 Okay, we're back here live in Las Vegas for Splunk Conference dot conference 2013. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, you strike the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder. I'm joined by my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Stephen Sorkin is here. He is the chief strategy officer and former VP of engineering at Splunk, longtime Splunker, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. So I got to ask you, so what's the most popular cheese on the planet? You know that, I think that men, mozzarella was the most popular overall. So we had a little bake off this morning, little cheese off, and that was the question put forth to Stephen and your colleague, Devani, who was one of the lead product managers here. That's right. She was working on the new and improved enterprise Splunk interface, you had the old command line search. And she completely destroyed me there. And you were happy about that, why is that? Well, I mean, it was my team who built a software. So our job is to make life easier and not just for ourselves, but for everyone in the business. And so we built a user interface that we knew would help product managers solve problems in addition to the traditional IT folks who Splunk is their bread and butter. So you started here back when, in fact though, I think the week that 1.0 was announced. Right, I started the week of the 14th of November of 2005. So a long, long time ago in Silicon Valley years. So you drank the Kool-Aid. I did. Well done, good call. I did. So I got to ask you about the, you know, in Silicon Valley, it's always product, market fit, you know, explode the market, get all the buzz. You guys really are a big success story in Silicon Valley. You know, great product, great founding team, a lot of passion. You picked the problem, you saw the great technology, but you guys really hung your hat on product excellence. And you know, it's a testament here at this event, kind of looking at all the, with the surging, big gated trend in the loyal base, the revenues of ecosystems exploding. But take us through that product excellence mindset of the culture of Splunk, because you guys had to really bunker down and get a position of beach head, grow it from there, build your audience base, incrementally just kick butt. I think it absolutely begins with knowing your audience and more importantly being your audience, at least at first. And so when I was looking at Splunk, I started looking at Splunk the summer of 2005 and I was a scientist at HP Labs and I downloaded Splunk on the recommendation of my friend who was there. I tried it out, I could imagine what could happen with technology like this, because there is no one that was looking at data in this way. And then over the years, we just had to keep on using the product, keep on solving our own problems with the product, because if you can't use it yourself, if it doesn't work for yourself, then you don't know that you have even one single customer. But if it works for you, then you know you have at least one customer yourself. So we kept on plotting along and building the appropriate product for the time. So Eric and Rob, when they founded the company, they had some earlier names, I'm sure you've heard of them, Oplicity and Transaction Engines, which were very grand ideas for what you could do with this data. But then they quickly realized that you had to start with a simpler problem. Just let's make the data searchable. And then once we get the data in the system and we prove value to some set of users, then we can do more. Every company has a culture and Splunk's culture here is pretty clear. Everyone loves to have fun. You can see the passion from the employees, from the customers. So I got to ask you, what is the culture at Splunk? Every company has one thing that they do great. Intel's Moore's Law. What is the Splunk thing that's featured within the Splunk culture, engineering and product that makes it like really, really unique and inside the DNA? I think that we like to be irreverent and disruptive. So maybe that's two things, but let's start with irreverent. And we like to have fun with the problems that we're having and really just kind of look at things in a different way. Okay, that's one. Go to the other one, disruptive. Disruptive? I mean, if you look at our software and you look at some of the developments that we've had over the years, when we added the search language, there were some people in the company that were very unhappy that we were going from pure keyword search to this maybe it's a bastardized search language that's half Google, half UNIX command shell. But that was the right thing for our customers at the time. And so over and over, we've had to think about what's the next thing in the product to really take it to the next level and solve a different class of problems without alienating our existing audience. We don't want to piss off our customers. There are greatest allies here. So the CSO is a new role, is that right? That is correct. So I mean, you were a real company before you went public, but now you're really under the spotlight. So that the role is actually, I think apropos of a public company. So talk about that role and what have you learned? Anything surprise you when you could sit back, give up the engineering, give it a polly. But it's very hard to give it up, but you handed the reins, right? That's right. And so what have you been thinking about in that role of a chief strategy officer? How are you going to operate in that role? What are your objectives? Well, the way that I think about it is the CSO is first and foremost a trusted advisor to the CEO. My job is to help Godfrey understand the choices that the company has to make, especially in the two to five year time horizon, weighing the technology, weighing the partnerships, weighing the field, weighing the... The chess board. There are many different options that we have. And I think that it's been said many times that for a company of our stage the most important thing is to focus and it's to decide what not to do. And so my role is to help understand what we do and what we don't do in the context of what our strengths are, our technology, our culture, our product, our customers, and make sure that we keep them happy. And so you got to listen to the customers. That's also a big thing. And now that you guys are growing up on a rocket ship certainly the growth has been fantastic over the past five years or so. You're moving up the value stack. You're seeing seed level conversations around Splunk, around analytics and business value. What's next? I mean, obviously at the mobile acquisition bug sense that's a good, you know, Splunk sense now kind of a combined opportunity. You get cloud with Splunk. What's next on the strategy march there for you guys? Well, I mean, I think that you've highlighted a lot of the important parts from the product angle. It's more products in order to serve more users, more products in order to serve more types of data, more products to serve more delivery, more products to collect data from more places. But I think that we also have to think about the richness of what we can do with the product. So how can we help our customers solve a different class of problem say by employing data science techniques here? And so that is something that is difficult to productize naturally. So service is certainly an important element there. Let me ask you about growing a company out. So you've been there from the beginning and there's always bumps on the road, especially the first couple of years you get through your Series B financing at Series C and then you clear the runway, as they say, and get the cruising altitude. You guys are certainly at that now. Hiring is always a challenge. We're going to ask you, certainly in Silicon Valley, but now you have a diverse employee base. You've got people from the Greek islands and Athens, if you will, and coming in on bug sense and what's the hiring challenge and what do you guys do in the company to really make sure you hire great people? There are a lot of good techniques out there for interviewing and for recruiting candidates that will do a terrific job. It's really, you can't be desperate if in a tough situation for hiring. So a lot of companies I've seen will, when the hiring market is tight, which it is now in Silicon Valley, everyone has good jobs already, but you can't let your standards down. You can't be more permissible than you should. And so just keeping track of the end game. Is this person someone who's going to work well with the company? Do they know what they need to know or do they fit in the culture? So you guys look for irreverence and disruption. We try, we try. I wonder if I could ask, John was asking about culture earlier, and we've noted today and over the last couple of weeks that there's this sort of renaissance in technology occurring and there's some, a number of companies, in fact, I tweeted out this morning, I put Workday in there, Tableau, ServiceNow, probably even put Salesforce in there, companies that do different things, but they're very similar in terms of the customer enthusiasm, the sort of why behind, why they started the business. And it seems like you guys have throw, I could even throw Amazon into this next statement is, is there really, you really focus on the customer, they can compete, you know, Bezos says you can compete based on being focused on the customer, or you can focus on competitors. You know, we focus on customers, you guys clearly focus on the customer side. I got a couple of questions there. One is, how does that affect strategy? I mean, sometimes customers don't know what they want, you know, sometimes you've got to sort of take a chance and decode what they're saying. You always have to listen to the customer. It's certainly not a foregone conclusion that you build exactly what the customer asks. So from the product perspective, you have to interpret what the customer is saying they want and build what the customer will need as opposed to the literal thing they're asking for, because they don't necessarily have the benefit of talking to many people who are encountering similar problems. And they may not have spent the time to imagine what is possible in the space. So in order to be customer focused, we listen very closely to the customer and try to understand what the customer really means and what the customer really needs and how that aligns with our capabilities. Steve, I want to ask you a question about what you're thinking about, because obviously you got the chessboard or whatever analogy you want to talk about with CSO advisor, CEO. What are you thinking the most about right now in terms of the disruption, the enabling technologies out there, internal, external, chair perspective for the folks out there? You know, I'm still thinking across the board. I'm thinking about our technology partners. I'm thinking about our technology itself. I'm thinking about how we can bring data science to more people than experience the traditional definition of data science. And we just released Splunk 6 today, which was a product that my team had been working on for a very long while. So I've been working with my team to make sure that it got out the door successfully. Do you feel like a happy father? What do you mean? Oh, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled. We're very, very happy about this product. A lot of great feedback on it. People cheering and going crazy. And you're looking for levers, right? Little, you know, a small lever can move. Well, absolutely. You always want leverage. You don't want a business where to double the revenue you have to double the headcount. That is not a good way to scale a business, especially in Silicon Valley. You want to be able to get more with applying minimal force. Well, I mean, you know, there are service companies that do that, right? And they're good businesses, but that's not the business that you're in. Those are good partners for Splunk. If that's what they're good at, then there are elements of Splunk deployment in the broad sense. You're enabling them. That's our hope. That's our hope that we have an ecosystem of developers. Developers are an important focus to me right now because if you think about all of the folks here at the Partners Pavilion that are developing their applications on top of Splunk, this is a good way to bring Splunk to a much broader audience than you could. Take a step back and describe for the folks out there who can't see to our right here at the Pavilion because it's really impressive. I mean, you guys are getting a lot of props in the market because you're a public company. Everyone knows you got great acquisition of customers on the product side. But on the ecosystem side, man, a lot of great support developers, but also some big names, Arista Networks, Palo Alto Networks. You're seeing some big names out there. Share the perspective of what's going on over there. Well, we certainly have the traditional technology integrations. As you mentioned, Arista is using us to look at their software-defined networks. Using us to look at their firewalls. Cloudera and Hortonworks are both partners of Splunk. But it's even more interesting when you go upstairs. So upstairs we have our Internet of Things Pavilion, which is a very interesting place right now. We have McKenny as a partner. They are a traditional engineering firm. They build large buildings, warehouses, Air Force bases, and one of their customers, Egland Air Force Base, use Splunk to look at their power consumption and reduce it by some large number of percent. And these nontraditional uses of Splunk, it's just very validating because we're enabling a new type of application that centers around the air. You guys really are the poster child for this new value proposition where you see enormous gains in value on implementations. It's been a success story, a common theme from everyone we talked to over the past two years. So that's great. Props to you, golf clap, good job. But I got to ask you a more personal question to kind of end the segment out, is you've been here for a while. What's the biggest surprise? Going back to 2005 to now, looking back to now then, what was the biggest surprise to you that you didn't expect? That was, it could be anything. The product, could be the market, could be the team. Share your perspective. You know, I really didn't imagine an IPO back then. And the IPO was pretty terrific. I think it would have been hard then to imagine a user conference with nearly 2,000 customers who just love the product, who love the company, who rely on us on a day-to-day basis. We were building a fairly simple tool back then to help sysadmins get their job done. And we built a lot around that. And it was wild. A lot of companies like yours will comment that post-IPO, they see this halo effect. I presume you guys saw a similar type of buzz around that. Okay, so what else about being a public company? What are the good, the bads, and the uglies? I mean, being a public company requires that you do things like announce your financials on a regular basis. So that's something that you have to keep track of. It's a type of diligence. What are you saying, the cube here? Exactly. It means that you have a much larger legal team than you do. I love you guys' legal team, but. Steven, congratulations. What a great success story. You were there from the beginning. Really great ride. You guys did a great, great run. Created the runway, grew. Now you're on a rocket ship. Congratulations to all your success. Really appreciate it. Going public. This is live. This is live in Las Vegas. Day one of two days of SiliconANGLE.com's exclusive coverage of the cube here at Splunk Conference, dot-conference 2013. We'll be right back with our next guest, John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.