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>> Hello, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of
splunk.com virtual
I'm John ferry hosted the Cube.
We are here in the Splunk's studios in Silicon valley,
where all the execs are here.
It's basically a Splunk studio.
It's everyone's here telling the story as well.
So we've got some remote guests coming in, customers,
partners, and other Splunk execs.
We've got Katie Bianche, Senior Vice President of customer
success. Welcome back to the Cube.
Great to see you.
>> Thanks, John. Great to be here.
>> Yeah. I love the customer success stories because
at the end of the day, customers vote with their wallet
and when basically like solutions,
they'll - customer examples of customer testimonials.
There's one thing that I've learned covering Splunk over the
past decade and doing many .coms,
is you guys have very happy customers.
And over the years of continuing to have great customer
success organically, now at the high end on the enterprise,
now with cloud scale, a lot's changing,
a lot growing, the world is going completely cloud.
And again, data is at the center of the value proposition
as it always was more than important than ever.
So what's new with the customers?
What are some of the successful ones that you're seeing?
What's new in your world?
>> Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for asking John.
I think, you know, we've been talking about
how things have been changing over the past 18 months.
And if I over simplify our customer obsession means that
everything we do is designed to make sure we're helping
customers get the most out of their investment with Splunk
every single day.
So we do this across our global team and our partner
ecosystem who are providing what the right adoption and
technical services and we're architecting and deploying
thousands of Splunk environments to help our customers get
to ongoing value. But in the world
that we're living in today
I talked to so many customers who are doing
amazing things with Splunk,
but dealing with really tough challenges, right?
So through the pandemic,
everyone's dealing with more complexity,
more change, and a velocity that we have never seen before.
And on top of all this shifting, to a fully digital business
model, there's whole new challenges
to effectively monitoring infrastructure and applications,
and maintaining security posture.
With this to, customers that I'm talking to
are also having to figure out ways to do a lot more
with less.
I think we all know it's an incredibly competitive
talent market out there.
So our customers are relying on Splunk and customer success
more and more to make it easier and faster, to get to value,
to investigate, to monitor, to detect,
and to remediate.
So that pace and all of that change of what's happening,
it means that we have to continually check ourselves to be
that right strategic partners that can move at the pace of
our customers because customers are counting on us to
provide right services at the right time for every stage of
their journey with us.
>> You know, Katie, great point.
Great insight there.
I want to ask you because the Splunk has always had this
kind of in their DNA, because when Splunk started,
it was always something new and it wasn't,
it was a new thing, not yet seen before.
Now, as the world could use it.
You guys continue to do that.
You bring something new to the market, you operationalize,
you bring value to customers.
Then it happens again and again and again,
but now more than ever the data roles of the cloud and
customer applications is new for customers.
So you have a diverse customer base.
I know you were obsessed with customer service,
but how do you, how do you - customer success.
How do you deal with the fact that sometimes things are so
new and
>> Yeah
>> there may or may not be a benchmark there and you
can't go with the proven format.
Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.
How do you solve it's "new to me" problem
that customers want this new thing.
>> Yeah, I think, you know,
a lot of what we see today is that the power of song as a
data platform to bring in a complex data,
allows customers to do many different things,
whether it's infrastructure monitoring,
whether it's security use cases or whether it's application
performance monitoring.
And although that is new for our customers.
So oftentimes like you said, we,
we grew up having customers use us for single use case when
we're bringing this much data into the platform and they see
what can be unlocked through the value of Splunk.
What we have to make sure that they can do is most
seamlessly move from use case and value point.
So that means from a CS perspective,
we have to continually make sure that we're doing what
customers are asking us to do,
which is having the right services that deliver the right
outcomes that are as prescriptive as possible.
And that we're doing that across the domain of all of our
empire portfolio.
So we spend a lot of time making sure that our technical
services are scaling to the needs of customers,
but also everything that we do around success,
planning and adoption and use case guidance and best
practices, as well as our education and enablement
are as prescriptive as possible for customers,
whether they are new to Splunk or whether they are scaling
Splunk across multiple use cases and
multiple areas of their business.
>> Yeah. And certainly a lot on,
not on multi-vendor multi-vendor activities, modern,
modern application development security is a big part of it.
So I have to ask you given all that,
what are the top things, top three things, for instance,
that your customers are asking from you guys from a CS
perspective, customer success perspective.
>> Yeah. Great question. So I think over,
I think what we hear the most frequently is giving me a more
seamless buying experience with services that are really
easy to consume and speed my time to value.
Second, and I just mentioned this,
is I need services that aren't tasked
just task-based to work.
I need services that deliver the outcome that I need for the
business problem or business opportunity that I am trying to
solve for.
So make sure that your portfolio lines up with our outcomes.
I think third, is all about more prescriptive guidance.
The world is hard. The world is complex.
Data is only getting more complex while the opportunity is
big. Our role is all about prescription
and making it as easy as possible
>> So I have to ask you the question that I'm observing many
people are in the industry as well,
is that Splunk has changing as a company.
Everyone knows the vibe of Splunk is very cool, very chill,
very organic, big community vibe, good customer success.
Everything's going great.
We continue to knock it out of the park over the years,
but now you're a mature company. Now scale is coming in,
your customers are getting bigger and bigger.
You have existing customers, you're getting new customers.
You have new offerings. There's a whole nother Splunk coming
another level.
>> Yeah.
>> How do you,
>> Absolutely and I think
>> how do you view that from a customer perspective.
And can you share your reaction to that?
>> Yeah, I, you know,
I think it's an honor to be part of a company that has such
a strong culture and has such great partnership with our
customers.
And it really is all because of who our customers are.
And I think who our people are internally.
But I think growing and scaling and making sure that we are
able to deliver the right services at scale is a critical
component of what we have to do to help customers along this
journey. So the role of, I keep saying this,
but the role of customer success is to make the complex
easy. And we do that by making sure that we,
as an organization have the right data,
the right prescription,
the right way to serve our customers
and the right coverage model,
no matter where customers are on the journey
or who they are, and getting,
the most prescription to them at the right time.
And that's, that's quite frankly how we scale,
but also what our customers are asking for.
They're asking for more modularized content and they're
asking us for more ways that they can drive best practices
and use case guidance from right within the product.
And those are things that we are working on to help continue
to scale out what we're able to do.
>> That's a great point.
Team the complexity, make it simple,
and enable them to be successful.
I think data does that. You guys are offering that platform,
which is a great business model, by the way.
If you could provide those kinds of value,
that's always a winning for me.
Make things easy, reduce the steps it takes to do things
and make it fast and simple.
I have to ask you, cause you mentioned earlier
at the top of this interview,
about digital business, you know, we're here,
Splunk canceled the conference. Now it's virtual.
We are coming in remotely here on site at the studio.
They, you know, they have a virtual student.
They're now in the media business, which is a data business.
You know, you guys are now doing TV with Cuba's here.
Everyone is realizing that the pandemic,
that digital business now is standard.
You seeing the impact of the instrumentation, you mentioned.
So as the digital business transformation
is accelerated here,
in this time, not for everybody,
it's going to change how customers are behaving.
What have you, what have you observed at the pandemic?
Because it's kind of the pandemic has cleared the runway
a little bit for people to do this properly
because you can see what's not working.
So what's your thoughts on this whole digital business
everyone's connected and data's at the center of it.
What's your thoughts?
>> Yeah, absolutely. I, I look, I think,
you know what we have seen over the last 12 to 18 months
with the success iteration to a digital business model is
that things and the other dynamics going on or that things
are only getting more complex, right?
So some customers come can come to Splunk cloud because we
know it reduces complex complexity in their moves because we
are that data platform that allows them to search,
investigate and monitor across cloud across multi-cloud and
across hybrid environments.
But that's complex over the last year.
We've seen customers get to very much quicker value in,
in Splunk cloud, right?
They're going through large complex transformation.
One of the easiest things you can do
is shed the amount of time and money you're spending,
managing, monitoring your infrastructure.
So coming to Splunk cloud helps accelerate time to value
for them in that way,
but let's make no mistake that is really complex.
And so part of what we are doing is ramping up our level of
focus on those modern natives they should service
for customers. So customers who are choosing to come
to Splunk cloud for those benefits,
we are there from planning and cut-over and beyond with more
prescriptive tools, more automation, and how we move data,
more resources and more experts to get customers to Splunk
cloud more seamlessly.
And that for us from a modernization perspective is one
thing that we are hearing clearly customers asking,
asking for a specific in the space so they can take more
advantage and move more quickly.
>> You know, one of the trends that we're reporting on
and I'll get to the headline and Silicon in a minute,
and what's reporting on this event.
There's more, more surface area. There's more data,
there's more tools and tools are important
for helping peoples automate.
But at the same time,
if you have more tools that you have to see more blind spots
or silos. So when you get into this world of architecture,
customers are struggling that we talk to around trying to
find the ideal equation of, okay,
balancing architecture platform and tools,
this equilibrium, if you will,
by getting access to the data.
What's your reaction to that?
Because this becomes one of those decision where I think
Splunk shines.
Where you can kind of have the best of a platform at the
same time, use tooling, where relevant to accelerate,
whether it's automation or other,
other jobs versus buying tools for everything.
>> Yeah. And I, and I, so I think part of the,
part of the thing that we continue to see is with the
proliferation of data and data sources and a different
degree of complexity in tooling,
the decisions around what's important,
and what's not important, become much more,
much more complex for customers.
And what's more difficult for customers to make.
So we're changing a lot on the product and pricing side to
sort of facilitate that piece.
But I think when you're talking about how do I get the most
value immediately,
what we do across our go to market organization is make sure
that we're partnering with customers to say,
what are the outcomes that you want from,
you want a need as a priority from a
infrastructure monitoring for an application performance,
from a security perspective.
And then how do we make sure that we're prioritizing your
maturity journey very prescriptively to say,
here are the use cases that are most material here are the
data sources that are most material,
and here's a success plan that helps you get deployed to
your priorities. So you can start the journey with us
and build on that as we go.
So again, it's really about
how do we make the complex really easy
through higher degrees of prescription,
but really making sure that we're doing our job and tying
the prescription to what our customers need most
when they need it.
>> A great segue to my next question.
In fact, my final question, cause, cause you know,
the headline on siliconangle.com that we're reporting for
this event is I'll read it to you.
Splunk doubles downs on multi-cloud data, access,
observability and security at its annual summit.
Okay. So balancing the shiny new toy
and the north star direction vision,
to practical prescriptive customer journeys is always
a balance because you want to talk to customers about the
future, multicloud, obviously observability super important.
And honestly, it's security got to be built in, okay.
We all know that back to the mainstream customer,
you're in the customer success.
So you want to show them the north star,
show them the headroom, whatever metaphor you want to use,
but at the same time they're dealing with problems and
things that they're trying to solve right now.
What's your, what's your thoughts on, on customer success,
knowing that there's a lot of cool new things coming.
>> Yeah, I think our job, like I,
I started on I'll start on the sales sort of start
and I'm the same way.
Our job at the end of the day is to help
customers get the most out of their current investment with
Splunk. And that does,
and that is all about working on what that maturity journey
looks like, prioritizing outcomes
that our customers care about,
and starting and starting that journey.
So there's foundational work that needs to be done,
aligned to priorities. That's where we start.
And then if we're doing what we need to be doing,
creating those prescriptive plans and those success plans,
then all of how we deliver to that value is prioritize
through what customers need the most when they need it.
And that is our role.
And then we believe that by doing that and moving as quickly
as we can with customers to get to that value,
then we're enabling them to continue on that journey for all
the new stuff that's out there that they can explore and
more value from.
>> Yeah. It's always good to have that north star
and that shiny new toy, new, new, new technology.
So I got to ask you a final, final question.
Since I have you here,
what have you learned during the pandemic that you could
share with other practitioners that are watching,
or maybe watching this as they look at the best practices?
We've seen a lot of evidence where some people have fallen
to the side or failed, weren't prepared,
people who were in the cloud experimenting
got that tailwind and survived and thrived, somewhere
refactoring, new business were emerging.
So you kind of see a pattern.
Is there anything that you've noticed on your end that you
can share with, you know, how to lean into something new?
So you don't be left out in the cold, if a wave comes,
a new trend comes that they need to take advantage of like
data at the edge or cloud scale, what are the,
some of the things you you've observed and learned?
>> Yeah, that's a great question.
So I think, you know, I think for me,
my personal learning through the pandemic has been like,
we always need to be looking around corners
and planning specifically
for our customers and thinking for them in terms of what
problems that they will have.
And we have to anticipate that so that we can pivot and
create the right services that help them leverage to do
what they need. So very early on,
even very early on in the pandemic,
our professional services team flipped within a two week
period to doing fully remote and virtual deployments because
we knew we couldn't stop time to value.
Given the shift to remote work,
our customers were relying on us to deploy so that they
could monitor infrastructure and monitor work from home
usage. And I think along with that,
as we've started to seeing through the back half digital
transformation is really pick up and customers moved to
cloud, we've been working across, you know,
across the last 12 to 15 months to really start to plan
around what does it take to create the right services and
the right capability, not just within Splunk,
but within our partner ecosystem to effectively move
customers to Splunk cloud and help them navigate, you know,
hybrid multi-cloud world with much more speed.
And so for me,
those are the two things that we really leaned into hard
because we were always looking around corners and saying,
what's next for our customers based on what we're seeing
happen in the external environment.
>> Great insight, Katie, thank you for coming on the Cube.
That's awesome. And I think, you know,
customers are seeing success formulas and the new ones are
emerging and you guys go to the next level.
It's always fun to talk about the future and today at the
same time, so great to have you on.
And certainly at the end of the day,
the customers are the ones who are deploying and creating
the innovation with software and data.
So thanks for sharing.
>> Yeah. Thanks John.
I'm really, really happy to spend the time.
There's nothing I like to do more than talk about our
customers and to all of our customers. Huge
thank you to you for your partnership and all you're doing
to continue to power. The world with data.
>> It's always good to have a lot of customers to tell the
story for you, but I appreciate you coming on.
Congratulations on your success. It's the Cube.
We are here live in the studio of Splunk studios for their
virtual event. With the remote interview.
We're talking all the people in the industry. We can,
we're bringing them in. We're going,
we're doing the interviews here in person as well as a
hybrid event, John, for the Cube.
Thanks for watching.
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