Well, here we are at Cloud Camp Austin, one. I almost said two. I don't know why it would be two. Right. And we've got another edition of Profiles in Courage. I'm one of your hosts, Michael Coté, as always. And we've got another guest with us. Why don't you introduce yourself real quick? Are you on camera? No, I'm not. It's just you. How do people know that that's not me? Well, they just recognize my voice. My name is actually Michael. That's right. But everyone calls me Coté. That's true. If people start calling me Coté, then I think we have something to worry about. That's true. My name is Michael Wild. And, you know, people from Red Monk frequent listeners may know you from the IT Management Podcast episode you were on, as I recall. I was on one episode, which apparently was the highest listened to and the highest highly subscribed episode. And I constantly get, you know, I'm signing autographs now. That's right. It's become a launch pad. Well, I'm sorry we've created that problem opportunity for you. Because nothing is worse. You want to go to the grocery store like you need a red bell pepper. And the next thing you know, three hours later, you know, you're often to call in the bounty guards and the big, the bounty, you know, the bounty, not bounty guards. What do they call them? Bodyguards. In the big SUVs. That's right. The Mounties. The Mounties. So, so, so, so why don't you tell us, here we are at Cloud Camp Austin and you've got a shirt that's basically like advertising something as a silver lining to the cloud. So how does, what does, what does a Splunk guy care about the cloud? That's a great question. Um, I work for a company called Splunk and we make a cool software engine, um, that is best described as a search engine for IT data. And, you know, my shirt says, Cloud Computing meets Silver Lining. Um, earlier we were in the UnConference session and we were, the session we were talking about is public versus private clouds and Amazon. I made a statement that, unfortunately, with folks like Amazon, GoGrid, Maso, we all have
2:00the same problem, you're still buying IT infrastructure and you still need IT people and you still need to manage all that stuff. And so Splunk is a really easy application that just indexes, allows you to search and report on any of the data that's happening up in the cloud, like all your transactional logs, web logs, a lot of the stuff that's just generated from the apps that you have running. So, you know, we, we generally are seen as someone who gives you a great deal of visibility in your infrastructure and hopefully puts a silver lining on cloud computing. And, and, uh, now, now you've actually been in the IT management business for quite some time. Hence the podcast. I can't, you know. And, and you, uh, you used to work at Tivoli, if I remember correctly, right? I used to work at Tivoli, um, after it was acquired by IBM. So I'm not an OT guy. And, and so, so looking at like being part of the, you know, Splunk is sort of what I would categorize as sort of one of the new, the, the wave of sort of new ways of doing IT management along with lots of other folks. Right. And like how, when you look back on the, whether it was OT or not, on, on sort of like the Tivoli way of doing things. Right. So the old, the old traditional way and sort of the newer way, like what do you see the differences are between these two different approaches or, or groups of products, if you will, to give you a broad question or is there no difference? Well, um, that's a good question because when I was at Tivoli, um, which hopefully the explanation of on Tivoli is pretty easy, but, um, we, the company started with its products on standardizing and wrapping software around the process of managing IT. And we used to say, you don't want to buy point tools because they're outside of your own process and they're really, um, completely separate. They have their own interfaces, their own training. You wanted to buy a whole suite of tools. Yeah, it's like, there's no reason why you need to buy QuickBooks.
4:00You could just buy SAP. Right, right, right. So we had to switch batteries, but you were going on. So Tivoli, it was like encouraging buying a whole suite of tools. Well, buying a whole suite, um, you know, like buying SAP versus buying QuickBooks and a number of other products and, um, um, the, the products are designed in a, with a general theme of how management should be done. And then you have the whole other side of the equation, which is, you know, guys in the trenches need the tools that they can use to get work done. Um, Tivoli and CA and the big five or six or two or three, now, whatever it is, great. Um, when you have a multi-billion dollar IT business, you want to manage the whole process. But, so Splunk comes out of, um, out of that era of, well, you know, Tivoli and IBM, they've covered a lot of things, but, you know, I'm in a diamond mine and I need a special tool to do that and that's sort of where the Splunk or Spelunking idea comes with, you know, getting me inside of a data center. So we built this extremely powerful tool that is used by a lot of the technical folks in IT. I mean, we've built our business on the backs of the geeks in IT. We're actually moving up the stack now to gain, to allow, you know, levels of management to gain visibility on what the heck's going on. Um, I, most of the time those worlds, um, work really well together because if there's a product like Splunk, none of the big five have anything even close to what Splunk does. They don't deal with all the unstructured data. They're awesome at monitoring and all this other great stuff. So when a customer asks me, hey, how does Splunk work with Tivoli? How does Splunk work with Nagios? I get that all the time. Um, you know, it's pretty much a human process that's plugged together where the IT management system will say, hey, something is wrong over here.
6:03A task would be doled out to a human to then go look over here. Splunk makes it really easy to go look over here fast. Right. So there's sort of a, nowadays there's a proliferation of sort of best of breed or niche tools. Sure. Instead of the complete solution that you might have expected in the past. We used to battle against that best of breed. Right, right, right. You need the, you know, the framework and, you know. But now both seem to be able to coexist quite pretty well. You know, it's a happy world and it's probably because of the cloud. So I have one last question for you. Now, here in Texas, a couple of years ago, we had this local distillery, like fifth generation, that makes Tito's vodka. And I've noticed in the liquor store, there's now a Dripping Springs vodka. And since you live in Dripping Springs, as I recall, have you come across this vodka? Do you know anything about it? Your memory is amazing. Yes. I live in Dripping Springs, Texas. And the Dripping Springs vodka is apparently supposed to be quite good. However, there was like a huge explosion and fire at the place where Dripping Springs vodka is made. It was on, I read about this on DS. So we should be buying this up. It may not come anymore. I'm going to go buy some tonight. I think we're going out after this. Maybe we'll have to stop by Specs on the way to Little Wondros. There you go. Well, I think we've gotten some actionable advice here at the end. That's good. And so thanks for being on this Profiles in Courage. Profiles in Courage seems like it needs some sort of da-da-da-da-da-da-da theme. Well, maybe we'll put that in there. You know, you need something like that.