 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE live from the AWS Summit San Francisco. Jeff Frick and I are here with the CMO of Splunk, Brian Goldfarb, hey Brian, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, thanks for having us, we're really glad to be here. You've been the CMO at the CUBE, at Splunk, congratulations. Promotion, this is amazing. You've been promoted, let me start with it again. You've been the CMO at Splunk, am I right yet? For about six months, talk to us about the new role that you have there, what are you doing, what's exciting, what's happening? Yeah, it has been just almost six months now, it's been kind of an amazing experience. Splunk was super attractive to me as I was looking at opportunities because it has both an amazing product and customers who love it. And that combination, particularly in technology, is that rare first place that's a marketer's dream, you're not creating champions, you're not convincing anyone that it's great. And so I've been coming in focusing on how do you take that incredible asset, our community and our users, and really expand it. And that's been kind of a big focus for me over the last five months. It's an amazing company, I'm very honored and lucky to be working with such a great place. In fact, we've won best places to work for the 10th year in a row. Well, we've seen 10 a row offices are pretty nice, I was lucky enough to go down there and check those out when you opened up. Oh yeah, that's awesome. We have, you know, our headquarters in San Francisco, but as you think about the expansion of the area, having facilities down in San Jose is super great for kind of as we grow our company. So I guess it's a match made in heaven, but the word on the street is you're a data guy. You want data to support everything, data-driven solutions, data-backed decision-making. What a perfect fit, because, I mean, the essence of Splunk is basically sitting on that machine data that's flowing through the system. That's right. Where our roots are is really, how do we take big data and make it useful for people? Like machine data is often forgotten, all the information flowing from sensors and hardware and servers. And as we sit here at the Amazon Web Services Show in San Francisco, all of that infrastructure is core to creating machine data. And we want to make it accessible and usable for everyone to get insights. And what we see is that manifests itself in a lot of interesting ways. I'll give you an example. Yelp, right? You think about food, think about reviews, but they're using Splunk for a couple things. One, make sure that their core infrastructure is up and running, obviously important, because we need a restaurant review. You need it now. That's a very San Francisco thing. But more importantly, as they've rolled out their new food delivery capabilities, all the business analytics required to make sure that operations business runs tip-top is critical. They're using Splunk for all of those pieces. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit about the relationship with AWS. I know you're relatively new, but Doug Merritt's relatively new. And of all of the logos that Werner went through, which were numerous and hard to see, he picked Doug to come up and really help out with the keynote. So obviously, cloud, big deal, AWS, big deal. You know, what is the relationship? How has it evolved over time? And how has this cloud-enabled delivery impacting the way Splunk does business? Yeah, we're very fortunate to have a wonderful partnership with Amazon Web Services. We've been a strategic partner of them for almost five years and we've made a big bet of our business on using their product to deliver our product in the cloud. You know, our business started 14 years ago with Splunk Enterprise, a non-premises-based software solution that's been adopted by over 13,000 customers around the globe. And we heard time and time again as the cloud became more important in the decisions people were making, how do we get the visibility that we need both across our on-premises assets and our cloud assets? And so the relationship with Amazon has been predicated on how do we deliver Splunk in the cloud? And more importantly, how do we give everyone who's now adopting Amazon at this amazing clip the visibility into all of the components that they're using so they can maintain their solutions, they can make sure things are running, they can optimize their spend, et cetera. And it's even a billing partner, right? I mean, so it's an infrastructure partner, it's a delivery slash kind of sales channel partner and you could even build directly through Amazon if I heard right earlier today. That's right, so yeah, we are both a customer and a partner is one way to think about it. And today in the keynote, we announced with their new AWS Marketplace SaaS Contracts API release that we're one of their first partners delivering our product through that new delivery model. And what's really interesting about it is today enterprises are trying to innovate faster. They get stuck sometimes through things that shouldn't matter, procurement, legal. How do you actually get the assets that you need in order to do the things they need to do? Speed is such an important part of being successful. And now that we can deliver Splunk through the AWS Marketplace, customers can easily find it. They can now easily buy it using their existing building relationship with Amazon. They can use friendly terms that are defined there and they can buy on one year, two year or three year contracts with the appropriate term-based discount. So the longer you buy, the cheaper it is. So procurement's happy, legal's happy, the technical user's happy because they can move faster than they ever have before. One of the things that we're hearing in a lot of companies, a lot of enterprises is that directives coming down from the board to the CIO, you've got to move more legacy applications to the call, but you've also got to try to find more value from digital assets. With that respect, how is, what's some of the core functions that Splunk Enterprise on AWS is delivering to customers from a value out of our assets perspective? Yeah, there's assets across so many different categories. So we look at, what are we doing across the infrastructure side of the business? What are we doing across the security side of the business? And now kind of this emerging category of IoT, how do we get all of those assets working together? And one of the things that we think about a lot with our customers is we have all this data. How do you apply different lenses so that different people can ask different questions of the same data and get the key insights back? So if I'm a security investigator trying to prevent fraud, that's something we can do, but that's also helping the people in IT maintain systems faster, and it's also doing business process management, working with supply chain, and we see that happening everywhere. We were talking just before we started about this mental model that enterprises have where they're kind of stuck in this reactive place, something breaks and you fix it, or a customer complains and you deal with it, and everyone's on this journey to being more proactive. How do I get notified that something broke so that I can fix it, or better yet, predictive? And so we're taking machine learning and artificial intelligence concepts, baking them directly into the Splunk platform and using that to help people go from that reactive state that they're in to this forward state of kind of predictive intelligence and being able to fix things before they even become a problem. So I would have loved to dig in a little bit deeper on the IoT, because you guys were into IoT when it was called machines. Machines are just a subset of the things, and now the IoT thing is really taking off. Obviously we do the GE shows, and also people are things too, which sometimes gets forgotten in the conversations, and we all throw off a ton of digital exhausts. So you guys are pretty well positioned to apply your technology techniques, processes, now to a whole giant new set of data flows coming off all these things. You put the words in my mouth, like people forget about people being things. We talk about machine data. The word machine can mean anything, really. It's how do you take all of this data, correlate it together in interesting ways, and then do something with it. Think about the retail use case. Customers now have an expectation of the experience that they're going to have higher than ever before. You just expect more. You know they have the information, so you want it. So you think about beacons and knowing your preferences. So retailers need to take advantage of that, and they can use that knowledge like Splunk to really get there. Another example on customer expectation, think about travel. We all travel here, you guys probably flew in or drove in, we have mediocre experiences at the airport in particular. We have a customer at Gatwick Airports in the UK who's completely Splunked everything they're doing at the airport with a goal of reducing the amount of time that it takes to go from the front desk to your gate to less than five minutes. And so on a dashboard they can see wait times at any particular security terminal, they can redeploy assets, they get alerts, and they can monitor all the different data streams, whether it's weather data, flight traffic control data, airline data, sensors from all the different parts of the airport, and pull all that together into a people-based experience to drive up that engagement. So Gatwick, great example, and your CEO is also talking about Coca-Cola on stage, for example, you've got over 13,000 customers. So as we look at kind of where we are today with cloud users maturing, cloud providers maturing, looking at what Amazon has today, over 90 services. As customers look at getting more legacy applications out of operations, what is, how is Splunk helping customers on this journey to hybrid? Or is hybrid a destination? What's the conversation they're like with the senior leaders that you talk to down to the IT folks? I, you know, in my job, I get the luxury of talking to hundreds of CIOs, and I'll tell you all of them see hybrid as the destination. Most of the enterprises that exist in the world have investments in things from mainframes to existing infrastructure and data centers. And even as they consolidate more and more into the cloud, we're going to be in a world where people have assets in many different places. What we've seen with Amazon and why I think our partnership has been so successful is we're helping a lot of these enterprises justify and control how they're able to get to the cloud faster. We talked about innovation and speed. Being able to adopt services in the cloud in addition to what we're doing on premise is critical. And with Splunk, they get kind of insight across all the different components. They feel that they can manage the security across both on-premises and the cloud. And they get the peace of mind that they have that operational visibility because they're going to be hybrid. They're going to be running in the cloud. They're always going to have their existing investments. And that's kind of the state of the world for the foreseeable future. So look at Ford, you've been in the job about six months or so. What are your priorities for the next six months? Next, you know, Doug says, all right, warm up, time's over, get to work, Brian. He said that on the third day. Yeah, on the third day. So what are some of your priorities? You know, there's a business we have a collection of priorities, right? One is the cloud, like full stop. We know that the journey to the cloud is coming full speed. And what we can do around Splunk Cloud and being able to fulfill and deliver services for our customers there is absolutely critical in continuing to grow that capability. And the second for us is kind of customer success, right? How we get people beyond single use case to multi use case, right? They're using it in IT. How do you take advantage of it in security? How do you take advantage of it in supply chain? Because that magic moment that customers have is really when they have the same data in and they get value across their entire business. For me, as the CMO, my priority is piggyback on that. First and foremost is digital. And it's kind of trite, everyone's talking about it, but I came from Google and Salesforce. I'm a performance guy. And so I'm looking at how we can reconstitute the entire buyer journey. From the moment someone says I'm interested in a topic that's relevant to our product to I transact online. And that's a big initiative for what we're doing across web and sales team to kind of work through all those pieces. And then second, you know, I now I'm the chief T-shirt officer. That's not an easy job. It's the hardest job I've ever had because it's not my strength and always innovating on what's next. I hear I was on trending on Twitter, Doug's T-shirt versus Werner's T-shirt today. That's right. I think we were winning. Well, and you guys have like the biggest T-shirt booth installation device at trade shows than anyone rather than just like giving away kind of in the back. The entire booth is basically built around. Oh, and we're spunky. T-shirts, I love it. Impressive. And we saw a spike in traffic to our store this morning after we went on stage. I put the picture up. So I sent the link. Hopefully I'm getting some Amazon sales on my back. I don't know. The T-shirts match the buyer's journey. Do you have T-shirts? Of course. Of course. All right. Stop chasing your tail dash out. All right. You got to connect to your logs and always keep watching. So before we let you go, let's get a plug in for Splunk.conf. The cube has been going. I think this will be our fifth or sixth year. Count that high amount of fingers and toes. You're eighth, our sixth there, I think. So, where is it? What's the highlights this year? It's always a great event. Much like AWS, we're doing events all across the world all the time. We have a series called Splunk Live. We just did one in San Francisco last week, which are super great ways to come and learn about the product and get hands-on keyboard to improve your skills. But it all culminates in .conf, which is our leading event in the category. It's going to be in DC this year. September 25th through 28th. And it's the best place to come, learn about Splunk, get hands-on with the product, meet the product team, learn from your peers, which to me is the thing that matters the most, to see all the innovative ideas that everyone is doing. Because one of the great things about Splunk is the use cases for the product are basically infinite. And so you hear more and more stories, whether it's the city of San Francisco, or Shazam, or Yelp, or Gatwick, or thousands of others, and .conf is the place. So, you guys are going to be there, I'm going to be there, which is the reason everyone should come, obviously. That's right, exactly. T-shirts for all. T-shirts for everybody. Well, Brian Goldfarb, CMO of Splunk. I got that right this time. Thank you so much. And the cube, it appears. And the cube, apparently. Thank you so much for joining us. Great, your passion is evident. We wish you the best of luck. Continue success in your role for my co-host Jeff Frick. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at the AWS Summit in San Francisco. Stick around, we'll be right back. It's changing in this entire process. You started to mention it a little bit. Yeah.