 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the queue at Splunk.com 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor Splunk. Here is your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back. When we are here live in Las Vegas with Splunk.com 2014, the hashtag Splunk.com. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. And we're excited to talk to, well I'm excited, I'm sure you will be as well. Product guys at Splunk and Guido Schroeder, Senior Vice President of Progs and Devani Lama, Senior Manager in Product Management. You guys are running the product. These are the folks bringing the magic of Splunk and really solving a lot of problems. So one, we just love your product. You guys are adding customers. So obviously, you know, the volume of customers. You have what they say in Silicon Valley, product market fit. So that's a good thing. Guido, what's your next act? So give us, you know, one, an update on the product now and we're going to get into, like, what's next? Right, so, you know, first of all, I have to say the adrenaline is still pumping through our veins from the keynote. It was just outrageous. It feels always like a firework how we are opening the event here. You know, another 1,000 plus customers more than during the last event. And I really enjoyed listening to our customers, what they are doing with it. And that's sometimes really defining also the next act or how we are finding those next acts. There's always a surprise. You know, when you listen to a customer, when you visit them or we have them at our Splunk lives, they always come back with some new story that you haven't thought about and that inspires us often. I mean, there is nothing better than co-innovate with your customers, understand what their real problems are and then work with them to get that problem solved with your product. Yeah. And the keynote, obviously, we have in theCUBE, which is great here, is you guys bring a lot of customers. And I think that's, let your game do the talking as we say on theCUBE. You guys have done that. But I really want to dig into the product piece about it. What is the most compelling thing that you guys are seeing with the customers? Where is, I mean, where is the continuing doubling down? What features do you see coming out of the platform? And again, it is a platform and tools. So, what's working? And you had to give yourself a check box next to the good stuff. You know, I think every successful technology company had something in it that really defined the 10 times advantage over what previous technology has done. And I don't know if you noticed that, but Godfrey had this one slide in his initial part, you know, when he set the rest of the keynote up, where he showed, you know, what the industry at large was doing over the last 25 years with relational database management systems and more transactional type of applications that we have built on it. And Splunk really came with a different idea. And you know, you heard this multiple times during the keynote where we really turned, you know, the world of data sometimes, somehow upside down. So, you know, store first and then structure it and state of structure it first and then put it into a relational schema. And I think this concept of schema on read and doing this very flexible analytics on top of it at scale, that is probably really, you know, one of the defining things that we have done. The other thing that I'm excited about is, you know, if you just look at the scope of, you know, things that we can get access to, that has dramatically changed. So you saw this diagram with all the portfolio expanded and that has multiple dimensions to it. Yeah, there is a dimension of, you know, acquiring data, collecting data. So there was really an explosion of new things that we have added to the product portfolio to make us a lot more versatile from where we can get data. So we were talking about mobile, you know, tapping into mobile devices, mobile applications. We were talking about wire data that came out of the cloud meter acquisition. You know, how do you capture a packet data and make some sense out of it? We were talking about, you know, our partnerships there with some of the mainframe to also get access to that and that still remains for many of our customers a backbone of their enterprises. So that's one dimension. The other dimension is everything that happens on the user interface. And we have Divani with us who knows his stuff a lot better than I am. We're going to drill down on her in a second, but I want to just say close out that piece. Great job. Congratulations. I think you guys cracked the code certainly with Gen 1, a lot of the core innovation engine. You're adding a lot more stuff around it. And it's really growing outside of just, you know, the one spot you guys have been winning at and continuing to add customers. But as you guys become the real-time center of the universe for data, you don't hear words like data warehouse and business intelligence. When I just made that tweet out there that your customers do not say data warehouse, business intelligence. They're just talking splunks. So this modern era is shifting. So Divani, I want to ask you about your role there because you do search and analytics. This brings up a very Google-like environment. I think search. I think Google. I think analytics. I think value. I think real-time. Give us the update. What's going on with search and analytics? Obviously, pressure from the customers probably saying, you know, give me more. What are you hearing and what are you guys building? I think the biggest thing that we're hearing from customers is exactly that expansion of use cases. When I first joined a few years ago, we were hearing a lot of IT. And now we're talking about how is IT a partner to the business and how is IT going to help business achieve their goals? So all of the things that I talked about in the keynote today are in direct response to those asks. Things like how do I mash up structured and unstructured data? How do I enrich my data? How do I have self-serve analytics? And everything that we're investing in is around this theme of usability, simplicity, and detangling this big mess of data that organizations have. So it's BI 2.0, really. The reason that people don't talk about business intelligence is because it comes with this long set of pain points that unstructured data doesn't have in the same way. So we're really just kind of thinking about how do we give you that capability, that interactivity? So more fluid, you mean. So like BI, the old world, you think of tables, structure, geeks, send it out to the fenced out organizations. You go and you ask everyone what questions are you going to ask of the data, and then you embed that into the model that you're generating. And then six months later, you have an answer to the questions that were going to be asked six months ago. With Splunk, you have the answer, remember Lee mentioning 10 minutes for some of the questions that he wanted answered. It's just instantaneous. So I've got to ask you, because one of the things we were mentioning on the intro, certainly on the crowd chat as well, was IT's changing from being business value-driven but also user productivity. So you bring up a good point. As you get more real-time, data has a life of its own. It's almost like chemistry, right? Chemical properties, it evolves, and if you're lagging, there's a huge issue. Domino's was just commenting on some patterns that saved them money, right? So there's business value, not just IT value, but business value and business units, but also the user experience. Because now with analytics, you're going into a new space, not just geeks but business folks. So what do you guys see there as the number one thing you're focused on in that user productivity piece? I'd say building of visualizations and building dashboards. I mean, they go hand in hand. So some of the investments we've made, an instant pivot in the pivot interface, just drag and drop reporting and all of the things that go with that. So if I had to summarize the investment area for us right now and going into the future, it's direct interaction with data for business users, for non-technical users. So Guido got to ask you about the Amazon news, but Amazon reinventable, theCUBE will be there here in Las Vegas. What does that mean for you guys? Talk about the Amazon news that hit today. You got Amazon. That smells like cloud. That's pay by the drink. That's real-time analytics. All that stuff's happening. How is that impacting you guys from a roadmap standpoint? And what's the value proposition? So I think it fits very nicely into our overall cloud activities. You have heard that all of our customers are moving there. That becomes pretty much a standard now and starting point for many conversations and we want to be there. And if you listen to what Praveen said, for us I think there are multiple angles to play the cloud here. I mean one is Splunk as a software, as a service, that's Splunk cloud. And then we also want to integrate with Amazon in different ways. Enabling our customers to monitor the applications that they are running in AWS that becomes an important data source for them. If they really want to use us as their insurance platform for running mission-critical workloads in the cloud. And then there is other, I would say, foundational Amazon technologies like S3 and EMR where we want to have a play. So the integration that we announced today with EMR is really to bring our hunk, so our do-based product to a closer integration with that. And that basically allows you to integrate hunk with a push-button click when you order an EMR instance with Splunk as an additional tooling that comes with it. And that I think simplifies our customers' life a lot to really get some value out of what they are doing in EMR. So if you could describe the kind of animal Splunk is, because Splunk is one of those companies that's this new modern era company. Certainly Wall Street is kind of seeing numbers go down, but you guys are producing results, right? So we see other companies like Tableau, these new modern companies that are really kicking butt, not really understood by Wall Street. So how would you guys describe yourselves to the Wall Street analysts of the world and folks out there who are trying to put their finger on why, how to describe the value of Splunk? I mean the high-level tech line for us is really that we are the industry leading platform for machine data analytics and what customers are deriving from that is operational intelligence. There is a platform element to it and I think we have found this character of being a platform over the last years quite a bit. And I mean there are just I would say new and bigger expectations that customers like the Cokes and GEs have. They really use us in some very mission critical aspects of their business and I think we need to grow with them in their users. So to support these mission critical applications with the cloud that means for example 100% uptime SLA that we are giving them and then just the whole scalability thing where I think we are really getting into a different dimension with what customers are doing. I was giving a talk and the premium idea which is a great business model for cloud. Cloud brings up this notion that you don't have to be a pure-play platform or a tool company. You can actually be both. You guys have really one integrated platform so that's awesome. Because the proof is in the customers. So Devaney I want to ask you what are you seeing from customers and how do you guys relate with customers so when you do your running like the wind you got your PRDs, your MRDs I mean you don't just make up features because I'm sure the feature list is pretty long internally but you got to go out and connect the dots with customers. What do you do, who do you talk to and what are some of the things you're hearing? We have a lot of different ways that we access customers. I think one of the best ways that we get is we're Splunk customers ourselves. So I use Splunk every day and my job is a product manager and it helps me make decisions based on what I see people clicking on on our website. The metrics that I'm gathering that people are using it's really like that modern age of product management but then of course we have just tons of time on the ground talking to customers directly seeing what they're doing, helping them we're all very technical and we have this very vocal community that I haven't seen at companies before they love reaching out a lot of them have me on speed dial and they'll send me a picture of a dashboard that they've built so it's really just kind of this combination of the analytics and also just the conversations. Last year in the Cube you had one of your customers said I've been liberated by Splunk I mean you've really changed, I mean what's great is you've changed their lives I mean you guys really have an amazing product and it does change and this is what I'm excited about the kind of companies that are coming out like Splunk this is the real thing that no one's getting yet like I say mainstream world certainly tech we do so that's awesome. What I asked you kind of a personal question, what's your favorite most cool feature that you're working on your favorite, everyone has their pet feature come on you've got to come clean with us For me I think it was event pattern detection it was the feature that I mentioned in the keynote so it takes these millions of events and then it uses machine learning to show you what's interesting and I think that's the future of analytics it's combining human insight and human intuition with technology and the power that we have from like these new powerful computers that can turn on data for us so that's an area you'll see a lot more investment from A lot of people that want to use as you move up to the business side of the user base they're not geeks they're not data science they're not going to wrangle data with python so what are you guys using some of that algorithms for you guys is a predictive analyst, is it the machine learning and what specific innovations are you guys doing to make the folks who just want to get their job done really clean clean product. So I mean you will see that we will make the product a lot more intelligent than what it does today I think we are doing already a great job but there is a lot of opportunity I think one of the key aspects to make the product a lot more consumable is really user experience and we have dialed up our efforts and investments on that quite a bit so Splunker has now really experienced you know senior manager Karola Thompson who is our chief experience officer and if I may add my personal you know favorite feature it would be really the new field extractor that we have and I think it's really a brilliant example of you know how we can user experience use user experience actually to solve a difficult problem so I mean if you look at some of the field extractions that is really I would say very complicated sometimes to make some sense out of it and that brings more data sources in is that the main thing? No it's really for you know how do you get some structure out of it how do you identify that piece of information in a rather cryptic string of text or data and that is really an art form to isolate that piece you are interested in and I think if you look at this new UI we have built there you will find that the team does an awesome job to make a very complicated problem rather simply that people like you and I who are more casual users could really do that job. Great well guys I really appreciate you coming on the Cube I'll give you the final word for both of you each share to the folks out there what's coming this year what do you expect to deliver this year actually the SVP it's everything for you and also what you're working on that you expect to bring to bear this year well so the next release is knocking at the door so we just announced 6.2 which will go into the market GA end of the month and I think that's exciting and that's I think for the rest of the year probably the biggest thing that we still have to deliver yeah I'd agree on the analytics search side definitely the six two pieces that we talked about today we're really excited to get that out there and then from there I'm really excited about next year I think we have some absolutely amazing features which is really building the team I remember when we were sitting the first time together in Las Vegas two years two and a half years ago you know I had a team of maybe 120 people this is almost three times as big now and that's one of the one of the key jobs three X growth this year I know overall compared to that time and so the you know development shop engineering team including product management is probably more like 300 plus now yeah and that's almost a full-time job in itself well again I'm getting the hook here but I want to ask one more question because you brought up something that I love talking about is every company has a unique culture Moore's Law in Intel which is you know very specific what's your culture in the product team what are you guys what's the guiding principle what's the one thing that makes Splunk unique you know people at Splunk value engineering excellence yeah and I think they like to build product having a lot of fun with it and I always say to my guys hey if we don't have fun building it don't expect that fun will come out of the you know box when the customers unwrap it we like delightful experiences if something isn't fun to use and isn't exciting and we kept it so you know if you ask our guys here the Splunkers I think they will all tell you they still have a lot of fun coming to the office every day as I always say work hard play hard you guys are great love love love the company and I think your business model is awesome I think the people are going to start to really see that this cloud evolution is not just about the pure play you guys are certainly delighting customers appreciate your time to come on the Cube the product team leadership here at Splunk they got the leadership they got the innovation engine and we'll see what happens next year and thanks for coming on this is the Cube we'll be right back after this short break thank you