 From the Walt Disney World Swann and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, it's the cue. Covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Wall. 2016, seventh year of the A&C, so the Angles Flagship Program. Go out to the events and expect the Singapore Noise. I'm John Furrier, John Wall. I've got two guests this segment. Get Dale, EMC, congratulations on the merger. Is this as good as the pre-chat? Then we're going to have a great segment. There's no doubt about that. We can't say what we were just talking about. Well, we could. It's actually PG. It is live. NC17, maybe? We do have Corey Metton with us, who's the Principal Systems Engineer at Dell EMC. And then Simon Yepp, who does Global Strategic Alliance at Splunk. So, gentlemen, good to see you both. First-time Cuber, I believe, and a many-time Cuber. Is that right? No, actually, first time I'm done. Yes, sir. So, part of that is just my personal blog. And what I realized was there was a lot of really smart engineers across Dell and EMC. And so, we actually made it sort of a hub of other folks that have similar ideas or at least similar kind of thoughts and musings and technologies. No, it works. All right. So, strategic alliances. Obviously, you have one here. Tell us about how you formalize that relationship between the two companies and how each of you is trying to leverage that now. Yeah. So, if you can, towards the lab, it's just been great. It's a hardware solution to us. You know, we're an ISV. We create software. It's just a great marriage, you know, from a technology perspective. And I have my Ninja team. We're all in with Splunk. I said, okay, great. He would show up to things. And he was the expert on storage. He knew our product well. This is a good story. So, that's how we met. You got to store the data somewhere. You got to be on some top, some storage, or EMC. Yeah, and it was... So, about three years ago, we made our first entry into the comp scene. And we sponsored it. And it was really kind of just an initial test like, hey, is this a market where Splunk is growing as an enterprise app? And it's consuming infrastructure. Cloud is becoming a real thing, but absolutely still need on-premise and hybrid approaches. So, we looked at it and we said, hey, there's a great story. We've been an enterprise IT infrastructure company for many, many years. It's trusted by thousands of customers. What? I'm trying to find a unique value differentiator for the Splunk use case. And that's really what we've been focused on. Well, and the stars are lining up, too, for your business at Dell EMC. As you guys can have a converged infrastructure and hyper-converged, the business models are also converging, too. And I think Splunk is a great example of what I call that next generation enabler. You get a great ecosystem, customers are all happy, but the key thing is that their company is a verb. Have you Splunked your data? You Splunked your car. We were talking about before you came on. So, when people start Splunking things, Kleenex. So, you know, you start to see that in the community. So, you see new innovations happening. So, I think you guys have to talk about for a minute where you see these new opportunities because as the business converges, some will say stores just collapse, but get growing at a bigger scale horizontally. Software and machine learning is not coming in. So, converged infrastructure, converged businesses. Am I getting that? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Partnership was the whole idea of making things simple and it actually began with trying to do something more on the converged infrastructure line. And so, actually, ICOMP, we're releasing this reference guide on how to deploy Splunk. It's a great story where everything is packaged together. You get frictionless deployment. And so, we're really trying to make it easier for people to deploy. And what you guys are also doing and the folks out there watching, you're starting to see the platform enable tools, a lot more solutions. Much more solution-focused. You guys have been there with the whole VCE thing on the high end, but as customers in the data center move to the cloud, they want to turn key. So, you're starting to see the kind of blending down. How are you guys at Dell EMC going into that? Because you can arrive with Splunk. Yeah, absolutely. So, software is right there. Yeah. So, part of the big challenge for many customers is that actually, provenance, so where did the data start from, right? So, if you want to have this enterprise, a machine data factory, a good place to host it because the provenance where that data began was there. But in many of our customers, that's not the case, right? They're not cloud data applications. They're maybe another data center that's very much in an operational context. And so, we understand customers are still going to deploy Splunk in on-premise scenarios. Specifically, when you have things like, you know, you have data governance concerns, the essential IT infrastructure company to support that the most effective way possible, right? And give them choice. We want customers to have choice. We talk about VCE certainly in our converge platforms. We talk about VX Rack and VX Rail. We still absolutely have storage platforms that are relevant for Splunk and deliver some really unique issues. We want to talk to customers about what their needs are. What teams, what team, like what Simon's team does is we want customers that cloud-like experience but with on-premise hardware. Things that they know work that we've test and improve. We can have that turn-to-experience. We buy it, we run it, we know we're going to be successful. And you focus on the SLA or the desired outcome. Our EMC always had the market leadership in drives, right? But a lot of the times, Splunk might cannibalize your business and might have a better solution producing the footprint. Now, Dell EMC with that merger now complete, you've got to have come from Ironman's shift. The game is still the same. The game is still, you've got to store the data. So it's not so much holding on to the VMAX or whatever products you have. It's kind of refresh, I guess, when I look at it from a gear standpoint. But customers want solutions. They don't want to hold on to the old way per se. How do you address that with your customers? Because you have a huge install base that's going to end up migrating to more infrastructure, more cloud, sleep. Yeah. So I think what actually I'd approach it and the conversation we have is applications are shifting from being monolithic to being these really massively parallel scale outs. And so we see that shift. And now, Garner, yeah. So thank you for clarifying. IDC's got the platform one, two. I'm an engineer so I'm bad at it. It's a better guess to go anyway. So when I think about it in those terms, right, we absolutely have been a traditional IT company supporting traditional applications with VMAX and others. And this new world, the applications are designed in a different way. They're designed to be massively parallel, meaning I should be able to scale linearly by using commodity hardware. And that's good. But at some point, because an application really becomes critical, and we've seen this, not only squunk experience, but even the folks in the Hadoop ecosystem are seeing it where these are no longer side projects that have a small use case. They're becoming mission critical. And when they become mission critical, you have to apply that enterprise IT governance and process to it. Real time is a great example. Splunk enables a lot more data to be surfaced and put in front of apps and other environments. You can splunk something over here, move that data quickly out of there and the time it would take to get there. I mean, that's essentially the value. Now, I got to ask the Splunk side of the equation. This is an opportunity for your ecosystem and partnerships to grow. What's the update? How are you guys doing? Obviously, the news this week is two big investments and some startups that's showing some nice leg on the partnerships, strategic partnerships. What's going on in the ecosystem? The EMC is a big player in that, but what's the ecosystem look like? What's the plans? Well, I think it's always been historically agnostic as far as when we recommend what you should deploy to. We've always sold software. I mean, well, we'll sell you software, but it meets the spec. And so the reality is that with these partnerships, like with Dell EMC, what we can do is we can build really great reference material like this reference that we built out. We actually have another one that's on VXRAC, VXRAL. It takes life so much easier for that customer or for partners like, essentially, that one to deploy it. And so I see it as, well, down the road, we may be able to go in a similar fashion. So it's just... Well, you're a partner-friendly. You're software, absolutely. You plug into anyone who wants the Splunk stuff. And I would actually say it's funny because one of the things that took from Doug's talk this morning was, you know, he talks about the partner ecosystem being critical to their growth. And that's one, right? We want to help in our Alliance relationship allows us to go out and actually sell Splunk via the EMC and Dell sales channels, right? So that's a good thing because we're expanding scale, which goes through the whole growth factor. But it also allows customers to have more confidence in solutions, right? And that they can build. And then I also like the fact that it gives us the chance to actually do some things, not just, hey, how do you run Splunk on Dell and EMC hardware, but Dell and EMC equipment using Splunk. So we've made some pretty massive investments over the last year. It's actually developed applications and the technology add-ons to make it super simple to onboard data from these platforms. You think, you know how big our install base is from VNX or VNX? We're building applications that make it super simple to pull data from those platforms. Having these applications that present gives the customer the ability to say, hey, here's a great starting point for looking at this data. How do I continue to evolve and correlate it against other data sources? And the cultural aspect of your customers is interesting because you have all the guys that are running the gear and running the shop on the operation side. And every year, Splunk customers are becoming much more, how do I say, higher visibility in the organization because they have such a case in the kingdom. So you start to see the intersection of two worlds coming together. You see the higher prominence of your Splunk customers. And you guys are giving them more power and more credit in the organization. Well, I think you pointed out something that's really important with the fact that the data collection from the infrastructure itself because we partner with them in these wonderful labs, it allows Splunk to work even better across the whole infrastructure. And we've talked today about our IT service intelligence offering. While there are modules that go in there, that will natively collect data from products like theirs. And so that really opens up the ecosystem. Well, and also for EMC as well, it gives EMC access to a very robust and loyal ecosystem in the software world. And EMC, I won't say is the biggest community, but they're loyal as hell too. So you have a lot of loyalty on both sides. And this one's growing. You guys are converging in. So in the last couple of years, we recognized that Splunk as a use case was growing. And EMC and Dell, so we actually took the opportunity to go into our pre-sales engineering teams and build LEMC Splunk Ninjas. And so we've actually taken 40 SCs from around the globe and we've trained them the same way Splunk trains their SCs. So they have an SC1 and SC2 and SC3 certification. We're putting our guys and gals through the same thing so that when customers realize that, hey, there's a good chance for me to bring Splunk and Dell EMC together in a conversation to really build something meaningful for sales teams and engineering teams in the field, not to know the language of Splunk, not to know the right questions to ask. So we've been really diligent about training folks and it's been really fun to see because when you talk about the community, the folks on that team are super engaged. I can't say enough good things about this. Well, they cross-pollinate. Well, yeah. You've got some here. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, they're all around here. So there's about 20 of them here. Yeah, there's about 20. And they're engaged. They're some of the best SCs from the company and they do gradations and testing that we're doing with the Splunk team. So they're super happy. Super happy. I mean, you guys both have customers that run stuff. I mean, you're running the storage and the infrastructure, running now Splunk, you're running the data. This is a good relationship. Congratulations. And thanks for sharing and creating the update. Splunk doing the partnerships. EMC, Dell EMC. Congratulations on the merger, by the way. Thank you. I texted Michael Dell. Congratulations. This is all happy place. This is theCUBE. You're watching live at Orlando for .conf 2016. EMC here with Splunk. Inside the Cube. I'm John Furrier with John Walls. Be right back.