 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in the Palo Alto Studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host. We're here during this time where everyone's sheltering in place during the COVID-19 crisis. We're getting the interviews out and getting the stories that matter for you. It's theCUBE's mission just to share and extract the data from, signal from the noise and share that with you. Of course, the conversation here is about how the data analytics are being used. We have a great friend and CUBE alum, Bruno Kirkdick, VP, founding VP of product and storage for Sumo Logic, a leader in analytics. We've been following you guys, kind of going back I think many, many years around big data now with AI and machine learning. You guys are industry leader. Bruno, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE. I know you're sheltering in place. Thanks for coming on. You're welcome, pleasure. So, obviously with the crisis, the work at home is really highlighted in the at scale problem, right? And so we've been having many conversations on theCUBE of cybersecurity at scale because now the endpoint protection business has been exploding, literally a lot of pressure malware, convenient crime time for those hackers. You're starting to see cloud failure. Google had 18 hours of downtime. Azure's got some downtime. I think Amazon is the only one that haven't had any downtime. But everything is being at scale now because the new work environment is actually putting pressure on the industry, not only just the financial pressure people losing their jobs or the hiring freezes, but now the focus is staying in business and getting through this. But the pressure points of scale are starting to show. And working at home is one of them. Analytics has become a big part of it. So you share your perspective of how people are using analytics to get through this because now the scale of the problem solving is there with analytics. You're seeing charts on the virus, exponential curves. People want to know the impact of their business and all this. What's your view on this situation? Yeah, the world has changed so quickly, you know? Analytics has always been important, but there are really two aspects of analytics that are important right now. So, you know, a lot of our enterprises today, obviously as you said, are switching to this sort of remote workforce, like everybody who was local is now remote. So people are working from home that is putting stress on the systems that support that working from home. It's putting stress on infrastructure, things like VPNs and networks and things like, because they're carrying more bits and bytes. It's putting stress on productivity tools, things, you know, like cloud provider tools, things like Office 365 and Google Drive and Salesforce and other things that are now being leveraged more and more as people are remote. And enterprises are leveraging analytics to optimize and to ensure that they can facilitate sort of course of business understand where their issues are, understand where their failures are internal and external route traffic appropriately to make sure that they can actually do the business they need. But that's only half of the problem. In fact, I think the other half of the problem is maybe even bigger, right? We as humans are no longer able to go out. We're not supposed to enable to go shopping and doing things as we normally do. So all of these enterprises are not only working remotely leveraging productivity tools and quote unquote, sort of digital technologies to do work. They're also serving more customers through their digital properties. And so their sites, their apps, their retail stores online and all of the digital aspects of our enterprises today are under more load because consumers and customers are leveraging those channels more. People are getting grocery delivered at home, you know, pharmaceuticals delivered at home. Everything is going through online systems rather than us going to Walgreens and other places to pick things up, right? And so both of those aspects of scale and security are important and analytics is important in both figuring out how do you serve your customers effectively? How do you secure those sites? Because that was that there's more load, there's more people and it's a bigger honeypot. And then also how do you actually do your own business to support that in a digital world? You know, Bruno, that's a great point. And I want to just reiterate that the role of data in all this is really fundamental and clear. The value that you can get out of the data. Now, you and I, we've had many conversations with you guys over the years. For all of us insiders, we all know this already. Data analytics, everyone's instrumenting their business. But now when you see real life examples of death and destruction, I mean, Ivers reporting yesterday that leaked emails from the CDC in the United States showed that in January, they saw that people didn't have fevers with COVID-19. Just the system was lagging. There was no real time notifications. This is our world. We've been living in this for this past decade in the big data world. This is highlighting a global problem that with notifications, with the right use of data is a real game changer. And this is getting more clear. So I have to ask you, with all this kind of revelations, I know, I don't mean to be all gloom and doom, but that's the reality. Highlights the fact that instrumenting and having the data analytics is a must have. Can you share your reaction to that? Yeah, absolutely. You're right. And like you said, we are the insiders here and we've been sort of espousing this world of what we internally at Sumo call the continuous intelligence, which essentially means to us and to our customers that you collect and process all signals that are available to you as a business, as a government, as a whatever's entity that is dealing with critical things, you need to process all of that data as quickly as you can. You need to mine it for insights. You need to in an agile fashion, just like software development, right? You need to consume those insights, build them into your processes to improve, to react, to respond quickly, and then deliver better outcomes, right? The sooner you understand what the data is telling you, the sooner you can actually respond to whatever that data is telling you and actually, you know, avoid bad outcomes, improve good outcomes, and overall react to whatever is forcing you to react. I was just talking with Dave Vellante last week about this, so my co-host, and also just Jeff Frick from our general manager who I've interviewed you in the past on theCUBE about the transition and transformation that's happening. So I want to just get your reaction to what we're seeing and I want to get to your thoughts on it. There's transitions and there's transformations. Yeah, we've been kind of in this data transition around analytics. You pointed out, as insiders, we've kind of been pointing this out for years, but I think now there's more of a transformative component to this and I think it's becoming clear to everyone the role of data and you laid out some good things there. Now I want to ask you on this transformation, do you agree with it? And if you do, how does that change the roles? Because if I'm going to react to this as a business, whether small, medium, and large business, large enterprise or government, I now realize that the old world's over. I need to get to the new way. That means new roles, new responsibilities, new outcomes, new ways to measure. Can you share your thoughts on that? Do you agree with the transformation? And two, what are some of those new role changes? How should a business manager or a technologist make that transformation? Yeah, if it was ever more clear, getting a switch or a transformation, as you say, from sort of the old way we did business and we did technology to the new way has only been highlighted by this crisis, right? You know, if you are an enterprise and you are trying to do everything yourself, running your own IT stacks and all of that, it is clear today that it is much more difficult to do that than if you were leveraging next generation technologies, cloud, SaaS, PaaS and other things, right? Because it is hard to get people even to work, right? I think if we've ever sort of been in a place where this sort of transformation is a must, not a sort of slow choice or an evolution, it is now, right? Because enterprises who have done that, who have done that already are now at an advantage, right? And I think this is sort of like a critical moment in time for us all, as we all sort of wake up to this new reality. And it is not to say that enterprises are going to be switched over after this specific crisis, right? But what's going to happen, I believe, is that I think the philosophies are going to change, enterprises are going to think of this as the new normal, they're going to think about, hey, if I don't have the data about my business, about my customers, about my infrastructure, about my systems, I won't be able to respond to the next one, right? Because right now there's a lot of sort of plugging the holes in a dam with fingers and toes, right? But we are going to need to be ready for this because if you think about what this particular pandemic means, this isn't going to end in April or May, right? Because without a treatment or without a vaccination, it's going to continue to resurface, right? Unless we eradicate the entire population of the virus, any new incident is going to start up like a small flare-up and that is going to continue to bring us back into the situation. And over this time, we're going to have to continue to respond to this crisis as we are, and we need to plan for the future ones like this. And that might not be a pandemic type of crisis, right? It could be a change in the business. It could be other types of world events, whatever it might be. But I think this is the time when, when enterprises are going to start adopting these types of procedures and technologies to be able to respond. You know, it's interesting, Bruno, you bring up some good points. And I think about all the conversations I've had over the years with pros around disaster recovery and bend and continuous operations. This is a different vector of what that means, because you highlighted earlier, IT is not like a hurricane or a power outage. This is a different kind of disruption. And you, we talked about scale. What are some of the things that you're seeing right now that businesses are being faced that you guys are seeing in the analytics or use cases that have emerged from this new normal that is facing today's business with, with this crisis? What's changed? What is this new challenge when you think about the business continuity and how continuous operations need to be sustained? Because again, it's a different vector. It's not as, not a blackout. It's not a hurricane. It's a different kind of disruption. And it's one where the business needs to stay on more than ever. Yep, true. And you know, what's really interesting and there are some relatively sort of straightforward use cases that we're seeing, right? People are dealing with their, you know, authentication, VPN network issues because everybody's low on bandwidth. Everybody is sort of, all of these systems are sort of at their breaking point because they're carrying more than they ever did. So, you know, these are the use cases that existed all along, right? The problem with the use cases that existed all along is that they've been sort of slowly ticking up and growing, right? And this is a discontinuity right now. So what's happened right now, all of a sudden, you've got double triple quadrupled load and you need to both scale up your infrastructure, scale up your monitoring, be much more vigilant about that monitoring, speed up your recovery because more is at stake and all of those things. So that's sort of like the generic use cases that existed all along, but have not been sort of in this, you know, disruptive type of operating environment. And second is enterprises are now learning very quickly what do they need to do in terms of scaling and monitoring their production, customer facing infrastructure, right? What used to be sort of in the data center, the three tier world, sort of adding a few nodes to an application to your website over time worked, right? Right now, everybody's realizing that this whole bent on, you know, building on microservices, building for scale, re-architecting and all that stuff so that you can respond to an instantaneous burst of traffic on your site. And you want to capture that traffic because it means revenue. And if you don't capture it, you miss out on it, right? And then customers go elsewhere and never come back and all that stuff. So a lot of the workloads are, you know, to ensure that the systems, the mission critical systems are up and running. It's all about monitoring real-time telemetry, accelerating root cause analysis across systems that are cloud systems and so on. It's a great point. You actually were leading into my next question. I wanted to ask you, and you know, you know, the old saying goes, preparation meets opportunity. Those are the lucky ones. You know, luck is never really there. You're prepared and opportunity. Can you talk about those people that have been prepared that are doing it right now or who are actually getting through this and what does preparation look like? What's that opportunity? Who's not prepared? Who's hurting the most? Who's suffering and what could they do differently? And are you seeing any patterns out there that people, they did their work, they're cloud native, they're scale out or they have auto-scaling or these things. What are some of the things where people were prepared and can you describe that? And on the other side where people weren't prepared and they're hurting, what's, can you describe those two environments? Sure, yeah. So, you know, you think about the spectrum of sort of companies that are going through digital transformation, right? There are companies who are on the left side. I don't know whether I'm mirror or not, but basically on the left side are people who are just sort of sort of making that transformation and moving to serving customers digitally and on the right side are the ones that are basically all in already there and have been building sort of modern architectures to support that type of transformation. And so the ones that are already sort of all the way on the right companies like us, right? We've been in this business forever. We serve customers who are sort of early adopters of digital. So we've had to deal with things like November 6th primary elections, right? And all of our media and chairman customers who were spiking or we have to deal with companies that do sporting events like World Cup or Super Bowl and things like that. So we knew that our business was going to always demand of us to be able to respond to both scheduled and unscheduled disruptions and we needed to build systems that can scale to that without many human interactions, right? And there are many of our customers and companies who are in that position today who are actually able to do business and are now thriving, right? Because they are the ones capturing market share at this point in time. The people who are struggling are people who have not yet kind of made it to that full transformation. People who essentially assume business as normal who are maybe beginning that transformation but don't have the know-how or the architecture or the technology yet to support it, right? Their customers are coming to them through their new digital channels but those digital channels struggle, right? And so you'll see this more often than not you're going to find these still running in the traditional data center than in the cloud. Sometimes they're running in the cloud where they're done, you know, just a sort of regular lift and shift instead of rearchitecting and things like that. So there's a really a spectrum and it's really funny and amazing how much it maps to sort of the journey in digital transformation and how this specific thing is essentially what's happening right now, it looks like the business environment demands everybody to be fully digital but not everybody is. And so effectively the ones that are not are struggling more than the ones they are. I mean, certainly we're seeing with theCUBE with the digital events happening on our side. All events are canceled so they got to move online. You can't just take a physical old way of doing something where there's content value and moving into digital. It's a whole different ball game. There's different roles, there's different responsibility. It's a completely different set of things. So that's putting pressure on all these teams and that's just one use case, you're seeing it in IT, you're seeing it at marketing and sales, how people are doing business. So this is going to be very, very key for these companies and the data will be ultimately the key and you guys are doing a great job. I do want to get to the news and I want to get the plug in for SumoLogic so I want to say congratulations to you guys. A press release went out today from SumoLogic. You guys are offering free cloud-based data analytics to support work from home and online classroom environments. That's great news. Can you just share and give a plug for that PSA? Sure, we basically have a lot of customers who just like us are now starting to work from home and as soon as this began, we got inbound demand saying like, oh, do you have an application for this? Do you have some analytics for that? Things that support work from home and we thought, hey, why don't we just make this as a package and actually build out of the box sort of solutions that can support people who have common working from home technologies that they used to use for 10% of their workforce and now work for 100% of their workforce. And so let's package those. Let's push those out. Let's support educational institutions who are now struggling. I have two kids in here who are learning. Everything is online, right? We have to get another computer for them and all the stuff they're young, they're in fourth grade. And so they are doing this. I can see personally how the schools are struggling, how they're trying to learn this whole new model. They need to have their systems be reliable and resilient. And this is not just elementary, but middle school, high schools, colleges have all the spend in there sort of on-premise teaching. And so we said, okay, let's do something to help the community with what we do best which is we can help them, make sure that the things that they do that they need to do for this remote, workforce remote learning, whatever it might be is efficient, working and secure. And so we packaged several bundles of these solutions and offered those for free for a while so that both our customers and non-customers and educational institutions have something that can go and reach for when they are struggling to keep their systems up. Yeah, it's also a mindset change too. They didn't want comfort. They want to have a partner. I think that's great that you guys do have the community. Can you just give some color commentary on how this all went down? Do you guys have a huddle in your room? You said, hey, this is a part of our business. We could really package this up and really push it out and help people. Is that how it all came together? Can you share some inside commentary on how this all went down and what happened? Yeah, basically we had a discussion, literally I think the first or the second day when we all were sent home, right? We got on our own online meeting and sat down and essentially learned about the sort of inbound demand from our customers and what they were looking to do. And we're like, okay, why don't we just offer this? Why don't we package it? And it was a cross-functional team that just sat there and it was a no-brainer. Like nobody was agonizing over doing this for free or anything like that. We were just sitting there thinking, what can we do, right? Right now is a time for us to all kind of pull each other up and help each other and it'll all sort itself out. You know, during the event on plague, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth during that time. So you guys are being creative during this time as a coronavirus. So props to you guys at Sumo Logic, congratulations and thanks for taking the time. Can you give some firing thoughts on for the folks who are working at home? Just some motivational inspiration from you guys. What's going to come next for you guys? Sure, and thank you for having me on this video. I would say that, you know, we have been making slow transition towards sort of remote workforce as it is, right? You know, in a lot of places around the world, it's not that easy to, you know, make it to an office. Traffic is getting worse. Big centers are getting populated. Real estate is getting more expensive, all of the stuff. And so I think actually this is an opportunity for enterprises, for companies and for people to sort of figure out how this is done. We can actually practice now, we're forced to practice. It might actually have positive impact on all industries. We are going to probably figure out how to travel less, probably figure out how to actually do this more effectively. The cost of doing business is going to go down. Ability to actually find new jobs might broaden because you might be able to actually find jobs at companies who never thought they could do this remotely and now are willing to hire remote workforce in people. So I think this is going to be all good for us in the end, right? Right now it feels painful and everybody's scared and all that stuff. But I think long-term, both the transformation into digitally serving our customers and the transformation towards remote workforce is going to be good for the business. Yeah. And, you know, it takes the community and really appreciate the effort and you guys making that free for people in the classrooms. And remember, Isaac Newton discovered gravity and calculus while sheltering in place. So a lot of interesting new things are going to happen. So I appreciate it. Absolutely. Bruno, thank you for taking the time to share your insights from your place sheltering. I made a visit into the studio to get this interview and a variety of other interviews we're doing digitally here. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate your time. Thank you. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here, CUBE Conversation with Bruno from SumoLogic Sharing. His perspective on the COVID-19, the impact, the disruption and path to the future out of this and the new normal that is going to change our lives. Thanks for watching.