 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at Splunk.com 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor Splunk. Here are your hosts, Jeff Kelly and Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back. Jeff Frick here at The Cube. We are at the Splunk.com 2014 show at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. This is the fifth year of The Splunk show. It's the third year of having The Cube. We love this show because we get a nonstop number of customers coming on, really talking about how they use Splunk, how it's changed their world, and we're really excited about it. So for this next segment, I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Jeff Kelly with Wikibon. Jeff, great to be back and back with you, the Jeff and Jeff show. As we started two years ago here at Splunk.com. So we're joined in this segment by Adam In. He's the IT manager with the Royal Flying Docker Service. Welcome, Adam. Thank you for having me. So let's just start with the most obvious question. What is the Royal Flying Docker Service? Sure, so the Royal Flying Docker Service is an Australian organization. We're actually the largest provider of rural and remote healthcare in Australia. So we provide a number of health services, but probably what we're best known for is flying out to really remote and rural areas of Australia and providing both emergency and also primary healthcare out there. So we'll fly doctors and other medical health professionals out to provide clinic services at places where there's no hospitals, no doctors, clinics. And we also will fly people back into cities where they can get specialist care. Now, is that, well, first of all, it's a huge country and a lot of that kind of rural area for lack of a better term, I imagine. So there's quite a lot of need for the kind of service you provide. Yeah, there sure is. I think Australia is like the third least populated country in the world. So there's a lot of outback out there. The outback, that's the word I was referring to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or the bush, you could call it. The bush. Yeah, but a lot of people out there doing important things. And it's great to work for an organization that goes out there and provides these critical health services where nobody else does. So is the Royal Flying Docker Service, is that a government organization or is that a private organization? No, it's an independent non-profit. We do obviously get funding from the government, but we also heavily rely on charitable donations. And Adam, how big is it? Just give us some metrics on the number of people, number of patients, just give us some basic metrics. So we've got over a thousand staff throughout Australia. We operate a fleet of, I believe it's 63 aircraft at the moment. 63. 63 aircraft, yeah. So we're actually Australia's third largest airline behind Qantas and Virgin. So if you do it based on the number of aircraft that we have. We've got, we do about, well, over 290,000 contacts with patients every year. So it's like the equivalent of helping somebody every two minutes. Wow. So let's talk a little bit about Splunk. So you're here at the Splunk.com show. So tell us about your use of Splunk. How did Splunk help you kind of deliver you on your mission? Yeah, sure. We had some discussions with our local partner, Secureware in Adelaide about how Splunk could help us with a lot of our day-to-day IT challenges. But we also pretty quickly realized that it could help us with some pretty niche things that we kind of were struggling with ideas of how we could put them together. So things like tracking our aircraft. You know, we had good streams of data, but not great tools to just easily put together reports and dashboards about that. So we're using it to track our aircraft. And we've also started to use it to even track some little Wi-Fi enabled devices that are monitoring the temperature in the fridges that we use to keep our important medicines like vaccines at our bases. And also in the insulated boxes that we use to transport them on the aircraft. So, well, that's interesting. So let's talk about the aircraft data. So is that essentially data that's streaming out the aircraft from engines, from any other number of sensors that could be? Are there people now putting onto aircrafts? Yeah, look, we started off pretty simply, really. We have a subscription with a service called Flight Explorer, which is basically an aggregator of data from the equivalent of our Air Traffic Control Air, Air Services Australia. So they put together the feed of data coming from ground radar and other sources. And then through their application, we can get a real-time stream of where our aircraft are, where they're going, their altitude, and key stats like that. And it's actually really readily available without actually needing dedicated hardware in the aircraft. So because the application logs everything to a file, we can easily grab that with Splunk, index it, create reports, create dashboards, look at our operations over time. Yeah, so talk about, what are some of those metrics that you're looking at? What are some of the important analytics that you're running on that data that you want to understand about how your aircraft are operating? Look, it's just interesting to look at patterns of where we've flown, but also to actually give us that real-time visibility. We've got our dedicated operational staff that obviously have their finger on the pulse 24-7 knowing where our fleet are, but using Splunk, we can actually easily and readily get this information about what we're doing, where our aircraft are, out to all of our staff. So we've used some big screens mounted on walls around our bases, showing Splunk dashboards, simple equivalents of arrival and departure boards at an airport, simple, but it makes a difference when there's a nurse at our base that needs to be able to go and meet an incoming aircraft with a patient on board to know exactly when they're due in. It's simple, but it does make a difference. And it helps, I imagine, to optimize your use of the aircraft and in terms of fleet management, that kind of thing? Yeah, look, we're certainly looking at how we can use Splunk that way. And then the other use case you mentioned, essentially sensors that are monitoring the weather, sorry, the temperature inside the fridges. Excuse me, another interesting, you might call, industrial use case? Yeah, yeah. Tell us a little bit about that. Sure. So tracking the temperature of vaccines is really important, but also for other medicines as well. As I said before, we store a lot of them in fridges at the bases that we fly out from, and then we need to keep them within a certain temperature range during flight. Historically, we've had pretty simple sensors there to do that, but not a whole lot of historical data and not proactive email alerts or anything. If this starts to be a problem where it looks like the fridge might be approaching a temperature that's gonna be a problem for the contents. So we went out to market looking for some simple devices that could help us track the fridges and the boxes that we temporarily store the medicines in. We found some sensors made by Corintec, which is a company based in the UK. And they basically are configurable so that you can log the temperature and humidity if you like it at whatever regularity you prefer. And then they will submit or send over your Wi-Fi network to their centralized software. The great thing about the software is that it logs everything to a file. So once again, Splunk can index that file and we can actually create extra reports, do real-time alerts in a more powerful and customizable way, exactly the way we want using Splunk. That's what I was gonna ask. You just answered my question, which was, what's the delta with what you can do with Splunk with that data versus what you could do natively with that data with the provider software? Yeah, look at the software is great, but it doesn't give you quite the same level of granular control, whereas with Splunk, you can say, okay, well, for this particular fridge or this particular box of drugs, I want to just email this person and then maybe see somebody else rather than everybody getting every alert. Right, right. And how many fridges are connected to this? Look, it's actually just a couple out of each of our bases, but there's quite a number of sensors when you add up all the boxes that we have, one on every aircraft too. So I wonder if you could talk about kind of exploring in the data. We hear a lot about people being able to search and query and kind of change information, change data and information, information to action. If you have any good stories that you can share where you guys are able to do some things that you couldn't do before. Yeah, of course. Look, one of the things that we were able to actually really readily able to do with Splunk was having brought in the flight tracking information from Flight Explorer, just for our own internal operational use, we were able to help our marketing team to provide a new service to people that are giving charitable donations. So we set up a new fundraising program by thesky.com.au where the idea is that if you make a $50 donation to recognize that will effectively give you a patch of sky and in that patch of sky will tell you every time we fly through it. So that's some real time information and we're able to generate all the information and reports that we needed for that out of Splunk. And how's that received? Yeah, it's really quite good. It's a new thing for us to be able to use social media to try and engage with donors and I don't think people realize just how much the Royal Flying Doctor Service does on every day of the year. So I think it's a pretty neat way to use that data that we had operationally to actually tell our donors, thanks for your donation, this is how we're putting it to work. Yeah, that's great. Adam, so one thing we hear from a lot of customers here at the conference is that they started with Splunk in one particular area off of IT operations and then they moved to other areas of the company. And certainly that's part of Splunk's strategy that kind of expanded and expanded. They do get a significant amount of upsell comes from more horizontal expansion. I wonder was that the case in your organization? How did you kind of get, you mentioned how you got started, but how did it kind of expand and what did that look like on the ground? Yeah, sure. So I mean, with our local partner, it was actually a pretty relatively straight forward process. We were able to set up a trial, which was great. Try before you buy, get to know the product, fantastic. And then just to be able to just see how quickly we could actually get some meaningful reports out was really great. So we started off pulling in the flight operational data. Obviously we were doing some of the IT things. We're indexing the logs from our mail security appliance, from our network devices. And great to be able to do reports and alerting for that. And then just, I guess, organically, we just started doing some of the other things that I talked about when we realized sort of how easy it was. So was it kind of word of mouth inside the organization that kind of, I mean, we kind of joke about it here, but I mean, sometimes it's literally the case of somebody kind of looking around a wall and saying, what is it you guys are doing over there with Spark? Yeah, look, the IT team that I'm a part of is actually a very small one. So we're sort of just trying to actually promote the use of it. Plus, it's more that the organization has come to us looking for help, or looking for a solution to a problem, or to fulfill a need. And because Splunk is so flexible, we've found that we can do that. So you also mentioned kind of that try before you buy model. And it's interesting development in kind of the enterprise software space, not just big data in Splunk, but just kind of enterprise software-wide. Talk a little bit about your view on that. I mean, the old model was, or still is, in a lot of large enterprise software vendors, a large POC, and then you plunk down a lot of money for a petrol license up front, and then a deployment, and hopefully you get some value out of that six, eight months, a year later, versus the, I want to try something, in some cases for free, a sandbox approach like Splunk offers, or maybe I want to, even then, when I do want to buy, I want to start small, and then expand over time, maybe with even with a subscription license. Talk a little bit about your thoughts on that transition, and how do you view the two different models, and what's your preference? Yeah, sure. Look, definitely my preference was to do a trial and make sure we could realize value before we put any money down, we're a non-profit. We've got to make sure that we're maximizing every dollar that our donors are giving us, and we've definitely got a responsibility for that. So I found, it was great to be able to spin up a VM, get some help from Secureware to install, configure, do some example indexing of data and reports, all without any outlay, was great to then convince me that yes, this is definitely going to provide value to our organization. Okay, Adam, so we're running out of time here, I'm going to give you the last word, the Splunk execs are watching, what do you need from them to help you do your job better, that you're going to be talking about at .conf 2015? Yeah, okay, well look, I've really enjoyed working with and creating dashboards and reports with the new native maps feature. With tracking our aircraft locations, I would love it if we could easily customize the icons. So rather than little pie charts with different colors, if we could easily customize the icons so it could have an aircraft icon. It's a little airplane icon, yeah. I want a little airplane icon. Yeah, okay, well that shouldn't be that complicated. So customize icons. Adam in from the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia. Thanks for stopping by theCUBE. We had a long flight here, hopefully you didn't take it in a small plane. So I'm Jeff Rick here with Jeff Kelly. We are at Splunk.conf 2014, the fifth annual Splunkieser conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.