 Well, hello everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE and continuing our coverage of splunk.conf21. You know, we talk about big data these days. You realize the importance of speed, right? We all get that. But certainly Formula One racing understands speed and big data, a really neat marriage there. And with us to talk about that is James Hodge, who is the Global Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer International at Splunk. James, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Thank you, John. And thank you for having me. And yeah, the speed of McLaren, like I'm all for it today. Absolutely. And I find it interesting too that you were telling me before we started the interview that you've been at Splunk going on nine years now. And you remember being at splunk.conf, you know, back in the past, other years, and watching theCUBE. And here you are. You made it. I know, I think it's incredible. I love watching you guys every single year and kind of the talk that gets there. And more importantly, like it reminds me of Conf. Every time I see theCUBE, no matter where you are, it reminds me of like this magical week that's.conf for us. Well, excellent. I'm glad that we could be a part of it once again and glad you're a part of it here on theCUBE. Let's talk about McLaren now and the partnership, obviously on the racing side and the e-sports side, which is certainly growing in popularity and in demand. So just first off, characterize for our audience that relationship between Splunk and McLaren. Well, we started the relationship almost two years ago. And for us, it was McLaren as a brand. If you think about where they were, they recently, I think it's September at Monza, they got a victory, P1 and P2. It was over 3,200 days since their last victory. So that's a long time to wait. And think of that as 3,000 days of continual business transformation, trying to get them back up to the grid. And what we found was that ethos, the drive to digital, the way they're completely changing things, bringing in fluid dynamics, getting people behind the common purpose, that really seem to fit the Splunk culture, what we're trying to do and putting data at the heart of things. So kind of Formula One and McLaren felt a really natural place to be. And we haven't really looked back since we started that partnership. It's been a really exciting last kind of 18 months, two years. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about the application here a little bit in terms of data. Cars, the Formula One cars, the F1 cars, they've got hundreds of sensors on them. They're getting hundreds of thousands or 100,000 data points almost instantly, right? I mean, there's this constant processing. So what are those inputs basically? And then how is McLaren putting them to use? And then ultimately how is Splunk delivering on that from McLaren? So I learned quite a lot. I've been a childhood Formula One fan and I've learned so much more about F1 over the last kind of couple of years. So it actually starts with the car going out on track. For anyone that works in the IT function, the car cannot go out on track unless monitoring from the car actually is being received by the garage. It's seen as mission critical, safety critical. So IT, when you see a car go out and you see the race engineer put their thumbs up, the mechanic put their thumbs up. IT, get their votes and get to put the thumbs up before the car goes out on track. There are around about 300 sensors on the car in practice and they reduce that to around about 120 on race day. That gets streamed by two megabits per second back to the FIA, the regulating body. It then gets streams to the garage where they have a 32-unit rack and you have two of them that have all of their IT equipment. Take that data. They then stream it over the internet, over cloud, back to the technology center in Woking where 32 race engineers sit in calm conditions to be able to go and start to make decisions on when the car should pit or what their strategy should be like to then relay that back to the track side. So you think about that data journey alone. That is way more complicated than what you see on TV. The race engineer on the pit wall and the driver going around at 300 kilometers an hour. When we look at what Splunk is doing is making sure that is resilient. You know, is the data coming off the car? Is it actually starting to hit the garage when it hits that rack in the garage? Are they then streaming that back with the right latency back to the Working Technology Center? They're making sure that all of the support, decision-making tools there are available. And that's just what we do for them on race weekend. Now, I'll give you one kind of more facts about the car. So you start the beginning of the season, they launch the car. The 80% of that car will be different by the end of the season. And so they're in a continual state of development. They're constantly developing to do that. They're moving much more to things like computational fluid dynamics applications before they move to wind tunnel. That relies on digital infrastructure to be able to go and accelerate that journey and be able to go and make those assumptions. And so Splunk is becoming the kind of underpinning of to making sure those mission critical applications and systems are online. And that's kind of just scratching the surface of kind of the journey with McLaren. Yeah, so what would be an example then maybe on race day, we'll just take race day of an input that comes in and then mission control, which I find fascinating, right? You've got 32 different individuals processing this input and then feeding their insights back, right? And so adjustments are being made on the fly very much all data driven. What would be an example of an actual application of some information that came in that was quickly recorded, noted, and then acted upon that then resulted in improved performance? But the most important one is pit stop strategy. It can be very difficult to overtake on track. So starting to look at when other teams go into the pit lane and when they come out of the pit lane is incredibly important because that gives you a choice. Do you stay out on your current set of tires and hope to kind of get through that team and kind of overtake them? Or do you start to go into the pits and get your fresh set of tires to try and take a different strategy? There are three people in mission control that have full authority to go and make that pit lane cool. And I think the thing that really resonated for me from learning about McLaren, the technology is amazing but it's the organizational constructs on how they turn data into an action is really important. People with the right knowledge and access to the data have the authority to make a call. It's not the team principle. It's not the person on the pit wall. It's the person with the most amount of knowledge is authorized and kind of, it's an open kind of forum to go and make those decisions. So if you see something wrong, you adjust as likely to be able to put your hand up and say, something's wrong here. This is my decision than anyone else. And so when we think about all these organizations that are trying to transform the business, we can learn a lot from Formula One on how we delegate authority and just think of like technology and data as the beginning of that journey. It's the people in process that F1 did so well. We're talking a lot about racing, but of course McLaren's also getting involved in eSports. And so people like you and like me, we can have that simulated experience through gaming. And I know that Splunk is migrating with McLaren in that regard, right? You're partnering up. So maybe if you could share a little bit more about that, about how you're teaming up with McLaren on the eSports side, which I'm sure anybody watching this realizes there's quite a big market opportunity there right now. It's a huge market opportunity. So you've got McLaren racing that has Formula One, IndyCar and now Extreme E. And then they have their kind of other branch, which is eSports. So, you know, gaming. And one of the things that, you know, you look at gaming, you know, we were talking earlier about Ted Lasso and you know, the amazing game of football, soccer, depending on kind of what side of the Atlantic you're on. I can go and play something like FIFA, you know, the football game, I could be amazing at that. I have in reality, you know, in real life, I have two left feet. I am never going to be good at football. However, you know, what we find with eSports is it makes gaming and racing accessible. I can go and drive the same circuits as Lando Norris and Daniel Riccardo. And I can improve and I can learn like use data to start to discover different ways. And it's an incredibly, you know, expanding, exploding industry. And what McLaren have done is they've said, actually, we're going to make a professional racing team, an eSports team called the McLaren Shadow Team. They have this huge competition called the Logitech G-Shop Challenge. And when we looked at that, we saw a lot of similarities in what we're trying to achieve. We are quite often starting to merge the physical world and the digital world with our customers. And this was an amazing opportunity to start to do that with the McLaren team. So you're creating this really dynamic racing experience that gives people like me or like our viewers the opportunity to get even a better feel for the decision-making and the responsiveness of the cars and all that. So again, data, where does that come into play there? Now, what kind of inputs are you getting from me as a driver, then as an amateur driver? And how is that then, I guess, how does it expressed in the game or expressed in terms of what's ahead of me to come in the game? So actually, there are more data points that come out of the F1 2021 code masters game than there are in Formula One car. You get a constant stream. So the game will actually stream out real telemetry. So I can actually tell your tire pressures from all of your tires. I can see the lateral G-force, the longitudinal G-force. More importantly, for probably amateur drivers like you and I, we can see is the tire on asphalt or is it maybe on grass? We can actually look at your exact position on track, how much accelerator, you know, steering lock. So we can see everything about that and that gets pumped out in real time up to 60 Hertz. So a phenomenal amount of information. What we, when we started the relationship with McLaren Formula One, super excited we're about to go racing. And then at Melbourne, there's that iconic moment where one of the McLaren team tested positive and they withdrew from the race. And what we found was, you know, the COVID was starting and the Formula One season was put on hold. The FIA created this season called, I can't remember the exact name, but basically a replica eSports gaming F1 series were using the game. Some of the real drivers like Lando, heavy gamer was playing in the game and they would run that the same as race weekends. They brought celebrity drivers in there. And I think my most surreal zoom call I ever was on was with Lando Norris and Pierre Patrick Habamiang, who was, who's the Arsenal football captain. He was the guest driver in the series to drive around Monaco. And Randy, the head of race strategy at McLaren, trying to coach him on how to go and drive the car. What we ended up was data telemetry coming from Splunk. And so Randy could look at, you know, when he pressing the accelerator and the brake pedal. And what was really interesting was Lando was watching how he was entering corners on the video feed and intuitively kind of coming to the same conclusions as Randy. So kind of, you could see that race intuition versus the real stats. And it was just incredible experience. And it really shows you, you know, racing, you've got that blurring of the physical and the virtual there. And it's going to be bigger and bigger and bigger. So to hear it here, as I understand what you were just saying now, like the Esports racing team actually has more data to adjust its performance and to modify its behaviors than the real racing team does. Yeah, it completely does. So what we want to be able to do is turn that into action. So how do you do the right car setup? How do you go and do the right practice laps? Actually have really good practice, driver selection. And I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of what really could be done. And the amazing part about this, now think of it more like a digital twin. What we learn on Esports, we can actually say we've learned something really interesting here in a maybe a low, if we get something wrong, it maybe doesn't matter quite as much as maybe getting analytics wrong on race weekend. Right. So we can actually start to look and improve through digital and then start to move that and pull that over to kind of race weekend analytics and supporting the team. Well, if I could, maybe a pun intended here, shift gears a little bit before we run out of time. I mean, you're involved on the business side, you've got, you're the Middle East, Africa, right? You've got quite an international portfolio on your plate. Let's talk about just some of the data trends there for our viewers here in the US who maybe aren't as familiar with what's going on overseas, just in terms of, especially post COVID, what concerns there are or what direction you're trying to get your clients to be taking in terms of getting back to work, in terms of looking at their workforce opportunities and strengths and all those kinds of things. I think we've seen a massive shift. I think we've seen that people it's not good enough just to be storing data. It is how do you go and utilize that data to go and drive your business forwards? I think a couple of key terms we're going to see more and more over the next few years is operational resilience and business agility. And I'd make the assertion that operational resilience is the foundation for the business agility and we can dive into that in a second. But what we're seeing, I take the Netherlands for example, we run a survey last year and we found that 87% of the respondents had created new functions to do with data, machine learning and AI as what they're trying to do is going to get more timely data to frontline staff to go and act that transformation. And because what we're really seeing through COVID is everything is possible to be digitized and we can experiment and get to market faster. And I think we're certainly seen in European markets definitely in Asia Pacific is that the kind of brand loyalty is potentially waning but what the kind of loyalty is is to an experience. Take a ride hailing app. I get to an airport, I try one ride hailing app it tells me it's going to be 20 minutes before a taxi arrives. I'm going to go straight to the next app to go and see if they can do it faster. I want the experience, I don't necessarily want the brand and we're finding that the digital experience by putting data at the forefront of that is really accelerating. And actually really encouraging, France, Germany are actually headed the UK a little bit in their attitudes and adoption to data. And for our American audience and America is more likely, I think it's 72% more likely to have a chief innovation officer than the rest of world. I think about 64% in Amir. So America, you are still slightly ahead of us in terms of kind of bringing some of that innovation there. I imagine that gap is going to be shrinking now I would think. It is massively shrinking. Yeah, so before we, we are just a little tight on time but I want to hear about operational resilience and just your thought, that definition, define that for me a little bit, put a little more meat on that bone if you would and talk about why, what that is in your thinking today and then why that is so important. So I think even putting in racing, operational resilience is being able to sense and respond to what is happening around you with people, process and technology to be able to baseline what your processes are in the services you're providing and be able to understand something is not performing as it should be. What we're seeing things like European Union in financial services, DORA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act is starting to mandate that businesses have to be operation resilient, service monitoring, fraud, cybersecurity and customer experience. And what we see is really operational resilience is the amount of change that can be absorbed before opportunities become risk. So having a stable foundation of operational resilience allows me to become a more agile business because I know my foundation and people can then move and adjust quickly because I have awareness of my environment and I have the ability to appropriately react to my environment because I've thought about becoming a resilient business with my digital infrastructure. It's a theme I think we're gonna see in supply chain coming very soon and across all other industries as we realize digital is our business nowadays. What's an exciting world, isn't it James? That you're working in right now. Oh, I love it. You said, eight and a half years, nine years at Splunk. I'm still smiling. It is like being at the forefront of this data wave and being able to help people make action from that. It's an incredible place to be. It's liberating. And I can't even begin to imagine what the opportunities are over the next few years as the world continually evolves. Well, every day is a school day, right? It is, my favorite phrase. I know that. And it is, James Hobbs. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Glad to have you on. Finally, after being on the other side of the camera, it's great to have you on this side. So thanks for making that transition for us. Thank you, John. You bet, James Hobbs. Joining us here on the CUBE coverage of Splunk.com, 21, talk about the McLaren Racing Team, Speed and Splunk.