 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCube at Splunk.com 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor Splunk. Here are your hosts, Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Splunk.com 2014. This is the fifth year of the Splunk conferences. This is the third year of theCube being here. We're excited to be back. It's always a great show. I'm joined here for the day with my co-host, Jeff Kelly. Jeff, welcome. Hi, Jeff, good to be here. Yeah, exciting conference. The crowd here is pretty excited and loud and vocal. Yeah, it's loud and vocal. There's people all over the place. So yesterday, the keynotes went a little bit long so we weren't able to open with our traditional open. John was here. Shout out to John, I had to go back to the Bay Area. So why don't we talk a little bit about what happened at the keynote and kind of break it down a little bit. Well, I think God for Self and the CEO came out to kind of a rousing welcome. The crowd here is very enthusiastic. He talked about, kind of ran through the things you hear at all conferences, how much the conference has grown. Think attendance is up about 70 to 80%, he said, to about 3,500 attendees this year. He talked about some of the things that they're really focused on or that they're seeing from their customers, things about around mobile first, around continuous app delivery, or on analytics-driven security and the internet of things. So those were kind of the four areas or four trends that he's seeing in his customer base. And Splunk, of course, is taking steps to address all of those issues and help their customers kind of meet the needs that they're kind of starting to see on a more regular basis. So it was exciting, a lot of customers talked. I think three customers was Coca-Cola, GE, and Red Hat all spoke, came on stage and had only good things to say now, surprisingly, about Splunk, but they were actually substantive presentations. And I was really impressed, particularly with Coca-Cola and some of the things they're doing with not just Splunk, but their whole use of cloud automation in conjunction with kind of the data lake principle that we talk about so much on theCUBE that's related to big data at Hadoop, and then using Splunk to enable that agile app development process so they can get dashboards and real-time analytics in front of customers, in front of employees, in front of partners, and do it quickly. He kind of drew an analogy between how automated and streamlined Coke's bottling process is compared to its internal IT operations and how they weren't, they certainly weren't, the IT operations certainly weren't as streamlined as the bottling was a couple years back. They made some big investments internally in IT, and it feels like they've got that system running very well now, and it was really an impressive presentation. Yeah, I thought the keynotes were fantastic, and because it's a Splunk show, we always know we're going to get a large percentage of customers on the show, which we just don't get enough of those, Jeff, and I think that's why this is one of our favorite shows on theCUBE along with ServiceNow, and really getting the practitioners on stage talking about what they're doing because all this is based, all this excitement is really based on people unlocking new business value, finding new business value that's enabled by these applications. A couple notes from, it was Michael Connor from Coca-Cola, talked about getting the data cartels out of the way. He talked about whenever they do a project, there's these data cartels that want to hold all the data to themselves, and they're getting them out of the way, and the way they're doing that is by automating the collection of data into their data lake and taking the cartels out of it. It was a really great presentation. He talked about the, what was it called, their automated dispenser machine. Greatest invention ever in Coke, the one where you push the gray button and you choose what you want. Really, a phenomenal data collection machine as well, and this point was there's like 100 megs of data that's generated off every push of the gray button when you order a Coke or a Diet Coke or a Blendwood Cherry Coke, whatever you order. And then, of course, made a joke because Splunk's licensing is based on how much data you process and index. They make a little bit of money on all that. But really, innovation in terms of sweet, sugary soda, but how they're using that data to really move the market. I thought it was Sunni Hai and Tani from GE Capital. Really phenomenal, some really high level conversations that were reinforced earlier in the conversation about really flipping the model upside down in the data paradigm, where before it was you had to define your schema, then go put the data in and then ask questions. So you really had to know the question before you collected, before you defined the schema and collected the data and really with Splunk and the technologies now flipping that paradigm upside down. First collect the data, then have the ability to index it and ask the questions after the fact and define the schemas after the fact. So a very different way to slice and dice the world in a world where the amounts of data, the speed of data, the source of data is increasing dramatically. The other thing that was talked about is this increase in data sources. Not only the traditional structure data, not only what we talked about with mobile, but now this new thing they talked about on the wire, kind of this internal machine to machine data, but there's a lot of interesting information there that they can do stuff with. Yeah, so speaking of the customers that talked yesterday in the keynote, what I think they all did well individually but really collectively was put, not Splunk necessarily, but put big data into context of larger operations of an enterprise. So big data we talk about all the time on the queue is a critical approach, a critical enabler to establish competitive differentiation but it's just part of a larger ecosystem. So they talked about how big data analytics fits in with cloud and automation and enabling the collection of that data as you mentioned at Coke. And then the whole DevOps question about being able to quickly spin up dashboards and applications that leverage that data to get analytics in the hands of the right people at the right time. And then using data in the application development brought this to monitor your application. How are they performing, identifying problems before they really kind of hit the customer? So I think what the customers did very well yesterday again is really tell the larger story of the modern approach to information technology, big data, cloud and how they fit together. And you don't see that at every show. So I was impressed with that. Now when we had customers on yesterday all day Splunk customers on the queue, a lot of them are not quite as advanced as those customers who saw on the keynote which is understandable. But you can see that they're excited about the possibilities and they're moving in the direction of tying these different pieces together to make a more cohesive streamlined operation like we heard about in the keynotes. Yeah, I'd like one of the interviews yesterday was with Garrett from Polycom. And he said, you know, they brought Splunk in kind of traditionally from really a break fix tool. But he said, you know, we moved from a break fix to prescriptive to now proactive behavior. And he very specifically said, you know, I think you asked him, what are the SL, you know, where's the business value? This is nice conversation. Where's the business value? And he found out said we're an SLA business. If we don't deliver to our SLAs, we have to pay money out. And I think the statistic he used was their SLA compliance proactive detection rate of problems went from 40% to 67% from less than half to more than two thirds. They can figure it out, fix it before the customers even aware that there was something coming up the pike. And the other thing I thought that he said was really interesting when I think you asked him about executive support of this initiative. And he said, because of this new, you know, don't structure the data, just collect the data, structure it afterwards. He asked his executives, if you could ask any question, what would it be? And now we can go out and we can address that. I just thought it was phenomenally insightful. And again, I think Guido said the simplest, which was store first, scheme on read is what it was. And then flexible analytics on top of that at scale. So really simple, I bet that's about 10 words description of a new philosophy in the way they handle data, manage data, and really make data more accessible to more decision makers in real time. So it's going to be a great day. We've got another terrific lineup of guests. Again, I encourage you to go out to SiliconANGLE.tv, click on the Splunk event page. You can follow along and see who we've got coming on, but we've got guests from Forrester Research, MindTouch, Flagstar Bank, CenturyLink, the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia. There's going to be a lot of Australians here, Jeff. I don't know what's going on there. InterNock, Red Hat, again, Function One, Business Spectator, and of course, we're going to get high-end song-on SVP security, a great security keynote as well. If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to watch that. Very powerful, really, in terms of the threats that we're under and really some sobering messages at the end. So we've got a great day. We're getting the hook, Jeff. We've got to jump into it. So I'm Jeff Rick here with Jeff Kelly. We're at thesplunk.com 2014, the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. We'll be back with our next segment after this short break.