 Welcome back to Las Vegas, we are live here inside theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE Wikibon as theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events and expect to see them from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Aleem Cummins is here. He's a practitioner with John Lewis out of the UK. It's a large department store and has some other businesses. Aleem, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thanks very much, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here, sir. So tell us a little bit about John Lewis. Many of our audience may not be familiar with him. Well, John Lewis' partnership is a fascinating organization. We began 150 years ago and approximately 85 years ago, the founder, John Speed and Lewis, he actually turned it over to the employees. So rather uniquely with John Lewis, if you work for John Lewis, you own John Lewis. So I'm an owner of John Lewis and we all call each other partners and it's a very, very special place to be. So we have two aspects to us. We have the department stores. Let's call John Lewis and we have supermarkets and they're called Waitrose and they're really, really popular and very successful in the UK. So the retail business obviously is going through some massive transformations driven by the internet, the cloud, technology changes, consumer buying behaviors. Talk about that a little bit and how it's affected your business over the last decade. Well, yeah, I mean, when we started off 150 years ago, what we were all about was customer experience, trust and the responsibility we have. Now, what's changed in 150 years is how people buy from us. So back then, we had shops. Now we have shops, people can buy via the phone, they can buy via the internet and growing in a huge way, people are buying over the mobile. So mobile is now a massive, massive part of our business and it's becoming more and more popular all the time. So we have to adapt to that. We have to be ahead of the curve. It's a very exciting place to be. It really, really is. So talk about the Splunk implementation you guys are doing because we've had some other folks on yesterday, big sites and they have all kinds of issues, log file, management, DDoS attacks, all kinds of operational challenges that they're surfacing with Splunk. So give us an overview of what you guys are doing with Splunk. Yeah, I mean, we started using Splunk about 18 months ago. I guess like many companies, it was quite small and we had some visionaries, some hobbyists and things like that. And with Splunk, it kind of goes from something that's a hobby, a proof of concept to like enterprise expectation overnight. You know, that expectation curve is sometimes it's interesting to surf. So we have more recently, I mean, we had a brand new platform for John Lewis come live on Valentine's Day was a lovely thing this year. And that really gave us the opportunity to use Splunk in a really powerful way. It has been a game changer. In fact, sometimes to a degree, it kind of feels like a new game. And that has allowed us to solve some real problems from real issues to the benefit of ourselves as a business and certainly to the benefit of our customers. So the customer experiences has been definitely, you know, improved by us using Splunk. Have you seen more cost reduction problems you solved or revenue generating activities? Well, it's a little bit of both. I mean, you can find that, you know, you have a wonderful platform, but sometimes you can have some leaks, you know, things don't quite work and traditionally you wouldn't necessarily know about those leaks. I mean, they might manifest themselves by customers ringing up saying, look, I've got an issue, but sometimes they don't necessarily. So with implementing Splunk, what we can do is we can kind of for once, we can have our glasses on and we can see the low hanging fruit and we can go there. So we are actually solving problems that we wouldn't necessarily know that we had and also we're able to, you know, get good intelligence about what our customers are doing and their behaviors. And then we can act accordingly and make sure that what we have in place is what they need to shop the way they want to shop. So Liam, you guys have been able to, you know, 150 year old company, you've been able to survive, you know, a lot of onslaughts of competition. So you had, you know, at least in America, you had the big box guys come in like Walmart. And now of course everybody's focused in your business on the Amazon effect. How are you addressing that? You obviously got a great brand. You said early on customer experience was everything you guys started the company. And I suspect that's part of the answer, but I wonder if you could talk about those competitive forces and how you've adapted and survived and thrived and given that context. Well, I mean, we're quite fortunate. John Lewis is kind of a barometer of the UK itself. If John Lewis is doing well, the UK is doing well. We have a special position within the UK. We're highly trusted by our customers. We're loved by our customers and we love our customers. So they tend to stick by us and they know that what we try to do is the right thing. So our customer service hasn't changed in 150 years. It really hasn't. So they know that if they come to us, they can look it up over the web. They can come pick it up in store. We're allowing them to shop the way they want to shop. So our click and collect now is massively popular. It really is. People can go to the John Lewis department stores. People can go to the Waitrose supermarkets. And now last week we just introduced Collect Plus so you can pick up your items from thousands of places around the UK, which is new and that's something other companies or somebody can't do. So you mentioned mobile, so it leads me to my next question, which is logistics. I mean the logistics component, especially for the online piece is really dramatically changing. You're seeing pressure for next day delivery or even people not talking about same day delivery. People talking about Sunday delivery. I wonder if you could talk about those trends, specifically as it relates to the UK and your organization because I'm not as familiar with that. And then is there a Splunk tie into that logistics play? Well, I mean, click and collect and people picking stuff up in the store has just exploded in the last several months and coming up to a year. And the fact that you can pick it up in the store the next day is huge. So if you go to John Lewis, I believe by about maybe 3 p.m. the afternoon, you'll probably get it the next day. And that is just fantastic and that's really, really popular. In terms of using Splunk for that, well, Splunk I like to think of as a very friendly, positive type of quicksand. It pulls stuff in and the more we can pull in, what comes out the other end is the gold and is the customer experience. So we will be doing more exciting things about that and looking at our behaviors of our customers, but that's to come as part of our vision. So click and collect, tell me more about this. So I shop online, I find what I want, I don't have to call and say to you have it and then go in and get it. I buy it and you're saying I can pick it up by three o'clock that next afternoon or sometimes same day, how does that work? It possibly wouldn't be same day, but if you go to our, no matter how you do it, no matter what challenge you choose to use, it should be available for you the next working day and you can pick it up in the stores and we've got 30 to 40 stores and our supermarket Arm Waitrose has over 200 now so there's a lot of places people can go. But in some cases I could go to the store and get it faster, is that true or no? Depends right on the item. I guess it does depend on the item, yeah, but the item would be there the next day. Yeah, when you click and collect. Yes, absolutely, yes. Or I could just walk in the retail store. Well, you could just walk in, yeah. You get it the same day. Well, you would, yeah, we got it. The beauty is we've got the presence on the internet, we've got the presence in the stores. So I'm saying as a consumer, I want you to compress that. Is it technically feasible to do that in say the next year or two? Compressing that cycle, maybe not same day, but morning of the next day or maybe even same day, is that even feasible? I think so. What's the gate there? Is it a logistics challenge? Is it an inventory challenge? Well, I think it's a bit of both. I mean, certainly, when we have all of our data for our generalist.com available to us in the Splunk platform and we're about to start bringing all the data from the stores in as well. So we can start to see, for example, that if we launch a new campaign to sell, I don't know, new iPads, we can see in real time how that's trending, how we're doing, what's the impact, and then we can adjust logistically in the back end of that to make sure that we are going to have the stock in the right places to keep our customers happy. And what about the other way? What if I don't want to get out of my easy chair because I'm watching the soccer game and I want you to deliver it to me? We will, I mean. So you'll do that. We absolutely will. And you're seeing that same type of trend where consumers want you to compress the cycle time in which they can actually get their product. Yeah, I mean, at the moment, we'll deliver it to you and we can probably do it next day as well, but the same day is quite interesting. It is quite interesting. I mean, is that a discussion you guys are having? I'm not necessarily privy to that, but I guess if I was a customer, that might sound like an exciting prospect. I guess it depends what it is, yeah. If it's a new iPad and we have them into the roofs, yeah, we could probably do something there. Aline, what do you think about the show here? Obviously, the folks out there watching yesterday got a good vibe from us, but you know, day two had a good party last night from out of town, you're in Vegas, Splunk is shipping code, making announcements, a lot of happy customers. What's your take on the show? What would you share with the folks out there? Well, John, I've been at this show for, well actually, I came early to do some Splunk University training and the energy, the vibe, the enthusiasm is just electrifying at this show. I mean, when we went to the keynote on, when was it, Tuesday, it was absolutely amazing. I think he was inspiring as well. We really, I felt invigorated and you really want to go back home and share what you've learned with your colleagues and partners back home and I think Splunk are tapping into our psyche. They're allowing us to dream and I think that's quite an exciting place to be and along maybe, along may we dream. What's so magical about the Splunk product that people get so excited about? I mean, the fan base amongst the customers is really high. Again, the dreaming, it's enabling solutions. What is it about Splunk that people get so jazzed up about? Well, I mean, you know, traditionally, I mean, before we would have had Splunk, we would have really, really good experts. So you might have a guy, we'd ship some logs, he'd write some fantastic scripts, he'd do some analysis and oh, he wants to do it again. He's got to repeat that whole scripting process and if he wants to do it for yesterday, oh, sorry, we've recycled the logs. So the fact that we can all tap into Splunk, it means our expertise is being channeled into the same area. So collectively we grow together and our best practice can really, really increase and our knowledge transfers. So they automate a redundant step that's kind of manually going over and over again. Yeah, but the thing is because the entry is quite, it's not steep, it just means that if there's an issue, you can jump straight in and you can find it pretty quickly. I mean, I did the searching and reporting in the last couple of days and what we can do now is stunning. I mean, I'm not necessarily the analyst guy from the internet, but I can do analyst stuff now. I mean, that's, so I think the roles tend to blur a little bit, so which is quite exciting. So it's just important that what we learn here we share with the teams. But what I do like about Splunk is that it definitely fosters collaboration. Because Splunk, where does it sit? Is it this team, this team, this team? Well, actually it's the organization that spans a lot and it does bring us together and we kind of grow together. We have our post-traumatic growth, if you will. Yeah, so Splunk allows you to dream, which is great. I mean, you got to dream the future before you can create it. As I say, you got to invent the future. What do you see for the future for you guys? I mean, what's the dream? What's your dream scenario for going forward? I mean, I think the dream scenario for us is that we never get calls from customers to say they have problems. I mean, if people are calling, that's for us is not a good thing. We need to be doing proactive, preemptive, alerting. We need to be trending. We need to be seeing where this thing is going. So the more data we're going to pull in from our estate in terms of CPU, memory, disk utilization, network utilization, that's going to come together and that's going to really let us know at the get-go where we're going. But also what we're doing, which is quite exciting, is when we have new big projects now in John Lewis, from day zero, we're actually having a Splunk 101. We're engaging with the projects from day zero, making sure that when we come to landing the project, we have the dashboards. We have the ability to report on the non-functional requirements, the key performance indicators, and the dashboards people need to see how healthy we are. And that's very exciting. Because I think traditionally in the past, people might have thought, oh, we'll do that monitoring thing at the end. And at that point, your monitoring is only as good as what you store in terms of your logs. But because we're engaging early, we're actually getting higher quality, higher throughput. It's just a great place to be. William, thanks for coming inside. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. Obviously, hearing from the folks in the trenches, not just the company, but people using the products, great. Thanks for sharing that with the crowd. This is The Cube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back, live, day two coverage of Splunk Conference dot conference 2013. This is The Cube. We'll be right back.