 And welcome back to the Cube SiliconANGLE's premiere video production. We're here live at .conf Splunk's annual user conference. We're at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. I'm Jeff Kelly from wikibon.org and I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick from SiliconANGLE. Thank you Jeff. Well, we've had quite a day here at the conf, conf 12. And now we've learned what Splunk is all about, what used to be the dive into the deep dark cave of your log data. Thankfully, learning that from Rob and from where. Right. Splunk apparently is making it easy and fun. We keep hearing people love using the tool, you know, making kind of data analytics a fun thing to do. Yeah. As opposed to looking at all that data and saying, oh boy, what am I going to do with all that? Yeah. There's been a lot of fun today. I think the constant kind of reinforcement of this message of how important the culture is of the company and the fun of the company and our viewers, you didn't get to see how crazy Eric and Rob were really having a good time. They obviously like each other a lot and they definitely have a culture. The fact that Tom, our host and PR director, talked so much about how Godfrey is such a special guy and the way that he leads and his desk is out in the open at the company. He's not behind a desk and it sounds like all he does is visit customers, which is fantastic. His enthusiasm for customers and the way people are using this tool, it's so much more than what was a data center centric log file tracker. I think it's still probably the vast majority of the usage, but where this company's going and what it can do and kind of their mission is much more than that. It's really been a fun day. Yeah, absolutely. I think everyone's really happy with the company right now. They're doing very well. They're definitely on a hot streak, but definitely challenges lie ahead. They've mentioned the fact that we're only going to see more and more types of machines with sensors and all sorts of new data sources coming online, and that's going to put the pressure on Splunk to continue delivering kind of the functionality, the applications to make sense of all that and help people actually draw correlations that help their business. So they've come a long way. They've done an excellent job with the IPO and had a great quarter, but long term, there's still a lot of challenges. They definitely seem up to it, but it's a really interesting world we're living in. There's so many big data startups out there as well. They have lots of competition to deal with. There's already been one former Splunker has moved off and started his own company called Logly. They're focusing on a similar market, and then you've got the more legacy players, ArcSight, now part of HP, plays in this market as well. It takes a definitely different approach, but my point is there's going to be some competition. Sure. They've got their work cut out for them, but definitely a really, really good day. Saw some really interesting use cases. What's for you, Jeff? We're like, you know, the maybe one or two real big takeaways you took from today. Again, I think the culture thing that I touched on before I think was pretty significant. I too have been at a lot of startups. I know a lot of the folks out in TV land have as well, and it's really hard. It's very seldom that there's a company that starts on a mission and then is able to execute that and grow and deliver a real company delivering real value to real customers. I thought it was interesting that they came at this approach really looking for a problem. I think that's atypical. I think most of the time you talk to really successful companies, it was usually a person in a role that said, God, if I only had one of these, my job would be so much better, so much easier. And then they go out and build that thing. So I thought that was an interesting comment that Rob said, where they really did their due diligence in their homework for a couple of years trying to really investigate where was an opportunity and the fact that they kind of, I don't want to say stumbled upon because they worked on it for two years. This data log file issue and this morass and no ability to really make sense of it or do anything with it. And in fact, as you said, and that was kind of the leading wave of what has now become this big data trend, I thought was pretty interesting as well. Yeah, absolutely, I agree. I think for me, a couple of big takeaways, definitely the culture. I mean, you can tell, and not just the culture within the company, the culture around their customers as well. I mean, everybody here that we've had on today, we've had some great customers, we're very excited about the product. They've all talked about, again, how easy it is to use, how they're drawing correlations they never really could before. And really, in some cases, are building businesses on Splunk. So the enthusiasm and the kind of quirky nature of some of the execs inside of Splunk who are some really interesting guys, really some cool titles. I think I'm going to take their advice and change my title every two or three days on Twitter. I'll come up with something good for the by the end of the day. Not Chief of Awesome is taken, but I'll come up with something. So that definitely struck me. I mean, I think this is clearly not, despite the IPO, this is not a button down corporation. This is definitely a group of guys and women that love to have fun, but also love what they're doing. So that's a good thing. You like to see that in a company. Also, I just think the technology is just powerful. I mean, I think that's the big thing for me is the culture's great. But if you don't have a technology that can back it up, a product that can actually deliver, then you have a problem. That's not a problem Splunk has. And clearly they are hitting all the use cases their customers are looking for. They've built in enough flexibility in the platform to allow their customers to do other kinds of things to explore on their own, different use cases. And that's very important because you can't have a rigid kind of data structure type model if you want to survive in the big data world. And clearly Splunk understands this, make the product so that it's easy to integrate new data sources, easy to build up new applications and whatnot. So yeah, I mean, they've got the culture and they've got the technology. So two very important parts of any successful company. And they're locking tremendous inefficiency and undiscovered business value. The message bus guys, the fact that they can basically recreate a messaging business, how long has messaging been around in email a long time. And use the Splunk technology to recreate a new platform for messaging. Leveraged across multiple clouds, public and private. And even use the intelligence within the application to partition the loads based on either the economic realities or working efficiency. I thought it was pretty neat to the point where they can actually build a business on that, deliver great value to their clients, and make enough money to pay their investors down the road. I think, as again, as I said, my buddy Mill Grand at CR Ventures, who's so excited about big data, because there's just a ton of inefficiency. But this new technology is allowing us to attack where we've done it in other places like in CRM and ERP and other kind of technology waves that have really impacted what's going on. And of course, now they're talking about automotive, which is kind of fun. How much data is coming out of automotive? Look at automotive as a kind of a harbinger of new efficient ways to do things all the way back to Henry Ford and doing things on a simply line instead of a bunch of guys standing around a chassis in a garage. Right. I don't think Henry, back 100 plus years ago, was thinking about the possibility of running advanced analytics against this car, but it would come a long way. So you're watching theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship video production. We're live here at .com 2012. That's Splunk's annual user conference. This is their third annual conference. We've got over 1,000 attendees. That's customers and some partners, some really great customers we've had on theCUBE today, some really good conversations we've had. Another thing that kind of came through is just very clear that the premise that others have said as well, that data really is the new oil of this economy, it really is coming through. I mean, it's really backing up that premise that really the most important commodity or resource, natural or otherwise, a company has, is really their data and the ability to take advantage of that data in real time, near real time, depending on your definition, our definition being fast enough to have an impact, either safely customer, improve the process, whatever it may be, that's really what's going to separate winners and losers in the 21st century economy. And so that's one reason Splunk is having such success because I think more and more people are starting to realize that. We're definitely still at the early stages of this big data market, it's still early days. CEO Gottry Sullivan mentioned that three years ago he had a little bit of tougher time explaining to CIOs why their log data was important, it's not boring. It's very important if you can actually draw some analysis out of and draw some insight. And he's having a much easier time with that conversation today and I think that's only going to get easier over time and as you mentioned, we're moving to automotive data, we're talking about elevator data, you name it, so we're moving beyond that simple log file data from servers to other types of interesting data and that conversation, the conversation's really interesting. I'm looking forward to getting out on the floor a little later today and just kind of overhearing some of the customer use cases and hearing what they're talking about in different ways they might be using Splunk. Yeah, it's interesting, the oil analogy is a good one because before they knew what to do with the oil, I think it just messed up a lot of people's farms. But the fact that they can run different data sets against other data sets to come up with interesting correlations that they didn't know about. Really adds the context lens that makes data much more valuable, data as data is what it was before, what Splunk is enabling is context to be laid over that data to really extract the value. Again, I think an interesting thing is this whole world of APIs where no application exists in a silo anymore, how can I open it up and pull different sources of data? We saw the example with the Google Map API and drilling down based on longitude and latitude and one piece of data into the Google Map API. I think that's pretty interesting. But there is further to go. We had Marquez come in and talk about specifically doing a search or trying to do some analysis on something he was interested in and then finding out kind of ad hoc that there was this whole other path that he wanted to go down. And Michael said the same thing, his behavior was kind of ad hoc and I drill and I drill and I move around. Well, the next stage is to take care of the people that aren't quite so inquisitive, that aren't quite so smart, that aren't quite so interested in figuring out answers and just being told what to do. So where the system's actually just kicking it out and saying, okay, you need to do X because these things are correlated in such a way. So I think the roadmap is vast for these guys and where they can still go with this technology. Yeah, that's interesting. I like the way you put that. Kind of, you've got, some people are naturally curious and that's in their personal lives and at work and others maybe are less so. And so the more that you can prompt a user to start to uncover new things and new insights, the better. And so that's definitely an area that we should keep an eye on. I think from a customer perspective, as I mentioned, with all these different data sources coming online, I mean, it's really, these cases are limitless. It's just a matter of your imagination at this point. We're really getting to the point where pretty much every facet of life is going to be tracked in some sense and that's a scary thing in some ways but it also opens up all these possibilities of new ways of helping, not just business, but helping the planet, helping with social causes, depending on your point of view. So there's just, the sky's the limit in terms of what can happen, who the winners and losers will be, I think are the companies that take advantage of these tools and these possibilities. And the ones that kind of shun it and continue to focus on the old ways of doing things, ultimately I think they're going to be left behind because really there's no industry that I think big data is not going to impact. I think we've seen that with some of the use cases here and the cross section of industries represented at this show. Right, and then the other piece that I don't think was as mature as I may be expected it to be and I don't know if those were good expectations but kind of the whole partner pavilion and the partner application space. Hopefully we'll get a few more of those tomorrow but I still think while the team and Godfrey and the guys have done a good job of maintaining the culture inside of Splunk, it's still one company and it's still one way of looking at the world and they've got the strategy to open up the platforms so other people can attack different problems with a different filter and a different context using the technology and that I think is again a whole other interesting thing that maybe will be at the Conf 2013 and a little bit bigger presence than it is here today but again, we're at the cube at Splunk, Conf 2012 in the Continental Hotel in lovely Las Vegas. The rains have stopped, the sun is down. We're giving you the wall to wall coverage that you want. We invite you to participate. Data journey, right data journey's been a long day. Data journey is the hashtag and of course the cube. I'm Jeff Frick, Silicon Angle, really enjoyed the day today with my co-host Jeff Kelly from wikibond.org. We look forward to seeing you all back tomorrow. I think we kick off, what time do we kick off tomorrow? We're gonna try to kick off around 10 o'clock tomorrow. We've got another great group of some execs from Splunk. We've got some partners and customers as well. We'll have a few cube alums. We'll have Eddie Satterleaf, Chief Big Data Evangelist at Splunk. We've had him on before we're joining us. We'll have Dan Woods from Forbes.com, really well-known columnist. Read his stuff, really good stuff with Forbes, covering the big data space and some of the evolution of the market. We'll have him on kicking off the show around 10 o'clock. But yeah, we're gonna have a full lineup tomorrow. 10 o'clock on, another full day. We need to get our rest. We need to get our rest. We need to give a shout out to Dave and John. We know you're here in spirit, guys. Couple of other cube emeritus beyond cube alumni. But it's been a great day. I hope you guys have enjoyed it. I hope you feel like you've gotten a little bit more information as to what's going on here at Conf 2012. Thank you for being here. And I think, should we move on to the evening's festivities as they have here at the show? I think that's probably a good idea. So thanks everybody for watching. Really appreciate it. We'll see you here tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific on siliconangle.tv, The Cube.