 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCube at Splunk.conf 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Splunk. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live at the Splunk conference. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. Here with Jeff Kelly, number one big data analyst on wikibond.org. This is theCube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the seeds and we're pleased to have Bill Kahl, who's the VP of the U.S. public sector for Splunk. He's the man, they call him Mr. Government internally. He's smiling and dialing, winning business. Bill, welcome to theCube. Thank you very much, thanks for having me. The government sector has always been kind of jury rigged by the incumbent vendors. I worked at HP for nine years, I know how it works, but recently Amazon won a landmark case against IBM with the CIA and if someone told me two years ago or even a year ago that AWS would win the CIA business, I would have said no way in hell, not for at least 10 years because it all ended up, how long it could take to get into government contract, right? But it proves a new era is on here on the market. People are winning, there's a new requirement. So I really want to drill down with you because this is a big, big market. So how you guys doing performance wise, the themes here, the keynotes, stuck net, security, cyber security, AKA cyber warfare in China, a lot of national security issues around, you know what the hell's going on in traffic, a lot of service providers, you got telcos and MSOs, everything's going on with the data. So what's going, business good? Business is good, yes it is. There is, it's a very busy time. Security, big focus? It is, it actually is. I mean security has been traditionally very important part of our business in government, but actually in the last couple of years, we have really seen a big growth in things like application performance management and traditional IT ops, but security still is a big part of our business. Well you guys own IT ops, I got, that's, you know, it's just on the Steve, the CMO, it's like, you won that, that territory's won by Splunk. Now there's new markets exploding around Splunk, the data market, internet of things, security data. So can you share some wins and then some of you, in the public sector around the security and other non-IT? So on the security side, what we've seen is really a move from what was perceived in the 2000 era around the easy button, where you could press a button and be secure and everything could take care of itself. Where we've moved to much more of a human factor where people are investigating, almost like an intelligence analysis of what's going on in your security environment, essentially looking at your security posture. And we play a pretty important role in that and provide really a conversation with the data to be able to find out what's going on in the environment and be able to pretty actively go after threats and stop them. So we have been at the right time with the right product, as you point out, a pretty critical time in the government. So the government is transforming Gov 2.0, you see all these trends and certainly they're awakened to the situation, security and other opportunities. What are the key trends that you see in the government sector that's modernizing? Then you can say, hey, here's some real specific areas where they're not the slow boat to China, pun intended. I mean, it really is moving fast. Where can you point to the folks who aren't in the inside baseball, if you will, or inside the beltway of what's going on? I think one of the things that surprised people a great deal is the move to the cloud. So for the last few years, people thought the move to the cloud was going to be limited to just email websites. We're seeing agencies actually move very important applications. You mentioned the intelligence community. There's actually been a mandate for a lot of those important applications to move to a private cloud, managed by the company you mentioned. So the move to the cloud is a big one. I think that's very important. And then also around doing more with less, which is something you hear a lot about in government, but they are being forced to do that. And that includes a rationalization of tools, which we also play a part in. We often are referred to in DC as a Swiss army knife. I think that's a fair characterization. What we do for a lot of agencies is we're able to do a lot of things that they do and a lot of other tools. And they see Splunk as a way to save money, which is pretty important these days. So, famously, President Obama, when he was candidate Obama, used data really effectively in his campaign to target voters and get out the vote. And then when he came in office, he talked a lot about it, and he's actually kind of kicked off a big data initiative within the federal government to really start to use data to better serve citizens. How would you grade the federal government at this point in terms of that initiative? Are they making good progress? Where are they in terms of modernizing the vote? Where they can actually leverage data coming in from whatever the source might be, whether it's public sources, whether it's from private sources. How would you grade them in terms of their ability to manage big data to better serve the citizens? Well, I think if you look at the pre-Obama time as far as visibility and transparency in the government, I think they get, I'd say, pretty high marks. A lot of that data, though, is structured data. And I think we're just starting to see the realization that structured data is only partway there. So the place that we play, and I think the part that we play important area in is unstructured data. But as far as structured data, which is kind of what people think about, campaign finance, how do agencies run their programs, how efficient are they? They've done really well. A lot of people are surprised when they go to the government website that essentially tracks how efficient IT projects are. You can see everything. They're braided. It's pretty transparent, and so I'd say they do a pretty good job, actually. It's a compliance for the compliance, right? So the government's overseeing itself and also have the data. So that's an important part of it. It is, and then it's interesting, too, because you see government program managers know where they rank, and so they know where they rank security-wise. You know where they rank posture from an application point of view, how successful they've been. Can we get Glassdoor for all the government workers? We can weigh in. How do they, it actually exists. Back to you, too. So tell us about some of the things you're seeing, some of the more innovative things you're seeing from your customers in the public sector. And where do they come from? Are they coming from? We mentioned the federal side, but I'm guessing state and certainly, even on the municipal level, you can potentially even have a bigger impact because you're really touching, you know, directly, more directly kind of there, the constituents. So what are some of the more interesting things you've seen out there in terms of your public sector customers? Well, I think, I would say that on the state and local side, just to start there is, we're working, interestingly enough, we think about mobility in local government, specifically around very large school districts, they have put in wireless networks. And what they're trying to do is, with Splunk, is provide visibility into what's going on inside that wireless network. If you think about a school district like the LA Unified School District, it's the largest school district in the country, that is a massive wireless network that they need to know what is going on and getting intelligence into who's on it, what are people looking at, is difficult to do. And so we've actually seen, of more than 25, 30 different school districts be able to provide visibility into the wireless network using Splunk, which is I think a pretty innovative use of our tools. I think also on the federal side, I think that there's interesting uses of Splunk around challenges like insider threat. So obviously with the Snowden and Bradley Manning and those kinds of challenges that the federal government is faced with, we're at the forefront of helping the government provide visibility into those bad actors that want to cause the government harm. So, I've got to ask you about data because one of the things you're bringing up here is not only the developer angle, but also the user experience piece. Education's like in people argue what level of in this, you know, the underground education is. You mentioned some of the work you're doing there. The kids learning these days are all like very much multiplayer gaming. So the people are saying that we should be moving to a much more predictive analytics environment for the teachers. So the issue is not so much the curriculum, it's the teachers, right? So any traction with Splunk in the area of bringing some of your magic into the, you know, public school systems where your magic and bring data surprise people with good predictive modeling to have better teachers? So one of the visions of our CEO, God for Sullivan is that we have actually one of the few companies I've ever heard of that has a education evangelist. So we have a person named Rob Reed in our company whose sole job is to bring Splunk into the classrooms. He primarily focuses on higher ed and bringing Splunk into the curriculums of higher education. But that has been an incredibly successful program and they're actually, you know, throughout a large part of, you know, the university base that we work with. Is he in the Bay Area or is he coast? He's actually out of the Bay Area, I believe. So yeah, and he works with higher ed organizations primarily, but we've also had him talk with local government as well, local school districts. What's the progression there? Any insight like down the road? Is this just conversations at this point or is it set some good traction there? Very much so. I mean, as far as, I mean, you can actually find Splunk as a curriculum in many of the higher ed institutions. And one of the things we've found as far as education goes, Splunk is so easy to pick up that you can really, from an education standpoint, you'd be surprised how quickly people can get familiar with it and get usability out of it. Awesome, so, I appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Any final insights in government Splunk? It's one of those things where you don't really see it immediately, then you start thinking about it and say, damn, it's not just another vertical you guys knocked down. I mean, what's the dynamics? Share some data about what's going on with Splunk in the public sector. I mean, it's exciting, we, I mean, we're just having so much fun in DC and out in the state and local government market. We are, you know, we're a small part of Splunk, but we enjoy helping our customers. We're doing some really neat things, helping both on the national security side as well as just the old-fashioned, making applications more economical and efficient and it's been, it's been a lot of fun. Certainly a lot of data to be had in the public sector. Available. Full of data. Definitely full of data. It's data-full. Okay, we're here in theCUBE. Bill Kahl runs there. Mr. Government, they call him. He runs all the US public sector here at Splunk. We are live in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.