 Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube 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 are live in Las Vegas with The Cube here at the splunkconference.conference 2014. Hashtag SplunkConf, I'm John Furrier with Jeff Kelly. Our next guest is Chris Grant with Group Health Cooperative, welcome to The Cube. Thank you, good to be here. So healthcare's got a lot of data. It's in all kinds of silos with all the regulations, but really the trend is really to consumerize it and make it more insightful, more available. Still a challenge, but still everyone, that's a demand. So talk about the dynamics of data in your role on how Splunk's helping you. Sure, sure. So we have, as Group Health Cooperative, we have a lot of data obviously from a, both from a patient perspective, as well as from an insurance perspective. And so we have the best of both worlds and from a security perspective and a data management perspective, sometimes it can be the worst of both worlds. But it's empowering to the organization to be able to look at both sides of that equation. And big data and data analytics is the way to harness that and to make it a market differentiator where there's a lot of organizations that aren't able to do that. And I think as we get further down that path, we'll find a lot of opportunities and a lot of business-relevant scenarios once we get into the data more, once we see what we have. I mean, it's one of those things where you have a lot of stakeholders, right? You have the consumers who want value to just get stuff done, get health care, right? And there's also costs involved for them. But also you have other stakeholders who really have protection needs, right? They want to make sure there's some security you mentioned that. So how do you balance the stakeholders and what have you guys done that's been transformative with the data? Have you guys, have you guys done anything that you say, wow, that's been pretty amazing? So we've done, well, most recently, and I'll pivot a little bit off of that, is that in health care as a provider of care, patient privacy is of utmost concern to the organization and obviously to the patients. In this era of data breaches and data compromise and data not being where it's supposed to be or kept where it's supposed to be, patient privacy is more and more a something that consumers demand. And we've built actually a patient privacy monitoring application on top of Splunk that gives us the ability to provide a better way to see potential privacy issues and to go have conversations with folks to understand what was this access to this record about and is it for a valid business purpose? And it's something that every health care organization that has patient data struggles with. And there are solutions in the marketplace, but we decided that we were going to buy Splunk and we were going to build an application on top of it to look at that particular set of data, that particular set of access logs and derive value out of that for our patients and for the organization, creating dashboards and scoring systems that allow us to easily discern what needs to be investigated and what isn't worth the time. Because there's a lot of valid business use cases for looking at obviously patient records, but not all of them are. And so you have to get into the data, you have to look at scenarios and from log data out of that, you can really create effective processes and get answers quickly. It really, instead of creating an application or creating a report, which is sort of the traditional way to think about these things, with Splunk we can create a dashboard and we can create an interactive experience that'll let the people that are looking into these things quickly go through the scenarios, the detected accesses and quickly determine what needs to be looked into further and what doesn't, what's not worth the time and that Splunk has really brought that to the table for us. So talk a little bit more about that actual process of building that application because Splunk is an interesting company because they're both an application company, they've got applications that you can run right out of the box, but they've also got, essentially they're also a platform company providing SDKs and other tools to allow customers like yourself to actually build their own application. So how would you grade them in terms of the tools and the capabilities of actually building applications on top of Splunk? Ease of deployment, sorry, ease of development, ease of deployment and actually the developer experience. Well, so I'm not a developer and full disclosure. So I won't be able to tell you how easy it is from personal experience, but I will tell you that one resource on my team built the Splunk application we're talking about called Sentry, we went from a proof of concept to production deployment in four months and because it's the platform we can build off of it, it went very quickly and very easily. You know, I would think that there would be commercial vendors that do the same kind of thing that you wouldn't get anywhere near four months of deployment no matter how easy they say it is. It really never is and Splunk ended up being a way for us to do that. So let's take a step back and just talk about security generally. So clearly security analytics is a use case for big data analytics, but I'm curious from a healthcare perspective, security is also a barrier. You talked a little bit about obviously people have privacy concerns, the application you built is to help monitor those kind of things. Do you feel like the security and privacy challenges in the healthcare space are kind of holding back that vertical from really exploiting big data to its full advantage? You know, I think there is challenges in the healthcare vertical when it comes to harnessing new technologies and when it comes to, because it really comes down to you need to get creative, it's all about the people really. You need to find creative people that are relentless for searching out answers and then a tool like Splunk as a framework where you can dive in and build your own application on top of it using the queries you want and the design you want, gets you above the fray of basic IT implementation and development. You can do a higher level thinking at that point because you've got a foundation to work from which is what Splunk provides. Healthcare in general has been challenged from a technology and from a data perspective, I think for a long time because of larger sort of economic forces that are in that vertical. But we're seeing, I think we're seeing those things change as the healthcare industry is changing, adoption of tools is changing, the mindset is changing around how, you know, how can we be more effective and how can we be more, how can we drive toward outcomes? Rather than just independently saying how can insurance company make the most money they can? How can a hospital make the most money they can? We get down to data-driven outcomes where we look at what does the research show for patient care over the last 50 years for this particular kind of condition. Getting into that, the drives, here's actually what we need to be doing from a procedure standpoint from a care standpoint to drive to the outcomes that make the most sense based on what the data is. And since the economics are changing where it's not purely about profit anymore, you can get down to better outcomes by getting to the data and you need tools to do that. I think the entire industry is going that direction. There's lots and lots of partnerships happening between care providers and between health plans for exactly that reason. Well, that's an interesting point because part of the challenge is, of course, sharing data amongst providers and making it more interoperable. Whether you're a patient going to one hospital or one treatment and then another clinic, the systems may not talk to one another, they may not share data, they've got privacy concerns, you've got insurance companies that may hold onto their data a little tighter than others. How much of this is a technology problem and how much of it is a cultural or even some extent legal regulatory challenge? Sure, well, what's interesting is that in a healthcare space, I'm fairly new to the healthcare space, most of my background is financial services and security and financial services, but healthcare is really, it's a people-oriented business. A lot of the people are in healthcare simply because they want to help take better care of people, which means that people's hearts are in the right place, which is a great place to start. From there, you have to get people's minds in the right place and so there is, I don't necessarily know that it's a cultural issue from a pillar from people not wanting to do it. There is an entrenched need for people to help people in healthcare, so that's solid. The cultural challenge is getting out of the mindset that we have to maintain our old technologies and we have to stay with tried and true, which from a care perspective, maybe that's what you want to do because tried and true is the safest option, but from a technology perspective, there's some room there to try new ways of thinking and try new technologies and it's about getting the right minds around the right tools to be able to do that and then it becomes really powerful. The privacy concerns are real, but everybody's held the sort of the same standard. The HIPAA is there for a reason and we all have to uphold the controls that are in HIPAA and high tech and the final omnibus role that came out. So it's not necessarily that the regulations are preventing it, I don't think. I think that they're generally there to support it and the way that those regulations are written and designed, they're very flexible about how it's, what's appropriate for your organization. So it's not necessarily about that that's preventing it. It's about getting the right people with the right tools with the right sort of mission and drive and then I think we can solve a lot of problems. Chris, what do you think about the, let's just comment, I think we got some great commentary going on Twitter and crowd chat. Tim Crawford says, interesting perspective for healthcare data-driven outcomes. We can't even bring up this notion and I commented, what do you think about talking to Tim? What do you think about the big trends in health IT? It's in need of transformation in a big frenzy data way, in a big way. So obviously this change of foot. What's your take on data-driven outcomes? Is that something that's being talked about in IT? Is that, is there still more of the old guard? And what big data transformations do you see happening in healthcare in general? There is a significant movement around data-driven outcomes and my organization has thought that for a long time. We've had, we've been both a payer and a provider for a long time so that's just inherent in how we think. There's a lot of organizations that that's a new concept for. But, and actually- Like, scary or just, they're not paying attention? They haven't had incentive. I think is really what it comes down to. There's been enough profit in not dealing with each other that they haven't had to have those data-driven outcomes. And so, but the industry is changing as a whole. Data analytics is very much a part of every, I would say every board conversation that's paying attention to their organization. The, we have the ability now, it used to be that we didn't have the technology to look at all the data. Now we have the technology, we just need to set it up in a way that we can get value out of it. And actually, you'll see that data-driven outcomes has been a part of the culture of healthcare for quite a while. If you look at the organizations that have research institutes from a primary care perspective, there's a lot of organizations that have spun up research institutes for specifically that purpose. And so, there is a culture of data-driven outcomes at the primary care level in a lot of organizations, but it's fairly new to broadly have data-driven outcomes from a broad sort of industry perspective. It's either a provider and a payer and into that picture. You know, it's easy for people to point, hey, get off my lawn or hey, I need that and everyone's always kind of right, hey, I want some stuff. But the question I want to ask you is, do you see it as a platform technology challenge, like the right tech in place, or is it the user experience expectation issue, the users? Because it's pretty complicated. We hear about feed ingestion from these guys, the feed extractor, some of the analytics that Splug's doing, is very interesting because it could almost, it could almost abstract away all that wrangling and all the structure, which is an inhibitor in the sense that it's complicated. So is it a platform tech issue or is it the users that are stuck in the mud or both? I think it's probably both. Having technology that gives you the ability to get above the fray of the mechanics of data is really empowering and you can really start thinking about higher level issues and not worry so much about the plumbing and how everything is connected. And so you have to get the people into the right mindset to be able to take advantage of that and you have to get the technology in place to be able to develop and support that. And it's not a trivial problem. We know we have the capability. It's just about spending the time and energy to do it, I think. Well, it's interesting. Let's unpack that a little bit. So getting to the point where you're looking at higher level issues and not worrying about the plumbing so much, sounds like you could potentially be talking about using the cloud, whether it's public or private, to help do those kind of things. To some extent, service organizations to come in and help you, architect systems. How does Splunk specifically help you do that? And what are your thoughts on using the cloud to do some of that more infrastructure level work, particularly in the healthcare space, which again, not always the most forward looking in terms of the technology adoption? Well, so I don't know that I'll have a full answer for that, because I think it's a great question. Cloud capabilities give us more processing power and more dynamic infrastructure than we've ever had before. The part where we struggle with in healthcare is that a lot of cloud providers are challenged to actually support the regulations that we're under. So it's not necessarily that the technology is the issue. It's more so that the organizations that provide cloud services need to step up and meet the need of their customers. That's improving over time, but if an organization can get by without the overhead of doing all of those compliance things, especially a startup cloud provider, they will. They'll go to the customers that aren't regulated first, and then they will start looking at how they can support others. Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, we're moving in that direction where potentially we're going to get to almost vertically focused cloud services and cloud providers who can adapt to and provide the type of regulation and privacy and security capabilities that a healthcare organization would need versus a retail organization versus financial services. Right, we're for it. And we're seeing AWS is taking steps to do that in terms of providing HIPAA compliance and things like that. But it is, clearly we've got a little ways to go, but it sounds like that's the direction we're moving. Yeah, and it's, the technology can support all of these things that we want to do. It's a matter of being legally protected. It's always, you know, it's a contract. You always need to make sure the lawyers are happy of which I report to one, so I'm very familiar with that. And then getting the right people and the right minds and the right tools, you know, I think they're all solvable. It's just a complicated picture. Okay, Chris, we really appreciate you coming on board. We're going to kick it over to the keynotes. So we're going to flip it to the big stage here. This is the cube. We are expecting to see them from the noise. That's what we do. And we're excited to be here live in Las Vegas and Splunk Conference. We'll be right back after the keynotes. Stay tuned for more cube. But let's right now go to the keynotes live on the big stage. We'll be right back.