>> I'm a little bit back to the cubes coverage of splunk.com,
virtual 2021. I'm John for your host of the cube.
We're here with Teresa Carlson, special guests cube alumni.
Who's now the president and chief growth officer of Splunk.
Teresa, welcome back to the queue.
>> Hi john
So glad you're here with.
>> Us as the president of Splunk. Great to see you.
Great to see you.
So we've had many conversations in the queue.
When you were the chief of public sector of Amazon web
services,
you grew that business significantly over the years,
we've documented on the cube and we've talked about,
I've written about it now, Splunk,
it feels a lot like AWS was back in, well,
a couple of years ago where you have this amazing product
everyone's using. They don't lose customers.
They're getting customers they're in the middle of the
security thing, which you know a lot about.
And they have this large enterprise based growing system.
Integrators are leaning in Splunk is,
seems to be going to the next level.
>> Totally. Well, you nailed it.
I would say we're definitely in a scale mode at this point
at Splunk.
And also to your point,
our customers are so loyal to us and we're seeing actually
customers with more than a million dollars doubling their
spend almost with us.
It's pretty cool. And now we have this cloud portfolio,
which is one of my jobs, as you know, I love,
I've got my cloud shirt on. I've been believer in cloud.
I'm a real believer. You know,
I saw the transformational effects of cloud in real time,
over 11 years and bringing that here even more to utilize
that in our security and observability spaces is quite
phenomenal.
And then you see again in a much more set of segmented
workloads, how customers take advantage of this.
And of course today,
like no other John security is just top of mind.
It's always been you and I talked earlier about how security
kind of evolved over the years and public sector led some of
that over time. And then commercial industry say, you know,
wow, that today it's, I mean,
it's more than top of mind for not just every enterprise
organization and government entity,
but it's also every board out there.
It's something that we think about internal threat,
external threat. How do we manage it?
How do we get the data around it to understand it?
And then how do we take action on it?
>> It was great seeing you up on stage
as a senior leader here
at Splunk at the virtual venue at a great keynote was a lot
of news. And we'll get into that in a second,
but I want to ask you,
knowing you personally and covering you over the years of
Amazon web services, you've been a fierce competitor.
Okay. But you also have been a great people.
Person, people loved working for you.
Splunk's this is it the same.
We've been covering them just as long as we cover an AWS,
the culture seemed to fit because Splunk is kind of
competitive, but they're kind of quiet, competitive culture.
Yeah. Interesting.
Tell us about, tell us about your experiencing.
>> Well, and I think we can, yeah,
we can do it in our own blankie way.
I'm learning new it's six minutes today that I've been as
blind quiches and believable that I've been here this long
already, but Splunk has a very quirky culture, which I led.
They have a lot of fan.
They have a big following and I'm so sorry that everyone
couldn't attend in person,
but the virtual social media feeds are off the charts.
I mean, I'm just, I'm having so much fencing high already.
They come together. It's a real community, but yeah,
on the competition front,
here's what reminds me so much about my old world is that I
always love that when somebody wakes up and realizes that
it's a huge industry and they want to participate.
And that's kind of what happened when I was at AWS and now
it's blank. I'm like, Hey,
all these companies are waking up and saying,
data's this real thing.
It's like a $90 billion plus industry and growing,
and then data with security. Hello, are you kidding me?
So I feel like really that's kind of what's happened.
And Splunk has such a unique set of tools and solutions that
just work, they work.
And that's what customers I've heard that statement from
customers and partners so much that it just works.
And the other thing that's pretty unique about us.
I would say John is our ability to navigate between an
on-prem world and a cloud world,
and a unique set of various like OT edge computing.
So wherever customer's data is multiple clouds,
we're able to take advantage of that for the customer.
So they make the choice of where that data comes from and
they use the Splunk tooling then to be able to get those
insights and information.
>> Well, great to have you on the cube, great.
That Splunk to have you.
And they're going to be lucky to have you going to do a lot
of stuff,
knowing you and knowing the Splunk community and the team
here. A great team.
Now talking about the announcements,
look at what's going on,
obviously security still in everything. Yep.
A couple of things,
rebranding of the partner versus sends a huge message of the
ecosystem. You know,
that movie you seen that year before digital journey for
customer success. Again,
they have tons of customers that have been with them for
beginning and new customers,
but they got a government action going on here was,
you know,
a lot about the government logging in monetization program.
>> Yeah.
Well, as you know, the government, you got 11,
but they do continually come up with N fended mandates.
And my government customers always have said, oh my gosh,
I've got another unfunded mandate.
So we're really helping them at that because yes,
while it's infested in this budget this year, as it states,
they know how important it is.
And I do think this initiative is something that is going to
have a waterfall effect into the commercial industries.
Also just like a lot of these things do and around security,
but it's important that we help our government customer made
as best as they can. So we've come up with, I think,
a very unique offering that they can take advantage of for
Splunk and we're going to be out there helping them every
way. And,
and hopefully John L also helped them learn more about cross
governmental,
what they're doing and how they can understand from their
logs and metrics even more about how to protect. Yes.
>> One of the things that we've talked about before in the
past, but how cloud-scale, and as creates ecosystems,
Amazon VMware,
you seeing all these ecosystems that have been thriving for,
for decades, Splunk as an ecosystem, developing very,
very fast, their partners are,
are loyal and they're making money with them.
And they're being building solutions as data becomes the new
enablement.
How do you see the role of the partners that growing?
How do you see them evolving over time?
>> Well, let me just tell you, I'm,
I'm a real believer in the partner community. I mean,
firsthand over the years, my time at Microsoft at AWS,
I saw it as an unbelievable force multiplier to your
business. And I mean that,
and they do things that you don't even think of. I,
you know, I'm always amazed at partners.
I'm like, oh, you're using the tool for that.
Wow. So while we are broadly good, we're,
we're very good at what we do,
but we cannot understand every horizontal or vertical
industry out there. And the reason it's important,
important to have partners,
they can take you to places that you never dreamed.
And for us, if you look at the categories,
we need our CSP or cloud service providers to be able to
really help us make sure that we take advantage of the cloud
platforms that are out there and our primary, we AWS,
and then Google cloud.
And then after that we work,
we work with both those a migration.
You saw Steve Schmidt today. Good friend of mine love Steve.
And the work we're doing. And you saw,
we were one of the first migration partners with AWS.
You'll see us continue that program.
We'll work together to continue to look for security
services, jointly that we can offer.
And we're a customer of theirs and they're a customer of
ours. It makes a good partnership.
And then additionally, you have, you have your MSPs, right?
Your managed service providers.
And today we talked about blue buoyant who had multiples.
And these are partners out there that have a unique offering
for generally managed security or observability in the
marketplace. They take the Splunk toolkit,
they add to it and they have it off,
offered out to their customers.
And then you have your largest size like Accenture.
I'm so excited about that. First of all, led Julie Sweet.
She's an amazing CEO and leader.
And what in what they're dealing with,
this they've been a long-standing partner of ours,
but now they've actually made us part of their,
one of their 11 business groups.
So it's Accenture plus blank,
and now they'll take us into all of their industries
together. So it's huge.
And you know.
>> What's that mean? Cause, cause this is a business deal.
This isn't just like a, you know,
some sort of DOE guys saying we're going together.
This is a specific division.
>> That's right. That's right.
So they have a leaven partners that they work with.
AWS is one of them. SAP's one of them.
IBM's one of them. Salesforce, I believe is one of them.
And they have,
they have experts at Accenture that can go into customers to
implement tools and services for customers at the enterprise
level. And so they have selected.
Splunk is one of those business partners that you heard Paul
today talk about.
We already have 400 customers together and growing,
we will expand that,
but it's a joint effort of both go to market selling and
technical resources that will deliver. But for Splunk,
again,
it's back to that horizontal and vertical slicing where they
can take us into
security practice that they have chosen.
Splunk is one of their security offerings and it's important
that we really support them.
But also in the Splunk partner verse,
we're going to do some new things. John,
if I just first second and talk about it,
we've had a great partner program, but now we're going to
Korea's credits technology, architecture, tooling, support,
getting, you know, to certify themselves,
to be pro serve ready for those migrations and
modernizations.
But also really what we heard from a lot of them is they
need more training and education remaster to understand our
new cloud offerings. And that makes sense.
So it's more digital and more cloud oriented with these
partners.
And then guess what they would love for us to talk about how
great they are and we should.
So when we get them out there that helps our customers
really understand the offerings
they have in the marketplace.
>> At Brooke honeymoon was saying she didn't do a lot more
listening and they're working on this next level partner
verse. I found that really interesting,
all sorts of Katy beyond key.
I talked with she's the SVP of customer success,
something you're I know you're obsessed about.
You always work backwards from the customers as the AWS way.
How do you view customer sets?
Because you have a lot of different customers,
you have diverse customers.
What's important. What are you Katie's on top of this,
but what's your view.
>> We ha we do have a lot of different customers. However,
we have a concentration of the largest,
most important and influential customers in the world.
So our customer base is very large enterprise oriented,
multiple departments within that enterprise take advantage
of Splunk. We work with 92 to the 100 fortune 100 companies,
and we've worked with them for a long time.
And like I said,
we're continuing to see them use more of splice,
not less as blank. And the way that that happens is,
and I hear from him, I sit and talk to him and they're like,
now we're using Splunk in these multiple departments and we
need to bring it all together at the enterprise level for
the C-suite to look at it. Now,
I know it sounds a little strange John,
but that's changed a bit over the years.
And that is because, you know,
if you look at big spenders at an enterprise,
he spends a lot of money because they need to at dev,
you know, security, right.
Security infrastructure, and they need to monitor all that.
They need to understand it, but guess what?
They want to understand it now at the corporate level.
And they need it at the CIO,
they need at the cyst level for threat analysis.
And then now boards want more and more that information they
want to roll up of what's happening.
So we're seeing a trend where the C-suite,
the senior executives really are much more interested in
Splunk. It used to be very departmental.
>> I'll throw another wrench in the equation.
There is one developers want shifting left.
They want real time data security policy in the development,
CDCs pipe lining. So another problem.
Yeah.
>> Yeah. And developers, lever tools.
And again, they're,
they're another unique group I should totally talk about.
That takes your tools to another level and really fears that
ways within their customer set to take advantage of the
tooling.
>> He's a great to see you.
Congratulations on your new opportunity here.
And the leadership at Splunk really perfectly poised to take
the growth of the cloud. So I have to ask you,
what's your mission?
What's your mission for the next year as you come on,
you're six months in what's the plan?
>> Well for us, here's blankets, continuing to scale,
really listening to our customers and partners. It sounds,
I don't want it to sound like a cliche.
We really are spending time listening and working back,
Sean and I are working.
He's their president of technology products and technology.
He and I are working very closely to look at features and
functionality that we need to be talking about.
It is about taking advantage of the partner community in a
way to support them, to help again,
get us into new areas of the business. And then lastly,
continue to make sure that we have the training and
education for customers directly because our tools and
technologies are evolving.
And if I've learned anything over the last 11 years is cloud
is a step change for a lot of customers and they're still
hybrid. So it's important that we meet them where they are,
but help them get over that bridge so that they have that
full digital journey.
So that's what you're going to see me focused on.
I'm super excited.
>> I was talking with Claire and the CMOs just before you
leave, I want to get your reaction.
This event went virtual the last minute.
It became a studio here in Silicon valley.
You're a media company now Splunk.
>> It's like it. I mean,
it is amazing what we accomplished today.
I, you know, I don't want to pre give numbers,
but we had way, way over 20,000 today, online and growing.
So the numbers we're still looking at,
but it was unbelievable. And we had,
I think we had had like 22,000 registered and we even got
more. So people joined in, they stay,
they watched the keynote,
there were out narrow specialty sessions. And I I'll agree.
Like it was pretty cool.
It was a step change because we were thinking about doing it
in person. We took a poll.
Somebody said, you know,
we think we can actually do a better job this year because
of COVID steel. If we do it all virtually and it turned out,
we have you. So look at this.
You're like, we have you here.
And I love your cool backdrop here, John.
Yeah.
>> Well, you guys do a great job.
You guys are a media company.
Now you're telling your own stories direct.
There's a lot of stories to tell.
Thank you for coming on the cube. Great to see you.
>> Again. John's great to see you.
Cause.
>> The cubes coverage here at.com 2021 virtual I'm John for
your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.