 Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Splunk.com, virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with Teresa Carlson, special guest, CUBE alumni, who's now the President and Chief Growth Officer of Splunk. Teresa, welcome back to theCUBE. Hi, John, I'm so glad you're here with us. As the President of Splunk, great to see you. Great to see you. So we've had many conversations in theCUBE when you were the Chief of Public Sector at Amazon Web Services. You grew that business significantly over the years. We've documented on theCUBE. We've talked about it, I've written about it. Now Splunk, it feels a lot like AWS was back in a couple years ago where you have this amazing product everyone's using. They don't lose customers. They're getting customers. They're in the middle of the security thing, which you know a lot about. And they have this large enterprise-based growing. System integrators are leaning in. Splunk has seemed to be going to the next level. Totally. Well, you nailed it. I would say we're definitely in a scale mode at this point at Splunk. And also to your point, our customers are so loyal to us. And we're seeing actually customers with more than a million dollars doubling their spend almost with us. It's pretty cool. And now we have this cloud portfolio, which is one of my jobs. As you know, I love, I've got my cloud shirt on. I've been believer in cloud. I'm a real believer. I saw the transformational effects of cloud in real time over 11 years. And bringing that here even more to utilize that in our security and observability spaces is quite phenomenal. And then you see again, in a much more set of segmented workloads, how customers take advantage of this. And of course today, like no other John, security is just top of mind. It's always been. You and I talked earlier about how security kind of evolved over the years and public sector led some of that over time. And then commercial industries say, wow, but today it's, I mean it's more than top of mind for not just every enterprise organization and government entity, but it's also every board out there. It's something that we think about internal threat, external threat, how do we manage it? How do we get the data around it to understand it? And then how do we take action on it? It was great seeing you up on stage as a senior leader here at Splunk at the virtual venue at a great keynote. It was a lot of news and we'll get into that in a second. But I want to ask you, knowing you personally and covering you over the years of Amazon Web Services, you've been a fierce competitor. Okay, but you've also been a great people person. People loved working for you. Splunk is at the same, we've been covering them just as long as we cover in AWS. The cultures seem to fit because Splunk is kind of competitive but they're kind of quiet competitive culture. Yeah, well we're- Interesting, tell us about your experience. Well, and I think we can, yeah, we can do it in our own Splunky way. I'm learning new, it's six months today that I've been at Splunk, which is unbelievable that I've been here this long already. But Splunk has a very quirky culture, which I love. They have a lot of fun. They have a big following and I'm so sorry that everyone couldn't attend in person but the virtual social media feeds are off the charts. I mean, I'm having so much fun seeing how everybody, they come together, it's a real community. But yeah, on the competition front, here's what reminds me so much about my old world is that I always love that when somebody wakes up and realizes that it's a huge industry and they want to participate and that's kind of what happened when I was at AWS and now Splunk, I'm like, hey, all these companies are waking up and saying data is this real thing. It's like a $90 billion plus industry and growing and then data with security. Hello, are you kidding me? So I feel like really that's kind of what's happened and Splunk has such a unique set of tools and solutions that just work, they work and that's what customers, I have heard that statement from customers and partners so much that it just works. And the other thing that's pretty unique about us, I would say, John, is our ability to navigate between an on-prem world and a cloud world and a unique set of areas like IoT, edge computing. So wherever customer's data is, multiple clouds, we're able to take advantage of that for the customer so they make the choice of where that data comes from and they use the Splunk tooling then to be able to get those insights and information. Well, great to have you on theCUBE and great that Splunk to have you and they're going to be lucky to have you. They're going to do a lot of stuff knowing you and knowing the Splunk community and the team here, a great team. Now, talking about the announcements, look at what's going on. So obviously security is still in everything. Couple things, re-branding of the partnerverse sends a huge message of the ecosystem. You know that movie. You've seen that movie before. Digital journey for customer success, again, they have tons of customers that have been with them from beginning and new customers. But they've got a government action going on here which you know a lot about. The government logging and monetization program. Well, as you know, the government, you gotta love them but they do continually come up with unfunded mandates. And my government customers always have said, oh my gosh, I've got another unfunded mandate. So we're really helping them with that because yes, while it's unfunded in this budget this year as it states, they know how important it is. And I do think this initiative is something that is gonna have a waterfall effect into the commercial industries also just like a lot of these things do in around security. But it's important that we help our government customer move as fast as they can. So we've come up with, I think, a very unique offering that they can take advantage of for Splunk. And we're gonna be out there helping them every way. And hopefully, John, that'll also help them learn more about cross-governmental, what they're doing and how they can understand from their logs and metrics even more about how to protect you as citizens. One of the things we've talked about before in the past about how CloudScale creates ecosystems, Amazon, VMware, you're seeing all these ecosystems that have been thriving for decades. Splunk is an ecosystem developing very, very fast. Their partners are loyal and they're making money with them and they're being building solutions. As data becomes the new enablement, how do you see the role of the partners that growing? How do you see them evolving over time? Well, let me just tell you, I'm a real believer in the partner community. I mean, firsthand, over the years, my time at Microsoft, at AWS, I saw it as an unbelievable force multiplier to your business. And I mean that, and they do things that you don't even think of. You know, I'm always amazed at partners. I'm like, oh, you're using a tool for that? Wow. So while we are broadly good, we're very good at what we do, but we cannot understand every horizontal or vertical industry out there. And the reason it's important to have partners, they can take you to places that you never dreamed. And for us, if you look at the categories, we need our CSP, our cloud service providers, to be able to really help us make sure that we take advantage of the cloud platforms that are out there. And our primary, we, AWS, and then Google Cloud. And then after that, we work with those on migration, you saw Steve Schmidt today, good friend of mine, love Steve, and the work we're doing. You saw, we were one of the first migration partners with AWS. You'll see us continue that program. We'll work together to continue to look for security services jointly that we can offer. And we're a customer of theirs, and they're a customer of ours that makes good partnership. And then additionally, you have your MSPs, right? Your managed service providers. And today we talked about, believe it or not, but we have multiples. And these are partners out there that have a unique offering for generally managed security or observability in the marketplace. They take the Splunk Toolkit, they add to it, and they have it offered out to their customers. And then you have your large SIs like Accenture. I'm so excited about that. First of all, Lev Julie Sweet, she's an amazing CEO and leader. And what they're doing with us, they've been a long-standing partner of ours, but now they've actually made us part of one of their 11 business groups. So it's Accenture plus Splunk. And now they'll take us into all of their industries together. So it's huge. And what does that mean? Because this is a business deal. This isn't just like some sort of deal where you guys say, we're gonna gather. This is a specific division. That's right. That's right. So they have 11 partners that they work with. AWS is one of them. SAP is one of them. IBM's one of them. Salesforce, I believe, is one of them. And they have experts at Accenture that can go into customers to implement tools and services for customers at the enterprise level. And so they have selected Splunk as one of those business partners. Now you heard Paul today talk about, we already have 400 customers together in growing. We will expand that, but it's a joint effort of both go-to-market selling and technical resources that we'll deliver. But for Splunk, again, it's back to that horizontal and vertical slicing where they can take us into all security practice that they have chosen Splunk as one of their security offerings. And it's important that we really support them. But also in the Splunk partner verse, we're gonna do some new things, John, if I just for a second talk about it. We've had a great partner program, but now we're gonna take areas, credits, technology, architecture, tooling support, getting them to certify themselves, to be pro-serve ready for those migrations and modernizations. But also really what we heard from a lot of them is they need more training and education remits to understand our new cloud offerings. And that makes sense. So it's more digital and more cloud oriented with these partners. And then guess what? They would love for us to talk about how great they are and we should. So when we get them out there that helps our customers really understand the offerings they have in the marketplace. Yeah, Brooke Cunningham is saying she's gonna do a lot more listening and they're working on this next level partner verse. I thought that was really interesting. Also, Katie Bianchi I talked with, she's the SVP of customer success, something I know you're obsessed about. You always work backers from the customers, that's the AWS way. How do you view customer success? Because you have a lot of different customers, you have diverse customers. The customer is just important. Katie's on top of this, but what's your view? We do have a lot of different customers. However, we have a concentration of the largest, most important and influential customers in the world. So our customer base is very large enterprise oriented, multiple departments within that enterprise take advantage of Splunk. We work with 92 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies and we've worked with them for a long time. And like I said, we're continuing to see them use more of Splunk, not less of Splunk. And the way that that happens is, and I hear from them, I sit and talk to them and they're like, now we're using Splunk in these multiple departments and we need to bring it all together at the enterprise level for the C-suite to look at it. Now, I know it sounds a little strange, John, but that's changed a bit over the years. And that is because, you know, if you look at big spenders at an enterprise who spends a lot of money because they need to, at Dev, you know, security infrastructure, and they need to monitor all that. They need to understand it. But guess what? They want to understand it now at the corporate level. And they need it at the CIO level. They need it at the CISO level for threat analysis. And then now boards want more and more of that information. They want to roll up of what's happening. So we're seeing a trend where the C-suite, the senior executives, really are much more interested in Splunk. It used to be very departmental. That's okay. You'll throw another wrench in the equation there. As one, developers want shifting left. They want real-time data security policy. Totally. In the development, CDC had a pipelining. So another problem opportunity to solve. Yeah. Developers love our tools. And again, they're another unique group I should totally talk about that takes your tools to another level and really fears that ways within their customer set to take advantage of the tooling. Well, Theresa, great to see you. Congratulations on your new opportunity here and the leadership at Splunk. Really perfectly poised to take the growth of the cloud. So I have to ask you, what's your mission? What's your mission for the next year as you come on your six months in? What's the plan? Well, for us here at Splunk, it's continuing to scale, really listening to orchestras and partners. It sounds, I don't want it to sound like a cliche. We really are spending time listening and working back. Sean and I are working, he's our president of technology, products and technology. He and I are working very closely to look at features and functionality that we need to be talking about. It is about taking advantage of the partner community in a way to support them to help, again, get us into new areas of the business. And then lastly, continue to make sure that we have the training and education for customers directly because our tools and technologies are evolving. And if I've learned anything over the last 11 years, is cloud is a step change for a lot of customers and they're still hybrid. So it's important that we meet them where they are but help them get over that bridge so that they have that full digital journey. So that's what you're going to see me focus on. I'm super excited about that. I was talking with Claire the CMO just before you leave. I want to take your reaction. This event went virtual in the last minute. It became a studio here in Silicon Valley. You're a media company now Splunk. Yeah, it feels like it. I mean, it is amazing what we accomplished today. I don't want to pre-give numbers but we had way, way over 20,000 today online and growing. So the numbers were still looking at but it was unbelievable. And I think we had had like 22,000 registered and we even got more. So people joined in, they stay, they watched the keynote, they were out in our specialty sessions. And I'll agree like it was pretty cool. It was a step change because we were thinking about doing it in person. We took a pulse and we said, you know, we think we can actually do a better job this year because of COVID still if we do it all virtually and it turned out and we have you. So look at this year, like we have you here and I love your cool backdrop here, John. Well, you guys do a great job. You guys are a media company now. You're telling your own stories, direct us. A lot of stories to tell. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you again. Thank you, John. It's great to see you. Okay. It's theCUBE's coverage here.com 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.