 And welcome back everybody, we're here live at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in sunny and hot Las Vegas. We're here at .com, Splunk's annual user conference, this is our third user conference. We've got our first guest of the day, very excited to have Splunk's CMO Steve Sommer here with us. Welcome to the Cube, I believe it's your first time here on the Cube, so thank you for joining us. It is exciting to be here. Thank you. Excellent. So, very exciting time for Splunk right now. Obviously, you guys had a great, very successful IPO back in April, had a killer quarter just ended in July. And now we're here at .com in Las Vegas, you got to think about over a thousand attendees. So you know, you had a large part about, in terms of putting on this event, how do you feel and how do you feel about the event? We feel great about the event. The first year we did it, we have 300 people and each year it grows. What excites me is that we have not just great developers and Splunk employees speaking, but the customer contributions. We have customers and partners leading over 30 sessions and for me the most exciting part is hearing how our customers and partners are using Splunk to better run their business. Yeah, because the one thing in the keynote that was mentioned and I found really interesting is the number of customers you have that you kind of land, you know, internally and inside a customer base with doing some of the more traditional IT, monitoring, analytics, things like that. And then you see them expand to other use cases, which I think really says a lot about the power of big data and that's really what it's all about is kind of answering questions you didn't even know to answer before. So let's talk a little bit about kind of where Splunk is and why don't you give our audience a little bit of a primer first off on kind of how Splunk approaches big data and analytics. Okay. The founders of Splunk originally realized it was extremely hard to manage applications and complex IT data centers and they came up with a brilliantly simple way to collect these massive streams of machine-generated data and to make it searchable and analyzable to better run the business, whether they're managing servers, virtual machines, networks, applications, whatever, websites. And people around the world, we have something like 4,400 customers using Splunk to better manage applications, infrastructure, security, compliance, websites based on that machine data that goes into Splunk and they can do the alerts and analytics to figure out exactly what's going on. What we're seeing now is our users are taking that data and getting valuable insights from the business. So the leveraging that machine data beyond IT for the business, we're also seeing a fascinating trend of people taking data that doesn't come from the data center. It comes from jet engines, it comes from flood meters, it comes from power generation equipment, it comes from GPS phones, social media and figuring out ways using Splunk to create new apps, new visualizations and better understand what's going on in their world. And what was really the breakthrough technology that they came up with? Was it just the ease in which they could collect the data? Was it the ease in which they could analyze the data? Was it the ease in which they could then correlate it with other things to really gain the insight? Because as I understand, listen to the keynote, that's really one of the great things is to pull multiple sources and run the analytics across the sources. And then the correlations come up and the insight really pops through. From a customer point of view, we make Splunk look extremely simple. A lot of people have traditionally referred to Splunk as Google for the data center. Simple search bar, put in any term and in real time from a single location find anything they're looking for, even in massive streams of data. The reality is we actually have patents on a lot of the complex technology that takes massive streams of time series unstructured data and puts it into a form that you can search, navigate and explore that data and visualize it the way you want. But from a customer point of view, we keep it very simple. Very simple. And then how you can make it even more simple, it fascinates me to think about the types of data you're talking about and yet to be able to get that on a mobile device in a way that's actionable for somebody to do something. Can you talk a little bit about how kind of mobile has changed the world? In terms of making Splunk simpler and making the data more easy to consume by anybody, a lot of it has to do with making Splunk into a platform. We've developed APIs and SDKs so that any developer can create these very simple apps, beautiful visualizations, leveraging the functionality of Splunk and the data that's in Splunk in any way that that end user wants to consume it. So that's been a core part. As far as mobile goes, we're seeing mobile impact our business in a few ways. Running Reliaway mobile apps is really critical and it's really hard. Mobile infrastructure, the underlying networks are very complicated. And Splunk's ability to take data from all the different sources, the end cell phone or smart phone, the mobile operator network data, your own application server data, and be able to take all that data and correlate it, lets people have much better views on the service levels they're providing. Companies like ADP Mobile are using us for exactly that purpose. So I'm interested to hear a little bit about why you think Splunk is really hitting its stride now. Is it because of a lot of the activity and focus around big data generally? What really was it that enabled Splunk to really kind of enjoy this growth it's enjoying now? And in terms of, I'd love to get your take on just the overall big data picture. How do you guys fit into that landscape as one of the most successful big data companies thus far? What's been the secret do you think to growing this business? Is it the focus specifically on machine data or there's some other aspects you could share? A lot of the industry and financial analysts are referring to Splunk as the first mover in big data. We did have an IPO back in April. That was very successful. Years of hard work went into creating a complete integrated solution for collecting, indexing, searching, analyzing, monitoring and managing all of this machine data. There are many companies in the big data space and we can be put in that category but we're focused on the real driver for machine data, the real driver for big data which is the machine data. It's your website, your quick streams, your cell phone, GPS, stamps, all that stuff. It's driving massive streams of new data. The machine data is no longer the thing on the factory floor that's pumping along. Right now we're all carrying it around and generating oodles and oodles of machine data for lack of a better term. You go into a store, you create one transaction, point of sale, you buy a sweater. You go on a website, you can create hundreds or thousands of machine events and all of that provides valuable digital intelligence to better understand your business today which often is in a virtual world, not in a physical store. One of the things again on the platform, the example on the platform is this idea now with companies that you don't want to just build a company that builds an interesting point solution that you go sell to people. It's really about building this ecosystem and this platform so people can take and extend what you've built on and take in different directions. So in the partner pavilion, can you speak a little bit, how many partners do we have out there? Are there one or two really neat apps or partners that you've seen that you'd like to highlight? There are about 20 or so partners in the partner solution area. We also have about 10 or 15 Splunk apps that we're featuring as well. And the real goal there is to make it easy for people to leverage Splunk for their particular use case. So collect all the data and make that data usable for everybody. If it's a Palo Alto Networks user, use Splunk app for Palo Alto Networks or BlueCo or F5. We have great apps for partners like FireEye for instance. A lot of the Weeding Edge, Next Generation, Networking, Security and other vendors have apps and they view us as very complimentary that we extend the value, the analytics, the visualizations and data stored for their apps. So for us it's exciting, the more apps we have, the more of a community we have, the easier it is for customers to leverage that data in multiple ways, the easier it is for them to solve a problem out of the box. That's interesting, yeah, because I think what we've seen in the Big Data Space generally is that really it's about community and kind of building applications not in silos but in kind of a community effort, kind of sharing best practices and learning from new use cases and things like that because this really seems to me to be a new type of computing. This isn't really an evolutionary thing. To me it seems like kind of a whole new way of looking at how we do business. This data as kind of the currency or the, you've probably heard, data as the oil of the 21st century enterprise. You've got to refine that and define insights into action, move those into action. So I wonder in terms of as you go forward, you mentioned, I should say Godfrey mentioned during his keynote that a few years ago it was a little bit difficult to explain to people machine data why it was important and it seems like that certainly is getting that message out but as the CMO, what's your focus in terms of messaging and really trying to reach people to help them understand what this Big Data is all about and specifically what Splunk is all about? Well our core users, and Splunk has always been focused on our core users having a very valuable perpetual software license for a free product, having fun t-shirts, branding. Our core users understand machine data, logs, events, alerts, those types of things. The higher level people have been more focused on traditional structure data coming out of the business systems and business intelligence use cases. And what we've been able to do is educate the market that that machine data is just as valuable or probably more valuable than additional more limited business intelligence use cases. And that's why we refer to Splunk as a platform for operational intelligence taking all the data from your infrastructure, from your customer interactions on websites, a lot of other data sources and making it valuable whether you're a sales person, a marketing person, a finance person, an IT person, understanding what exactly is going on in your business and seeing that in real time. Do you find a lot of the enterprises are just in shock, just not quite sure what to do with this giant proliferation of important relevant data outside of their walls and how they're supposed to respond to it, how they're supposed to keep track of it. I would imagine you walk into customers who are just throwing their hands up that they've lost control of a really significant and important amount of data about them, from them, their customers, that they have absolutely no control prior to recent times visibility. So is that a big concern and is your solution really helping them try to rein that in a little bit? There's definitely a lot of hype around the topic big data. We see a lot of companies hiring data scientists investing in large clusters of these open source big data solutions and that's all fine but we think of it as big data with a purpose. Our users can start really small, low risk, download splunk, solve a specific problem and most of our customers don't start thinking they're going to change the business with this machine data. They start with we're going to troubleshoot, we're going to monitor root cause analysis, we're going to drill down in the data and find that needle in hay stack. Then we're going to start being more proactive and alert. Then we're going to get all of our IT data, machine data and have end to invisibility and see how are we doing as a service provider with our SOAs and KPIs and then they realize if we partner with the business side we can take this data and understand really valuable insights for the business. If we're an online services provider which customers have declining usage patterns? What parts of the service are they attending to use more? Which parts of the service are they using and then dropping off and weaving our site? Expedia is a great example of that where they brought us into better monitor downtime and avoid downtime because for them it was millions of dollars a month in lost revenue. But they went from there to figuring out how to optimize their entire online marketing, web based marketing because they can see people coming to the site where they come, what ad networks would ever brought them to the site they can optimize the SEM spending, search engine marketing spending, they can monitor for security threats and they can actually with Splunk look at real time business transactions. How many of these people who are coming to our site are actually doing reservations and buying airline tickets and hotel reservations. And that kind of closed loop business intelligence, operational intelligence is valuable to everyone in the company. And that just wasn't available before. I mean is the phenomenal light that they just could not do that before or that the pain of trying to execute those types of analysis was just the hurdle rate was too high and you guys have just brought the hurdle down. Traditionally there were silos of data throughout the enterprise. The people running the infrastructure, the people running security, the website, the people looking at their customer, CRM type systems. And with Splunk you can correlate data from virtually anywhere and do any kind of analysis. So it really is an open platform and we sometimes talk to users and say all you need is a browser in your imagination. Splunk has a browser interface. It's a great paradigm. It's terrific. We've lived so many great technology waves and innovation that have come through over the last 10 years. It just continues. And only a few years ago it seemed like it was all the consumer kind of fun alternative ways to pick up the phone and call your friend with Facebook and social networking and Twitter. But now I talked to Camille Grant at CR Ventures who's so excited about Big Day. So excited about actually business use cases for things that exist to really change the world in terms of productivity. And I know part of the keynote was because we can really start to optimize and take fat out. So it's a really exciting time. As soon as I leave here I'm going to go listen to Target. I'm going to go listen to Comcast. I'm going to go listen to Expedia. I'm going to listen to Auto Direct from Germany because some of our customers are making the most creative use of their data with the solution that we provide. We look forward to hearing more about that. So with that I think we're going to let you move on to your next engagement. Thank you for stopping by theCUBE. Hopefully it wasn't too too taxing. Thank you for letting me be here. Thank you Jeff. Thanks a lot and again we are theCUBE. We are at the Splunk Conf 2012 in beautiful Las Vegas. It's warm here. Hopefully it's not so warm where you are. Next is going to be Godfrey the CEO Splunk. We'll be back in just a few minutes and thanks again Steve for stopping by. Thank you.