 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering.conf 2017, brought to you by Splunk. And welcome back here on theCUBE as we wrap up our coverage of Splunk.conf 2017. We're live in our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Just kind of sandwiched between the U.S. Capitol, which is right up there, and they have a little healthcare discussion going on. The White House, about a mile and a half in another direction. They're probably talking healthcare tonight, too. I would imagine it a little bit. We're talking Splunk, Dave Vellani, John Walls, and Dave, a good couple of days. It's actually a great couple of days here. We're not getting into all the specifics, but just the range of guests that we have talking about the application of Splunk shows you about the breadth of this technology and how it's reaching. There's so many parts of the American enterprise today. Well, you know, John, we've been talking about all week that we, this is our seventh Splunk.conf. We, theCUBE started following this company pre-IPO. We've seen their rocket ship ascendancy. And the kind of, you know, last several years, the stock has kind of gone sideways. So, you know, the street hasn't been as sanguine as before, but it looks like new management, you know, under the guidance of Doug Merritt and new sales organization has really started to put this company back on track. Not that it was ever off the rails, but you can see a path to go, I mean, it's a $1.2 billion company with a $10 billion valuation. So that's not, nothing to sneeze at. You can see this company has the potential to really be one of the next big software players. And you've seen a number of companies emerge. You know, Salesforce was the cloud company, right? But you've seen a number of companies like Splunk emerge, you know, from sort of the mid 2000 area or, you know, the timeframe into a real powerhouse. I mean, getting to a billion dollar software company, that's a real milestone. You know, there are not many make it. So I'm impressed with that. They're growing at 30% plus per year. And the things that we confirmed this week, that the traditional SIM security, you know, log file, you know, digging through these log files, that's giving way and has given way to a better way. Where you're reading machine data, you're able to search that and begin to automate and remediate in a proactive fashion to a practitioner when you talk to people around here. The Splunk way is the better way, no doubt. Now, what you've seen, and I tell you, early on in Splunk, I heard from a lot of vendors, we got the Splunk killer. Well, Splunk seems alive and well. It hasn't happened yet. Yeah, and it's because they're, in my opinion, they're this customer focused company that talks to customers, gets that feedback into their system. And as Doug Merritt would say, they're innovating faster than the competition. Now, there's some startups going after them, probably trying to attack their cloud model, the pricing model, but I feel like Splunk is in a really good position here. The other piece of this is, you know, the IT, you know, management component of it. You're starting to see a lot of companies really glom on to what they're doing in what they call, I call it ITOM, but they have an acronym that use ITSI. Really bringing analytics to IT management, understanding what's going wrong, where it's going wrong, and how to remediate it. So those are really the two big use cases. The other concern that we heard from Wall Street was pricing. I don't hear that from, certainly from the loyal customers. And you've asked a lot of folks today, just, what do you think? What do you like? And the response has been, I'd say, fairly positive. Yeah, I've been pushing on the cube and also, you know, at lunch, when you're not on camera, I've only really found one area of concern, somebody in the government said, wow, at the volume we're doing, you know, it gets kind of expensive for us, but generally speaking, most users that we've talked to have said, I like that pay by the data drink model, and it's machine data, you know, kind of log data, so it's not like massive amounts of data, although it's going to grow. One of these days is going to be more metadata than there is data. So, but I think in general, Splunk is a good handle on that subscription models, moving to a cloud, you know, model, but still plenty of their base is perpetual model. So fundamentally this company, I think, has some significant upside. I think there's still some skeptics out there on the street, but the customer base is not skeptical, and ultimately that to me is the end arbiter. If customers are happy, they're willing to spend, they see value, they're committed, the base is growing, we see 7,000 people here versus 4,000 last year, that's a 40% growth. You know, when we first found this company, we said this is going to be one of the next big things, along with, you know, some others like the service now, we've, you know, pinned tableau early on, even though they've had some bumps in the road, guys like Nutanix, you know, Red Hat, you talk to their customers, they're passionate, you definitely see that here. So, let's talk about the customer focus a little bit, because that's the hallmark, right? It kind of reminds you of AWS a little bit, we're going to focus on the customer, and we hear that from everybody who sat down here and people we've talked to on the show floor, they have a, it's a very direct relationship, it's a warm relationship, it's not customer client, you know, it's right here, they're sympatico. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there are different models, Andy Jassy talks about this, Doug Merritt talked about that there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, you could be a customer focused, customer first company, we make all your decisions based on what the customer is saying, and maybe that's an overstatement, but there's another model which is a competitor focused, if there's a competitor, I'm going to go kill them, and there's some very successful examples of that. I mean, I would put, you know, EMC in that category, even though they're very customer focused, you know, you cross them as a competitor, they're going to put you in their sights and shoot you. I think Microsoft has some sort of similar, you know, characteristics there, you've seen, you saw Microsoft decimate, you know, its competitors in the past, I would say Oracle in that sense, not that these companies don't care about their customers, of course they do, but they're fanatical about the competition. Not competition, right, right, right. I think, you know, companies like Splunk, I think they are concerned about the competition, they don't ignore it, same with AWS, but if you put the customer first, do right by the customer, good things happen, I mean, it's a good philosophy. So going forward now, I mean, Splunk is a company that's based on change, right, it's all about transformation, it's all about speed and providing these services. I mean, what do they have to do in your mind the next 12, 18 months to really separate themselves and take that quantum leap off the 1.2, where they are now, to get to that maybe four or five billion. Well, the number one is don't screw it up. I mean, okay, that's obvious. Good rule. But I think the second thing is the TAM expansion, one of, I think Doug Merritt's big challenge is, how do they expand their TAM, you know, beyond those two core, you know, areas, security, obviously, you know, huge area and just sort of IT, you know, operations management, but again, what I call ITOM, they don't use that term. How do they grow beyond that and where do they grow? And I think there's a couple ways to think about that. One is, I mean, Splunk is, it can start delivering apps that are very deep, that's what it's doing around security, it's our ransomware applications, for example, going depth. As a platform, Splunk has breadth, but they don't sell the platform per se. They really, what they do is they sell the solutions around that platform. The platform is there though. To me, Splunk could become a big data development platform. And what I want to see is I want to see this ecosystem grow dramatically. I think that's, for them to get to five billion, this ecosystem has to explode. I think they have to start becoming a developer outreach, developer friendly company, so that the ecosystem can innovate on behalf of that platform. So they have a very powerful platform. It's like George and I were talking about this morning. It's Hadoop-like and it's a big data pipeline, but it's integrated and it's a lot simpler. And so, to us, Splunk can start expanding its TAM by building out applications with its ecosystem on top of that platform. I think that's an interesting challenge. We've tested that a little bit here. Splunk's shy about going there. They haven't gone there yet. I think they have to be careful because you don't want to scare away the ecosystem either. I mean, remember Microsoft, their timing was good. And you know what your sweet spot is too. I mean, so you can't leave your core. Yeah, you don't want to lose that. Like I said, they don't want to screw it up. You got to take care of your core. And security's a big market. No question about it, as is the IT ops market as well. But there's a lot more runway. If they're going to get to be a five or a $10 billion company, it's unquestionable that they're going to bump in to the other big platform players. Right, right. And what's the horizon for something like that? I mean, it's not a 12 month play, right? I mean, you're talking about- No, I think it's a five year vision, but it has to start to unravel over the next 12 to 18 months in my view. One of the things I would look for is again, expansion of the ecosystem, i.e. number of partners, the substance of those partnerships, and then purposeful, deliberate developer outreach. I'd love to see these guys do a little dev con within .conf to see who shows up. Again, they don't play up their developer tools in a big way. They're not really, you know, there are hackathons going on here. There may be, but they're not front and center. No hackathon award winners that we're interviewing in theCUBE. It'd be interesting to see what would happen if they released some, you know, low code SDKs, have a little, you know, test the, I'd like to see them test the water there to see who comes out. I bet you they'd be oversold. Right. A lot of cool T-shirts though. A lot of cool T-shirts. It's a fun company. It is, no it is. That's the other thing, you know that. You know, there, I mean, this is geek fest. Right, right. There's a lot of, you know, great, fun, senses of humor, they're self deprecating, funny T-shirts and... And I think we're the only two guys that I've seen in here all week with ties on, as a matter of fact. Usually the only one. Yeah, well, I just, I know it was me with you and I had to dress up for the occasion. Really enjoyed it. Great working with you. Thank you, it's been a pleasure. Dave Vellante here on theCUBE. He gave you the playbook splunk. Now just follow it and let's see where you are five years from now, right? Yeah, it was there for you. We're done, doneconf.com 2017, wrapping up our live coverage here on theCUBE. It's been great having you along for the ride so long from our nation's capital.