

Towards the end of the first day of the Splunk Conference in Las Vegas, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, interviewed Stephen Sorkin, Chief Strategy Officer with Splunk, debating the traditional and non-traditional uses of Splunk, the platform’s extensive history and explaining the product excellence mindset as a culture.
Proceeding to present himself and the company, Sorkin declared that “our job is to make life easier, not just for ourselves, but for everyone in the business.” That’s why “we built a user interface that we knew would help Product Managers solve problems, in addition to traditional IT folks who see Splunk as their bread and butter.”
Furrier asked Sorkin to elaborate a bit on the product excellence mindset as a culture, in order to explain the success they’ve been enjoying for so long in a very tough and competitive business. Sorkin obliged:
“It begins with knowing your audience, and – more importantly – being your audience. At least at first. When I first looked at Splunk, in the summer of 2005, I was a scientist at HP labs, I downloaded their product on the recommendation of a friend, I tried it out and I could imagine what could happen to technology like this. Because, at the time, there was no one that was looking at data this way,” remembered Sorkin.
“Then, over the years we had to keep on using the product, keep on solving our own problems, because if you can’t use it yourself, you don’t know if you have one single customer. But if it works for you, you know you have at least one customer,” Sorkin remarked, jokingly explaining the entire process.
Every company has a culture, and Splunk’s seems to have fun, noted Furrier. He wanted to know what was *the Splunk thing* that’s featured deep in the Splunk culture. “We like to be irreverent and disruptive, having fun with the problems that we’re having and looking at things in a different way,” explained Sorkin.
As for his position within the company, Sorkin explains that “the CSO is a new role and the Chief Strategy Officer is a trusted advisor to the CEO; my job is making him understand the choices the choices that the company needs to make, especially in the two-to-five year horizon, weighing the technology, the partnerships, the field and all the different options out there.” As many people in the business already know, “for a company like Splunk, the most important thing is to focus and decide what not to do.”
That’s why Sorkin’s role is to help understand the right course of action in the context of the company’s strengths.
What’s next on the strategy front? asked Furrier. Obviously, developing more products in order to serve more users, to solve more problems, to collect data from more places; “but we also have to think about the richness of what we can do with the products, how can we help our customers solve a different classic problem by employing data science techniques,” Sorkin said.
Recognizing the value of human assets, Furrier asked Sorkin about the process of recruiting new people, asking what the hiring challenge is to make sure they hire great people. “Keep track of the end game,” advised Sorkin. There are a lot of good techniques out there for interviewing and recruiting candidates that will do a terrific job, but you can’t be desperate – in a tough situation – for hiring. When the hiring market is tight (like it is now), and everyone has good jobs already, you can’t let your standards down.
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