user analytics and app analytics by incorporating BugSense with Splunk. And then, Hunk, I want to come back to that because I said this, John, earlier, to me it's the holy grail of big data. Everybody's trying to kindergarten proof big data. I was tweeting that out today. People said it's impossible, it can't be done. Your value proposition is essentially you're laying Splunk on top of Hadoop clusters. It is doing all the matte-produced stuff in the background for you and just allowing non-technical users to really interact with Hadoop data number one. And number two, you're keeping the data in place. It's where it is, you're not moving the data. You're not having to ETL it or move it out of the cloud and into on-premise or vice versa. Talk about that a little bit. We have customers who love Splunk. We've talked about that before. But they also have these big data storage. Hadoop is really good for cheap batch storage. And we have customers who have said we wish we dream of taking the Splunk analytics, Splunk visualizations, and putting it on top of Hadoop. And I, being a marketing thought, that was a complete dream. But we had engineers such as Wedy and Bettenka who came up with a concept called virtual indexing. And it enables people to use the UI of Splunk and do powerful analytics on Hadoop. And we now have partnerships with the leading Hadoop distributions because they've seen a lot of customers fail in terms of getting value from Hadoop. Six, 12 month projects with no value. And now customers in 30 minutes or an hour can get value from these massive data stores that are locked up in Hadoop. Steve, I want to ask you kind of a personal question. You've been with Splunk about five years. What is the biggest surprise that you've seen in that journey? And obviously, it's, you know, you go back to the origination when I was talking to some of the venture capitalists and early investors. And Splunk was, you know, early on, great technology that founders were in there. As you said, the product was kick butt and then it had great traction and right out of the gate. But that big data movement wasn't happening really. And they got in the front end of it, but still that growth came in the past five years. So I want to get your personal perspective of the growth machine called Splunk. Evolution of the product to customers. What are the biggest surprises? What would it be to learn? What can you share? Give us some color into the past five years, if you could. That's a great question. I'd love to talk about that over a few beers and a couple hours. I was here tonight. Yeah, I'd say one of the biggest changes, one of the biggest surprises, is when I joined Splunk, I knew from previous jobs that it was really great technology. It was a great tool. And I could see people getting value from it, whether you're managing apps or IT infrastructure security. What I didn't foresee back then was that Splunk would turn into a platform. A platform where you could develop, you could create apps, whether it be an ecosystem of 430 partners. And where people like me, marketing people, web intelligence people, would be using Splunk to get business value and not just troubleshooting their infrastructure. So basically, I'll translate that. You realize you're in a rocket ship and you're holding on as tight as you can, having some fun, right? Yep, yep, we're keeping up as fast as we can. Steve, thanks for coming inside theCUBE. I know you're super busy, got an amazing event here. You guys have done a first class job. Thanks for having us here. Again, success on the ecosystem, great endorsement from some of the big names, startups as well as established companies here in the partner pavilion. Keynote was great. You guys are doing great. And the customer act was just like, congratulations. This is Cubes year two at splunkconference.converse2013. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Stay tuned for two days of live coverage of dot-conference2013. And the hashtag is Splunk, C-O-N-F, SplunkConf tweet. We're watching the Twitter stream and we'll respond to any questions you have. John and Dave are here to answer them for you, checking to see them from the noise. We'll be right back after this short break. Great, thank you guys.