 From Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2017. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live in Palo Alto, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here in our studios for our RSA coverage. We have Mobile World Congress coming up at the end of the month. We're doing the in-studio coverage, not a lot of space for theCUBE at RSA, and certainly we're not going to have a CUBE at Mobile World Congress, but what do we do in-studio now? It's for two days, February 27th and 28th. Full days in Silicon Valley coverage from 8 a.m. to 6 all day, thought leaders covering what's happening in Barcelona. What have we been doing here? Just a little plug there. But here, we're talking about RSA, and I'm proud to have our next guest, Madhu Sekhar, who's a CUBE alumni, now has a new jersey he's got on, new company he just joined, one of our other favorite companies. Service Now. Madhu, great to see you. Thank you, John. So you get to be part of it. No longer splunk on, you got the Service Now, you changed jerseys, but the game is still the same for you. Very same game, and I've been very proud to be part of Splunk in the process, but I'm great to be part of Service Now now, and Frank asked me to join Service Now, so it's a pleasure to be part of Service Now. It's hard to turn down Frank Slutman. That's very hard to say no to him. Frank's great guy, I love having obviously the CUBEs covered all the now conferences, Knowledge 17's coming up, same week as EMC World, Dave Vellante will be down there, but I want to get your take because you sold your company as an entrepreneur, you've long time entrepreneur for the folks who don't know Medu, entrepreneur, sold your company Splunk, hot in the big data space, you've been doing big data since we've known each other, going back seven years now. It's evolved a lot. Your company sold the Splunk, Caspian, right? Caspita. Caspita, Caspita, okay, that's right. Now Splunk's entire strategy is now big data and they're huge security opportunity, and now Service Now, very big data, we're in big developer community developing over there. It's all the action right now. I mean, the game is still the same. Is it? I mean, what's changed in big data and security? No, absolutely. I think that things is evolving a lot from what I see out there today is in the world of security, the big data is moved to machine learning. That movie has happened with what I saw with Caspita and Splunk. The next movie right now is more in the area what I call security operations. The disruption is in the area of incident response. What people don't have is people. So what security people are asking is, can you reduce the time to do detection? Can you do an operations? Bringing automation into security response, doing next generation incident response is the next hot game right now. I saw on the trending hashtags on our radar, DevSecOps, so some people call them DevSecOps, kind of a play on DevOps with cloud. You're being more specific. It's SecOps, S-E-C-O-P-S. Not SecOps. Not SecOps, which, you know, we're the internet so there's no real rating system here, but we're not going to go there. SecurityOps is really hardcore because there's so many open jobs right now that this begs the question, is AI the holy grail here? Because if there's too many jobs to fill and not enough candidates to fill them, it's a people problem. At the same time, it's also a technology opportunity. Is that reality right now, or is that just the beginning of the game, first inning, first pitch? No, it's the beginning of the game, but definitely I think that there will be a lot of disruption in the security operation because it's two things happening. One is the people angle. Second is the operation should be done in the cloud and the SaaS manner. See imagine, if you want to do this incident response, you're going to have people all over the world or maybe you'll have virtual agents doing this workflow automation, incidents and change response. All of them should be done almost in the form of a cloud and a SaaS. That's where it's service now it makes sense, right? So think of like a, they're doing security operation like in ERP. So security operation will go through what ERP went through cloud. So service now is the best company to do security operations in the cloud. So ERP though, that was a little slower market. I mean that created the whole enterprise software. So you're saying that you think security ops will take the same kind of path? It'll take a similar path only thing is much faster because there's a burning need, there's a pain. And you got cloud too. And there's a cloud to it. And the cloud and security are happening so fast delivering security operation in the cloud as a SaaS application. To me is the best way to deliver a disruption right now in this market. So question for you on the cloud. Does cloud have more security than no cloud? Cause it used to be cloud was a security risk now. Some people are saying at RSA this week that actually cloud is more secure than on premise. I think that's debatable. I think my view of the world is cloud creates more opportunities in it. On-prem is also security problems are there but cloud creates lot more challenges than on-prem because the data needs to be secured. You need to encrypt the data in cloud which probably on an on-prem you may not do in the same way. Even though you have inserted threat attacks I think cloud security and cloud is a much more a different beast than on-prem. How about the anomaly detection? That seems to be a hot one this year. Ransomware seems to never stop. And we've been seeing fake ransomware. We always talk about fake news and the election. Now you see fake ransomware is a hot trend. Is ransomware still a problem in your mind or is it getting under control? I think ransomware is by far still one of the top five problems. It's going to be there. It will continue to be there. It's what I call a low hanging fruit for a hacker to go into the system. But in terms of credential compromise, insert attack, threat detection, all those things will continue to be as a problem solving. But in terms of I think where the problems are being solved, attention given to threat protection and threat detection. I continue to think that the next bucket right now is once you find a problem, how do I resolve it? What's the change? What's the incident? How do I fix it? The more attention will be more on orchestration, workflow, that part of automation, not in the area of protection and detection. I think those problems are like well solved. The next new investment will be now that you found the problem, what do I do next? So this is your comparison to ERP. There's a workflow evolution that now this shifts to the value is rapid turnaround on the problems and mediation. Okay, I got to ask you the question. I got to ask an entrepreneurial question or more of a provocative question. What is the coolest thing that you saw this week at RSA in the industry as the show unfolds? A lot of noise, a lot of pomp and circumstance, a lot of action. What surprised you? What's the coolest thing you've seen? I think I would stick to the same thing where I said look I think the area of threat detection, threat protection is old. There's nothing new there. The only new I think this year RSA is doing machine learning for the workflow, automation and orchestration. I call it the cloud security operations or cloud sex ops. That's it. And what's the key determinant there? What's the key disruptive innovator? The disruptive innovator is how can you do it without a human being and automate the whole process? Wouldn't that be nice if the system will find automatically what incident to do and fix it and you just keep watching your Netflix? Great, and I asked you one other thing on this trend that we saw. There's been a mandate. We saw this at Splunk.conf this year. Security people are it's pretty close community, well vetted. They all know each other from the industry. Yet there's a now we saw at .conf at the Splunk event sharing has been a big thing. We saw the cyber threat alliance up there. We saw pals on networks. All the top dogs are up there. Is data sharing a reality? And with the government not participating in as that they should be, is it even possible to have a data sharing commune environment where a community environment where people are sharing the data? Or does it matter or is it important? No, it's a good question. I think it does matter. I think threat intel sharing is an important aspect. The sharing will happen at all levels. There'll be some community sharing. There'll be public's way of sharing it. There'll be private sharing communities. But sharing the data and doing the indicators of compromise at all levels. At the detection level, at protection, at even the workflow level. I think it's important and that is one fundamental feed that people will try to leverage going forward. Great, awesome. Got to ask you about the ServiceNow and the changing of roles between Splunk and ServiceNow. Obviously it's hard to turn down Frank Slutman as where you were kidding. But in all seriousness, what attracted you to ServiceNow? I want to really ask the question, why ServiceNow and obviously senior vice president, general manager of ITOM? I think look, as I said, the number one is obviously Frank asked me to join this company. It's a great opportunity. By far I think I'll see service now as like what, they're the second largest SaaS company right now, growing at 50%. They're the largest growth company over a billion dollars. And IT operation management, the group that I'm running which is cloud operations, IT operations, making sure services don't go, eliminating service outage. It's a great opportunity for me. I mean, it's the second largest BU for ServiceNow. What's the head count that you're under you? I mean, a couple of hundred people. It's pretty large group that we are running it. It's a second largest BU for entire ServiceNow. Taking that to the next stage and we are growing at such a large clip of 50% growth for ServiceNow. I think it's a great opportunity for me to take it to the next billion dollar opportunity. And when you look at that opportunity, when you look at the 20 mile stair, given your experience, obviously where they are now, where you want to take it, what are the big things you want to knock down in that next couple, a couple steps as you go to the next level? What's the vision? I think my vision is I think if I can manage both in the cloud and operations, of IT operations will have the same thing that happened in the industry of security, e-commerce and ad tech. The movie will be the same. If the IT operations will be also automated, it'll be automated with machine learning and AI to the point where I can tell you which application is going down, which service is going down, what problem to do, doing the predictive service maintenance is what I want to solve for mission critical applications. And that really allows the businesses to shift their value. Exactly. That's the ultimate vision of ServiceNow. Have you, were you impressed with the developer community there? Because one of the things that jumped out at me in covering ServiceNow over the years is they kind of had this developer program just kind of came out of nowhere. This developers are very loyal and Absolutely. Very good community there. I think if you think about like the way in which Frank and the team have created, they have a good platform. So he always called it like we go in herds. We have a great platform. We have developer community ecosystem to build on it. We offer certain solutions on top like what we're doing with ITSM, ITARM and security operations of providing this whole platform and these applications makes it very unique. Yeah, I got a lot of stares at me when I first started going to ServiceNow and I started talking about DevOps. This is years ago and if you look at what ServiceNow has happened they've really kind of intersected with the DevOps trend. Because as you're pointing out this is an opportunity for them to I won't say back into the cloud because they are in there, right? So their customers are back into the cloud. So they really kind of rode that opportunity pretty well. That's one of the projects that I'm also responsible for which is doing the cloud management and also doing release management for DevOps doing DevOps automation orchestration. That's a very hot area for us. Madhu, I got to get your take on Silicon Valley obviously looking forward to having you on our Silicon Valley Friday show soon. Great guest. We're going to certainly get your phone number before you leave and we'll call you up and love to have you in the studio. You're a entrepreneur. I know you're always itching itching to scratch that entrepreneurial itch. Luckily ServiceNow is an entrepreneurial company with Frank Slutman in charge also. A partner at Greylock. A very good culture there. But what's your take on the current ecosystem and entrepreneurs? Certainly a lot of those angel funded companies have gotten funding. Some aren't really making it. They call the living dead when you have enough revenue but you're not breaking through. Yet there's a whole nother wave coming machine learning, AI and whatnot. So do you have kind of a interesting dichotomy going on here? It is. I think I would say the my theory of the world is look there's always a good companies will always survive and do well. It's a good entrepreneurs, good companies, good investor, that hygiene as long as you have there it'll do well. And there's always going to be bad companies, right? So that's part of life. But I think any companies that's built before not designed for cloud age or DevOps age or machine learning those companies are going to die. So anybody who's designed for the classical enterprise software or did not plan cloud as a fundamental cloud native application. You didn't build it for cloud using the cloud and using the machine learning as a core piece. It's going to be a hard time for you to survive in the future as a entrepreneur. For that matter. And your advice for the pivots out there just shut down and repivot It's all of the above. Look every entrepreneur CEO and investor should look at it and to look like as we call bill what's his bias like is it worth putting more money to continue? Or should we sell this company now? I mean that's something a management should decide but definitely two thousand a year there'll be a lot of change will happen. What's going on in the startup circles that you hear in terms of funding any anecdotal stories around easy to get a seed round series A's are hard B's. What's the what's the parameter and from your perspective? I think things are more optimistic this year than last year. So there's more funding coming down because this is already a lot of capital. So I think funding will be more good for the entrepreneurs both A, B and the later ones. Hardest is always the series B. Series A is the easy one. And if you are series B is the hardest round to get. You get through the B that you're breaking through. Exactly. Series B is the hardest. Madhu, Stadikar, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. Now with service now senior vice president and general manager of the ITOM group. Again, IT as a service is big. Automation's coming down. IT needs to be an enabler, create, no, not create friction, but create automation. You've got it. That's your vision. That's right. Thanks for coming and joining our RSA coverage. Final bumper sticker for RSA. What's the big theme this year? Bumper sticker for RSA. Security operations. Security operations. SecOps. In cloud. SEC, not sex ops, which I thought it sounded like but SecOps is where it is. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE. Live coverage of RSA. We'll be back with more after the short break.