 Live from the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walls. Welcome back live here on theCUBE. We are in Orlando, Florida, live on the show floor at dot com 2016 along with John Furrier. I'm John Walls. The two continuous coverage here have been here for a couple of days and we'll be wrapping up a little bit later on this afternoon. It's for New Keynotes Live tomorrow. We have with us a keynote star from today, Andy Mann, who is the Chief Technology Advocate. I knew I wasn't going to get that out. Sorry, Andy. Thank you for being here with us. And John Rooney, who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Splunk. So thank you both for being here. Thank you. First off, just your take on what you see, what you feel, the vibe that you got going on here. I mean, John and I have been talking about it for a couple of days. Seems to us very positive, very upbeat. Lot of good spirit going on here. Your take. Yeah, look, I'll jump in. There's a great vibe at this show. I mean, it's something I've understood from this company is the customers are such part of our lifeblood and they love to be here. They love to be with each other. They love to learn about stuff. They love to tell each other how good things are going. When they listen to the keynotes, you can really feel the buzz going in. Yesterday's keynote with Doug. Also the one with Shy and our product team was just really positive, coming out of there, all the buzz was like, oh wow, I got to get that. I'm willing to try that. Let's get that installed, how soon can we have it? So people are just really into what we do and the results we get and that gives us a lot of energy. Yeah, John, your take. Yeah, this is my, so I've been at Splunk for four and a half years. So this is my fifth user conference and obviously we've gotten bigger. The scale has gotten bigger, but the spirit's still there. There's still the fundamental spirit around our users, our customers pushing us to do more, telling us about how they're using the product and I think it's been a really great kind of growth experience of seeing how we're still bigger but the heart of that vibe at the conference is still pretty much the same. And you guys are getting a lot of new customers and new Splunkers in the customer base, blending into that culture that you guys have seen to preserve the work hard, play hard. Certainly the keynotes are packed, the hallways are packed with people coming out, running to the sessions, the sessions are packed, the party's rocking. I mean, I saw more adults going on rides last night at Disney, going, you know, why was one of them? But I'm not a customer, but people smiling, a lot of bonding, high fives, just that's a cultural tenant, isn't it? Yeah, it's something that we're really thoughtful about in terms of in hiring and growing and how we treat our customers. We really tried to not let go of the things from the early days even beyond when I started. So it's good. This is coming to the product conversation because this is where the rubber hits the road. They put all that aside, great community, into the people's jobs are on the line, digital transformations happening, Splunk went from a tool to a platform, now a fabric. That's not the way it's supposed to go by the playbook of tech startups. It's supposed to be platform tools and then world dominance. You start as a tool, turn into a platform now, that's really an interesting progression. But the tool has turned into a platform. Well, I mean, I think the way we looked at it is, going back three, four years, we wanted to make sure that the fundamental things that Splunk did well around the data ingestion, the correlation, the visualization, we made sure that that was a platform, that was extensible, that was something that not only we could build on, but our partners could build on. And then over time, what we found, the more we talked to customers, the more we heard about how they were using the product, we wanted to focus on, okay, what are the couple pillars of the business? And that's why we really doubled down around IT operations and security and to build out these solutions like enterprise security and IT service intelligence that are hyper-focused on those users, their pain points, how to deliver value to them. Solve a problem. Absolutely, that are problem-focused, but still take advantage of everything great with the platform. So, first of all, it's a testament to all the companies and startups out there that are trying to figure out the future. If you just solve a problem, now that you've had a growth strategy and there's a business reason why you did that, I get that. But an observation, we go to a lot of events, so this year I think we'll be over 100 different events. There's a pattern emerging about the successful companies. Here it is. The ones that I see that are doing well and disrupting, but yet innovating, they do it completely opposite of the way it used to work. And so it's almost a reverse. And that's kind of come from this whole DevOps ethos. The way you used to do it actually is not really the way you want to do it in the future. So IT guys have this challenge. How do you keep the lights on? How do you maintain operations? But I got to start retransforming my workflows, my work streams, my personnel, my tasks, almost doing it opposite. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of what Andy talked about at the first part of the keynote. This notion that there's this big change, this big transformation driven by everything from cloud to microservices to hybrid environments. And all of a sudden the job of the IT professional looks different than it did 15 years ago. However, is the mission ultimately different? Like, isn't your job to deliver value and run that business? I think Andy made a great point in the keynote this morning that this idea that IT was somehow a separate entity from the business, I think is a misnomer. And I think it's becoming more into- Well certainly it's into the fabric because IT's in software's every part of the business. So IT then has to horizontally embed in. Fundamentally, right? Yeah, there's no technology division of every company. Like every company is contained within that. So talk about conventional wisdom, guys. Because you hear this a lot, conventional wisdom. I have to have top of rack, switch is, and I got to do all this. Cloud busted that big time. Data analytics, this is what happened. Well I want to know what's happening and what will happen. New dynamics around data, new security. The perimeter's dead, we all know that. So a lot of the conventional wisdom tenants are all getting thrown out the window. Which ones do you highlight right now that you think are the most vulnerable or have already been kind of demystified, if you will, in terms of the conventional wisdom? How are you supposed to do IT operations? How are you supposed to do security with data? Yeah, I can't remember who said it, but the common wisdom is frequently neither, right? So it's neither common nor wisdom. And so it's one of the things that Splunk has been really good at is disrupting and doing things differently. I mean, you look at everything from our, the way we collect and store data, the way we price, the way we work with our customers, the way we work with partners in a really open ecosystem. Yeah, these things are all doing a lot of ways contrary to whatever the common wisdom might have been, the conventional wisdom. I think with the IT operations, the conventional wisdom was change causes problems. And that's got to go. And that's part of the DevOps philosophy as well. And I certainly believe that change is the only constant. And if we're not changing, then we're dying. We've got to get rid of this notion that IT apps needs to stop people doing stuff. We need to hold back. Now I can't do that. You'll need to raise a service ticket. Now I can't do that because we need to wait for a change window. There's just not acceptable anymore. We've got to accept change and love change. Well, we had Yelp on earlier today and they said fundamentally, it's all about software everywhere. And automation of that software to get rid of some of those objections. Change window. What? Use containers and publish it to a scheduler. I mean ultimately, if the big driver of this is businesses want to move faster, they want to do more and they want to learn faster, you can't do that stuff manually. That's no longer eyeballs and things written on sticky notes. It has to be infrastructure as code. It has to be software driven. It has to be data driven. Or Dave, don't turn this off. Absolutely. Yeah. How many times have you seen that in data center? So ultimately, all the ditch digging is done by the technology so that the people are freed up to actually add value. And that's whether you're talking about from things around automation or even what we're doing with machine learning. If you think about machine learning, we're not replacing security or IT practitioners. What we're actually doing is bringing the answers and the information to a much more crystallized point so that they're better prepared to do their job. But they don't have to do all the hauling of the information and the chopping of wood to get there, which doesn't scale very well. It doesn't allow you to do what you need to do at the speed in which businesses need to work. This is the question more along the lines of how you go about your business on what you do. But because change or this ability or I guess a willingness to accept new paradigms, new visions, I mean, is that something that's embedded in Splunk in terms of your hiring and the kind of people you look for? I mean, what is it about Splunk, do you think that differentiates you from others in the tech sector when it comes to that kind of employee perspective? Certainly as a relatively new employee, I've only been just over 12 months at Splunk. And going through the hiring process was actually different. I've been hired for a lot of different roles in my time. And going through the hiring process was very different. It was in a large way structured and different, I've interviewed other candidates since I've joined as well. And to a large degree, it's structured so that different people are asking different questions of the same candidate. Some will focus on technical skills, some will focus on experience, some will focus on cultural fit. And we have very distinctly described cultural values and we'll often get older timers, if you will, or interviewing for the cultural fit so that the people who know deeply what the cultural Splunk has been continue to reinforce that. And I think that's actually very powerful. It's a couple things to highlight. You guys have the Enterprise Splunk, IT source, intelligence, product update, then security, Enterprise security, user behavior analytics, and on and on, continue to add to the product sweep. So I want to ask both of you guys, what's the biggest thing you'd like to share with the audience? And I'd like to know from your perspectives, what's changed most with the data? Because the data continues to be the most valuable asset for the customer. We had the CTO on from Splunk earlier talking about how you can start to separate data into classes and use the machine learning differently. Time series is different than relational databases. He's got a great vision on that. I think he's right on the money. But this means a completely different view of how you have data and the value of that data putting it to work. What's changed this year? What should people be thinking about? Just general comments around how important that data is. Yeah, I mean, I think I'd go back to the machine learning theme. The paradigm for working with Splunk from the beginning was get it all in one place and ask questions of it, right? But that's still massively powerful. It's still a powerful use case for a lot of customers. But I think there's a huge opportunity from the analytics side to say, how about your data starts to tell you some things? How about your data proactively, does some pattern recognition, does some predictive things, does some threshold analysis? And now all of a sudden you can expand the scope of the type of data you put in. Essentially, you're gaining this scale that you wouldn't normally have because the software is doing more of the work. It's not just answering questions. It's coming up for the questions for you, which is a very different thing. And I think it's the cusp of a whole new paradigm for us. And the data sharing dynamic. Is that coming into play? Yeah. And I think this, you know, you talked about was this year, we see the rise of containers, the rise of microservices, the increasing adoption of cloud, teams working together with DevOps kind of modes and variations on that theme. And I think this fragmentation is fundamentally changing the way that we need to manage and use and share data. When you've got such amazing and such diverse fragmentation of resources, sources, applications, infrastructure and everything, including customer data, and increasingly executives want business data in that mix, I believe you've got to have one source and everyone on the same page. Can you achieve agility with data or agile data? Data native, whatever you want to call it. I mean, we're coming down to that conversation, aren't we? I mean, you guys are providing this data agility, data native environment. Yeah, I mean, I think the notion, I mean, those terms up, the principle of kind of data driven decision making has lived around forever and probably, you know, going back in the NBA textbooks for time out of mind, but it's just, it hadn't been feasible before. It's been really hard to make data driven decision makings if you can't measure, you know, if you can't manage what you can't measure. And I think, you know, we're now, Splunk is, you know, part of this new generation of solutions technology that now enables you to even be able to make those decisions, enables that type of discussion. And so, all of a sudden, organizations that may have worked off of hunches of the data or subsets of the data or the loudest voice in the room, you can't argue with the data, but you have to be able to structure the argument. And I think we're an enabler for that. John, I want to ask you, what's the biggest disruption in IT operation or IT in general? Is it personnel, technology process, all the above? And I would say it's, you know, from a DevOps standpoint, and Andy lives this all the time, talking to our customers and talking to industry, it's the cultural change around DevOps. And it's just the notion of, you know, the traditional, I'm IT, my job is stability, don't break anything, keep things cool, and I'm Dev, and I want to push, I want to push and build and push and push and push, and it was, you know, Snake and Mongoose. And I think this new world where, no, they're working together, you're all rowing in the same direction, and these general principles of working off of the same data set, taking shared tasks and that empathy, and, you know, tools can help that, but it's not the driver itself. It's very much of a change management or cultural thing, and Andy, you talk to customers all the time. Yeah, I look very much so, and I think the idea of sharing and collaborating together, historically, we've been tasked with different things. Operations, DBA, security, development, had different goals, different MBOs, and of course they're going to work differently. Bringing them all together, having this collaborative attitude where they communicate with each other, that's so much different from how it has been in the past, and that's enabling this agility, because again, they're working together to common goals, they're using common data to make decisions rather than making things up and having opinions, and that's a massive change. So just take 10 seconds a piece. You always talk to customers, you know, they go back to the bosses, what did you learn at the show, right? What did you get out of the show? So if you tell us 10 seconds or you would, John, Andy, what are you getting out of the show? What are you going to take back with you, back to work? Sure, I mean, I think I'll reinforce what I was talking about before, that we're on the cusp of making analytics real, and having more of a less, we're moving away from kind of the passive, you know, data management, data farming worlds, having that data start to work for you, and having that leverage point really drive the business in new ways, and we're in the beginning of that journey now. Andy? And for me, it's the demand from all of our customers for this DevOps thing, right? The reaction from the keynote, the full rooms and all of our breakout sessions led by customers and partners and us, the buzz that I'm hearing, the attraction at the booths that we're showing off our capabilities, and how all our customers are working with DevOps. This is a transformation in flux, but this is a transformation that is only going to grow. You mentioned the stage, you look good up there, man. I mean, you own that stage. Just have it. Thank you very much. John, appreciate it. John, Andy, thanks for being with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. We continue our coverage here, live from Orlando on theCUBE. Not provide effective detection and response. Skilled experts are hard to find. Organizations lack threat intelligence that is applicable and actionable. At Herjavek Group, we are laser focused on protecting your data and your business. Information security is what we do.