 Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios, having a CUBE conversation. The madness of the fall conference season is just over the horizon, but it hasn't hit yet. So we're excited to get some time to bring people into the studio and we're excited to have a many-time CUBE alum, but he's never been to the studio before. And it's Brian Goldfarb, the CMO of Splunk. Brian, great to see you. Yeah, great to be here. This is amazing. I was going to say how you like the digs. I love it. It's awesome. It's nice. You don't have to set up the lights every time like we do at all the various shows. So the crew is very free and we keep it cold. So what's going on at Splunk? Give us an update. Just had the quarterly announcement came out a month or so ago. I was listening to that before you came in, another rock and roll revenue growth. You guys just seem to be hitting it time and time and time again. On fire. Things are going great at Splunk. We've just huge rounds of customer success, lots of new products and technology. I think it's been a big focus for us. How do we continue to drive the innovation engine for security and for IT and really transform how, as the leader in big data, how we help our customers. It's been super fun. And from the marketing side, we're driving an enormous amount of transformation. I think you see this happening for CMOs everywhere, their businesses are changing. I fundamentally believe that the marketing department is the department going through the most transformation right now. CMOs are under the most pressure to change. And so there's so much going on and how we're thinking about digital first, how we're thinking about being data driven, Splunk on Splunk in many ways, how we're using our own technology to drive our business and community, which I know you guys are super passionate about here. Right. And in the community, but your kind of reputation, when you came in as your data guy, you like to measure the data, you like to see how things are working, not like your dad's old marketing department where you just kind of throw it up and raise 50% of that budget as wasted, we're just not sure which 50% can measure stuff. That was a great excuse for a long time. I always talk about kind of hashtag math camp is one of the things we talk about a lot. How do we think about leveraging data in everything that we do? How do we get data driven insights? How do we have data driven instrumentation? And ultimately how are we using that to drive the marketing department? I think what we're seeing so many places is, first, the accountability required in marketing is changing, right? You can no longer say, if a 50% works, I don't know what half. It's what's working right now for our customers. And we see the need to leverage data and digitization across businesses being a key part of that. But we also can't lose sight in many ways of the need for community. And the emotional connection that brands have with customers. And I think one of the things, you know, see the T-shirt, the energy, one of the things we're doing really uniquely beyond being amazing at delivering big data solutions for our customers is creating that community, that connection, building that emotion, and doing that in a way where we can connect the dots from the relationship that we're building, customer success, and ultimately, super happy and satisfied customers. And we've seen that, we've been going to SpongebobConf actually was my first Cube gig in 2012. Oh my gosh. Back at the, was it the ARIA? No, was it the Cosmo? Was it the Cosmo? It was the Cosmo, right around the IPO. So you guys have a super vibrant community, really passionate and engaged. And I don't know if it's by smart planning or circumstance, or a little bit of both, but you know, kind of your play in the security market is the security market has just exploded and using machine data, which, oh by the way, has something to do with IoT and IoT. So, you know, you guys are really well positioned sitting on all that machine-generated data. You can think about the roots around IT first, right? How do we help IT professionals find out what's going wrong with their systems and fix them as fast as possible so they can really focus on customer outcomes, taking those same patterns to security, which you rightly acknowledge on fire, super important, board level issues. And now we think about business is going through digital evolution, right? They're iteratively trying to add more and more digital components. You see it in the marketing department, right? We have better access to data so we can become more digital. And as we see our customers evolve, the patterns that were successful in IT and security now work in other parts of the business. A great example, just as a customer example, Yelp in Bay Area, I don't know, for you, if it's not on Yelp and I'm not looking at a review, I can't eat there because it's too much risk. But they were working through how do they improve the quality of the experiences customers have with food delivery? Right, it's not an IT thing, it's not security, but it's how do you take their data and begin to investigate the root causes of issues? How do you then monitor and detect changes in those patterns and how do you automate and analyze the resolution with the end goal of very clearly having that warmer food for customers? So it's been an amazing experience for them and they've been amazing outcomes and all of that is as more and more data explodes across the business, you see Splunk adding value in every department. So I'd love to get your take, something we talk a lot about on theCUBE and you've been in the business for a long time before Splunk as well. And that's before data was really a liability. It was expensive to gather, it was expensive to store, you had to buy a bunch of boxes and stick it in a data center and usually bought like 75% more than you needed in case you had a bump. So it was really kind of a liability. Now obviously, as you said, data is a huge asset, some would say the oil, et cetera, it's an asset. But it's not measured on the balance sheet, it's still not measured on the balance sheet today. So when you see some crazy valuations for a lot of companies say at Facebook or Google, it's really a reflection of a multiple of the value of their data, not necessarily just a multiple of the value of their revenue or their earnings. So as you work with your customers and as you measure kind of ROI on return of an investment, say the Yelp investment, it's a very different measure of ROI. If the investment on the data side is to drive better outcomes, it's to drive more revenue, it's to drive maybe new product development and innovation. And yet again, it's not really measured as an asset. So how does that kind of play into how people decide to do projects, how they measure the success of projects when it's not the cost center that it needs to be. And that's the transformation that's happening, right? Digital is happening everywhere, which really means data is happening everywhere. And it's not just the structured data that we're used to, it's all the unstructured data, the data that people were unaware necessarily had enormous amounts of value, certainly not balance sheet value, but any value. And I think the world has realized in every department that that data has value. And so those decisions on where to have projects, if you will, stems from that understanding. And then the best way to evaluate it is what are customers doing, right? We're working with DomWare, automotive company. And their challenges were, how do they secure, you know, their automotive systems, their plant systems. And they had, they're in the old world that was disconnected, it was offline. And as more and more of that becomes digital, it's way easier to sort of take advantage of software like Splunk and apply it to those use cases and start to realize the value. And the value at the end of the day comes from, I'm solving a set of problems, I'm more secure, I'm happier customers, I'm delivering better process, I have faster time to resolution with my systems recovery. And in marketing, if you think about it from the CMO lens, which could be, you know, it's really important, we can start to tune, you know, there are investments and the campaigns that we're running and the messages that we're using for the audience. And it's particularly important in B2B marketing where you have a lot of data, but it's longer sales cycles. And I don't know, you know, I believe the CMO in many ways and the marketing department works for sales, right? It's our responsibility to drive the demand to help our business, but at the same time, it's critical that we don't lose sight of that creativity and that community that is so important to the loyalty that happens over time with brands. And that's another just such an interesting point, right? Is back in the day, you know, the brands control the messaging, the brands control the information, the brands control the content. That's no longer the case anymore. By the time somebody inquires to you or participates in a campaign or shows about a Splunk event or goes to the website, they've probably done some homework. They've probably talked to their peers. They've probably done some investigation online. And I know when I go online to investigate stuff, I'm looking at the other people talking about the products that I'm interested, not necessarily the company's product. So it's a really different challenge from a CMO perspective to engage, enable and help those people be your advocates while at the same time, you don't really have this quite as control the message as you used to have back in the day. And that's actually, I think, a great thing, right? Most customers are doing more due diligence on their own. And I think there's research, you can see research from others that say something to the effect of 60 or 70% of the decision-making process is occurring before they even engage the brand. So once you recognize that, how you tie all these things together becomes super important. So I'll go back to community. I don't want to over-harp on it, but that's the only way that you can effectively manage the unknown unknowns in that first 70%. How do you get your customer advocates to tell their stories, the value they're getting? How do you make sure that the content that you think is relevant to the industry is out there, you're contributing to it? How do you, just think about what you guys are doing, right? How do you distribute the value chain of content creation to more valuable individuals that then can tie back to organizations and how do you tie up the stories that we tell? So I want to test another hypothesis by you because again, you're smart guys. And we talk about a lot here, which is really kind of classic old school that have a big number with some small conversion rate and that's your yield. Versus having a relatively small but targeted number with a much higher conversion rate because these are actually the people that care versus more of a kind of a broadcasting strategy. Are you seeing some of that? Are you trying to execute some of those types of things? I think that's critical in the future of all marketing, right? The broad reach stuff is expensive. It's really hard to measure the impact and yeah, if you can do 10 million here at 50 basis points, you'll get to some outcome but the world is pivoting to very outcome driven, right? How many transactions did I drive? What's the value of those transactions? Or more importantly, how successful were my customers? We care at Splunk deeply about getting the software, adopting the software, getting value from the software. And so that has nothing to do with big, broad, hit 100 million people. It's hit the right 10,000 people, pull them through a customer journey that starts with their research phase, ultimately puts them through the adoption phase in an incredibly successful way. And that tunes everything, your investment, your philosophy, what you reward. Because I think in the older school model, there was this belief that more is better. Just do more. You're a successful company, so what are you going to do? Just do more, more, more, more, more. And you get these linear growth patterns on more. And eventually that stops working because something else breaks. And you realize that more wasn't actually doing anything, it just felt good in the moment. It was just more. It was just more. And it kept people busy and it was great in those sense. And so that's why measurement, that's why being able to take your data and get value from your data and listen to your data is so critical in every department and marketing more than anyone else now has that data so you can be targeted. I mean, if I only touched five people and those five people became incredibly successful customers, that's an amazing marketing campaign with huge success. Versus I ran a commercial during the Super Bowl and I touched 240 million people, but no one bought any software. You might feel good about that, but it isn't necessarily driving the outcomes and the results and then B2B, that's so critical. Yeah, and obviously we're huge believers of that and also on the community side as well because we want to get peers. Your buyer's peers talking about their experience with the product is very, very different than reading any kind of marketing brochure or those types of things. So it's such a critical component. I mean, just with the Yelp example, that's a peer concept. That applies exactly the same to enterprise software. Community, like community is critical. Like with digital is the trend that's driving all the change, right? That gives you access to data which forces accountability into new parts of the organization that never really had it before. No more excuses. And now you have this incredibly new community-driven model which never used to be important, but actually to me is the lifeblood of the long-term investment that marketers are making today. Right, the other thing that you guys have done a good job at kind of growing with the times, if you will, and that's customers want choice and they want buying choice, right? So you guys have obviously adopted cloud. You have more subscription type of opportunity. So I wonder if you could speak to, from a marketer point of view, you have to kind of repackage things. You got to look for funny arbitrage opportunities that kind of screw things up in the market and your channel partner conflict, you have to kind of manage all these things. But the reality is people want to buy the way they want to buy and you have to give them the options that they expect to be there. And I think that's really the big change is the expectation is there that you have those different types of options. Well, no one's successful in isolation anymore. Any belief that one vendor and one product is the solution to all ills is a fallacy. And so there's two views there. One is what are you doing from a technology innovation perspective? And that's for us very clearly focused on making sure Splunk and all the software you already have work better together. The sum of the part should be greater. And then from a marketing perspective, it's recognizing how you can go to market, how you can sell with all the partner in the ecosystem. This isn't a competitive conversation. It's how do we make customers successful? And so Splunk and Salesforce is better because I can look at my Salesforce data. I can use Splunk. I can drive my organization. That's what we're doing inside the house. And we see customers starting to do it, right? Splunk in Hadoop. It's not about the Hadoop ecosystem per se being separate. That data lake coupled with our software is a better solution. And so Splunk with all these different technologies together being more effective is critical. And it's exactly what you said. Customers have what they have. They've made the investments that they've made. They have great reasons for all those things. And I want to augment their success with our software. Such an exciting time to be in marketing, especially in the BV space. So give you the last word, Brian, before we cut out here, Splunk.conf 2019 is coming up. We're just 19. 2018 is coming up. So what do we expect? How many people, what should people be making sure they get registered and get there? I'm glad it's not 2019 yet. I have like 15 months until we have to worry about that. We're not starting the planning on that. We are, of course we are. So Splunk.conf.18, it's our amazing user conference. You were there in 2012. We're going to have almost 10,000 people there. It's in Orlando, Florida, October 1st to October 4th. It's really, it's an amazing experience. Really focused on celebrating our amazing user community, demonstrating all the great innovations and then bringing them together to share ideas, which I think is really, for me, as someone who's only been at Splunk for almost two years, so exciting. Every one of our customers is using our software at Splunk in innovative ways. And what we're seeing more and more is it's expanding outside of just IT and security. And so as our customers talk to each other, share ideas, share use cases, we see the light bulb moments, the aha moments, if you will, going off. And that part is incredible. Right, we'll be there again. So we're looking forward to it. All right, Brian, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day on a Friday to stop by our studios. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's awesome. I appreciate it. Pleasure. He's Brian. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching.