.conf24 Day 1 Keynote: The Splunk You Love, Now Even Better

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Steele, welcome to .conf 24. You know it is so great to be with the Splunk community. I have to say this is my third .conf, and it's become my favorite week of the year. I look forward to it every year. Now we've got an amazing agenda planned for you. There's lots of t-shirts, lots of fezzes of course, Buttercup, a lot of great special guests which I think you really enjoy. And most importantly, we're going to give you the skills to help you drive digital resilience within your organization. Tomorrow we've got great product keynotes with deep dives in security and you're going to want to check out the Source Pavilion. Great demos, really cool partner technology, spend some time there. My number one goal for everyone here and those tuning in online is to leave .conf with the skills and understanding to help you keep your organization securely up and running. Now the world has seen a lot of change since we last gathered here a year ago. There's been a lot of breakthroughs across medicine and genetics, there's been cool advancements in AR and VR across industrial, education, and commercial usage. We've also seen a lot of advancements in 3D printing and material science where creators can do amazing things. Lots of issues, we're living in a very complex world. You think about it, there's elections around the globe. It's a very uncertain geopolitical environment with two active conflicts, potential additional conflicts, and we're living in a cyber world where threat actors continue to win. You know, on net, I feel like I'm a believer that there's more progress and possibility than there is downside, but it's always a balance. And in particular, we're living in this new AI era where AI is probably the most transformative technology that we will see in our lifetime. I got the bay off to the right and you've got a road on the left, and I'm running along and I see a Waymo car. Everybody's probably seen Waymo cars, they have all the sensors on them, the spinning top. But I looked in the car, there's nobody in the car, fully autonomous. And I remember not that long ago sitting around at a dinner table talking to friends and people were debating whether we'd see fully autonomous driving in our lifetime. It's here, it's with us today. And so the speed with which we're seeing things is fundamentally changing, all driven by these advancements in AI. And the one thing that I am very, very excited about is I believe that all of you will be positively impacted by AI across security, across IT, much more fulfilling and drive a whole lot of great outcomes. Now obviously AI comes with its risks. We're seeing it on the cyber side. We're continuing to see the power of what can be done in AI. But I do believe while there are these downsides, AI will be an amazing catalyst for good and for growth for all of us. Now as you think about AI and this revolution, one of the really important things is to build that foundation of digital resilience. Because without the ability to prevent, detect, recover, and respond to events, you won't get the value that you need. Dealing with that, we need to manage have continued to escalate, and AI is accelerating that. You have legacy apps, you have new apps running in the cloud, you now have AI apps. All of these generating more data, often times in more places. And with all this, with this broad digital footprint, it's a big attack surface. And threat actors understand that, and they're going to come after it. So the critical thing here is we really have to focus on how do we get great outcomes with reasonable economics. You can't break the bank in building out. I spend a lot of time with customers. It's probably my favorite part of my job. And one of the things I hear consistently is in the monitoring space, let's just use that word for a second, monitoring oftentimes is literally hundreds of tools across organizations, hundreds. And on the security side, I think we've watched how the security industry has developed. The security industry has encouraged everyone to go out and buy best-of-breed point solutions and improve security posture by adding yet another tool. And in reality, what you end up with is a lot of different silos. And what happens then without comprehensive visibility? It's expensive. We launched today a report on the global cost of downtime, and the results frankly are pretty startling. The annual direct costs for the Global 2000 are $400 billion. And you think about how can that number be so high? Well, think about ransomware, think about some of the companies that have been impacted by ransomware and their whole operation is down. Think of the cost of that. These are direct costs, but there's still a lot of indirect costs which are frankly tip of the iceberg. Stock prices drop typically 9% when these events happen, and probably more importantly, 95% of the time it stops. So clearly the stakes are high. And our mission as Splunk is we're focused on delivering digital resilience across your entire digital footprint wherever your data flows: across your own network, across non-owned networks, across your broad infrastructure, through your applications, and ultimately into the hands of that user. And we focus on helping you analyze and act, do it proactively, ensure that your systems are securely up and running, and doing all that at enterprise scale. And we focus on delivering industry-leading observability and security solutions, all running on our unified platform. And what we're excited about is in the last year, this rolling list I think is a really good list. I'm excited about things like Attack Analyzer. I'm excited about Asset and Risk Intelligence that we introduced at RSA. I'm excited about all the work that the Observability team has done to really ensure that we bring together metric traces and logs at enterprise scale to help you really understand what's going on in your environment. And I'm really proud of all the hard work Splunkers have done to deliver these capabilities. Now what's cool about it, frankly, is we've with all that innovation, we've been recognized in the industry. We're the only vendor today that is a leader in both the Magic Quadrant for SIEM and the Magic Quadrant for APM. And devices, I feel like my excitement and enthusiasm is one that I fundamentally believe we can drive better outcomes for you, and that's what I think about every single day. Now to give you a sense what the future looks like together, check out this short video. We live in a distributed world. We're creating, connecting, shaking things up everywhere all at once. It's astounding. But keeping it all running safely and securely can be a struggle. You have to get everything right: the right infrastructure, the right security, the right observability, the right data. The good news: it just got easier because when the company that connects and... wow. In the age of AI, thriving means being able to connect and understand every piece of data and protecting it all from all forms of digital risk. It's a tall order, but with Cisco and Splunk together, you can build unprecedented digital resilience and say hello to the next era of innovation. Cisco and Splunk, better together. We're really excited about what we can do together with the Cisco team. And to tell us more, please welcome Cisco chair and CEO Chuck Robbins.

Better together. On a more serious note, I think everyone here is really trying to understand what's it going to be like for all these fun customers now that we're part of Cisco?

Yeah, for me the thing that I've always been excited about is you guys accelerate our journey for digital resilience. And I think that makes such a huge difference in what we've always wanted to accomplish. Now one of the interesting things that I didn't know about, I feel like I was sort of dated honestly. So can you catch people up that might also be dated like me?

We will provide that underlying infrastructure play. We're also deploying, as we say, security for AI and AI for security. So we're actually deploying security for these AI models, but we're also leveraging AI to help all of you drive a higher degree of security as the bad actors become much more proficient at using AI themselves. We're going to deliver productivity through AI assistants, we're going to help our enterprise customers. We have an announcement with Nvidia, we announced our first enterprise stack last week that is going to simplify the deployment of AI workloads for our enterprise customers. So there's an awful lot going on. It's really great. And one of the things that I'm very focused on is doing and moving fast. Since day one at RSA, which was just a few weeks ago last month, we introduced the integration between Cisco XDR and Splunk Enterprise Security. We focused on all the technical add-ons or TAs across Cisco to ensure that they deliver real value. And frankly, in the past mileage varied on some of those, and we're bringing them up to a gold standard. And then we've been bringing together this broad observability portfolio anchored by AppDynamics and bringing it together with Splunk Observability Cloud and our core platform. That's a lot. And I think what's really critical that I'm focused on—and I think you're focused on—is this drumbeat of innovation that is going to be critical. And we have to prove that's how we prove that this is really working.

Thank you, Chuck. I appreciate that. So Chuck, just to wrap up, what's the one takeaway? What do you want people to remember as you walk off the stage, other than the t-shirt and the hoodie?

Thank you, Chuck. Thanks, appreciate it. So I think you can see the level of enthusiasm we have. I just want to comment on a few of the things that are critical. We will continue to drive that and encourage it in every way we can. As we talked about, really important roadmaps aren't changing. You're going to hear from the product leaders, Tom Casey and the product leaders, on all the cool things that we're delivering. We're staying on course on that roadmap. Super important that we deliver it. We are also, we will stay open. One of the amazing things about Splunk is it's been a central point that has brought in vendors, sometimes competitive, that brings all vendors to Splunk where you can get amazing outcomes because everybody collaborates together on Splunk. That will stay as well. And so I feel like we're set up for an incredible journey with Cisco, and we're thrilled to be part of it. We still believe in on-premise. We know a lot of you have critical infrastructure there. We will continue to invest in that. But we want flexibility across all the hyperscalers. So I'm excited today to announce the private preview availability of Splunk available on Azure. This includes Splunk Cloud, Enterprise Security, IT Service Intelligence, all running natively on Azure, and it'll be available in preview this summer. We committed to this to you last year, and we're really proud to deliver. And I want to give a big round of applause to the team that has been doing this. Access and management, helping you manage these volumes of data, and thoughtfully being able to decide where you want that data to live. The second critical area for us is to continue to power the SOC of the future and think about how we can transform and drive impact to all of you that leverage Splunk in the SOC. We're focused on observability by ensuring that you can prevent unplanned downtime. And all of this is underpinned by a very exciting AI roadmap that you're going to hear more about later today. I'm going to spend just a few minutes on each of these. First, on data access and management, two aspects. One, and we talked about this last year, you have data in various places. We're excited to be able to offer federated access, for example, to S3, federated access to Amazon Security Lake. We will continue on this journey because we want you to have the ability to make decisions where you want data to live. Secondly, we've been on a journey to make it easier to get data into Splunk. We passionately call it GDI—get data in—and that is really all about how do we help you pre-process data, reduce the size of data, redact private information, and structurally make it that much simpler to get benefit of data that oftentimes is voluminous or contains critical content. And so we want you to have the best security posture in the industry. We want you to have a single platform for threat detection, investigation, and response, and make the person that's sitting in the SOC make their time that much more effective. You're going to see the automation advancements that we've made from an AI perspective. We still believe in human in the loop, meaning human ultimately makes that final decision. But can we make it that much easier by reducing noise and driving AI into the fundamental workloads and workflows that people have as they're sitting in the SOC? And then of course leveraging that broad federation that I just talked about. So traditional application management combined with Splunk Observability Cloud for modern applications, all underpinned by the Splunk platform, bringing together those capabilities plus the digital assurance capabilities that live in Cisco through ThousandEyes. No one else on the planet can deliver the insight that we can. And I'm incredibly excited and enthusiastic about all of these capabilities coming together and delivering real value to all of you. Now we've made significant progress in the last year as it relates to artificial intelligence. It's really accelerating the outcomes that we can deliver for security and observability. And because we want to reiterate that we are here to help you drive great outcomes, we're committed to this ongoing path of innovation. You heard it from Chuck, you heard it from me. And you can measure us. You will be able to see the innovation that we will deliver as a combined company. I wake up every single day and, as Chuck described, I have a big job. And I really think about every single day: what is the impact on all of you, and how can we ensure that we're delivering great outcomes for all of you? And Splunk has had just an incredible 20-year legacy helping you solve some of the toughest problems and challenges in your broad digital environment. And I fundamentally believe that the years ahead are going to be even more exciting. We announced Splunk's VP of AI.

Patrick Coggin, hello everybody. Stephanie, I am so excited to be up here with you at your first .conf. Big round of applause for Stephanie. Now that was a pretty cool video about Medtronic. But I imagine there's some folks here who don't know much about the company. Can you tell them a little bit about the mission of Medtronic and how does that translate to your role as CISO?

That's great. 95,000 is a lot, that's more than Cisco, I think. Can you tell us just a little bit more about how you turn those people into your front-line defense? What kind of culture do you need to have to do that?

Yeah. And there's so much complex and critical work that we do within the security team, but of course we can't operate in a vacuum. And we spend a lot of time and energy at Splunk thinking about how security and IT and engineering need to work together and how do we bring them tools to do that better. But why does that matter for you? Why do you care if security and IT work better together?

I love it. You heard it here first. Couldn't have said it better. A call to action, that's fantastic. If we can maybe bring a little bit of the Splunk lens into this: so tell us, you're bringing these teams together, you've got a vision for the team. Where does Splunk fit into this, and how do you think about the value it brings?

Okay, so we got one more question. This is a tech conference in 2024, we can't let you leave this stage legally without talking about AI. So can you tell us a little bit about what you see as the risks and challenges with AI at Medtronic, but also where are the opportunities?

That's great. Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for doing this. But thank you more for being such a great example and leader and advocate for the security community. Big round of applause. Splunkers Tony Pavlovich and Alexander Turbit. All right, well hello .conf 24. It is great to be here presenting again. My third .conf, your second.

Okay all right. Hi Buttercup. So anyway, Buttercup is going to help us tonight to present the awards. It is really our favorite part of .conf because we get to recognize the amazing work that all of you are doing to make our customer experience better, to make your customer experience better, and really be innovative in the work that you're doing and so many different achievements as well. And as you said, for me it's my second .conf, but it's actually my first time presenting those amazing awards to our customers. I couldn't be more excited to be here. And as you've seen, Buttercup is here with us and we'll celebrate those award winners with us on stage later. You here today, our .conf partners, as our .conf sponsors and our many partners are here today to help us celebrate our winners. Before we get started with the awards, can I please ask all partners in the room to please get up and give them a very big round of applause? Stand up! Woo. Awesome. All right, it is so great to see so many of you here to celebrate all of the success. So the Spunky awards recognize a user, a power user, who has really kept digital systems up and running thanks to using ingenious ways of Splunk. And the nominees are: Robert Slammer from Nvidia, Chloe Fals from HSBC, and Steven Nelson Smith from Ticketmaster. And the winner is... you ready? I did that on purpose, see that pause was on purpose, so you stay with us. Okay. The winner is Chloe Fals from HSBC. So Tom Ashford is actually—that's not Chloe, that's Tom. Digital footprint and thanks to Tom's support and Chloe's hard work in execution, HSBC has been significantly improving the root cause analysis. We all know root cause analysis takes a lot of time. They've saved hundreds of hours at the bank, and it's all due to the work that Chloe has done. So again, congratulations. The next award is the Inventor Award. The Inventor Award recognizes users who have dreamed up an unexpected way of using Splunk and then actually made it happen. And the nominees are: Steven Hatch from Cox Automotive, Daniel Ferrera from Shell, and Benjamin from Sasel. Congratulations, well done. Take a picture. Before Benjamin worked his magic, Sasel actually struggled to monitor and respond quickly to disruptions across their network towers. Benjamin actually took it upon himself to build a single visual dashboard combining five different tools. So thanks to Benjamin, Sasel can now have a very proactive approach to consolidate and correlate all the data and ensure a reliable customer experience. Great job, well done Benjamin. The next award is the Community Hero Award, which recognizes a community hero. The nominees are: Philip Adams from Bank of Canada, Michael Armstrong from Inspire Brands, and Harold M from Atlassian. And the winner is... the winner is Harold M from Atlassian. Well done, Harold. Harold is also known as 'The Shield,' and I don't know why they call him The Shield, but definitely find him and ask him. He's the first person that more than 5,000 people turn to when they have an observability related problem. So because of Harold's software development kit and other Splunk-based work that he's done, Atlassian has spent... We're going to find out. Project Log Deleter, don't know what that is either. But then how he has helped Atlassian stay in compliance when it comes to API access. So again, Harold, congratulations, The Shield. The next award is the Champion Award. The Champion Award celebrates rockstar executives who have cranked up the volume on innovation, teamwork, and results that are delivering with Splunk. And the nominees for this award are: Craig Woly from Louisiana State University—LSU, go Tigers, and you wear in your... okay.