 from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering splunk.com, 2015. Brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and George Gilbert. Okay, welcome back, and we are here live in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand. This is splunk.live.com for 2015. It's theCUBE's Look at Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the single noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. Here are my co-hosts, George Gilbert. Big data analyst at wikibon.org. Our next guest is Steve Summers, Chief Marketing Officer of Splunk. Welcome back to theCUBE. You put on this show here, again, bigger and brighter every year. More people, more product announcements. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. It's great to be back, thank you. So, day one. So, day two is always tough, but give us an update on the event ones. Give us some inside the numbers, what's going on with the event, how big is it, and what's different from last year, what's some of the growth numbers and what's happening here? We've got over 4,000 people at this event, 10 times bigger than the first one we had, so it's good growth. We've got something like 65 different partners sponsoring the event, 700 Splunkers here to make sure every customer has a great experience and maximizes what they learn for the next three days. So, one of the things that we've been looking at, covering you guys for the past, it's our fourth year doing theCUBE here. So, it's been fun for us to get the relationship with the folks at Splunk, but also in the ecosystem and the customers. You guys do things a little bit different with theCUBE live broadcast. You let your game do the talking, you let the customer speak for you guys. Of course, we want to talk to all the top dogs at Splunk and get the data from them, but you have a lot of customers and this seems to be a trend that you guys have had going on for multiple years because you have such a loyal customer base. Yet, there's been tons of startups that have come out, the Splunk Killer, we're going to be the Splunk Killer. You guys have been successful to defending that market space, yet you've been growing significantly. What's the secret and why are the customers so happy? Obviously, the product success and the value. Can you put the finger on? Is it the ecosystem? Is it the global reach? Is it the products? What is it? It all starts with great software. Our founders wanted to create software that would really make the wires of our customers easier, better, make a big difference on how they get the jobs done, make a big difference for their companies. Software that they would actually wake up in the morning and they'd want to use it. And that's what we did. And once we had that, it was the smart thing to do to let our customers tell their stories. We have really smart customers, really passionate customers, and we just let them talk about their life before Splunk, how Splunk has helped them in their company, how Splunk has made their lives better. And the ways that they really creatively, innovatively apply Splunk capabilities to their problems and their data just blows us away. So we will have to hear from our customers, too. So the other thing that you guys did that was very interesting was you had a great beachhead in the initial software, but you really have a big data DNA in the company. There's a lot of, obviously it's good software, it's key, we love software. But the big data aspect is good growth. So you have, now, internet of things happening, you have security, which is a big data problem. You've made a few acquisitions with machine learning. So I'm kind of connecting the dots here. Is it true to say that you're a big data company and that you're going to continue to roll out software that has a big data DNA? Yes, I think in the beginning, we were more of a log analysis tool. People viewed us as a way to look at the logs and do root cause analysis, troubleshooting, security investigations. And what's happened is people saw what Splunk could do and now they've dramatically increased the variety of the data they're putting into Splunk and the amount of data, the real time use cases for monitoring, the historical analytics, and they're getting tremendous value by using Splunk, not as a generic big data platform, but as a solution for specific problems based on their machine data. And that's why we have our machine data platform and then we have premium solutions and over 700 apps that solve customer problems out of the box. What is the big thing about machine learning that people should know about? That people watching this video live and or on demand after machine learning seems to be nuanced as a geeky thing. Like you can see behind me, there's a car there, instrumentation of data. What's the big aha of machine learning? What should, and how is that disruptive to their business? There's a lot of hype, a lot of focus on machine learning right now as well as should be. The capabilities, the potential was really immense. What we've done is look at generic machine learning technology, algorithms, things like that. And we've done, we did an acquisition there, a company called Infer. Then we also acquired a machine learning based company in security space. So what we're seeing is that it really makes sense to take the machine learning but then it has to be tailored for specific customer problems. Whether it's running IT operations and capacity planning or whether it's looking for insider threats and all sorts of anomalous behavior from a security perspective. Where's the growth area? One of the things we look at is, with Splunk is Splunk has been very successful with establishing that foundation like I said. And then, but also going into new markets, you're recurring revenue is significant and Wall Street loves that. I just saw it for the first day in the C.S. 1st Boston. And he said, oh, it's a good company, right? Of course, looking good off the tee, but you got to grow. You got to have new products. What is going to be the key growth area if you get, how do you get new customers? Is it solutions? Is it new technologies? How do you guys talk about that internally? Because your upside is pretty huge right now. You got a great cost to customer, a lifetime of value of the customer is pretty high. You got to get new more customers. That's your job. What's the conversation like in terms, what are you guys going to do? How are you going to do that? Well, we multitask here, we're in the company. This morning, our CEO talked about how we just celebrated having 10,000 customers. We're really proud of that. But there is probably another 10 million out there. We talked about Splunk Enterprise, which is a core product and all the customers we have there. But we now have other products like Honk, Splunk White to expand Splunk to smaller IT environments. Honk for people who have data at Reston and Hadoop and other NoSQL data stores. We're constantly innovating around premium solutions. Enterprise security has gotten phenomenal traction in the security space. And today we announced IT service intelligence. One of the presenters this morning said, it's going to bring back the sexiness into service monitoring. And it's a whole new approach around service monitoring with the data, with the analytics to really understand what's going on with your services. It's always, always hard. I mean, as someone who's inside the ropes, if you will, in the industry, it's fun to cover you guys because your tentacles are everywhere in terms of where you guys are touching the market. You got the nerve center for security. You have the new ITSI, Service Intelligence, which I'm sure George has a zillion questions. You're in the log analysis doing some stuff there. You have some blocking and tackling products in the platform. You guys are kind of in global security all that together. How do you market that? What is the overall message to the customer base out there? Because you can look at Splunk and say, well, it's a diverse company, broad portfolio of markets. I mean, like ITSM, IT service management by itself, bringing intelligence to that space alone is a public company. So your team is huge, but also the focus could be argued that there's a lot of focus issues going on. So how do you guys make sense of that? Obviously, big data is in the eye of the beholder. That's the customer. So we joke at Splunk that all these areas are really strategic, really critical, so we focus on everything. Still trying to figure out how to do that on a daily basis. The way- I'm on the old board, we focus. We got to focus. When you hear that, that means you're not doing well, but when you're doing well, if you can take territory down and you have a scalable product with good software. I mean, is that kind of the nuance right there? You good software solves all problems? I think the nuance is having software that you can start very easy, very small and solve a particular problem, whether it's app monitoring, whether it's security analytics, or whether it's monitoring power generation in windmills. And then being able to take that data and ask different questions. A big focus this morning was making sure that everyone in the audience who's quite technical understands the business value of the data during business analytics. Taking the same data, no extra cost. They already have the data in Splunk and coming up with insights for their marketing people, for their sales people, for their line of business people, looking at real-time business analytics. That's kind of interesting. The fact that you take your existing repository and can repurpose it and extract more value and different, for different audiences and sort of very much in line with the ethos of Hadoop. But circling back to IT service intelligence, we were talking earlier about how the application landscape is so much more complex in the last few years than even five years ago, and certainly then 10 years ago. What's the message to customers who are new to Splunk about how to engage with you and why to engage with you and sort of what are those first steps look like? Yeah, well, so our customers are facing a lot of challenges. They're dealing with software-defined everything, networks, storage, everything else. They're dealing with hybrid architectures, very few companies say, let's throw out everything and just move everything to the cloud. There's a whole migration, new apps, incremental transitions and migrations, and we're there to help make it easy. We don't care whether your apps are on-prem in the cloud or hybrid. We don't care if you've got physical environments or software-defined environments. Our software makes it easy to collect the data and understand exactly what's going on, and we're making it easier and easier and cheaper and cheaper to put the data in Splunk and ask the queries and get the value out of it. The big focus today was all around lower cost of ownership, making it simpler, easier, making it more compelling from a graphical presentation point of view as well. We had a lot of customers lined up where you've got a busy day. You've got to stack up the interviews. We love talking to all your customers. I want to say thanks for having theCUBE here. Really appreciate it. Thank you for being here and have a great time talking to our customers. It'll be the highlight for your whole day. Final question, I'll give you the last word. Talk about the partner ecosystem because one thing that's really emerging fast for you guys is your ecosystem, the partnerships, your partners that are here behind us. What's going on with that? Real quickly, give a quick plug for what's going on in the ecosystem and how people are making money with Splunk and partnering with you guys. We've always been extremely partner-friendly company. We have channel resellers. We also have global system integrators and many of the companies here are technology partners or global strategic alliances and it's a win-win, when a Cisco, when a service now, when others can integrate with Splunk and have bi-directional integrations, have information sharing back and forth. It makes the life of our joint customers that much better. How's it feel to be part of a startup that's now in the big leagues and grown up? You guys are grown up on paper still, but you're still growing, right? You're growing up. I mean, how tall can Splunk be? I mean, you guys are in the big leagues with great partnerships called at Cisco. I saw EMC here, a lot of big names. You guys are not a startup anymore, you're a public company. You've been for a while now. What's it feel like? Well, the fun and the challenge for us is to keep the culture. We want to be fun, we want to be disruptive, innovative. We want to keep the startup culture where it gets stuff done fast. If we make mistakes, we recognize it right away and fix it fast and take advantage of the scale we now have with over 1,700 employees worldwide. Steve, thanks for coming on theCUBE. CMO here, breaking it down, kicking off the day one coverage of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with George Gilbert and Jeff Frick will be joining us as well, hosting some all day tomorrow as well. This is theCUBE, two days of coverage. We'll be right back with more live coverage when we hear from their customers after this short break.