Sunil Potti, Google and Orion Hindawi, Tanium | Google Cloud Next OnAir '20

Sure, yeah. I mean, if you look at why we decided that Google would have been the perfect partner for us, we have very large enterprises. We work with about 70 of the Fortune 100, the USOD, a lot of these very large environments, and many of them were coming to us and telling us two things. And the second one was, in the new kind of post-COVID world, the amount of work from home risks that they were seeing, and the kind of perfection they needed to achieve on finding threats quickly and neutralizing them was actually also going up. And so between those two things, we started really looking for a partner that we could accelerate with, to provide our customers with true world-class data analytics, retention, being able to visualize that data, and then being able to act on that data through Tanium. And I think that the partnership that we've struck with Google and the work we've done with them to make this seamless for our customers, to make it scale really well, even for the largest managed networks, is something we're really proud of.

So maybe I'll take a stab, Sunil, then you can take one as well. We've been working with Chronicle now for over a year. And we've got customers who kind of pointed us in this direction, which is how we love to start partnerships. We had some customers who had a lot of faith that Google was going to be able to crack this nut. And honestly, many of our customers had been really struggling with this with their current vendors at the time for years, and were really looking for Google, because Google was the company that they saw as having the most credibility with massive, massive data sets. What we got surprised by actually was that there were a bunch of different legs of the stool that we could work with Google on. So not only data retention of Chronicle, but things like zero trust, which I think many people know Google actually invented the concept of. But we expect that over the next even years, we've got a lot of room to run with Google to really secure and help our customers.

So I might take a stab at that. You know, I think that a lot of our customers, if we look at where they were at the beginning of the year, they'd been building on a pretty creaky foundation and just adding more and more layers to it. So, you know, in the security side, many of our customers have 20 or 30 or 50 different tools. And many of them are there because they were there yesterday. They're not actually, if you were going to zero base budget the way you were going to do security, they wouldn't be the tools you'd choose. And the interesting thing about this whole work from home transition is it is effectively a zero based budget for security, because a lot of the tools just basically don't work. They were built for the LAN and now just don't work over the internet. And so when we look at our customers, they're realizing they have to replatform their security model anyway. And what they're doing is they're now picking again. And what they get to do is they get to pick the platforms that they now trust in 2020, with the work from home environment as it is. And I think what it gives you as a customer is a huge simplification of your environment. I mean, we talk to people every day who were used to operating those 20 or 30, 50 tools, and they were spending 90% of their energy just operating those tools, not actually improving security, and they were falling behind. If you look at what they're able to do now, they actually can go back to a starting point where they think about what is the real threat I'm facing. What are the real platforms? The resistance to change has been removed. People can't resist change anymore, change has come, and as a result of that, they get to choose what they would like now.

Because I think you're absolutely right. If you talk to the person who operated the compliance tool in a big bank, and you ask them, what do you need from that tool? They very quickly get the things, that if you just take the question, which is, I need to do compliance for the bank, what do I need to do compliance effectively? And you look at the answer that they give you, which is I need this check box here. I need this button here. I need this kind of minutiae that I'm used to, to be consistent with what I've been used to for the last 10 years. Those two things are not the same. And what we've really been encouraging our customers to do is take a look back at your requirements. So you are processing credit cards, you need to be PCI regulated. You need to be able to answer to your vendors how many copies of their software you're using. You need to be able to find an attacker. Let's talk about the core capabilities. And it's a very freeing conversation actually, because what a lot of people start realizing is they've been maintaining the status quo for reasons that actually have nothing to do with efficacy, they have to do with comfort. And the curse and the beauty of the last six months is no one's comfortable. So I don't care how comfortable you are with your tools. No one I know is comfortable today. And what it's giving us is an opportunity to look past the old school comfort and think about how do we transition to the future. And I think it's actually going to galvanize a lot of positive change. You know, I was saying this before we went on air, but I don't think anybody wished that COVID was the way that we would end up in a position where people have the appetite for change. But now that we're here, we can take advantage of it and bring in things that are much more effective.

I mean, I will admit, I am not known for being good at soundbites, so I'll give you the one sentence and you can help me pare it down. But I mean, really what it is, is I think Tanium got the highest fidelity endpoint visibility and control out there. And I think Google's got the best data storage, analytics, retention, cross-referencing we've ever seen. And when you combine those two things, it's incredibly powerful for our enterprise users, and we've already seen customers where it's been transformative.

Yeah. I will just add, you're absolutely right. I mean, if you look at a customer I'm thinking about today, and I just heard this from their CIO a couple of days ago, but they have one and a half million things they're protecting today. They expect to have over 150 million in five years. And they are very frustrated that at the time that expansion is happening, the network essentially did become a control point. You couldn't trust it anymore. So the thesis that Google had around zero trust actually became our entire world for most enterprises. When you look at that, we do owe our customers quantum jumps in capability, or they're just not going to catch up. And I think that the theoretical approach that we're taking here between Google and Tanium lets our customers take one of those quantum jumps, where they're going to be seeing a lot more, they're going to be able to trust it a lot more. They're going to be able to allow devices to have access to things based on their current state and based on believing that we can extrapolate whether their security on that device accurately. And that's something that I think is really powerful. And you know, I'll just say one other thing, many of our customers had to literally, like, three or four months ago, were in a position where they were spending 60 or 70% of their security budgets on network. There's nowhere to spend that money today that's actually productive. It gives them the ability to refactor what they're doing and the obligation to do it, because if they don't do it, I think, as I was describing with the amount of increased assets, the amount of complexity, the lack of network control, if they don't do it, looking at the amount of threat our customers are facing today, they're going to be under water really quickly. And so, you know, I'm proud that we get to get together here and give them a big step forward.

Thank you.