 From the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walls. Well, welcome back to Orlando. We are live here on the show floor at dot.com 2016, here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV, where we extract the signal from the noise, shows all across the country this week. Of course, we're here with Splunk. And along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls, and we're now joined by Chris Kurtz, who is assistant architect and really a huge advocate, Splunk advocate at Arizona State University. So, Chris, glad to have you with us. Thank you very much, glad to be here. We could talk about three dozen things with Chris. We gotta tell him what we just talked about. So, yeah, we'll get to the Splunk stuff in a minute, but they've been at Arizona State 14 years. 10 of which were spent working on various NASA projects that dealt with the Mars rover project, which I'm just fascinated by that you were involved and Arizona State was integral to those projects. Absolutely. I worked for a group called the Mars Space Flight Facility, led by a scientist named Dr. Phil Christensen, and he's a NASA researcher. Had four instruments in orbit or on the surface of Mars at the same time. And I ran, I was the computer guy for him, so I was the assistant manager, and I worked on Spirit and Opportunity, both of the older rovers, and worked on Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, so I did that for a decade. So, when you told people, yeah, I got a job that's out of this world, you really meant it, you really didn't have a job out of this world. A large number of scientists have graduated and moved on to other fields and stayed in geology and continued to work with JPL and NASA and other NASA groups. And so, there's a lot of people out there that I helped get their PhDs. My son's at University of Santa Barbara at Physics major and he's always fascinated with the whole space concept and he's so interested. So, are there a lot of young kids coming in? They must be fascinated by all the science now has changed. Absolutely, and as a university, our job is to train these kids and help them get future jobs and both undergraduate and graduate degrees, PhDs, et cetera. That group is really focused on trying to get as many young people involved as possible and make that available. That's cool, well, I mean, you certainly got a challenge. When you say you shipped your product, you definitely ship it out of this world. Yeah, no maintenance on that. That's beyond FedEx too, I mean. You're hanging around the Splunk trust. Yeah, I shipped the product into space. What have you done? Well, I put it on Amazon. But I mean, all kidding aside, this is the fun part, right? So, you've got a job that's real world, you've got real instrumentation out in space and that's something you're working on. But behind is the data. Behind is a lot of stuff that's the computation. Your day-to-day job requires data, simulations. You probably have some cloud on, super confused on demand. You need to simulate, you need to do stuff to get to where you're going. How are you using Splunk? How is your job changed by Splunk? Has it changed your role? How you approach it? Yep, so Splunk was brought into Arizona State for the security group to pull information from our operations group real time or as real time as we possibly could. I came in at that level at the very beginning and have shepherded Splunk into a full-blown enterprise product. We started as a 50 gigabyte customer a little over four years ago. We're at a terabyte now and I've really been able to architect and shepherd Splunk into its position now. I work for our jeopardy CIO directly in the data analytics group and our goal is to make Splunk into an enterprise tool that the entire university can use, not just security, not just operations. Everybody's going to be able at the university to use it and hopefully eventually even researchers like the Mars Groups will be able to use Splunk. It's funny Chris, take a step back as you also have an instrumentation background legitimately instruments in space but instrumenting an enterprise in a digitized way is really where Splunk's winning. Absolutely. People want to digitize and understand the data, the digital assets flowing around. How do you get that done? How do you become the disruptor, the agitator, the innovator, all kind of rolled into one because you got to kind of get that sphere in there and clear the way, right? I mean, how do you get that done? Yeah, so we started with an actual need. We had data that was in operations and that data needed to get to the security group in a timely fashion. And so we started there and then as the security group used it more and more, we turned that on its ear and turned back to the operations group and say, look at how good this is working. Look at how much simpler this is making your job. Let's bring in more data. Let's bring in new sources of data. One of the common questions about Splunk is always what's the ROI? I need use cases. I'll tell you, the best way to get use cases is hallway use cases. You're standing around with your coworkers in the hallway while getting a drink of water and you say, I wonder if we could take this bit of data and if we could combine it with this bit of data and we could do something new with it. And almost every single use case that we've come up with has been this, I wonder if we could take these two pieces of data and combine them. And then also, well, that's kind of the intoxicating conversations. People are like, oh yeah, let's do that. But then the ROI may fall down and say, well, I got access to server or, so the risk is, ah, but now Splunk solves that problem because you create a separate Splunk instance, right? So we have one Splunk instance for the entire university, but we segment the data into operational units into indexes so that the firewall data is in one index and we can control who has access to it and the server data is in another index and we control who has access to that. That allows our information security office to be clear about who's seeing the data and what's important and only the proper people are seeing it. Does that mitigate the risk kind of fear, if you will? I think that mitigates the risk and fear a lot. And one of the things that I love about Splunk is that as an audit tool, it's very comfortable so that I can turn around and I am missed compliance or I have other compliance and I can say, yeah, we're using Splunk, we're compliant, we can keep the data separate, we can keep it for as long as we need to. That's nice insurance. Absolutely, and we can also use Splunk as both the carrot and the stick. I was recently told by somebody that I was the carrot and the stick. So the carrot is look at all this great data that we're going to bring in, it's going to be fast, it's going to be reactionary, you can use all the data in any way you want, you can produce these awesome reports but you're going to get held to the fact that the data's in there and if the data doesn't show things that are working well, you're going to see that too. You're accountable for that. You're accountable for that too. So you mentioned some areas in which you are currently applying Splunk, we're using deploying it. I mean, why not university-wide? Is this the time and resource issue? Time and resources one step at a time. I'm in the office of the deputy CIO in data analytics. We moved Splunk into that area specifically because we wanted it to be an enterprise tool that was not owned by security and was not owned by operations. It's a tool just like, I don't want to say email, but it's a tool that everybody in the university can use. So starting with the university technology office, starting with the things that we have the manpower and we have the mandate for, but starting to bring in others, I'm an evangelist for Splunk on campus. If a researcher is interested, I'd go talk to them. You can show them how Splunk can be used in their research. If their research is of a certain area, we may go to Splunk for good and say, hey, look, we have a use case. I did that recently with T-Gen. Is it a safe zone that way by design? Because you're not getting political, right? Right. Would you get in? Absolutely. It's a safe zone by design and we're going to start to bring in people who are asking, start to bring them into the fold and then isolate them. And then if we need to set up a separate environment for NIST purposes or HIPAA, we can go ahead and do that. But we want it to be an enterprise level tool. You're also a Splunk Trust MVP. I'm also a trust professor. You're working within that community and we've talked a little bit about the community already today, actually quite a bit. It does show off quite a bit. There's always a handout, right? There's always somebody there to be helpful and we find that to be a really unique trait that's evolved out of this Splunk tribal affinity or whatever you want to call it. Absolutely. This community is amazing. I've been in higher ed for 14 years. I've been in the IT field for 25 years. I've never seen a community around a product like this. Absolutely wonderful. Why is that? Products good, that helps. But Splunk gives you access to the people. That's the number one thing is that any Splunk customer can talk to a product manager or somebody who's developing the product and get feedback and provide feedback and a lot of companies don't provide that. You can get to the sales people. You can get to the sales engineer. You're never going to get beyond that. And people give up and there's no real authenticity to it. Absolutely. I found out a feature of a product I was just looking at today isn't available and I said, well, I want that. He says, okay, great, let's talk about that. Let's see if the product can go in that direction for you and that's amazing. And they do that for all the customers. They're really listening. They really do listen. It was mentioned in Doug's keynote that they do listen. They're not always going to do what you want, but they are going to listen and they really honestly do listen. That's different. We had the other two guys up here and I love this because we're kind of joking. We're all old timers talking about IRC chat rooms and believe me the stories in the old days were worse now. We're a big IRC chat organization. And they were saying that they don't mind the brutal feedback either, which actually shows maturity for a young company like small taxis. They want the bad feedback. They want the bad feedback. They want the back feedback as well as the good. And the number of times this week I've heard, can I get your contact? Would you be willing to be in a beta? Would you be willing to look at an example of the product? One of the features that was in Doug's keynote is a feature that I have been working with Splunk behind the scenes for on a year and a half. I've been providing feedback for over a year on that. Just yeah, that's I think the direction you go. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, that's the thing that we should, I think we should be doing. What do they think they should do with the community going forward? Because I was pointing out yesterday and our commentary on our wrap up was they're really making a big expansion with the community. Why wouldn't they? It's already expanding. And that's a competitive advantage for the company. It is. Now, the danger is you can let it over build too fast. I mean, they have a good DNA so I'm not going to say that's the case, but they got to worry about that. I mean, how do you keep that in check? How do you grow an organic community fast while maintaining all the benefits? I think that's a very hard problem. So I think that you need to continue to grow the community, continue to grow the trust. The trust got a little larger this year. Trust members vote on upcoming trust members. And then we turn that information over to Splunk and they have the final say. But yeah, you got to grow that. You got to represent all of the different areas. There's two people in higher ed who are members of the trust. There's a bunch of different industries that are. You're in that trust. I'm in that trust. You're one of the two. I'm one of the two. And by doing that, you need to make sure that the customer has really continued to be involved. And if the customer decides to not be involved. Has there been a revolt yet? I mean, there's always a revolt. At some point, there's always growing pains. Has there been a revolt in the trust network? No, no, no, no. We love Splunk and it's a product and they do, they absolutely listen to us. So there certainly hasn't been a revolt. So there's no need for a revolt. There's no need for a revolt. This chatter, rumblings, but it's all positive. But we meet with Splunk senior, maybe not senior executive, but we meet with Splunk people on a regular basis and they do listen and that's the amazing thing. It's different from any other high-tech company. You always wonder. You don't want people getting jammed stuff down your throat and you see communities, as companies get older, they don't really be mindful of the sensitivity of the human aspect of the community. All right, so I'm going to ask the same question. I asked the other guys, what's the weirdest use case you've seen in the community? Because Splunk has so many use cases. What's the weirdest corner case of coolness that you've seen? So not mine, but one of this, the sales engineers I worked with, worked with a company that was Splunking data from snow-making machines. And so they were bringing in weather data to figure out when to make snow so that you get the best snow for skiing. I thought that was pretty awesome. That is awesome. Say that again. They were the snow blowers. The snow blowers, to make snow on the mountains for skiing, so those snow blowers have an immense amount of telemetry on them. How much water, water pressure, all that stuff, they're bringing in that all into Splunk and weather data to determine at what time is the best time to make the best snow for skiing. Now that's die-hard skiing. So between seven o'clock and six a.m. When the temperature is in this range. Which puts our best rainbow for the bed lightest powder or whatever. I wonder if that was an East Coast person because in the West Coast we don't have that problem. You don't need that in Colorado or... I think people get to make snow, they have the lower elevation. I sure, Pennsylvania, Maryland. I thought that was an amazing kind of edge use case that's not, you know, IT security laws. So what's your elevator pitch? If you're an evangelist and you're talking to somebody from University of Arizona or University of Denver, whatever, another university type who's looking. What do you tell them? Splunk can take any log you want. It doesn't matter what it's type, it doesn't matter what it's format. You can get it into Splunk and then you can compare and you can do transactions. So you can look at authentication and firewall data and web server and temperature in the room and whatever you want. And no other product is flexible to let you do that. It doesn't matter what the data is, you can get it in Splunk very easy, very fast, and honestly at a very convenient price. What about people who want to bring Splunk as a central nerve center for data? I think that's definitely the way to go. Let's just say I have all this firehose Twitter data and I want to jam that in there. And I have all this point of sale data. Can I jam that in there? Yep. Would that work? Absolutely, we bring in Twitter data. We look at Arizona State's incoming feed of mentions and then we're able to send that to the appropriate group and maybe a student has an issue and we want to be able to say, hey, somebody needs to look at this issue. So we monitor that type of information. We look at the amount of bandwidth that the university is using. We look at temperature. I'm working on a project with E911 to look at that data in Splunk and how to better. The goal is to better serve the students at the best price and protect everybody. Yeah, and that security aspect there too. Absolutely. What does it shape network traffic at all? Because number one complaint kids want to do is they want to have a server in their dorm room so they can have servers and then have game servers. It's a future prospect. We haven't done it yet, but I think the goal is to put as much operational data in Splunk as possible. What's the coolest thing kids are doing on campus these days with technology? Just out of just curious. Raspberry Pi is everywhere. Arduino is everywhere. We have a very good 3D printer program in our engineering school. We have a very active program for some of the robotics clubs. And so the technology that's in my age when I was a kid was unheard of is now $25 and sitting on their desk. And the tech culture is certainly broadened too. It used to be us geeks. Like now it's the tech culture as a genre. There's so much touch points. Everybody has four devices. They've got their laptop. They've maybe got a desktop. They've got a phone. They've got a tablet. And they're all bringing them on to campus. And they expect everything to work. Great. How's the STEM stuff going on too? A lot of women in check going on. Absolutely. A lot of STEM and a lot of STEAM. Add in arts in there. And I think that that's the key to the future. That's one of the reasons I've stayed at the university for so long is I really do feel like I'm improving the next generation. Well the STEAM is really important. It's important to get that A in there because arts is really a key part of this now. Absolutely. And can we make sure that we use Splunk to get John's son to class on time? Yeah, maybe. Can we do that? He's never on time. He's a physics major. I don't even think he goes to class. I just thought maybe we could nudge him in that direction. You know, I hit a 10 o'clock one time. Maybe not. No, no. Chris, thanks for joining us. We appreciate that. Absolutely, it's been a pleasure. And a fascinating background you've had. But it's interesting to hear about the current application too and best of luck down the road at ASU. Absolutely. Thanks very much for the opportunity. BUSC, right? Yeah, absolutely. The game this weekend. All right. Chris Kurtz from Arizona State back with more here at con.com 2016. Live on theCUBE in Orlando.