iTWire. I'm assuming you're not hugely technical. So most of my questions are going to focus more on leadership and management and your role in the company. With that in mind, what do you bring to the role of CEO at Splunk?

Steele. I joined Splunk after 19 years in a company that I co founded that ultimately reached a billion and a half in revenue. So I come with a lot of cyber experience and enterprise experience and understanding of how to run public companies. So I think that the experience capability that I bring is, a helpful responses out of maturity.

iTWire. So with that in mind, what's your leadership style?

Steele. I'm direct, transparent, and I think I'm a good communicator.

It's interesting, one of the things that I've implemented in the company when I joined is, because the company got through a bunch of change, we do a weekly town hall with people every week. My goal is simply make sure that people feel they are connected to what's happening, the decisions that are being made, that there's a level of understanding for why we're doing what we're doing and how they can play part of that. And so in a time of a lot of change, which we have a lot of change prior to me joining the company, it was really important to give people a sense of stability and understanding where it didn't feel that way. So my style is just super-transparent and I'm really clear about priorities. I put the customer first I think the one thing that I observed when I joined was that we had an amazing culture, the company's culture was amazing, but the customer wasn't at the centre of the culture. I think we've made that transition. And I don't think that was hard actually, that feels very natural for the average employee to pick this up. But I think this kind of makes sense.

iTWire. This kind of loops back to my question from the meet-the-press session yesterday of looking for the company's 'true north'. I probably expected something a bit more philosophical but your whole 'the customer....'

Steele. It helps drive the decisions I make.

iTWire. Can we dig a bit deeper into your background.

Steele. Prior to Splunk, I spent 19 years at Proofpoint so I was part of that that founding team basically grew from zero from concept all the way through to ultimately the sale of the company. We were public since 2012, so I had lots of opportunity running a public company. Prior to that, I had run another private startup company called Forterra. And I did that from basically 98 to 2001. And then we ultimately sold the company to another private company. And then prior to that I was a general manager at a software company, Sybase which is now part of SAP. So that was my first general manager job at Sybase when I was running their data warehousing and middleware teams. Prior to that I had a range of marketing roles at Sun Microsystems in the era where Sun was really relevant and prior to that I started my career at HP primarily in a technical role as a developer.

iTWire. Yeah, I started programming as well. But I realised very quickly I'm a competent programmer, but not a good one.

Steele. Yeah, I made the decision very early on that I didn't want to grow up in R&D, and I felt like [inaudible] there are opportunities to be in other places where you shape product and strategy. I felt like being on the product management / product marketing side was a more strategic spot to be.

iTWire. So having resolved the core of the company onto the customer, what's you major challenge at the moment.

Steele. I think we've made a tremendous amount of progress in the last year but there's still more work to be done. I think our pace of innovation has improved. We still have more work to do there. I think we can continue to strive to do a better job for our customers, but there's still more work to do there. And we're in a markets that's fast moving we need to continue to stay out in front of where the markets headed to be and really meet the market where we can take it.

iTWire. Moving on to the company, what attributes do you admire most in or value highest in a Splunker?

Steele. In hiring a Splunker?

iTWire. Current, or hiring, either, I don't mind.

Steele. I think, the one thing that has been amazing here is just the passion for the product and the technology. We have that inside the company. We see it here at the user conference. Really unique and really amazing... and finding that in future employees as well. And then we obviously need employees that can help us on that journey of continued innovation; people who are super thoughtful and creative. They see things in a unique way that ultimately gives us opportunity to deliver more value for our customers.

iTWire. I see that Splunk is the kind of company that would attract those people. And that's obviously something you need to keep doing. You do attract those people.

So you're not particularly hands on at the product levels. I'm assuming your main focus is more road-map.

Steele. Yeah, I mean, we have 8000 employees, approximately. So we have a little leeway. I spend more of my time thinking about what should we be investing in? Where should the company be headed? How do we ensure that we're delivering our commitments for our shareholders? Thinking about what the financial picture of the company should look like. As we mentioned earlier, really pushing for this balance of growth and profitability, which isn't always easy to achieve, that is not something that company has been focused on prior to me joining. So we're having that opportunity to really shape what the financial should look like over a period of time.

iTWire. Yes, because once you start thinking about a new product line, then that means dollars pouring into it... and eventually, it'll come good but for a little while, it hurts to...

Steele. Yes, you have to figure out to deal with the things that you want to go to.

iTWire. To change direction a little, who do you admire in the business world?

Steele. I think I just take examples from companies that have delivered great innovation over a long period of time. You know, you can see it all over the place where you look at the leadership that Salesforce established for example, and what Benioff did with a great run in the cloud. What Microsoft has done under Satya's leadership, and the focus on the cloud and how they deliver for the customers I think is there's lots to be learned there. And then I admire people that drive innovation, and so CEOs of younger companies that are doing cool things. All that's interesting.

iTWire. So is there anybody in particularly that you derive inspiration from?

Steele. I don't think there's any single person that factors into that. I just look at a broad range of people and how they inspire me to do different things.

iTWire. so you're not an avid reader all the latest business publications.

Steele. I read some of it I don't read all of it. I'm much more of a 'read current news,' what's happening from a tech perspective... stay current that way, versus going back in time reading lots of nonfiction books about people.

iTWire. So you're very internally driven.

Steele. Actually, I wouldn’t say that.

iTWire. That's where I got to in regard to with what you were saying.

Steele. No, I spend tons of my time with customers, with our sales organization, with our investors. So when I joined I meant to meet 100 Customers in my first one hundred days, which is a really big number but that pace is intense, I spend a lot of time... because I think it's really important not to have all that information filtered to you. You look directly at the customer and understand how they're feeling about what you're delivering and how you can improve. So I spend a lot of my time on this.

iTWire. No, I'm thinking more about the motivation rather than the source of information.

Steele. I kinda get motivated by customers too with how they're using the product.

iTWire. So, where do you see Splunk the next five years, 10 years 20 years?

Steele. I think the destination around helping our customers build digital resilience is a long journey. There's lots of work to be done there. I believe we're incredibly well positioned, given our strengths across security and observability to help customers achieve great outcomes. I believe that there's a whole innovation cycle here to help make it simpler to achieve all that - it shouldn't be as hard as it is today. And many of the things that we talked about here [at .conf23], play a role in that, whether it be our AI announcements, because we're going to see the world get a lot more efficient and how they do their jobs, to things like HR where we're giving people visibility into areas they never have visibility into. Those are all factors in how do we ultimately help in this digital resilience journey. The great thing about Splunk is we have an amazing volume customers who want to do more with us. I think there's this opportunity for long term global growth to get us beyond where we are revenue wise to 5 billion to 10 billion and beyond in terms of recurring revenue.

iTWire. So, out of those 5, 10, 20 years, how many of those will you be at Splunk?

Steele. I'm a guy that has long tenure in the companies that I've been at. So you know, I see myself being here for a very long time.

iTWire. At some point, the board will say “we've had enough!”

Steele. Yeah, I think at some point you need to also be self critical. When is the right time to turn the reins over to someone else? Not that age is a big issue, but I'm not the youngest person in the room - maybe that matters at some level.

iTWire. So what do you enjoy most about the role?

Steele. For me, I love all of our customer interaction and the opportunity to match that with innovation. And I love leadership and management, a lot of people don't like; I actually love it.

iTWire. We've seen the bones of that whole simplification process in the keynotes. So I'm guessing there's still a long way to go, because we still have very disparate tools various control panels bringing it together. So I'm assuming you're expecting that to coalesce a lot better.

Steele. Mission Control really that single work surface. There's always more work to be done. Because we gotten into the durability world through a set of acquisitions. We've made tremendous progress really, really great deals. Getting named as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant all abounds with validation of that.

iTWire. But watching the keynote it looked to me as though there were some joining gaps. It didn't seem as seamless as I would like.

Steele. But I think it really comes down to does the workflow work well? I think that's the critical thing. I think we've really focused on how do we improve that user experience, which I think we've done a really good job of.

iTWire. So, why did you get into hardware? [referring to the Edge device]

Steele. I think it's actually simple. It's really driving a software opportunity for us. So how do we bridge this gap where OT has been its own world of itself? So for a long time it's just a separate thing. And in reality, in this digital resilience world, all these things have to be interconnected. We can't live in a world where all of that separated. There's been a bunch of trends, I think one is Chief Information Security Officer is now responsible for OT and they have to do something and they have to be able to draw that connectivity, but to see the entire environment because you have a threat actor - that that's the way they enter. Separate from that I just think there's there's been so much data that people haven't been able to see that can ultimately improve the economics of businesses or can you field fundamental business outcomes that are different because of that disability? Well, hardware was a vehicle to fix a problem that was complicated, the value that we're deriving from the software.

iTWire. When I was here at .conf19 I did see the beginnings of that. A little tiny stand, off in the corner.

Steele. Know that we did test it for a long time.

iTWire. Yeah, because the OT guys are terrified of IT, when they say, “oh, you've got Windows [whatever version], we need to update it.

"NO!!"

Steele. The rate of updates such as this is a problem.

iTWire. And the worst thing is a lot of the configurations are type-approved. You cannot change it and that's particularly true in health.

Steele. Oh, ‘Health’ is a whole [inaudible]. Just walk around an operating room and see the amount of windows [there]. Scary!

iTWire. Some of the applications have to run 10, 20 30 years and they can't be changed. “...and we need to shut your Windows PC down for a patch and that will stop the plant.

"No!!"

So that's that's the whole challenge. And then it's a major reason why OT are terrified of IT. Of course, IT starts coming in with the attitude, “It's got lights, it must be ours.”

Steele. Right. There've been territorial boundaries for a long time.

iTWire. OT has approached IT to a certain extent moving into things like MES and Historians and that kind of software. So there has been a certain egress of data from from the plant floor, but it's been like pulling teeth.

Steele. Yes, it’s pretty limited and the protocols are different, and there's a whole bunch of things that make it hard.

iTWire. The protocol differences are to a certain extent, quite deliberate.

The guys down on the exhibition floor were telling me that the box is slowly going to support more and more factory protocols. The problem is, there’s lots of them.

Steele. Right.

iTWire. Let’s go to ‘buildings,’ you need BACnet, let’s go to the plant floor, you need Profinet or Modbus.

Steele. Of course.

iTWire. That’s all I’d planned to talk about. So unless you had anything else to say, I’d like to thank you for your time.

Steele. Thank you. It's a pleasure.

The author attended .conf23 as a guest of Splunk.